Pictures can be intriguing, especially when they contain an unknown face from the past. Yesterday my friend Jane sent me a gift of a Facebook page called, “Dusty Old Thing.” I say it was a gift because I really do enjoy it. On it are pictures of antiques, objects that were important to someone at some point in time, and, guess what? Each antique has a story! What a treasure trove for any number of cozy mysteries! That page got me started thinking about some mysterious pictures that belonged to my mother. They are mysterious because she didn’t know who they were or where they came from and neither do I. Through the years of her girlhood in the early 1900s, Mom made a lot of pictures. It seems to me she said that someone gave her a camera as a gift and boy! She really used it. Probably some of her chums gave her photos they had snapped and Mom stashed them with hers but, since she didn’t know the people, forgot their names, such as the photograph of the very young man in a World War I uniform. Who is he? I have no idea.
Now, like a real detective (or a mystery writer doing research) I have tried to find out who these people were. I took their pictures to our family reunion for a couple of years and asked if anyone could help with identification. No one was any more enlightened than I. However, I made a really scary discovery. The reason no one knew was because I am now a member of the oldest generation at those family reunions. How frightening. And bewildering. How did that happen, anyway? The generation of my mom and dad and uncles and aunts is no longer with us. It’s just my cousins, brothers and sister and me. We’re the old folks now. There must be some mistake!
My brother Richard likes antiques as do I. Even though I look carefully at old pictures and build a story around them, Richard is the expert with a critical eye and he can discern many facts by close observation.
My cousin Carolyne sent a picture a few years ago that intrigued both Richard and me. Carolyne didn’t know the people in the photograph and thought we might. We didn’t. It was a faded, dim picture of a sad scene. Three men stood in front of a cemetery. There were three headstones behind the men, taller than those around them. Two horses stood hitched to a wagon. The three men were somber and looked tired. No one in that picture considered it a happy day. But who, why, and where, I had no clue.
Then, Richard took over. He had a magnifying glass and he studied the old photograph carefully. “Those are not horses,” he said. “They are mules. The time of year is autumn, see those few dead leaves on the trees. The men are not dressed up, they are wearing overalls. They look tired because they have been digging a grave. And the mules are hitched to a wagon that carried a coffin to the cemetery.” He added several more things about the photograph. When I looked more closely, I could see he was right. Now we knew more but knowing more deepened the mystery and made me want to know the whole story.
Both my brothers, Richard and Tracy, are helpful in gaining background information for my cozy mysteries. They are a treasure trove of facts.
So, I look at the young World War I soldier and build a story. Perhaps he was about to board the train in Tahlequah and go to some place he had only heard of or read about in books. He may have been leaving a mother, father, sister, brother, behind. Or maybe a sweetheart, a girl as young as he, would wait for her soldier to return from war. Did he go overseas? Was he engaged in cruel battles? Did he return home? I don’t know.
I love mysteries when they are not of the macabre, awful sort. I like to start with something unknown and then untangle the knots and frayed ends until I’ve smoothed out a satisfying conclusion to a cozy mystery story, as Darcy and Flora did in their third book, Best Left Buried. Those unknown faces from the past intrigue me. They furnish material for many stories. There’s always another mystery stirring, waiting to come to life within the pages of the next book!
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