THE MYSTERY IN MY LIFE
I grew up reading my mother’s Agatha Christie novels, losing myself in idyllic English villages where everyone knows each other, sprawling manor houses with hidden passageways, and luxurious seaside hotels that reminded me of the England I’d left behind when we’d immigrated to Canada. With each book, I took on the challenge of matching wits with Miss Christie, ever hopeful that this time I would identify the murderer. However, the real mystery in my life was my own family.
My Polish relatives lived behind the Iron Curtain which might explain my father’s secretive nature. He spoke little about his past, but when he did, he told a different tale to each of us. Once he confessed to me that as White Russians, we’d been forced to flee to Poland during the revolution where we’d adopted a Polish variation of our name. But even so, he assured me, everyone would recognize our royal connection.
For several years, I revelled in the fantasy that I was descended from the House of Romanov. Once I saw the film Anastasia, it became obvious who my grandmother truly was. The grainy black and white photograph of the squat Slavic woman my father claimed was his mother was obviously part of the deception my aristocratic relations had been forced to perpetrate in order to remain safe. Sadly years later, DNA analysis proved this to be false.
Like my protagonist’s Aunt Emma in Secrets in the Water, people in my British family had a habit of disappearing from my life—my Uncle Terry, my cousin Terry, and my great-aunt Marie. I was a third of the way through the first draft of the book when I realized I’d unconsciously patterned the death of Emma on that of my uncle. Only one month after the birth of his son, Terry fell asleep at the wheel, rolled his car down an embankment, and bled to death. As you’d expect, his death devastated the family.
But even a seemingly straightforward car accident was problematic. The family had always suspected Terry was a hemophiliac since he suffered uncontrollable nose bleeds whenever he became excited. While it’s highly improbable he had this disease, the story was kept alive. The family couldn’t accept that their only son, with his whole life ahead of him, could die such a senseless death. As no one wanted to hold Terry responsible, the hemophilia myth allowed us to blame the disease for killing him, rather than his own carelessness.
In my book, with no evidence to the contrary and a suicide note, the coroner ruled that the responsibility for Emma’s death was hers alone, a judgement her family and friends have struggled to accept for fifty years. Like Terry, Emma was about to start an exciting new phase of her life, having just been accepted into Cambridge University. Part of what my protagonist Kate is up against as she searches for the truth of her aunt’s death is that over the years, the islanders have idealized Emma, choosing to ignore her weaknesses and failings. But if Kate is to get to the truth, she must be open to every aspect of her aunt’s character, no matter how unpleasant. When asked if she would like to know something about Emma, even if it wasn’t nice, she replies, “It’s not the nice things that get you killed, is it?”
So why do I write mysteries? It’s because mystery has dominated my life. Other authors write crime fiction because it allows them to set the world straight, to bring justice to victims, order to chaos. But for me it’s the need to understand what happened and why. It’s like finding the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Only then is the picture complete.
Emma Galway’s suicide has haunted the Meredith Island for fifty years.
Back on the island to lay her grandmother to rest, Kate can’t avoid reflecting on the death of her aunt. Learning that her late mother had believed Emma was murdered and had conducted her own investigation, she decides to track down her aunt’s killer.
With the help of her neighbour, impetuous and hedonistic sculptor Siobhan Fitzgerald, Kate picks up where her mother had left off. When the two women become the subject of threatening notes and violent incidents, it’s clear that one of their fellow islanders is warning them off.
As they begin to look into Emma’s connection to the Sutherlands, a prominent Meredith Island family, another islander dies under suspicious circumstances, forcing Kate and Siobhan to confront the likelihood that Emma’s killer is still on the island.
Buy Links- https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Water-Alice-Fitzpatrick/dp/1988754607/
https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/secrets-in-the-water/9781988754604.html
Alice Fitzpatrick has contributed short stories to literary magazines and anthologies and has recently retired from teaching in order to devote herself to writing full-time. She is a fearless champion of singing, cats, all things Welsh, and the Oxford comma. Her summers spent with her Welsh family in Pembrokeshire inspired the creation of the Meredith Island Mysteries series. Secrets in the Water is the first book in the series. Alice lives in Toronto but dreams of a cottage on the Welsh coast.
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Ladies of Mystery 
I enjoyed this post when I put it up here and I enjoyed it reading it here on the blog! It is interesting what in a writer’s life brings them to write what they do and how they bring in a part of them into each story.
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This is a good post to get us thinking about our own families. My husband’s grandmother was Polish, and his sister got the idea that her family was nobility, but any talk about family history upset my father-in-law. The whole idea of coming here was to leave all that behind, so I never did figure out if the story was true or not. My family’s stories don’t have disappearing titled people. We have disappearing cads and horse thieves and the like. Much more fun on our side of the ledger. Good post.
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A fascinating look into familial history and how it propels some of us to write a story, half-true, half-fiction. I did it myself in Murder under the Big Top, a fictionalization of my mother’s time as a performer at Ringling Brothers’ Circus. It was a lot of fun but it was also cathartic. Thanks for the post. I enjoyed reading it.
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