Through fate and circumstance, three strangers spend a summer inside an abandoned mansionāthe site of a series of murders that took place in the 1950s.
- Don Grimes is a forty-year-old dishwasher squatting inside his late uncleās farmhouse.
- Lillian Schumacher is a true-crime-author who intends to solve the decades-old murder at ground zero.
- Bianca is a runaway teenager hiding out in the cupola of the strange house, unknown to the adults downstairs.
Each uses their own unique voice to tell a different version of what happened over that violent summer, while the surprising truthānot revealed until the endāhangs over them all.
Through fate and circumstance, three strangers spend a summer inside an abandoned mansionāthe site of a series of murders that took place in the 1950s.
- Don Grimes is a forty-year-old dishwasher squatting inside his late uncleās farmhouse.
- Lillian Schumacher is a true-crime-author who intends to solve the decades-old murder at ground zero.
- Bianca is a runaway teenager hiding out in the cupola of the strange house, unknown to the adults downstairs.
Each uses their own unique voice to tell a different version of what happened over that violent summer, while the surprising truthānot revealed until the endāhangs over them all.
I.Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Donald Grimes
My decision to return home to Mound City was hardly inevitableādonāt think that for a minute. Nor, by a long shot, was it my only option. By then Iād found considerable success in an industry where I could have gone anywhere in the country and found a jobāprobably the first position I applied for, too. And no doubt at a higher salary than Iād been earning, which was already respectable and more than Dad ever made, I promise you. I was barely forty and at the peak of my managerial skills, and the only reason I had remained working for the Haase family in Calvert so long was because I liked them personally. That and the obvious fact that they needed meāIām not one to cut and run where Iām needed. They were simple people, now into their eighties, and had long since lost whatever business edge they once had, if theyād ever had any at all, which I doubt. They were beyond a point where they could do much hands-on micromanaging and left me to run the business as I thought best.
Not that thereās ever been a need to micromanage me, of course. Iād made them plenty of money over the past twenty years. I saw it as my duty. Iād been born with a knack for dealing with the publicāmore than they had, for sureāand my looks were an admitted asset in most of my encounters with both customers and subordinates.
Thatās not meant to sound like bragging, mind youāIām going to try and be as honest here as I can be. Iāve always been considered āa lookerāāeven my sisters will admit that. At forty, I carry the same 160 lbs. as I did in my senior year at Mound City High School, and as an adult, nature seems to have taken the exaggerated weirdness of my dadās faceāhis sharp, oversized nose and pointed, dog-snout chināand my motherās pasty Midwestern-girl blandness, and combined them to make my own ālookā both rugged and gentle. I have a handsome face: At least, thatās what my sisters and other girls Iāve known have told me. Not that I am ungrateful for my parentsā quirks; I studied them closely while growing up and made a pact to remain vigilant with my own attitudes and to extinguish any traces of quirks should they pop up, the same way youād take Round-Up to weeds growing around your storefront.
No, my decision to return to Mound City was not one of necessity, and I hope Iāve made that clear. It was (in part) to repair a family rift, and where better to do that than within the family home? After all, it was standing empty. It was that, but it was also because Iād simply earned the break. Iād been grinding my keister off for John and Mildred Haase for half my lifetime nowāsometimes sixty hours a week without complaint, never taking a sick day and only a couple of vacations during which I still phoned in a dozen times a week to find out how things were going.
Why? Because thatās who I am. Thatās how I am hardwired.
Thatās not how I was raised, of course. Dad used to develop migraines if he had to put in more than half a dozen hours in a work-week, and any money my parents had was the result of my motherās work ethic, which was in her DNA: She was a Blank. The BlanksāI always thought it was funny that Momās maiden name was āBlankā, because her expression was generally pretty blankāhad been prosperous farmers in the first part of the twentieth century, and at one time, they owned half of Calhoun County.
As I have heard the story, as told by the few remaining Mound City people who remember or record such things, back in the 1940s, the most prosperous Blankāmy great uncle Alvaāhad enlisted in the Air Force to help liberate Eastern Europe. Something he saw overseas re-focused him, and as soon as he returned from the war, he quit farming, sold off his acres and used the proceeds of the sale to build a sprawling mansion out on Littlefarm Road a few miles beyond Mound City limits.
Uncle Alva was a legend throughout the countyānot just because of his crazy house, which should have been listed in a national oddball directory for the floor plan alone, where there are tiny rooms with multiple doors and halls and staircases that lead into solid wallsābut also for his ultimate fate, which was intimately connected to the nasty history of Littlefarm Road itself.
Actually, the house has the makings of a tourist attraction, since there are plenty of sicko creeps in love with the macabre, but as far as I know, itās an angle that nobody has ever thought to pursue.
Now, take from this what you will, but since I was a child Iāve been told that from the neck up, Iām a physical ringer for Uncle Alva. The only photo Iāve seen of him shows a scowling little shrimp leaning up against a hitching post outside the post office. As it happens, that post still exists and Iāve taken a tape measure to it and I wouldnāt have placed Uncle Alva at much more than 5ā2. Me, I topped out at 5ā10 Ā½, and I am by far the tallest person in my family. Dad was only 5ā8, and Mom barely hit five feet. My sister Mary is 5ā2, and overweight by seventy poundsāshe looks like a bowling ball. My other sister Dale is slim like me, though not nearly as tall: 5ā9. Sheās gangly and wears her hair ridiculously short hair, like a manāshe looks like a pin to match the bowling ball. No, I am the tallest person in my family by far and personally, I donāt see the slightest resemblance between me and Crazy Uncle Alva, and for that, I thank God.
But there is one thing I can tell you about Alva Blank, and in fact, am here to tell you: Despite his tiny size and his agricultural background and despite the name of the road where he built the house and despite the crap that the local losers have been spreading about him and my family for generations, Uncle Alva was not āThe Little Farmerā. Old gossips may sniff at the truth, and the modern kids raised on Freddy Krueger movies may think that urban legend is more fun than facts, but thanks to my profession I tend to be a little worldlier than them and I use my wits to problem solveāalong with my looks, that makes me an effective manager. I did a little basic research and quickly concluded that the violence that happened along Littlefarm Road back in the 1940s was none of my great uncleās doing, and that any involvement he might have had would have been strictly peripheral.
And guess what! If the time is ever right, I may reveal to the world the actual identity of real killer, but in the meantimeāif nothing elseāI am happy to have cleared up any horse-pucky rumors about Uncle Alva.
So, as I said, my intention in moving back to Mound City was to mend family bridges, and as soon as I had made my decision (and while I was still bleeding out my security deposit in the apartment in Calvert), I sent emails to both Mary and Dale and informed them that I was moving back into our familyās home and invited them both to come live with me.
Although at the time Dale was married and living in Tennessee, I assumed that sheād consider her immediate familyāMary and Iāmore important than some silly job with the Lutheran Council school system, especially if it meant re-establishing a sibling bond that we hadnāt had shared since I was six and she was twelve, babysitting me while mom went to work and Dad was on the hammock with a migraine. No chance, though: She wrote back asking me if I was off my medications and, in my opinion, she was unnecessarily terse for a born-again Christian. She told me that she knew why Iād lost my job in Calvert and asked me to leave her alone.
Mary and I were only a year apart, and much closer friends than Dale and I had ever been, so although her response was equally blunt, I could recognize in it more confusion than anger. Iām good at reading folks that way, which is why I have been able to find success as a āpeople person.ā Mary reminded me that the family house had been sold right before Mom and Dad moved in with Dale and her husband in Knoxville.
I replied by reminding her that Mom and Dad had passed away and had nothing to do with it.
āIām not talking about our old house on Leland, Mary. I wouldnāt go back to live in that flea-infested pile of bad memories for all the gold in Fort Knox. Iām talking about our real home, the one where we used to play when we were children. Iām talking about Uncle Alvaās place. I want you and Dale to come live with me at Littlefarm.ā
I recently finished reading Chris Kasselās The Awful Grace of Littlefarm and I have to say it was not at all what I was expecting. Outside of the fact that it was a mystery novel, this book was filled with some interesting characters, many twists and turns, and an unusual setting. The Awful Grace of Littlefarm centres around three characters who share their own perspective of the interactions they have with one another at the farm house known as Littlefarm, and the mysteries that surround the place.
When I first started reading the book, I liked how the author introduced the mystery aspect and this made me more intrigued to figure out exactly who did what and how the many characters came into play. I will say that the characters were not what I had pictured as main characters. They were each filled with their own boat-load of flaws and had something that left a strange uneasiness in your stomach. The author did a good job at depicting these characters in a way that makes the reader unsure of who they are to cheer for. Another interesting aspect about this book, is that it is filled with so many twists that completely shocks the reader. Things happened so quickly that I had to stop and re-read sections. The book finishes up nicely with most ends tied leaving the reader with that same uneasiness, but with questions having been answered.
That being said, the characters in this book really confused me. I wasnāt sure if I was supposed to like the characters or despise some of them, but at the end of the book I found myself not really caring for any of them. I didnāt feel bad for their pitfalls or their wins. If this was the aim of the author, then they did a good job. The author also spent a lot of time describing scenery, outside secondary characters and setting the scene for a plot that I couldnāt quite follow. I found some of the characters and plots to be repetitive or not relevant to the story. I also felt that there were too many parallels to the characters in the book, in the sense that their personalities were the same and even the tone of the characters were the same. Lastly, I didnāt know what the major mystery of the book was. There were so many side things discussed that when the final plot twist came, I had myself thinking, āwell of course that happened, what else was there to expectā.
All in all, I donāt think this book was for me as I found myself too caught up in the details of side characters and side plots, that I couldnāt appreciate the main mystery when it happened. I would recommend this book to someone who enjoys the confusion and likes a mystery where the main characters donāt have that typical ending because, this is not a typical mystery novel.