Free The Mandie Collection by Lois Gladys Leppard

This is not New York, you know, where you have everything modern.”
    “It hasn’t been long since we got the furnace in the building here,” Celia added. “That was a mess to install, holes everywhere.”
    “And Miss Prudence allowed Snowball to stay here to chase the mice that came out of the holes,” Mandie said with a big grin.
    “Now that we are up here, what did you plan on doing, Mandie?” Joe asked as he surveyed the shadowy room.
    Mandie walked back over to the doorway and lit an oil lamp sitting on a trunk with matches beside it. “We need this to light up the corners that the light bulb doesn’t reach,” she explained, picking it up.
    The tall pieces of furniture—dressers, headboards, wardrobes, and such—prevented the light of the bulb from shining between them. Mandie walked around with the lamp. “If y’all see anything open—drawers, trunks, anything—let me know, because Miss Prudence keeps a strict rule about how everything must be closed.”
    Jonathan walked around and said, “I still don’t know what we are doing.”
    Mandie looked at him with a big grin and said, “I just said if you see anything open let me know. If someone has been up here, maybe they left something open and we might find it.”
    Jonathan had stopped in front of a huge wardrobe. He reached over and opened the door on it. Suddenly piles of papers came falling out of it. It seemed to be packed with papers of some kind. Everyone stopped to look.
    Mandie quickly set the lamp down on a nearby box and hastened to stop the flow of papers.
    “What a mess!” Celia exclaimed as she knelt to pick up the papers.
    “Yes, and Miss Prudence said things must be neat and orderly,” Joe added as he bent to help.
    “What are all those papers, anyhow?” Jonathan asked, looking at one he had picked up.
    Mandie was also inspecting the papers. “Looks like real old bills of some kind,” she said, and reading from one she added, “One case of dish towels. A case of dish towels? My goodness, that would be a lot of dish towels, wouldn’t it?” She glanced at her friends.
    “This one says one case of pillow cases, embroidered in pastels,” Celia read.
    “And so does this one,” Joe said. “A case of pillowcases embroidered in pastels. I wonder what they did with all these pillowcases.”
    “Look at the dates on these papers,” Mandie said excitedly, holding one up. “June 30, 1880. That’s twenty-three years ago. Why would they want to keep stuff that old?”
    “You said one time Miss Prudence never throws anything away,” Celia reminded Mandie. “Besides, I don’t believe anyone ever comes up here and goes through these things. Remember we found those old love letters in that trunk that time?”
    “Yes, that was an exciting discovery,” Mandie said as she kept picking up papers.
    “Yes, it was. I was with y’all that time when we found those, remember?” Joe said, shuffling through a stack of papers from the wardrobe.
    “Yes, I remember that very well,” Mandie said, grinning. “We found out lots of secrets that time.”
    Jonathan was trying to place the papers back into the wardrobe, but it was too full and they kept falling out. “Mandie, I don’t think all these are going back in there,” he said.
    Everyone straightened up to look at the inside of the wardrobe.
    “But they all came out of there,” Mandie said.
    “And it was absolutely running over, too,” Joe said.
    “Let’s look for something else to put some of them in,” Mandie said, walking around the area and looking at the discarded furniture.
    “Here,” Celia said. She had opened an old trunk and found it completely empty. “This will hold a lot of them.”
    Mandie glanced at the trunk and then at the wardrobe and said, “But how are we going to divide them? I wonder if all these papers are bills from way back in 1880.”
    “We can find out,” Joe said and began taking stacks of the papers from the wardrobe and placing them on the