By Susan Davis Cummings

While finishing up my book, I realized my lead character or hero of the story seems to be loosely based on me. Interesting. I didn't plan it that way, but I guess it makes sense. Not so much my personality, but my childhood experiences exist in my story of Noah Drinkwater and his Deanes Island life.

As I'm writing descriptions of certain scenes or buildings, I have pictures in my mind of ones I've seen or know. The Aleynby house is roughly based on the house I lived in during my school years in Yarmouth. It's a little bigger but the downstairs layout is almost an exact  copy. The room at the back next to the kitchen is where my Grandfather Drinkwater stayed when he lived with us. In Murder Is Always Evil it is Abby's room. My real house has no sewing room, which I added to give Abby a larger area as her own domain.

We had woods behind our house which eventually led to an inlet or tributary of the Royal River. During the winter months when the leaves were gone from the trees, we could see the mouth of the river from our house. We lived on a street called East Main Street and our house is on the top of a hill, a short ways from the bridge which crossed the Royal River and connected East Main St. with Main St. and Pleasant St. The house is still there. It was a wonderful place to grow up.
   

Looking up East Main St. towards our house on the right just beyond the white house.