Michael Malone - Weebly

tales. Although a prude and a snob, she had never been
a gossip.
Gladys Goff had scarcely admitted that Madder lay
on the eastern side of Dingley Falls. Architecturally,
Madder was a hodgepodge, and its family trees were
weeds. Certainly she had never so much as
acknowledged the existence of Judith Haig, who had
not only grown up in Madder but had been raised in a
small Catholic orphanage there, and who had no idea
who even her parents were, much less her great-greatgrandparents.
For there had been no clue, no note
pinned with a gold brooch, no monogrammed lace
handkerchief left with her in the cardboard box that
Father Patrick Crisp had found beneath a station of the
cross one Good Friday night forty-two years earlier.
This morning the pastor had heard, from Sarah
MacDermott, that there was something the matter with
Judith's heart. It did not appear that God had made her
lucky. Her story, sighed Father Crisp, continued to be a
sad one.
Before Mrs. Haig retired to fix up her house, she
had to make final arrangements at the post office.