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beans—the jelly beans, the polyester pants, and the bright green apple-smelling, totally artificial shampoo Mem probably went through as a kid. She couldn’t hide all that from me for long now that I had her Irish friend to track down and ask.

SECRETS
    I got up the next morning with a mission. I’d hike into Plattsburgh and see what I could find out about this Rosien. With a small town, it’s easy to get the inside scoop on folks. They published just about everything in our hometown newspaper. The Perryville Post even announced who brought what for church picnics. Plattsburgh wasn’t that small, but with a name like Rosien, it’d be pretty easy to track her down with a good word search. Too bad Mem and Pep thought the Internet was a way to catch fish or I wouldn’t have to walk all the way to town to find some answers.
    Grabbing my camera—a photographer’s Swiss Army knife in the “always be prepared” department—I
left a note to say I went hiking. Actually, I was hiking. Just not in the mountains as Mem and Pep would suppose. To be honest, I’d prefer a hike in the mountains to trudging into town. I kept to the trees because these days traveling roadside is more dangerous than the chance of running into a bear in the woods.
    And even though I’d rather be in my nice, safe downtown park on Clark Street far away from a lake, I had to admit that the ferny undergrowth and sky-scratching pine trees of upstate New York weren’t half bad. With it being just light, I even heard an owl hoot—probably headed home for a day’s rest. Started thinking a shot of an owl in flight might even top my purple hairstreak shot. What if I got it from above rather than below?
    The idea almost had me ready to shimmy up a tree for a test run, but I had a mission. One that proved impossible. At the library, I searched the Plattsburgh Register online until my eyes blurred, found a Rose, a Rosie, and two Rose Maries, but no Rosien. Even did a Yahoo search of the phone listings in town. Not a one.
    I tried “Ireland,” “Irish,” and “Immigrant” and all I came up with was a stupid Halloween story about the silkies in the lake. Sure, the article was a joke,
something fun for the little kids who still believed in fairies and silkies, but why print that kind of stuff in a paper? Newspapers are supposed to print the facts, not the fairy-tale nonsense Mem and Pep tried to feed me. I needed real answers, like who was this Rosien woman who came to our house the night before?
    Not sure what else to do, I asked the librarian if she knew a Rosien.
    â€œRow-sheen, you say. That’s pretty,” she said. “But no, I don’t know anyone by that name.”
    A lot of help she was. I could’ve kept trying, but I was a little dizzy from all that searching and a lot hungry, so I headed home, hoping Mem and Pep had a big lunch in the works.
    All the way there, I kept wondering, who was this Rosien? Not everyone gets their name in the paper, I guess, but it still seemed odd not to catch even one reference to her. That meant she hadn’t been married there or gotten a speeding ticket or been to a town meeting or had a daughter win a ribbon at the Clinton County Fair Mem had told me about. A pretty secretive lady this Rosien. Maybe she talked even less about the past than my mem and pep. She might be a Traveler. They like to stay off the radar. Local folks tend to blame things on strangers they
don’t understand. And I sure didn’t understand why Mem didn’t tell me she had a friend living up in Plattsburgh. Maybe that’s why Mem and Pep really wanted to vacation there—a chance to see some of the folks from their old home. But how was I ever going to know if I couldn’t find Rosien?
    Not that I thought it’d do me any good, but I planned to ask Mem and Pep once I got home. When I walked into the kitchen, Mem looked like she’d