Ah-ha! I thought, feeling like Sherlock Holmes. At some point after her husband died, Annie must have gone into the lacemaking business, with several local ladies she had located through ads she had placed in the newspapers. Why lacemaking? I wondered. Was it something she had learned as a girl and liked to do? Or had it been a desperation move, when she had no other resources to fall back on?
Whatever prompted her to create her business, it apparently became a success. One clipping, dated later in 1888, was headlined, “Mrs. Annie Duncan Secures New Accounts in San Antonio, Austin.” The story described her affiliation with women’s dress shops and millinery shops in the two cities and noted that the handcrafted laces produced by her lacemakers were prized for their delicate patterns and graceful execution. “Mrs. Duncan is to be commended for her artistry and her business acuity,” the reporter noted enthusiastically. “She is an outstanding example of Pecan Springs’ entrepreneurial spirit!”
So the women in the photograph weren’t a neighborhood sewing circle—they were part of Annie’s lacemaking business! Some of the laces we had found in the wooden chest must be theirs. Christine would be interested to learn about this, I thought excitedly. She could add Annie’s Laces to her research on women’s late-nineteenth-century needlework businesses in Texas—and it had happened in what was now my shop!
But the clippings in the box told a second, separate story, as well. An 1881 piece from the Galveston Daily News announced the marriage of Miss Delia Louise Crawford, 19, of Galveston, Texas, to Mr. Adam Hunt, 29, of Pecan Springs, Texas. This reminded me of the photo I had seen of the formal wedding. I took it out, turned it over, and saw the two names, handwritten on the back: Adam and Delia, with the little heart drawn around the names. According to the clipping, the Hunts were at home in a house Mr. Hunt had recently built at 306 Crockett in Pecan Springs. They were Annie’s neighbors, I thought, with some surprise, living in the yellow-painted frame house that is now the Hobbit House Children’s Bookstore, on the other side of my garden. I would have to show their picture to Molly McGregor, who owns the bookstore. She’d be interested in this bit of history.
The Hunts seemed to flourish. In 1882, they announced the birth of a daughter, Caroline. Several clippings over the next few years reported the expansion of Mr. Hunt’s business, Hunt’s Feed and Tack, which was located beside the railroad track, next to Purley’s (now Beans’ Bar and Grill, our favorite eating place). Other clippings noted that Mrs. Hunt and her daughter, Caroline—she appeared to be an only child—made frequent trips by train to Galveston, where Mrs. Hunt visited her sister, Miss Clarissa Crawford, shopped, and attended social events.
But there was heartbreak in store for the Hunts. The clipping was headlined, “Local Woman’s Funeral Planned for Friday.” The story was short on details, but it reported that Mrs. Adam Hunt, of 306 Crockett Street, had died on October 14, 1888, when she mistook poison hemlock for wild carrot. Hemlock poisoning! The writer concluded the article with this caution for his readers: “This tragedy is a reminder that we need to be especially careful when we dine at Mother Nature’s wild table. It is too easy to be seduced by a pretty (but poisonous) blossom or a tempting mushroom. Beware!”
How bizarre, I thought, and reread the clipping for the third time. Had Mrs. Hunt eaten the leaves as a salad? But fresh leaves usually appear only in the spring, and she died in October. Well, then, she might have cooked the root as a vegetable, mistaking it for wild carrot. Was she the only one in the family who ate it? Had Adam Hunt and little Caroline eaten it, too, and somehow managed to survive? But there were no answers to my questions in the terse newspaper report. It was a mystery.
And there was another puzzle, as well. A clipping from the Austin Weekly Statesman, dated October 25, 1888, reported the death of Mr. Howard Simpson, 34, of Galveston, Texas. According to witnesses, the man had calmly walked to the middle of the recently built iron bridge that crossed the Colorado River at the foot of Congress Avenue, and jumped. His body was recovered the next day at the Montopolis crossing downstream, where another bridge had recently been built. The clipping offered no indication of how this event might be related to either the Duncan story or the Hunt story. Another mystery.
But then the two separate stories became one, and the puzzling mystery of my ghost’s last name was finally solved. “Local Couple Weds,” a clipping informed me. On August 3, 1889, not quite a year after Delia Hunt died, Mrs. Annie Laurie Duncan and Mr. Adam Hunt—the widow and the widower—had married.
Ah, yes, I thought. I pulled out the wedding photograph of the twice-married man and the woman in the taffy-colored dress. So this was Annie. Annie Laurie, my ghost.
Assumes facts not in evidence, Your Honor, my lawyer self said, but weakly and without conviction. For there she was, very much in evidence, the woman with the remarkable eyes who (in my dream) had wanted desperately to tell me something. But what had she wanted to say? What was I supposed to learn from all of this?
I studied it for a moment, thinking of the first Mrs. Hunt’s mysterious death and wondering if anyone had raised any uncomfortable questions about the circumstances. A wife is tragically poisoned; her husband (albeit after a respectable period) marries the next-door neighbor. It seemed like the kind of situation that might
