The first chapter of Hand-me-Down Bride, which will be published some time this year.
Sophie studied her toes. She sat on the double bed in which she'd spent the night, knees drawn up beneath her white lawn nightgown. Only her toes stuck out. Lifting her dark head, she gazed through a nearby window at a June morning that shone upon a blooming--but sternly regimented--rose garden. In spite of the warm breeze, she shivered.
Then, hoping it wasn't true , for the hundredth time, she looked at the other narrow bed, the one next to hers. Upon it lay her new husband, the rich grandfatherly man who'd paid her way from Germany, a man she'd married only yesterday.
Theodore Wildbach was quite dead. Proper, in death as in life, he was flat on his back, hands folded on his chest. He looked a bit like the stone knights lying in the cathedral in her home town. That was how Theodore habitually slept, and how he'd died. Pale lips gaped inside a ring of neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard.
She'd discovered him upon awakening. She’d arisen and come up close, staring, unable to believe her eyes. It was a terrible surprise, nowhere among the thousand twists of fate she'd imagined as she'd journeyed across sea and land to German Mills, Ohio.
That was when the shivering began. Stumbling, teeth chattering, Sophie beat a hasty retreat to her bed.
She’d sitting there ever since. She kept thinking she ought to feel something, sorrow for Mr. Wildbach, panic at the black abyss of unknowns into which she was plunged, but all she could do was sit, study her toes, and shake.
At last she heard footsteps ascending the stairs. Sophie jumped out of bed, dashed across the room, tore open the door and ran into the long hallway. She didn't know which member of the family she’d meet, but she didn't care. She couldn't sit with a corpse--even such a proper one--for another minute.
There was her dead husband's youngest son, dressed in one of those outfits of denim and leather that all the young men around here seemed to wear. He was tall, muscular and blonde. He was also shocked by her sudden and indecorous appearance in nothing more than a summer nightgown.
"Herr Karl Joseph!" She how noted his clear gray eyes widened, then began to roll, trying to look anywhere but at her. "Dein Vater ist Tod!"
"What?"
Ireland 1947. Seven weeks of relentless snow. Guard Eamon Foley is searching for a missing child.
At Toby Appleyard’s farm, he discovers the kitchen littered with dead cats. And the skeletal remains of a woman. Upstairs, Toby is dead in his bed.
