Behind the Pages of Shadowed Summer

After Mass, we invaded the cemetery row by row, back to the old side of the yard.

"Where y'at?" Collette asked, and helped me onto Jules Claiborne's crypt.

It was just a grayish slab box, maybe six feet long. Its top was pocked from rain, rough and nubbly, and it made our jeans catch on the surface.

Folding my legs up, I settled on the stone. "I'm fine. How are you?"

           -Shadowed Summer

People sometimes ask what's real in a book. My usual answer is "Everything." All the characters are me, all the settings are real to me, but I know that's a little disingenuous. They want to know where fact stops and imagination begins.

Throughout Shadowed Summer, Iris, Ben and Collette spend a lot of time in Ondine's graveyard. And while we here in Indiana can put our dead into the ground, I did have bits of my own Crown Hill in mind when designing some of Ondine's burial ground.

Crown Hill is the third largest garden cemetery in the United States.Opened in 1863, Crown Hill is the final resting place for James Whitcomb Riley, Booth Tarkington, Etheridge Knight, and John Dillinger, among others. But what's amazing about Crown Hill is the statuary.

(You can click on any image to see a larger version; I took all of these in the fall of 1995.)





When I walk through Crown Hill, these stones tell me stories. Not just about the grief left behind by death, but the lives led before that grief.

There are two obelisks, Lena and Julius Rommel, both etched with birth dates- 1854, 1860- but no death dates. I wonder about them, how they came to leave two beautiful granite obelisks unused- or are they? Were they simply unfinished? Did they move? Or are the Rommels somewhere in the world right now, still young and beautiful, coming out at night for the opera and a taste of blood, perpetually 17 and in love?



Then there's the Kitchen crypt, set right into the hill. Someone came through and sealed it completely with concrete- it has a shadow door, and nothing more. Probably, it was closed to protect the contents from vandals. But what if it were closed to protect us from what lay inside?



And yes, there is extraordinary grief here- grief so great it can only echo love or guilt. I like to think that the Forrest monument is about love, though. To give you a true sense of scale here- the bronze statue inside the monument is life-sized.



But there is also extraordinary joy here. On a hill, the Bane mausoleum stands. It's art deco, shiny black granite, a lovely little structure, but sedate as you'd expect. It is in every way, a proper, somber memorial. If you peek through the doors, you'll even see stained glass in the back- just what you'd expect to find, yes? Except this is the stained glass window in the Bane mausoleum:



I love walking through Crown Hill. It's a quiet place to think; a quiet place to wonder. And yes, there is one real piece of it in Shadowed Summer. Though I rearranged them in the book (and subtracted one,) the crypts on which Iris, Collette and Ben talk, plan, dream, play with the Ouija board and more, they are based on this trio:



Whenever I have guests from out of town, I take them to see Crown Hill. And if my guests are particularly adventurous, we will all sit here and have a picture made- like this one. I am the shadow on the right.



So that's the true answer. That is what's real in Shadowed Summer. I hope you'll read it and enjoy it; I hope if you do, you'll enjoy it a little bit more because you know what's behind the pages.