As Marion grew, Grace kept them alive on a combination of family help and cooking & cleaning for families in town. She would also take in sewing, sell eggs, and do any other things she could to make ends meet, short of selling her body.
At age 5, Marion had already grown into a beautiful & charming child, of average intelligence but rather physically adept. She loved playing with the boys, climbing trees, and swimming in the many creeks and streams that ran through Steelville and the surrounding area. Enchanted by nature and the mysterious, she had a habit of sneaking away, either into the woods or into the handful of closed up old houses in the town.
The old house on Oak St. in the north part of the town was her favorite, being a two story affair with aging Victorian gingerbread. The house was simply locked up and the neighborhood hoodlums, such as Steelville sported in that day and age, took girls into the old place to explore the "haunted mansion"... as the old grist mill owner's house had come to be known.
When Marion first discovered the painting in the old house, she was drawn to it in a way that she could not explain... it hung in the parlor... in a dusty frame with equally dusty cobwebs stranded across it. The image of the strange old building on the canvas caught her imagination and took her to places that she could only dream about... certainly ones not to be found on the streets of Steelville's tiny existence.
A few more years passed and Marion's fascination with the old house and the painting grew. She wanted to know more about the building contained in that frame. She would steal away after school to the parlor of the old house and stare at the canvas in the lengthening shadows, connecting the strange structure and its imagined locale with the stories she found in the books of the tiny public library. She knew there were adventures out there, and while the woods and hills and streams around the town were full of interesting things, the world outside Crawford County was already calling her.
Marion's middle name should have been "Adventure", not Jessie. She thought nothing of sinking herself down into a crystal clear creek with a big rock on her lap and opening her eyes wide to watch the fish swim around her until her breath ran out. Things she saw in the woods, so strange and yet so intriguing, imprinted themselves on her mind... like the snake skeleton wrapped around the tree with the china egg inside. Despite the wonders around her, she still wanted out... dreaming dreaming dreaming of the world outside.
Grace watched her daughter grow with great satisfaction. Marion, from an early age, had a solid sense of herself and her world and yet seemed to want more. The mother dreamed of her daughter going to college and getting out of the limited world that was Steelville Missouri in the 1920s.
When Marion turned 9, the old haunted mansion was sold to the new car dealer in the town, who had great plans of remodeling the house and moving his wife from St. Louis. Ferrin Bass cared nothing about the house's tattered contents. However, being a businessman, he thought maybe he could sell some of the better items for some profit. There wasn't much of value, but the painting that Marion loved so much did go up on the auction block... but it was beyond her mother's meager earnings. Luckily, nobody else wanted it, so Bass decided to donate it to the city library, figuring that it perhaps had some value to the community.
So now, instead of sneaking into the old house, Marion went to the public library, read and stared at "her" painting for hours on end. (Little did she know there were some clues as to the location of building attached to the back of the painting.)
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