Goshen Cove (working title): a novel-in-progress
The Button Field charts a mysterious disappearance in November 1897; Goshen Cove begins with a mysterious appearance in November 1897.
Although not in any sense a sequel, Goshen Cove crosses paths with The Button Field, intersecting in the person of Henry Robinson–and all that follows in this paragraph is true– the man convinced that he had located the missing college girl, Bertha Mellish. She was hiding out, he claimed, on the Hedden farm in Waterford, Connecticut, where he worked as a hired man. There Bertha Mellish called herself Mary Shepard, and she was getting far too close to Benjamin Hedden, a crazy son just home from Yale. Henry Robinson contacted Bertha’s father, Rev. John Mellish, enticing him down to see the girl for himself.
Such sightings and encounters in the Bertha Mellish case—and there were many– intrigued me, and seemed deserving of their own stories. Who might this Mary Shepard have been? What if I made characters of the people who took her in, imagined how her arrival affected them, changed them, stirred them up? How might I envision the scene when Rev. Mellish came face to face with the girl he must have prayed with all his heart was his missing daughter? And how challenging would it be, to give life to devious, deluded Henry Robinson, skulking, spying, threatening?
These questions were the catalyst for Goshen Cove, which, although sparked by actual history, is pure fiction.