I say goodbye to Beethoven, the cat I inherited last week from my neighbor who died. Mary Wheeler, Joseph’s mother. Joseph, the boy we lost thirty years ago when we were seniors in high school. Found dead in that barn that still has a wooden cow’s head peeking from the rafters.
Outside, the cold of New Hampshire’s winter has settled in. It will snow soon. I can feel it in my bones. I look at the name on my mailbox. Deborah Strong. Strong is what I’ve been since Joseph died and since I lost my husband and daughter on a beautiful July day when they were on their way to get ice cream.
I’ve found my peace here in the little town where I grew up. People like how I’ve used my degree in library science to move our library into the twenty-first century. It still has evidence of the church it once was. The marks on the darkened wood floor where the pews used to be. The steeple and the double doors in the front where parishioners used to enter. Now it has a ramp for the handicapped, a line of computers that high school kids use when they have to find something through EBSCOhost. Volumes from the Library of America take up space beside the mysteries most of my patrons favor.
I wave to Irwin Trombly. He’s a lovely man and someone my mother would dearly love me to marry. I’m not interested. Even on this day when the wind is starting to rip into my face, I wouldn’t trade my drafty nineteenth-century house for the warmth of his modern one.
I unlock the door to the library, turn on my computer, and scroll through reviews in Library Journal to see what I might want to order. People start to drift in, but Jody, the volunteer clerk, helps them. Someone stands in front of my desk and I look up. I jump from my chair, gasping out “Rachel.” We hug, and I can feel her pull back, the way she had shut me out the year we found Joseph Wheeler dead on the floor of the barn.
I take hold of her hands and study her face. The same dark eyes, the same high cheekbones, lips painted with the same shade of red. She still looks like Cleopatra. Blunt cut hair, black and untouched by the gray that has invaded my own. Bangs brushing the top of her eyebrows. Despite her thick parka, I can see that she’s still as thin as a painting done by some ancient Egyptian before the development of perspective. Time has deepened her beauty. I feel provincial next to her.
“You came for Mary’s funeral,” I say.
“And for the cold case. We need to find out who killed Joseph.”
The Barn is the first book in the NEW “Deborah Strong” traditional mystery series, released July 3, 2020.
A barn with a wooden cow’s head peeking out of the loft. . .
Two girls bicycling on a September day in 1990. . .
The friend they find dead in the barn. . .
For the next thirty years, the case of Joseph Wheeler’s murder lies as cold as a New Hampshire winter. Deborah Strong has settled in the town she grew up in, learning to heal after her friend’s murder, and later, the deaths of her husband and child in an automobile accident. When her former best friend Rachel Cummings returns home for the funeral of Joseph’s mother, the precarious peace Deborah has found as the town’s librarian is threatened.
Against the backdrop of the beautiful but cold New Hampshire landscape in January, Deborah and Rachel reopen the cold case of their murdered friend, and uncover secrets about their neighbors that have festered for thirty years, as they often do in small towns.
Meet the author
Sharon L. Dean grew up in Massachusetts where she was immersed in the literature of New England. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of New Hampshire, a state she lived and taught in before moving to Oregon. After giving up writing scholarly books that required footnotes, she reinvented herself as a fiction writer. She is the author of three Susan Warner mysteries and of a literary novel titled Leaving Freedom. The Barn, the first novel in a new mystery series, features librarian and reluctant sleuth Deborah Strong as she and her friend solve a thirty-year-old cold case. Set in the depth of New Hampshire’s January, The Barn is a story of friendship lost and recovered, secrets buried and unburied, and the power of forgiveness.
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