mary downing hahn deep dark and dangerous

She always looked sad, even when she wasn’t. Standing there, head down, she wore the same expression caught in the photograph. I found her in the kitchen chopping onions for the vegetable casserole she was fixing for dinner. Putting the photo back in the book, I ran downstairs to ask Mom about Gull Cottage, the lake, and the girl. Dulcie, Claire, and T-.” Like her face, the rest of the girl’s name was missing.Īlone in the attic, I stared at the arm and shoulder. There was Grandmother’s neat, schoolteacherly handwriting: “Gull Cottage, 1977. I turned the photo over, hoping to find the girl’s name written on the back. Pressed against Dulcie’s other side, I could make out an arm, a shoulder, and a few strands of long hair, just enough for me to know it was a girl. Behind the girls was water-a lake, I assumed. Dulcie was about eleven, I guessed, and Mom nine or ten. Next to her, Mom looked off to the side, her long straight hair drawn back in a ponytail, eyes downcast, unsmiling, clearly unhappy. In faded shades of yellow and green, Mom’s older sister, Dulcie, grinned into the camera, her teeth big in her narrow face, her hair a tangled mop of tawny curls. Just as I was actually getting interested in the plot, I turned a page and found a real-life mystery: a torn photograph.

At thirteen, I’d long since outgrown Carolyn Keene’s plots, but I opened one at random, The Bungalow Mystery, and began flipping the pages, laughing at the corny descriptions: “Nancy, blue eyed, and with reddish glints in her blonde hair,” “Helen Corning, dark-haired and petite.” The two girls were in a small motorboat on a lake, a storm was coming, and soon they were in big trouble. Hoping to find something to read, I started pulling out books-Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Misty of Chincoteague, and at least a dozen Nancy Drew mysteries. They’d been sitting in the attic collecting dust, their contents a mystery. Although Grandmother had been dead for five years, no one had unpacked any of the boxes.

One rainy Saturday in March, I opened a box of books Mom had brought home from Grandmother’s house.

Mary downing hahn deep dark and dangerous