Bound by Love…When Evil Lives After…

 Today, we have a guest. Multi-published author Toni V. Sweeney.  Because it's Monday morning, I have a dental appointment, and I am facing a very close deadline to finish a book, I'll turn the mic over to Toni and allow her to handle the introduction:

Biographical Note:  Toni V. Sweeney has lived 30 years in the South, a score in the Middle West, and a decade on the Pacific Coast and now she’s trying for her second 30 on the Great Plains, specifically in Lincoln, Nebraska. Since the publication of her first novel in 1989, Toni divides her time between writing SF/Fantasy/Romance and Horror under her own name a several nom de plumes. She has received numerous Reviewers Choice awards from the Paranormal Romance Guild’s annual review, the Preditors & Editors Readers awards and the Maryland Writers Association.

 And now, on with this blog…

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In TV shows and movies, occasionally the statement will flash across the scene: “Based on True Events…”. In my novel Bound by Love, that statement would have read “Based on a True Location…”.

 

Part of the setting of my novel is an old house, abandoned by its owners.  On my grandfather’s property, there was such a house. Though as far as I know nothing as violent or grisly as the events in my novel happened there, it became the place where the disappearance of Dylan Roth and his neighbor Jules Mercier is finally solved.

 

The real house was called the Old Stubbs place. That was the only name we children ever knew it by. That’s what everyone called it.  Nothing about the people who lived there and gave it their name, however. It was located on the other side of my grandfather’s 220 acres—half farmland, half pulpwood forest and swamp—and we could stand at the edge of the feedlot in the backyard, look across the cornstalks and actually see it in the distance, a medium-sized house, its weathered planks devoid of paint, its two chimneys visible in the distance.

 

 It could be reached either by following the road in an arc, going across the turn-off where dirt had been tamped down across a drainage ditch or going across the field on horseback. Both ways took an equal length of time but it was more fun to ride there, or for the more hardy of us to actually walk, following the tractor-trail across the terraces and skirting the pine woods where wild gooseberries, plum, and the occasionally yucca plant bloomed.

 

The entrance road went through a soybean field on one side and pecan grove on the other, leading directly to the house. There had once been a garden on one side, with a tiny outhouse perched in a corner. On the other side, a huge and ancient chinaberry tree grew, with a Cherokee rose twining itself through its branches. Those roses featured prominently in my bnook. Beyond that, the  house was surrounded on three sides by pine trees, with a fig tree and a stand of sugar cane facing it across the road that went past the house, meeting the tractor trail on the other side of the barn.

 

Steps to the porch were partly missing, partly falling to pieces and one had to climb them carefully.  Overgrown hedges bordered either side.  The porch itself was in pretty good shape but the roof was only partially there.  Inside, two rooms opened into a center foyer with two rooms behind that.  A front room held trash and junk…newspapers, boxes, you name it. It also had an upright piano, where mice had taken up housekeeping. This fact give rise to the “mouse in the cupboard” incident in my novel.

 

While in that particular room, we bigger kids would run around raising dust and telling the smaller ones they were ghosts, but only in that room, probably because of the piano and the fact that when the mice ran around in it, it made weird jangly tunes.

 

Behind the last room was another, perhaps a storage area, since it was accessible only from the outside.  By the time I knew the house, this room had steps but no door and no floor.

 

There were two springs on the property. One had been made into a well a short distance from the house; the other was a quarter of a mile away at the end of a field. It had been shored-up with planks and was filled with deep green water.  Some of my uncles used to swim in it but I wanted no part of that dark stuff.  I had no idea how deep it was and didn’t want to find out.

 

When my youngest uncle married, he and his bride lived in the old Stubbs place—very primitively. They had electricity strung to the house but they also had lanterns—just in case.  There were fireplaces in the two front rooms but their heat was a large pot-bellied stove set in the bigger room…and this was in the mid-Sixties!  The kitchen held a set of hot plates attached to a small propane tank. My uncle plowed the garden and planted it. He lowered himself into the well, cleaned it out, and installed a pump, sending water to faucets he set up in the kitchen.

 

There was no indoor plumbing, and let me say…I wasn’t particularly enamored of that outhouse, especially in winter!

 

They didn’t stay in the old Stubbs place very long, only until he made enough money to buy a real house another uncle had built elsewhere on the property.

 

All my life whenever we visited my grandfather, we children would range the fields and woods, and eventually end up at that old house. It was a fixture.  Riding my horse, I’d go there, circle it, climb its pine trees, pick its plums, and ride through its woods. Whether alone or with my cousins, I always got a frisson when I was there, wondering who the Stubbses had been and why they’d abandoned the house.  No one ever said and for some reason, I never asked.  It was simply there, a part of the landscape until the day my grandfather died and it was torn down when the property was sold.

 

The old Stubbs place is gone now and a subdivision stands in its place but it, the house, its dark, deep well, the pecan grove and sugar cane stand live again in my novel.

 

Bound by Love

 

After a nasty divorce, Dylan Roth is back home, joining his dad and brother in the family construction business. He’s assigned to the renovation of the old Mercier house, which is being filmed for the TV show Dream Homes, Unlimited. The last thing Dylan wants is to fall for Scarlett “Letty” Mercier, but an undeniable attraction is making it hard for him to say no to the redheaded beauty. When he learns the Roths’ and the Merciers’ pasts are entwined, he starts digging, and family history can no longer stay buried. Dylan and Letty are bound by a haunting secret that threatens to keep them apart unless they can break the ties of the past.

 

EXCERPT:

 “Mother, whatever you’re cooking up, forget it,” I said. “Letty Mercier and I are not going to be romantically-inclined toward each other any time soon.”

“If you say so, dear.” She went back to the paper, laying aside the comics and opening Parade magazine.

“Don’t do that,” I warned. She’d used the same tone she always did when I said something and she refused to argue because she knew better. “I…no, never mind. Dad, What’s the deal here?”

“What do you mean, son?” Dad looked up from the want ads.

“Quit it. You know exactly what I mean. What’s this thing you and Letty keep hinting at? The bygone you two are letting go by. The reason her father might worry about her staying with us?”

Dad didn’t answer.

“You may as well tell him.” Mom looked around the page she was holding. “It’s unfair to keep Dylan in the dark, especially since Letty obviously knows.”

Dad didn’t answer. Instead, his mouth tightened into a sudden straight line.

“He has a right,” Mom went on. “So simply state it plainly…about your great-grandfathers, and the scandal, and everything.”

“Scandal?” I looked from him to her and back. “What kind of scandal?”

Dad sighed. “Why bring it up?”

“You already have,” she answered. “By not bringing it up.”

“So there really is some deep, dark secret?” I asked. “A skeleton in the Roth closet…and the Mercier one, too?”

“I don’t know why it has to be dug up at this late date.” Dad folded the newspaper and dropped it onto the lamp table in a gesture just short of throwing it. “Why can’t we simply ignore it and—”

“You realize you’re only making me more curious,” I told him. “What happened?” His expression was so serious I had to laugh. “Come on, Dad. What could be so bad? Did Great-grandpa Roth run off with Great-grandpa Mercier’s wife or something?”

Mom drew in a sharp breath.

For a full minute, Dad studied me silently before he answered.

“On the contrary. He ran off with Great-grandpa Mercier.”

 

Bound by Love is available from:

http://boroughspublishinggroup.com/books/bound-love

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/924697

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P3917V2