Fabulous Five 015 - Melanie's Identity Crisis Read Online Free PDF

in the very same pose with
Scott or Shane or Garrett.
    "Take the album home with you, if you'd like,"
Gran Pennington offered. "I'm sure you'll enjoy looking through it, and
you can bring it back when you've finished."
    Melanie smiled appreciatively as her grandmother went on, "Here.
Look in the trunk. She saved a whole bundle of love letters from young men who
wanted to court her. She tied them in a pink ribbon, and they're in here with
the other family albums and some other papers and letters that I've collected
over the years."
    Melanie's eyes brightened. Love letters? The idea was so
romantic that it made a lump form in her throat. Maybe someday someone will
write love letters to me, she thought. Maybe Scott or Shane or maybe someone I
haven't even met yet.
    "I'll just go down and do some things in the kitchen,
and you can look through the trunk to your heart's content. You may find all
sorts of information for your genealogy project. How's that?"
    "Gosh. Thanks, Gran. That would be super."
    As soon as her grandmother left, Melanie knelt before the
old trunk and carefully lifted the lid. It was filled with yellowed papers and
fragile photograph albums just as Gran had said it would be, and a stale, musty
odor drifted into the air. She wanted to look at everything, but first she had
to find Great-great-grandmother Cordia's love letters.
    Beneath the first layer she found them. The pink ribbon was
faded and the bow flattened from years in the trunk, but Cordia Mae Lee's name
was on the front of every envelope.
    With trembling hands she lifted the packet out of the trunk
and placed it in her lap. Then she slid the first letter from under the pink
ribbon and opened it.

CHAPTER 6
    The old-fashioned handwriting was slanted and hard to read. My
dearest Cordia, it began.
     
    I have been watching you during church , praying
that your eyes would meet mine and that you would smile at me the same way you
did that Sunday last month at the church picnic.
     
    Melanie giggled. Gran was right. Cordia had been a flirt!
     
    Your smile was so warm and sweet that I thought surely
you cared for me as much as I care for you. But now I fear that I was mistaken.
If you really do care , please meet me by the poplar tree behind the
church next Sunday morning before the service.
    Your devoted admirer,
    Ben
     
    Melanie clasped the letter to her heart, trying to picture
Ben's face and deciding that he was probably very handsome. "I wonder if
she met him," she whispered out loud. "And I wonder if he was the one
she married."
    Quickly Melanie turned to the next letter in the stack and
began to read it. It was from a young man named John. Melanie gasped. He was
the one in the picture who was ready to push her in the swing. And Cordia had
written my very best beau under the picture.
     
    My beloved Cordia ,
    I have been worried sick these last few days. It seems so
long a time since you favored me with a smile. Is something wrong? Have I
offended you?
    I beg your humble pardon if I have. Please give me a sign
that you still care for me.
    Yours forever ;
    John
     
    "'Yours forever,'" Melanie repeated just above a whisper.
She sighed deeply and closed her eyes, seeing Cordia twirling a lock of her
reddish-brown hair and smiling softly as she read this very letter from John
all those years ago. If he was her very best beau, surely they had gotten back
together. But what if they hadn't? She wished she could call to Cordia back
through the years and urge her to smile at John again and to smile at Ben,
also. I certainly would, she thought.
    Slowly she picked up a third letter, from Charles, who was
equally infatuated with Cordia and who had also thought she liked him but was
having doubts when he wrote the letter. One after another, the letters sounded
similar. The one from Jacob, the one from Aaron, the one from Robert, all
swearing their devotion and begging her to care for them, too.
    Melanie was deep in her reading when her grandmother called
up from