A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [88]
Additionally, they each had projects that they were anxious to finish before winter settled in full-time. Cici had finally finished restoring and regrouting the tile in the sunroom, and spent her mornings (when it was too cold to paint) cutting and nailing trim and her afternoons (when the sun had heated the room so that the paint wouldn’t thicken) carefully painting around the 152 divided window-panes. It was so cold in her workshop that sometimes she would have to dash inside, strip off her gloves, and hold her hands over the fireplace or the kitchen stove until the circulation returned to her fingers and she could hold the tools again.
Lindsay took on the completion of her art studio with a determined ferocity that both impressed and alarmed the other two. She hired Farley to run an electrical line to the building, and Sam to install a series of baseboard heaters. Cici had been right about there being a water line already serving the building, but it had broken long ago. Rather than hire a plumber to dig up the semifrozen ground and make the repairs—a process that could take weeks—Lindsay hauled bucket after bucket of soapy water from the house to scrub the grimy windows and scour the floors. On one memorable occasion, she even climbed up on the roof to scrub away the years of accumulated muck from the skylights while Cici and Bridget held the ladder and passed up cleaning supplies and called up words of advice and concern.
She hung fluorescent shop lights from the rafters and whitewashed the dark wood walls. The interior fairly sparkled with bright winter light. She hung hooks on the walls to hold her tools and built shelves for her supplies. She moved in easels and rolls of canvas and paint boxes and art books. It was with a sense of almost defiant satisfaction that she began stretching and priming canvases. She had moved here to paint, and paint she would.
Bridget turned the small sitting room off the kitchen into a sewing room, and set about designing draperies for the tall front windows. She had found a scrap that wasn’t too mildewed in the box of fabric they’d uncovered in the dairy loft, and sent it to Paul in Baltimore. He had been able to find a modern-day equivalent of the rose damask that was far more practical and much less expensive than the original, and shipped twenty-five yards. Now that everything had been preserved that could possibly be preserved, Bridget had time to begin the painstaking process of measuring, hemming, lining, and pleating the fabric into draperies.
Farley brought a dozen pumpkins when he came to run the electrical wire to Lindsay’s studio, and the women spent an afternoon carving jack-o’-lanterns and setting them up to line the front steps, and another afternoon turning the leftovers into pumpkin pies.
And that was where the mystery began.
They baked four pies. Two they wrapped and put in the freezer. Another they sent home with Farley. Another they enjoyed for dinner—or at least they enjoyed three pieces of it. When Bridget went to cut herself a slice for lunch the next morning, the entire pie was gone.
She would not have thought much of this—although it did seem odd that Cici and Lindsay could finish off an entire pie between breakfast and lunch—if it hadn’t been for the ham. Bridget baked a small ham for dinner with the spiced apples they had preserved from their own tree. The next day, they all enjoyed ham sandwiches for lunch, and Bridget decided to use the leftovers in a casserole for dinner. But when she went to get the ham that evening to prepare the casserole, there was no sign of it—not even the plate upon which it had sat.
“I think it’s the ghost,” Lindsay said, when Bridget told the story. “It left us presents all summer, now it’s taking some back.”
“The ghost giveth and the ghost taketh away,” Cici agreed. “I just wish it would give back the wood-handled screwdriver I left in the sunroom. That was my favorite one.”
“Oh, sorry.” Bridget produced the screwdriver from her jeans pocket. “I used it to pry open a stuck drawer. And you didn’t leave