I've just finished Mardi Link's "Isadore's Secret," published last year. It's a good read, well-researched and well-told with respect for the people whose lives it touched for decades.
Link, a former police reporter and book editor, doesn't conclusively solve the mystery of who killed Sister Janina in 1907, but I closed the book knowing that wasn't the point. What I needed was perspective, and I have that now.
Old mysteries never die, I suppose, but most aren't as haunting as this tale has been since Sister Mary Janina went missing 103 years ago. Friends who grew up in that part of Leelanau County tell me some people still talk of hauntings and hearing a woman singing in the woods where Sister Janina supposedly walked and some hunters to this day refuse to go.
"Isadore's Secret" gave me a deeper understanding of Isadore, a farming community of Polish Catholic immigrants surrounding Holy Rosary Church and school in the center of Leelanau County. I have a fuller grasp of the importance in their lives and the then-wooden church.
Thanks to Link's thorough research and storytelling skills, I have a better sense of the priests, the nuns, sexton, sheriffs, judges, the rules and laws they all were supposed to live by and sometimes didn't. I have a bigger picture of Stanislawa "Stella" Lipczynska, the former rectory housekeeper accused and tried for the nun's murder in 1919 after Sister Janina's bones were found buried in the basement of the church.
It takes a good writer with a concern for accuracy and fairness to take reams of research and transform them into one highly readable book. Link baited, hooked and reeled me in, time after time.
She seemingly left no stone unturned. She sifted little-known and fascinating information from old Catholic diocese and archdiocese records, Leelanau County trial transcripts, letters, interviews with descendants of Isadore immigrant settlers and newspapers. The final 12 pages of her 252-page paperback offer a long list of sources.
She even starts each of her seven chapters with a quote from a battered copy of "The Nun's Rule," written by priests in 1905, which she bought for $1 at annual Attic Treasures sales at Holy Rosary.
As I finished the book, a phrase came to mind: The truth sets us free.
Mardi Link has shed more light on a terrible secret that caused much hurt, anguish, sadness and tragedy in Isadore more than 100 years ago. She has gone to great lengths to do it thoroughly with accuracy and fairness. Her book paints a picture of a time and place. It often is not a pretty picture, but it is human and deeply hued.
Perhaps Sister Janina and others can rest in peace now.
Associate editor Loraine Anderson can be reached at 933-1468 or landerson@record-eagle.com.
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