“’Too often I deal with people between a rock and a hard place,
as my mother used to say.”’
Susan Van Kirk, Fabric of Lies, Page 263, Detective TJ Sweeny
What happened to the Blackburns?
Grace Kimball and Jeff Maitlin are now married, and into their lives comes an unsolved mystery from 30-some years earlier. In 1981, Matt and Gemma Blackburn disappeared from the house next door to Grace and her then-husband, Roger Kimball. At that time, the Blackburn’s two-year-old, Anthony, was in the hospital recovering from pneumonia. Now, it’s 2014, and a thirty-five-year-old Anthony Blackburn returns to Endurance to find out what happened to his parents and solve a mystery deeply embedded in the history of the town.
Meanwhile, Jeff Maitlin, Editor-in-Chief of the Endurance Register, is threatened with a takeover of his local newspaper. The newspaper has been owned by the same family for four generations, and it would be a disaster for the tight-knit community to lose their local news and local ownership. But Jeff is fighting against a huge competitor—a corporate vulture hoping to steal everything of value and destroy the fabric of the town and Jeff’s beloved newspaper. Can he win? Can Grace help Anthony Blackburn solve the mystery of his parents’ disappearance?
Susan Van Kirk
When Anthony Blackburn appears looking for Grace, she can’t help but aid his quest to find out what happened to his parents. When their bodies turn up, obviously murdered, he wants to find the murderer, as does Grace. But for Anthony, everything is new because his mother recently confessed to him that he was adopted, which brought him to Endurance. Grace’s note that accompanied the two-year-old to his adopted parents resulted in Anthony focusing on Grace for information.
Grace is an empathetic character, which gets her into trouble every time. E. B. Davis
When Grace sees former students around town, she remembers their high school stories. Does that mean it’s harder to overcome one’s youthful antics in small towns or, because people have the opportunity to see you grow over time, they remember less of the past?
It may be a little of both. Grace remembers really funny things about her former students (as do I), but she always gave them a pass when they were young and foolish. Often we both laugh at those memories. It’s harder in a small town where people know so much about each other, but Grace’s students do grow up, and her dealings with them as adults are generally positive.
Why did Grace set her ring tone for her former sister-in-law, Lettie, to the theme from Jaws? Does Lettie bite?
Lettie is a very complicated person, usually well-meaning but often quite judgemental. She’s very opinionated, and her conspiracy theories are quite funny. She sometimes drives Grace nuts with her opinions and her actions, but, again, Grace tries to give Lettie a bit of grace. After all, when Grace’s husband (Lettie’s brother) died years earlier, Lettie was the one who came to Grace’s rescue and helped her raise three children as a single mother. The first notes of the “Jaws” theme generally signal danger nearby. Grace must be careful what she says in front of Lettie, who has quite a jungle telegraph all over town.
Like Grace, I used to teach this book of poetry. Masters is from my area of the country and lived fifty miles south of me. His anthology is a series of poems by fictional people looking back on their lives after their deaths. The entire book gives the reader an understanding of what life was like in the early 1900s in rural towns. People were judgemental, angry, remorseful, victims of injustice, and all the other human failings that go along with living side-by-side in small towns. One of the characters in Masters’ book is based on a relative of mine who sold alcohol under the counter of his drugstore during prohibition. Anyway, Grace’s writing project is going to be a “cemetery walk” where people from the town go to the local, oldest cemetery and are guided from one grave to another where actors portray the founders of the town. Grace hopes to help teach the local teenagers about the history of their town, and she plans to partner with the historical society and the schools to do this. Each actor will have a script about his character and reveal his or her part in the founding of Endurance. Our local art center has done two cemetery walks now, and they’ve been highly attended and quite informative.
While Jeff is still working full-time, why did he and Grace decide to open a bed and breakfast?
Jeff fell in love with a Victorian home built by Judge Charles Lockwood in the 1800s. The house has quite a history, and some terrible events happened there, as revealed in earlier books in the series. Now that Jeff has decided to settle down in Endurance and live the rest of his life there, he bought this house thinking it would make a wonderful bed-and-breakfast because it’s in the historical section of town. Jeff is interested in history, and he spent thousands of dollars renovating the house so it would look like it had in the 1800s. It even had a ballroom on the top floor. He could partner with the college and provide a beautiful place for people to stay when they’re attending events at the college. His newspaper comes out three times a week. Eventually, he figures he will actually retire, and then he and Grace would have fun hosting people at their bed-and-breakfast since they’d both be retired. And bonus–Lettie is an amazing cook, and her husband, Del, is a carpenter. So they also have a place to live and meaningful work to do.
I was surprised to find that Jeff has an employer. I thought he owned the newspaper, the Endurance Register. What is his relationship like to Mr. Winslow, head of the Winslow Trust?
Jonathan Winslow’s family owns the newspaper, and he hired Jeff, a New York City editor, to run the newspaper. Jeff was looking for a small town to retire. When he first came to run the newspaper, Jeff had a lot to learn. He was used to working on newspapers in huge cities, and now he was in charge of a small newspaper that was failing. It was a challenge. Mr. Winslow knew Jeff had “newspaper ink in his blood” and he let him have free rein with policies and the newspaper’s content. In fact, Winslow smiles when he remembers this “big city” editor trying to figure out how a small town works. Jeff has been highly successful in bringing in new readers and putting the newspaper in a profitable situation. They have a strong working relationship, and Winslow trusts Jeff to run the newspaper in a professional way. They respect each other.
Oh, my. This country is losing two local newspapers every single week. Between 2004 and 2023, 2,627 weekly publications have closed or merged. Forbes, in 2023, quoted the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University as saying by the end of 2024, a third of weekly newspapers will have disappeared (8,000.) Since 2005, 2/3rds of journalists have left the business. I feel very strongly about this because my hometown and my current town both lost their newspapers to Gatehouse, which sold the buildings, fired the journalists, and are producing newspapers out somewhere with only national news. The fabric of small towns are torn apart when people have no way to know what is going on in the area.The percentage of voters in elections goes down, and often corruption flourishes. Local newspapers are archives of the area’s history, and they provide a common understanding of what’s happening locally. Without them, the culture of the towns take a huge hit.
Grace and Jeff enjoy walking the trails around Lake Lancaster. Why did the college decide to dredge it? What is bathymetry? Endurance College has a gorgeous lake area that is used by both the college and the town. Everything is natural, and it’s a huge advertisement to attract students to the college. Bathymetric mapping uses GPS and depth-sensing technology to create a three-dimensional model of a body of water. It can detect the bottom contours and predict volume calculations. The results are used to manage water quality, algae, aquatic plants, and other parts of the ecosystem. This means the college can use that data to manage vegetation and algae, plan and budget for future sediment removal, and find the correct places to place aeration devices.
Dredging gets rid of the muck, dead vegetation,and debris that harms the ecosystem. It improves the water quality and raises the oxygen level. I guess it’s like going to the doctor for a complete checkup so you can become healthier and function better. Jeff Maitlin knew nothing about this when he arrived, and, frankly, I didn’t either.
Actually, that figure is from the National Crime Information Center. A good share of those missing persons reports are teenagers (about 35%). But most of those missing persons are found, and only about 1% are open cases still pending. I thought that number was huge, too, but the fact that they find so many makes more sense.
Why doesn’t TJ, Endurance police detective and Grace’s former student, care if people talk about her?
TJ has been through a lot in her life. Being a biracial woman in a small town and fighting her way through the system to become the chief detective was horribly difficult. However, she has a strong sense of her own worth, her intelligence, and her attractive looks, and what people say about her doesn’t bother her at all. She’s probably the most confident character I’ve ever met or written.
“You believe too easily, Grace.” (TJ says on page 44) Does Grace follow a religion or have a belief in God?
That’s a great question, and one I’ve never considered. This is an area where Grace and I are very much alike (as you said above), but it’s more about human faith than religious faith. I probably taught between 5,000 and 6,000 students during my 44 teaching years. This is my own voice when Grace says: ‘How could I teach teenagers if I believed they were all taking advantage of me, cheating, lying, and doing dark deeds? It would have crushed my soul.” Call me naive–I certainly call Grace that–but that belief got me through forty-four years, and they were the best of my life.
Why would a lake have seaweed? Wouldn’t it have grasses?
You are actually correct in the strict, scientific sense. However, “seaweed”is often used colloquially for aquatic vegetation in any body of water, including lakes. Lakes contain both algae and other aquatic plants that are similar to what people call "seaweed.”
When Grace is discussing the case with Gino Ross, one of the men in the poker group that Anthony’s father was part of, he acknowledges that half the group died at an early age. Why does he say, “Fate has a way of catching up with us, doesn’t it?” (Page 237)
He could mean that death (fate) comes to us all at different times, but it surely comes, and for many that fate comes early. In my own mind, I think he is acknowledging that he knows something he’s not divulging.
You have elements of fire in all of your stories and covers—why? I know Grace has a fire in her past, but do you?
There is no fire in my own past, but the fire that was part of Grace’s past in the very first book, Three May Keep a Secret, was based on a real fire that killed a friend of mine in college. It was actually the event that sparked my thoughts for writing that very first mystery. When I began researching that actual fire from way back in the late 1960s, I spoke with the fire chief at the time and with others that were there. I read the newspaper articles, and all the emotions I had about her death came tumbling back. I’ve never had a great memory, but often I discover the events I remember well are tied to emotions at the time. This experience began my understanding of Grace Kimball-Maitlin.
What’s next for Grace and TJ?
That is an excellent question. I’m planning to take the month of January to edit and produce a second edition of my memoir about teaching called The Education of a Teacher (Including Dirty Books and Pointed Looks.) It is now fifteen years old and out of print. But I believe it still has a lot to say about the life of a teacher.
However, Grace and TJ are never far away from my thoughts. They will definitely have another adventure. This book, Fabric of Lies, was rather a turning point. I had to decide how their relationship would change now that Jeff Maitlin married Grace. And what part would Jeff have in the series now that he and Grace were married? I think I’ve solved those questions with Fabric of Lies, so my brain can begin thinking about what comes next in the small town of Endurance.
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