Viola Bachelder was simply created as a foil to receive the letters Jedediah sent. I never intended to include any of her letters in the book, but she wouldn’t agree to stay quiet. In the end, I realized that any woman who would so captivate a man like Jedediah after years of marriage would have to be loving, yes, but also strong and independent. I had already “killed” her during the plot development phase of the book, and it grieved me that I could think of no way to “save” her without weakening the story. The final two letters that passed between Viola and Jedediah were among the last passages of this book that I wrote, and it pleased me to give them a happy ending, even if it couldn’t come in this world.
How did you feel about the fact that Faye was looking for gold and emeralds in this book, rather than the arcane archaeological finds she’s usually hunting? I’ve always felt that archaeology made such a good setting for mystery novels because, though it is a science, there is also the air of a “treasure hunt” about an archaeological dig. No, modern archaeologists are not looking for King Tut’s gold. They’re looking for rotted kitchen scraps in order to reconstruct a civilization’s diet. Yet the fact remains that they could, at any time, unearth a bag of gold or even a huge emerald that was buried for safekeeping years ago. You can never know where you might find hidden treasure. If you knew where it was and where it wasn’t, then you couldn’t call it “hidden.”
I was already toying with a story about Jedediah Bachelder and the Confederate government, when I realized that this story could send Faye on a real treasure hunt. The fate of the Confederate treasury still generates books and magazine articles and web pages galore. Some stories say the Confederate Gold passed through Florida. Other stories put it in just about any other place you could imagine…which made it easy for me to put it exactly where I wanted it to be. How did you feel about the fictional Faye discovering the fate of a real treasure? Does that blur fact and fiction too much? Or does it just make the fiction feel more real?
Now we know how Faye and Joe feel about each other. Is this the end of the series? Of course not. When a romance resolves itself in real life, do the lovers’ lives come to an abrupt halt? Faye and Joe need to finish school, find jobs, enjoy the company of their friends and each other…and we know they both want children. Life goes on, but if all goes well, they’ll be living that life with each other. I will continue throwing life-and-death ordeals at them but, in the end, I want them to be happy.
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