The Widows of Braxton County

by Jess McConkey

  Kate counted on her fingers. “Four generations. That’s where the ‘sins of the father’ comes in.”

  Will nodded.

  “So who carved those words in the music box?”

  “My guess is Joseph. We’ve always believed he was the one who really killed Jacob.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ll never know. My grandfather once mentioned rumors concerning the death of Jacob’s first wife and Joseph’s mother. She died under mysterious circumstances, but nothing was ever proved.”

  “Revenge?”

  “Maybe, or maybe he got tired of waiting around for his inheritance. I figure that carving is the closest thing to a confession that Joseph ever made.”

  “Johan knew the Krauses?”

  “Yeah. Here we are,” he said, turning into the cemetery.

  Kate’s eyes widened. “You brought me to the cemetery?”

  “I told you that I wanted to show you something.”

  Will drove past the rows of headstones, their polished surface gleaming in the morning light. When he reached a corner of the cemetery, he stopped and got out, motioning for Kate to follow.

  A slight breeze whispered through the pines and stirred the leaves littering the graves. Artificial wreaths and flowers marked a few of them. Some had bright banners waving next to them that seemed out of place in such a somber space.

  Finally, Will stopped at a headstone made of gray granite.

  Smiling, Will pointed to it. “Kate, meet Johan Bennett.”

  Kate’s chin dropped as she stared at Will. “Hannah? Hannah was Johan Bennett?” She shook her head. “But how? I don’t understand—I thought Hannah spent her life in an insane asylum?”

  “She spent ten years,” he answered grimly. “Her sister and brother-in-law worked for her release, but it wasn’t until Willie became an adult that they managed to get her out.” He wiped a dead leaf off the top of the stone. “They both moved to Chicago where Willie went to medical school and Hannah found a job as a secretary.”

  “When did she start writing?”

  “Right away, but she did it under her pen name.” He chuckled. “When her essays started causing a stir, she quit and wrote full-time.”

  “No one ever made the connection?”

  “No, not even when she became successful. She was always very careful to keep her past, and the fact that she was a woman, secret. She didn’t believe that she’d be taken seriously if it got out she’d spent ten years in an insane asylum.”

  “She was probably right. I take it Rose and her family knew?”

  “Yeah, in fact Hannah helped Essie get established.”

  “And both families have kept her secret all these years?”

  A look of sadness crossed his face. “Hannah went through hell and back, first with Jacob then in the asylum. We’ve always felt that the least we could do was respect her wish for anonymity, even after she’d passed away.”

  Kate knelt by the granite stone and traced the lettering of Hannah’s epitaph.

  A VOICE NOT SILENCED

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve often been asked where I find the inspiration for various stories. In this case, this book was inspired by a real event that happened in Iowa in the early 1900s, and by the intriguing book Midnight Assassin by Patricia Bryan and Thomas Wolf. I’d like to thank them for creating such an interesting book and for whetting my desire to learn more about women’s issues during that time period. (Thank goodness I live in this age!)

  Another big thanks to my editor, Emily! You not only spot the holes in the story, but give me specific ideas on what I need to do to fill them! The story is better and stronger thanks to your input and I can’t tell you how much I value your comments!

  My agent, Stacey—for the past seven years, you’ve guided my steps down this crazy path, and I never would have made it without you! Always patient and kind, you have been a joy to work with!

  To Alexx Miller, my beta reader. Thanks for being there with the praise and/or swift kick in the keister, and for knowing which I needed the most at any given point in time!

  To my friend and fellow author, Tamara Siler Jones—thanks so much for being the “voice of reason” during the process of this book and for the endless brainstorming! I knew that I could always count on you to give it to me straight!

  Mark Shepherd, Dallas County Deputy Sheriff and Medical Examiner Investigator—thanks, Mark, for all of the valuable information about law enforcement procedures and ideas on how to set up my poor characters! And thanks for the tour of the Dallas County Jail! So happy that you didn’t make me stay, and I pray I never have to enjoy your hospitality!

  And, as always, a heartfelt thanks to my family and friends. You’ve been on this journey with me since the beginning and I know it hasn’t always been an easy one, but your love and support has never wavered.

  To all the readers who’ve spent their time and their money on these tales I spin—without your interest, my stories would be just another file on my hard drive. As you can see a lot of people had input into this story, but all errors and mistakes are mine alone! Hopefully you, the reader, will forgive those oversights and enjoy the story!

  P.S.

  Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  Meet Jess McConkey

  JESS MCCONKEY, aka Shirley Damsgaard, is an award-winning writer of short fiction and the author of the Ophelia and Abby mysteries and Love Lies Bleeding. She lives in a small Iowa town, where she served as postmaster for more than twenty years.

  About the book

  The Story Behind The Widows of Braxton County

  EVERY AUTHOR is asked the question “What inspired you to write this book?”

  Personally, my inspiration never comes from the same place: TV, news articles, a book of nonfiction, a tale told by a friend. Often a story or pieces of a story will be influenced by more than one thing. At other times I might not even be aware of what exactly started my brain churning.

  However, in the case of The Widows of Braxton County, it’s easy for me to pinpoint the source of my inspiration. Several years ago, I attended a book signing at a semilocal independent bookstore (which sadly is no longer in business) and listened as the two authors explained how they came to write a book detailing a murder that happened here in Iowa over a hundred years ago. I bought the book, read it, and found it to be much more than a story about a murder and its aftermath. Midnight Assassin by Patricia Bryan and Thomas Wolf not only deals with the Hossack family’s tragedy but goes into detail concerning women’s lives at the turn of the twentieth century.

  I knew life was hard back then— farming is backbreaking work—but until I read this book, I had never stopped and thought about how difficult it could be for a woman living during that period. In 1890, women had little control over their lives. First they were under the jurisdiction of their fathers, and then after they married, as was expected, under that of their husbands. In some of the situations written about in Midnight Assassin, women were little better than slaves, with no recourse when situations were bad. There were no women’s shelters, divorce was considered extremely shameful, and not only was family counseling unheard of, it wasn’t the “done thing” to air your dirty laundry in public. Some of these women were truly trapped in a life not of their own making.

  Reading Midnight Assassin made me want to learn more. I learned about the Cult of True Womanhood, a middle-class value system that arose during the 1820s and flourished for the rest of the nineteenth century. It promoted the idea that a woman’s place was in the home. A woman’s role in life was to provide a refuge for her husband; she was thought too fragile to face the hustle and bustle of the outside world. The watchwords of the Cult of True Womanhood were piety, purity, submission, and domesticity, and these ideals were advocated in popular literature and from the pulpit. A true woman devoted her time to unpaid domestic labor. In 1890 only 4.5 percent of married women were employed outside of the home. Some
states even had laws legally limiting a woman’s working hours so work wouldn’t affect her duties to her family. Needless to say, under conditions such as these, a widow whose husband hadn’t provided for her would have been devastated financially, left with little means to care for herself and her children.

  I’m a child of the 1960s and ’70s, so some of these ideals seemed very foreign to me. Also, my father died when I was an infant, and until Mom remarried five years later, I watched my mother do everything! She worked her entire life, slowing down only when she was in her late sixties. She could drive anything with wheels, be it tractor, truck, or car; can vegetables; hang wallpaper; plow a field; tend pigs. And the same hands that were strong enough to help my stepfather butcher an animal were gentle enough to dry all my childhood tears. Oh sure, she had definite ideas about what being ladylike meant and I heard the words “act like a lady” plenty of times growing up, but being a lady never stopped her from doing a job that needed to be done.

  And after reading more about society’s expectations of women in the late 1890s, I realized that back then women like my mother had helped change those views about what a woman could or couldn’t do. They lobbied for the right to vote, the ability to receive a higher education, the opportunity to work outside of the home and earn their own wage.

  But it wasn’t just women who sought change. In 1869, John Allen Campbell, the first governor of the Wyoming Territory, approved the first law in U.S. history explicitly giving women the right to vote. In 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention, Frederick Douglass signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which urged passage of national suffrage. Although when women’s suffrage came to a vote before the House of Representatives in 1918, the proposed amendment eventually failed in the Senate, many congressmen went to great lengths to cast their votes in favor of it. One congressman, at his wife’s request, left her side as she lay dying so he could support the bill’s passage. All of these people made a difference. These stories got my mind spinning. Who were these people? Where did they find their courage? What day-to-day challenges did they face that we can’t conceive of?

  When I began creating the characters and plotline for The Widows of Braxton County, all this material was fermenting in my mind—the problems faced by women in the 1890s, the expectations placed on them by society, the example my mother set for me growing up, how the world has changed for young women today, and how some things haven’t changed. I wanted my character Hannah, who in my opinion is expected to achieve an unattainable level of perfection, to rail against the status quo and have the strength to fight against all odds. At the same time, I wanted Kate to be the opposite: a woman who has many more advantages and privileges than Hannah had in the 1890s but who, at the beginning of the story, is determined to play by the rules and do what is expected of her. It’s only through learning from her mistakes and dealing with tragedy that Kate is able to find her inner strength and become an instrument of change to help others, just as Hannah did in her time.

  I hope that you, the reader, enjoyed Hannah’s and Kate’s journeys, and that you too will have a new appreciation of the real-life battles fought by the women and men who’ve gone before us. Their fight earned us many of the freedoms we now have, and personally I’m grateful that each of them chose to be “a voice not silenced.”

  A Reading Group Guide

  The Widows of Braxton County focuses on two central characters. In what ways do you think Kate’s life runs parallel to Hannah’s? How do their lives differ?

  What is your first impression of Kate? Does it change by the end of the book? What impact do Doris and Rose have on your perception of Kate?

  What is your impression of Hannah? Was there anything she could have done to change her life? Do you think that she ever loved her husband?

  Do you believe the Krause family was cursed? If so, where did the curse originate? Discuss the difference between a curse and a haunting. Was the Krause home haunted, and if so, by whom? How much do you think that Trudy knew about her family’s history?

  Did Trudy deliberately place the knife instrumental in Joe’s death in Kate’s vehicle? Did she want Kate blamed for his death?

  Joe is incredibly attached to his mother. Was Joe’s attachment to Trudy justified? How do such strong attachments form?

  In the beginning, Kate struggles to be the “perfect wife.” Why do you think it was so important to her to please both Joe and Trudy?

  How does Kate’s relationship with her grandmother shape the other relationships in her life?

  How does the quote “The Sins of the Father” resonate throughout the story?

  Does Hannah’s stepson Joseph have any redeeming qualities? How was his personality shaped by growing up in an abusive household? Was there justice for the crimes that Joseph committed?

  One act of violence, the murder of Jacob, has shaped many lives throughout the generations. How did it affect Hannah? Willie? Joseph? Essie? Rose?

  In the end, did Hannah triumph over her adversaries? If she did, is it important for the townspeople to know?

  Read on

  More from Jess McConkey

  LOVE LIES BLEEDING

  To what lengths would you go to keep a past buried?

  Samantha Moore is a golden girl—with a perfect job, a perfect man, a perfect life—until a random act of violence changes everything. Unconscious for two months, Sam awakens from her coma a different person—bitter, in constant pain, and forced to endure medications that leave her nauseated and paranoid, struggling to keep a grip on reality.

  Furious with her family for sending her away to a small, remote town to recuperate—placed completely under a physical therapist’s care and robbed of what little freedom she has left— Sam lashes out at the “nice people” all around her who claim to have only her best interests in mind. But are her violent outbursts the by-product of her condition . . . or something else entirely? Strange things are happening here— and either Samantha Moore is losing her mind or her friendly new neighbors are far more dangerous than they appear to be. . . .

  “Haunting, mysterious, and subtly romantic, this debut under Shirley Damsgaard’s pseudonym is inspirational and full of hope.”

  —RTBookReviews.com

  More from Shirley Damsgaard

  WITCH WAY TO MURDER

  Thirtysomething Ophelia Jensen wants to live a quiet life as a small-town librarian. She’s created a comfortable existence with her kooky, colorful grandmother Abby, and if it had been up to her, they could have lived out their days—along with Ophelia’s dog, Lady, and cat, Queenie—in peace and quiet. But to Ophelia’s dismay, she and Abby aren’t a typical grandmother/ granddaughter duo. She possesses psychic powers, and Abby is a kindly witch. And while Ophelia would do anything to dismiss her gift—harboring terrible guilt after her best friend was killed and she was unable to stop it— threatening events keep occurring, forcing her to tap into her powers of intuition. To make matters worse, a strange yet devastatingly attractive man is hanging around Ophelia’s library, and no matter how many times she tells him she has sworn off men forever, he persists. Soon this handsome newcomer reveals he’s following a lead on a local drug ring, and then a dead body shows up right in Abby’s backyard. And much as Ophelia would like to put away her spells forever, she and Abby must use their special powers to keep themselves and others out of harm’s way.

  CHARMED TO DEATH

  Ophelia Jensen’s good witch granny Abigail revels in her paranormal powers. But Ophelia never asked for her bothersome psychic abilities— especially since they proved worthless when the thirtysomething librarian’s best friend Brian was murdered by a still-unknown assailant.

  Now, five years later, another friend is gone, killed in almost identical fashion. Even dear old Abby isn’t safe, distracted as she is by her fight to prevent a massive mega-polluting pig-farming operation from invading their small Iowa town. And Ophelia can’t count on her snarling, scoffing nemesis, police detective Henry Comacho, to get the job d
one, so she’ll have to take matters into her own hands. Because a common thread to the crimes and a possible next victim are suddenly becoming troublingly apparent . . . Ophelia Jensen herself!

  THE TROUBLE WITH WITCHES

  Ophelia has always considered her psychic abilities an imposition, except for those times she’s been able to put her paranormal talents to good use— as when a friend asks her to help find a missing teenager. Unfortunately it means she and Abby, her kindly, canny sorceress granny, will be taking to the road to pursue the vanished girl in the wilds of Minnesota.

  The signs are pointing toward the secluded new age research facility of Jason and Juliet Finch, who live with their troubled—and possibly matricidal—thirteen-year-old niece. A bizarre local murder that follows their arrival—along with the appearance of a mysterious Native American shaman— only emphasizes the urgency of Ophelia and Abby’s hunt, drawing them into a web of dark secrets and to the last place they’d ever wish to be: a cottage in the woods where true evil quite possibly resides.

  WITCH HUNT

  Small-town librarian Ophelia Jensen is finally starting to embrace her lot as one of the “chosen”—a psychic and folk magick practitioner, aka a witch. Expert loving guidance from her magickally adept grandmother Abby helps—and adopting Tink, an exceptionally talented teenage medium, has given Ophelia’s life new purpose . . . until a brutal murder clouds the sunshine of their days.

  Ophelia’s coworker and best friend Darci is distraught when her cousin is implicated in the small Iowa town of Summerset’s most recent murder—the violent death of a biker. Unfortunately for Darci’s cousin, her fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. She claims she’s innocent, but it’ll take Ophelia and Abby more than a good incantation or two to get to the bottom of this crime— what with ghosts, crooked cops, secret identities, and a small army of outlaw bikers thrown into this devil’s brew.