Non-Stop Reads: Margaret Westlie

Showing posts with label Margaret Westlie. Show all posts

Friday, February 6, 2015

#Excerpt from ANNA'S SECRET by Margaret Westlie @MargaretWestlie #AmReading #Historical #Murder

“Someone’s gone to great pains to leave her comfortable.” Angus stared down at Anna. He was a church elder, and because of his wisdom, the unspoken head of the community. The ten minutes since Neil had arrived with his news had seemed an hour.

“Aye, they have indeed.” Duncan regarded the neatness of Anna’s grey drugget dress arranged modestly around her ankles, her folded hands lying across her abdomen. “It’s more than she deserved.”

“Hush now, Duncan, it’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead.”

“Yes, Duncan, she might come back and haunt you,” said Hector, his pale blue eyes quite serious.

“Och, Hector, you’re always thinking of ghosts.” Angus shook his grey head. “The poor thing probably has more to do than come back and haunt the likes of you.”

“She’s likely dancing in the hot place wishing for a bigger fan,” said Duncan.

A giggle erupted from Neil who had been hovering at the periphery of the small group of men. Angus looked hard at Duncan. “No more of that talk now, in front of children.” He squatted down beside Anna. “Is this the way you found her, Neil?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You didn’t touch her?”

“No, sir, only to shake her arm to see if she had just fallen asleep. She was stiff with the cold.”

Angus regarded Anna for another moment. “Help me turn her over, then.”

The three men knelt and turned her onto her left side. A small swarm of flies rose from their feast of sticky blood left on the pillow of yellow straw that had supported her head.

“It must have been someone who cared about her to take such trouble with her remains,” said Hector.

“Aye, it’s as if she was being put to bed,” agreed Angus.

“One more time,” said Duncan.

“Who’s going to tell Ian?” asked Hector.

“I will,” said Angus. “He’s my own cousin and we’ve known each other since we were schoolboys.”

“But we’re his cousins, too,” said Duncan.

“Nevertheless, I will tell him. You two will follow with Anna’s remains.”

“We need something to carry her on,” said Hector.

“There’s the door to Murdoch’s house that’s fallen in,” said Neil.

“Run, then, and be quick about it. Go with him, Hector, he’ll not be able to carry it by himself.”

Hector and Neil set out across the field where they had worked side by side with Ian only a few days before. The oats had been thick that summer and the straw had been plentiful, its shadowy roots home to field mice and grass snakes and crickets. Murdoch’s house had long stood vacant, its windows broken and its door fallen off its leather hinges. The roof had blown off in a winter gale three years ago and now the whole structure sat at a crazy angle not quite ready to fall into its cellar.

“You’re lighter than I am,” said Hector. “Go in and get the other end of the door, but mind where you step, it’s none of it very stable.”

The floor creaked and moved even under Neil’s slight weight. A few moments of careful manoeuvring freed the door from its bed of fallen rafters. In a few minutes Hector and Neil returned to the others.

Neil watched as Hector, Duncan and Angus loaded Anna’s remains onto the grey planks of the door. A smear of blood darkened the wood as they positioned her head for the journey home.

Hector shuddered. “Old Annie said this door would be smeared with the blood of the just.”

“Will you stop it, Hector,” said Duncan. “When did she say that?”

“The winter before Murdoch left for the Boston States.”

“That’s years ago, and Annie’s senile.”

“Not then she wasn’t. She said it as plain as day. I was there and I heard her.”

“And what did Murdoch think of all that?”

“There’s some say that’s the reason he left the Island.”

Anna Gillis, the midwife and neighbour in Mattie’s Story, has been found killed. The close-knit community is deeply shaken by this eruption of violence, and neighbours come together to help one another and to discover the perpetrator. But the answer lies Anna’s secret, long guarded by Old Annie, the last of the original Selkirk Settlers, and the protagonist of An Irregular Marriage. Join the community! Read Anna’s Secret and other novels by Margaret A. Westlie.

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Genre – Fiction, mystery, historical

Rating – G

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Website http://www.margaretwestlie.com

Thursday, July 3, 2014

@MargaretWestlie on Anne of Green Gables & Maggie Muggins #AmReading #Historical #Fiction

What books did you love growing up?

I loved the Anne of Green Gables stories and ultimately read every one several times. I liked J. M. Barrie’s Little Minister, and Maggie Muggins. There were others of this nature. I also liked the Cherry Ames series (nurse) and the Nancy Drew series. My father encouraged reading and education and he always read to me when I was tiny and read poetry to me when I was older.

Who is your favourite author?

I don’t know if I have a favourite author. I like stories that have a happy ending with all problems resolved satisfactorily. An author who provides this is one I will likely read again. I am rather taken with the Mitford novels by Jan Karon just now and have read about half of those so far. I don’t like stories that are dark and brooding. I like interpersonal relationship stories.

What do you hope your obituary will say about you?

That I was joyful. I don’t know what else to say. Of course, I am many other things like warm and kind but those traits are kind of cliche to say out loud. I’m gentle and mostly non-judgemental although if you look at judgement as discernment that opens up a whole other discussion. I am discerning. I’ve thought off and on that I should write my obituary just for the exercise of it. It seems a little extreme but it could be very revealing. The other side is that what I would write now and what I would write in ten years time could very well be something entirely different.

Location and life experiences can really influence writing, tell us where you grew up and where you now live?

I grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and was educated in the Halifax school system. I took my nursing diploma at the Victoria General Hospital School of nursing, worked in ER there, then on to Dalhousie University in Halifax. After my nursing degree I lived in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia doing Public Health, then on Prince Edward Island doing several nursing jobs. I then lived in Calgary, Alberta, doing in-service education, then on to Waterville, Maine, as a nursing supervisor and night charge nurse. I met my husband in Waterville and we lived there for a year until he took a job in Liberty, Missouri, and we moved to the Kansas City area. I worked for awhile as a night charge nurse at the hospital and then retired in 1988. I started studying music at the college where John was professor because I always wanted to study music. My writing education began there.

How did you develop your writing?

I picked up the English courses I needed at the college where my husband was teaching to convert my nursing degree to an English major, then went to University of Missouri at Kansas City for a Masters’ degree in English with a professional writing emphasis. Since then I have taken various workshops in poetry and now have over two hundred poems. I have also been writing and writing, and reading about writing and practising writing. You rarely see me without a pen in hand and my listening ears on.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

Inspiration comes to me through stories I hear. My uncle, now deceased, was a great story teller. The germ of Anna’s Secret came from the story of Anne Beaton’s Hollow. The murder occurred in Lyndale and the hollow is still called by that name. My grandmother was another source of good stories. She lived to be 106 and died in 1990, just before I started writing. She was bright to the end and people came from far away to learn about their ancestors. They’d ask her about a certain person and she’d think for a moment and then say: “yes, he/she was so -and-so’s child but he/she always went by this nickname.” A lot of stories went with both her and her son.