While in the house, taking breaks between tasks, she had spent more time in the living room contemplating the photographs on the mantel. She couldn’t understand how all of Wilma’s children could have forsaken this house—and what about those two unknown faces? The boy in the Marine uniform could hardly be older than Byron. What had happened to him? Why wasn’t he here in Pine Rapids?

She looked at the ladies bent over the quilt, and cleared her throat lightly. “Did Wilma Mickelson have grandchildren?” she asked.

“Here we go again!” Corinne laughed.

Mrs. Fryt looked up from the quilt, and trained her caterpillar eyes on Dolly. “Why, yes, of course. Wilma’s oldest son Jack had two children, JJ and Elissa.”

JJ and Elissa. The boy and the girl in the photographs. “So Jack came home from the First World War, and he was all right? And he went on to marry and have children? Who did he marry? Where are they all now? Why don’t they live in the house?”

The ladies exchanged glances. “So many questions!” Corinne said.

“Yes, one thing at a time,” Mrs. Fryt said.

“You know,” mused Thelma, “for some time you would have almost thought that everything was going to be all right.”

“That the curse was lifted,” Jeannette added.

“JJ and Elissa—Jack’s children—were certainly beautiful,” Thelma went on. “And Wilma and John doted on them, as grandparents do. I remember Wilma telling me about JJ, when he was about six, walking all the way across town one day to show her a frog he’d found on the riverbank. I suppose that was more than twenty years ago now! Wilma said that when she saw that frog cupped so carefully in JJ’s hands, she thought it was a message from God. It seemed like, after that, she had such a light in her eyes. Especially when JJ was near her.”

“JJ joined the Marines right after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941,” Corinne told Dolly. “He wanted to do just like his father Jack had done back in 1917, when the First World War broke out.”

“JJ was like Jack,” Mrs. Fryt said. “He had the same arrogance, the same sense of entitlement.”

“The same charm,” Corinne added.

“Yes, JJ was a handsome boy,” admitted Mrs. Fryt. “The type whose smile sends them tumbling like lawn bowls. Isn’t that right, Judy? Of course, not that his charm was any good to the family—”

“For heaven’s sake, Grandma,” Judy broke in, her pie-crust face inflamed. “It wasn’t JJ’s fault. It was his awful sister, Elissa! She tore open that family just the same as if she’d taken a set of pinking shears to it! It was that boy she met during the war!”

“Oh, but she couldn’t have known!” objected Thelma.