The Secret Deceptions of Love and Lies
by
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Secrets in Saxton– Autumn 1999
The letter was addressed to: Ms. Rosalynn Smith PO Box 44 Saxton, PA. 16678. The gray-haired woman, with her hair neatly pinned into a French twist reminiscent of the 60’s, pulled the mail from the tiny slot of the local post office. There were two envelopes instead of one. She was expecting her trust fund stipend in the envelope that she had received every month for the past thirty years plus more recently, her Social Security check. The envelope bore the distinctive raised logo of Harvey, McKenna and Shoen of Wilkes Barre, PA. The second one was quite a bit smaller than the other. She looked at the return address. It was from Carbondale. She recognized the handwriting. She hadn’t received a letter from her youngest sister in a long time and normally they were full of bad news. The last one she received told her of another sister passing of cancer. The small envelope was not completely sealed on one end and she was able to run her finger across the top, detaching the rest of the envelope gum. She slowly pulled out the pages from a writing tablet and read:
He passed away on Valentine’s Day. According to the girls, he had open heart surgery last October and never left the hospital. Looks like it was Pancreatic cancer that finally killed him.
With everyone else gone that matters now, do you think it’s time to tell the girls? It hasn’t been fair to them all these years and if something happens to you or I, they will never know the truth. Write me back and let me know. I can put you in touch with them unless you think it’s best to leave well enough alone.
XXX and OOO
M
Well this was interesting news, perhaps not all bad. Saundra placed the letter back in the envelope and tapped it against the palm of her hand as she blankly gazed out the window. What to do? What to do? Her mind started to wander back many years earlier but was abruptly broken when a familiar voice pierced her silence.
“Can I buy a plane ticket there, Rosalynn?”
“Where, “ she slowly returned from her trance?
“Wherever you are.”
“Oh. She blushed and turned her eyes to the floor for a brief second. She knew that voice belonged to her long-time friend, Charlie McGee, who ran the local general store.
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About the Book
Forty–year-old Dulcey Patterson discovers that someone is collecting funds using her mother’s social security number. The only problem is that her mother died in 1963. Who is this imposter? Dulcey thinks she saw her mother breathing in the casket, but was that just the distraught hope of a grieving five-year-old who just lost her mother? Was it possible that her mother was alive?
Follow the trail of Dulcey’s new relationship as Jesse’s PI friend helps her to uncover the truth, from the city life in Chicago to the mountains of New Hampshire and onto a small town in western Pennsylvania that is barely a dot on the map. Find out what lies beneath The Secret Deceptions of Love and Lies and how one woman’s choices affected so many.
About the Author
S. E. Goodwin believes that everyone has God-given talents and abilities. Some develop them early in life, while others remain dormant until later. Goodwin had an early ability to make lines of poetry rhyme in meter and always maintained an active imagination and sense of humor. She has been called a daydreamer more than once. It was much to the chagrin of upper management that whenever she sent e-mails, they would be detailed and descriptive rather than bulleted and pointed. At one point, over ten years ago, she began to think that perhaps she was missing out on using a God-given talent and should turn it in to something positive.
This past year, she finished her first project, using her imagination, talent, and sense of humor to create this story, loosely based on some events of her own life in the hopes that she can one day move into a different realm—one free of the mundane. It is her hope that you will enjoy the escapades of Dulcey Patterson as she travels and unravels many mysteries during her career and even finds love.
Goodwin has worked in corporate America for over twenty years. She and her husband lived most of their lives in central New York, but moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 2005, where she currently resides. She is active in her faith and church, using other talents that God has given her to serve him.