Word Count: 60,058
Summary of Events:
Emil and Zygfryd, having finished strengthening the walls inside, worked on repairing the siding outside before Emil accidentally cut his finger with a saw. Keeleigh went looking through the trunk again to see what other information she could find and came upon some loose pages . . .
Excerpt of the Day:
"They all looked to be written in the same hand, and like they might be part of a letter of some kind, but there was evidence in the upper left corner that the staple holding them all together had failed, leaving them scattered in a disorganised disarray.
Not to mention, being unable to read Polish, Keeleigh was unable to identify what order they went in, she could only figure out which side of the pages was front, and which side was back, and, with that information, she arranged them all into a stack, at least.
She found one page that appeared to have the end, as it was full on the front side, but only halfway so on the rear, where it was ended with a signature.
It took Keeleigh some time to figure out the hastily-written letters, but eventually she made it out to be Zbigniew W. Niemcyk. If she recalled correctly the W stood for Wenceslas.
So this was some sort of a letter written by Zbigniew, but to whom and for what purpose, Keeleigh had no idea.
She kept the end paper at the back and added all the other pages to the front of the stack until she found the one in which the staple was, which seemed to be something of a title page, as it had a nicely centred heading before the text began.
The last couple pages she found that belonged to the document she put in the middle, keeping the front page on the top.
Once she had all the pages assembled, Keeleigh counted how many pages she had in her hands and found an astonishing fifteen neatly handwritten pages. She wonders what exactly Zbigniew had written in them.
She scanned the document for names and found Klementyna mentioned, as well as Kornelia, Benedykt, Gustaw, Jadwiga, Emil, Zygfryd, Adelejda, Igor, Aleksander, Jarogniew, and Malwina.
The only name she knew of in all these papers that wasn't mentioned was Olga. Considering that Zbigniew had died when Dad had been twelve, Olga would still have been alive, and considering all the others had been named, Keeleigh had to think those were the names of all his children.
Emil and Zygfryd were the two boys older than Aunt Kornelia, Adelejda was the little girl, and Olga would fit as the girl around Aunt Kornelia's age.
All of this evidence pointed to there having been four more children, two great aunts, and two great uncles, all of whom she'd never heard of, and all references to whom had been hidden away in this trunk for reasons Keeleigh couldn't begin to guess.
This meant that the Adelejda she'd seen at Aunt Malwina's funeral was Great Aunt Adelejda, and she lived not all that far away in Opal, from where she'd been sending Christmas cards faithfully for over sixty years, even without response from any of her siblings.
Keeleigh crossed her arms and surveyed the papers around her. Why had she never heard of them? What sort of dishonourable thing had one — or all — of them done to deserve the ostracism which they'd received?"
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