Burnt Cove: Mystery, Murder, and a Haunting in Maine

The novel Burnt Cove: Mystery, Murder, and a Haunting in Maine will be my 22nd published book when it is released in 2025.

First draft finished on August 25, 2024. Hard-copy editing completed on September 8, 2024. More awaits but getting there!

For a chance to win an autographed copy and more, email pascoagwriter@gmail.com and write "Burnt Cove" in the subject field.

 

This is the opening:

Copyright 2024 gwaynemiller.com 

(This post was last updated on September 8, 2024)

Thursday, June 15, 2023

 

“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal. Love leaves a memory no one can steal.” – Irish headstone

 

A passerby traveling the road that descends into the village of Stonington on Deer Isle, Maine, at eleven o’clock on that cloudless morning of Thursday, June 15, would have observed a scene that could have been described as peaceful and pretty.

Framed by a white chapel to the left and the harbor with the emerald stepping-stone islands of Merchant Row beyond to the right, a cemetery with its carefully trimmed grass and abundance of weathered tombstones presented itself as picturesque in that quintessential coastal New England way. The oaks and maples shimmered with fresh young leaves in a spring that last week had turned unseasonably warm, a delightful development, all agreed, after a winter that had continued stubbornly past Easter, when four inches of snow fell, ruining the egg hunt and sunrise services. Only the irregular mound of back-hoed earth beneath a green tarp would have brought unpleasantness into the passerby’s mind.

A new grave had been dug.

And there, next to it in a coffin, was a woman about to assume permanent residence.

Measured numerically, the living who had joined the deceased in her final moments above ground constituted an unimpressive assembly.

These were them: Fr. Bertrand Lombardi, the octogenarian pastor of Saint Andrew Church, home of the island’s only Roman Catholic parish; three part-time employees, the full staff, of Farrington Family Funeral Home; and 16 mourners, all but one middle-aged or older. The oldest was a wheelchair-bound man who was in the care of an aide and encased in an Afghan, despite the humidity and heat, 76 degrees and climbing.

And thus a passerby might have assumed that the dearly departed had been a person of no particular import, in the larger sense: a local who had passed a quiet existence, troubling no one outwardly and likely having made a meritorious contribution to the gene pool; and/or a native-born returned after decades from a more tax- and climate-friendly place (Florida, if one had to guess). The sort of ordinary person who had been the subject of ordinary obituaries with an outdated head shot in the regional weeklies, The Ellsworth American and Island Ad-Vantages -- obituaries laced with “dearly” and “beloved” and “loving” and other such flowery adjectives composed by a funeral-home director with tearful input from a family member with no desire for candor, let alone full disclosure, at this Most Difficult Time.

And that assumption would have been correct.

The deceased’s obituary, illustrated with a black-and-white photo some three decades old, had indeed appeared in this week’s editions of The Ellsworth American and Island Ad-Vantages. Beyond the canned tributes, it offered little more than an age, a birthplace, names of relatives and a request that in lieu of flowers, donations in her name be made to Haven Home Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, Burnt Cove, Deer Isle, ME, 04627.

In her 97 years, more than she had expected or desired, the existence of Rose O’Reilly White had been confirmed in published form only four times before.

The first marked her wedding to her husband Bill, the man in the wheelchair, on August 23, 1947, in a Charlestown, Massachusetts, church: a two-paragraph story without photo that ran in the Boston Daily Advertiser together with a dozen similar accounts of the latest post-war couples who had committed to their role in bringing forth the initially promising but (given how the country and the planet had worsened on its watch) ultimately disappointing Baby Boom, which was beginning to depart the scene with a fetid stew of political buffoonery, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, MAGA mayhem, and incessant whining about depleted 401(k) accounts and the cost of Medicare Plan B, leaving replacement generations whose digital obsessions (think: TikTok) were turning human behavior robotic; not good, no matter how you dissected it. And Artificial Intelligence would finally sink the ship altogether, the doomsayers predicted. Granted, there were many Boomers who gave back and whined not, and many who struggled for their food, housing and healthcare in civilization’s richest nation ever, shame on America and its politicians. But would history tell their stories?

The second published confirmation of Rose’s existence was a story in the Bangor Daily News in July 1965 commemorating the tenth anniversary of Paradise Park, a small theme park noted for its mini-golf, batting cage, petting zoo, Tilt-A-Whirl and 50-cent lobster rolls that Rose and Bill had opened and owned: Ten Fun Years at Deer Isle’s ‘Family Destination,’ the headline read. At the time this cheery representation of Paradise Park had been published, Rose was five months pregnant with Jack, her only son, the middle-aged man who stood today at her graveside.

Her third previous published appearance concerned something tragic: her inclusion in the obituary of her and Bill’s daughter, who occupied the grave next to that into which she herself was about to be lowered: BRENDA O’REILLY WHITE, February 1, 1950 - July 29, 1973, With the Angels Now, the small granite stone read.

And her fourth had been in the autumn of 1982, when Paradise Park had burned to the ground, never to reopen. That had drawn media attention including a report on Portland’s MCSH TV’s six o’clock news broadcast and accounts in local newspapers, large and small, around the state. “Paradise Lost,” was the headline in the Kennebec Journal, as Rose could have shown a visitor in the scrapbook she kept.

But how little media stories and obits tell about the lives the dead actually lived.

How many secrets are taken to the grave, or the crematory, depending on your final wish.

Rose took many of her own with her, but unlike most others, she’d left a key to unlock them.

More secrets than any of those assembled today could have imagined.

Any, that is, but Bill.

The Bill, that is, who once inhabited the body of the old man in the wheelchair.

Which was precisely what Rose had intended when, during Jack’s last visit, she had handed him the key to a safe deposit box at Bar Harbor Bank & Trust with his promise not to open it until the time was right.

“When will that be?” Jack had said.

“You will know,” Rose had said.

Now I do, Jack thought as he stood there that morning of Thursday, June 15, 2023.