Hidden Heritage by Charlotte Hinger Read Free Book Online

Kansas twin.
    Josie is a registered consultant for our tiny county and had become involved with more crimes in Carlton County than most large towns experience per capita in a year. She didn’t hesitate to remind Keith and me about the toll stress was taking on our lives.
    In the beginning, my sister had not been in favor of my marriage. To put it mildly. But last spring she had a change of heart. Her acceptance of Keith came because both are incredible musicians. Tolerating Kansas, the land, the prairie was harder. The wind, the emptiness came harder yet. Her adjustment was helped along by Tosca, who was Mistress of the Universe out here and She Who Must Be Obeyed to the zillions of rabbits who lived in our windbreak.
    Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, the horror of another murder to deal with, or the challenge of dealing with a collection of difficult personalities, but the thought of Josie meeting Tom made my stomach roil.

Chapter Five
    Wednesday morning I was back in the historical society office taking advantage of the peace and quiet to lay out pages. Our office manager, Margaret Atkinson, had taken a well-deserved day off. It was pleasant to work when there was no one else around. Last spring all of the Fiene family’s systems had undergone a major upheaval. The first move had been to hire Zola. The second step was to put Margaret in charge of organizing everything but the county history books. She now kept track of volunteers, ordered the supplies, did the bookwork, and helped with research requests.
    When I let Margaret start bossing people around she stopped criticizing everything I did. We had even managed to come up with enough money for her to have her own part-time secretary. The hired girl was still in high school and couldn’t spell “cat” without using Spellcheck, but Margaret gained a new spring in her step after she was able to drop “my secretary” into conversations.
    As I cut and pasted stories and inserted little newspaper clippings for fillers, I suddenly realized we had no immigrant stories in our books. How had I been that unaware? Victor Diaz’s death had set me thinking about the impact of groups coming into Carlton County.
    Inspired, I began a time line of events. Carlton County was organized in the 1880s. There had been a bitter county seat fight as there was in over half the counties in Kansas. However, there had been no bloodshed—just an exchange of inflammatory rhetoric among newspaper editors. The biggest issue had been the location of the county seat, because there were only two surefire ways to create lasting towns on the prairie: attract a railroad, or establish a town as the county seat.
    Restless, I got up, walked outside into the hall, and gazed out the window at the end of the corridor. Below stretched a patchy carpet of drying grass. My office is technically a windowless vault once used to store old county records. In summer, the door is open to the main air-conditioned part of the courthouse, and with the help of a strategically placed fan, enough cold air filters in to keep the room comfortable.
    Back at my desk, I loaded microfilm and started at the county’s beginning. There had been five towns vying for the county seat and one of the critical issues was a good water supply. Digging a well was a terrible ordeal and a regular cause of accidental deaths. Wells were dug by hand. Sometimes men died from the deadly methane gas at the bottom, or the sides collapsed, or rocks became dislodged and crushed their heads. That is if they knew where water was to begin with. And there was only one way for pioneers to find out. A sure and revered method.
    They used someone who could witch wells.
    Wells. Still a charged issue out here.
    At the beginning of summer, my very scientific husband wanted to drill a new well to water his cattle. He had hired a geologist who traced all the logical water sources and picked the most likely spot. The only question was