For all my avid fans who have been asking me over the years, after they finished each of the five previous books, if Rose and David will ever be able to marry—enjoy!
I very much appreciate Bill Harris and the team at Beyond the Page Publishing, who now publish the Quaker Midwife Mysteries. Thanks to my agent, John Talbot, for steering me in their direction.
Huge gratitude to Ramona DeFelice Long for deep reading this manuscript, as she has done with each book in the series, and for enriching it in so many ways with her suggestions and critiques. I couldn’t do it without you, my friend! She also leads the seven o’clock online “sprint” group, which starts every morning with an hour of focused creativity and gets my day going in the best of ways.
Thanks again to mystery fan and midwife Risa Rispoli, my consultant on all things perinatal, for keeping me accurate, birthwise. I named one of Rose’s aunts Drusilla so her nickname would be Dru, in honor of the fabulous Dru Ann Love, a mystery reviewer, blogger, and enthusiastic supporter of the genre. I also borrowed the maiden name of my longtime friend (and gardener) Janice Bugos Valverde for Effie, the old woman who lives and tends flowers across from the wharf.
Blessings on the West Falmouth Quaker retreat cottage, where I regularly spend a week in solo retreat during the off-season and where I finished the first draft of this book, my twenty-third mystery. I was there in September 2019, which was perfect for checking details of light, weather, flora, and history. West Falmouth Friends generously helped me with local research for this book, as did the West Falmouth Public Library. All errors are of my own making.
I wrote the first quarter of this book at the Women’s Writing Retreat at Pyramid Lake in the Adirondacks. Thanks to the Pyramid Life Center for letting eighty women writers of all types occupy your camp and share creative energies for a week. Writers—check it out. It might be the best mid-July week you’ve ever spent. I last went to this retreat in 2001, and my first published full-length story sprang from a Pyramid Lake prompt. I was delighted to be back in 2019 with eighteen published books under my belt.
Amesbury resident Marie Deorocki was the high bidder at the Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society Auction to have her name included in the book. Thank you for supporting the kitties, Marie, and I hope you like your made-up historical self.
Gratitude to my fellow Wicked Authors—blogmates, dear friends, and lifeboat. Readers, please join us over at wickedauthors.com and meet these fabulous authors: Jessie Crockett, Sherry Harris, Julie Hennrikus, Liz Mugavero, and Barbara Ross (and all their alter egos). I hope readers will also find my two contemporary mystery series, which I write as Maddie Day.
Thanks as ever to my family—Allan, Alison, John David, Barbara, and Janet—and to my fellow Amesbury Friends, for your support and joy at my successes. Hugh Lockhart—antique house restorer extraordinaire as well as my life partner and kitty co-parent—helped me figure out the crowbar scene after I had placed the door hinges in the wrong place. Whew!
I’d like to offer deep and special thanks to my dear friend and Friend, the late Annie Tunstall. Even during her own serious health struggles, she never failed to ask about my writing and my books. She taught me about gratitude and celebrated life’s graces with me. This series was her favorite, and her soul was released to God—as Rose would have put it—during the writing of it. I miss Annie very much, but after a long life well lived, she slipped the surly bonds of earth and sailed away (to quote Emmy Lou Harris) knowing she was loved and that she would soon rejoin her beloved late husband, Richard Gale.