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The Barrier
By: Rex Beach
Many men were in debt to the trader at Flambeau, and many counted him as a friend. The latter never reasoned why, except that he had done them favors, and in the North that counts for much. Perhaps they built likewise upon the fact that he was ever the same to all, and that, in days of plenty or in times of famine, his store was open to every man, and all received the same measure. Nor did he raise his prices when the boats were late. They recalled one bleak and blustery autumn when the steamer sank at the Lower Ramparts, taking with her all their winter's food, how he eked out his scanty stock, dealing to each and every one his portion, month by month. They remembered well the bitter winter that followed, when the spectre of famine haunted their cabins, and when for endless periods they cinched their belts, and cursed and went hungry to sleep, accepting, day by day, the rations doled out to them by the grim, gray man at the log store. Some of them had money-belts weighted low with gold washed from the bars at Forty Mile, and there were others who had wandered in from the Koyukuk with the first frosts, foot sore and dragging, the legs of their skin boots eaten to the ankle, and the taste of dog meat still in their mouths. Broken and dispirited, these had fared as well through that desperate winter as their brothers from up-river, and received pound for pound of musty flour, strip for strip of rusty bacon, lump for lump of precious sugar. Moreover, the price of no single thing had risen throughout the famine.

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Fancy
Eighty-two year old Frances Smith, known as Fancy, is suffering from senile dementia. She doesn’t know it; neither does her family. Ten of her younger years were consumed with her love for Carlos, a man who worked on her father’s farm. Their love blossomed and grew until one fateful day.

As an old woman, Fancy spends more and more time in her past, through both her dementia and her conscious remembrances of Carlos. She remembers how they loved to dance at fire halls and other dances. She constantly asks him when they will once again dance. His reply is always the same, “Soon my love.”

All the while her family tries to come to grips with her dementia.

Get Fancy here

Centerville
Sheriff John Shambach is consumed with the tragedies happening, without rhyme or reason, in the nearby village of Centerville. While he tries to track down the murderer of little Betsy Smith, two teenagers, Jimmy Harris and Ben Snyder, who live in the village, are well on the way of discovering who this evil monster is. They discover who was responsible for the horrible events at the Firemen’s Carnival, where Betsy Smith was brutally murdered and another girl attacked and nearly raped. They piece together the clues to what actually happened to Patrick Marks and why his pants were on backwards. And why he was found down a well. Through this summer of horror they unearth the facts that the sheriff is unable find and they identify the serial killer in their midst. How does a small insular society cope with tragedy after tragedy in that hot summer? Twenty years pass and now Ben Snyder is a detective deputy sheriff in the same quiet central Pennsylvania area where he grew up. The peacefulness in Centerville is shattered by the murder of an elderly woman who is confined to a wheelchair. Ben finds it suspicious that the woman is found in the cellar with her wheelchair but the wheelchair is too wide to fit through the doorway. Not long after that a local Mennonite girl is brutally murdered and Ben struggles with the few clues to solve either case. A sudden revelation opens things up and leads him back to his own childhood and the horrible events of the summer of 1955.
This is an expanded edition combining Watermelon Summer and Ben's Story into one volume.
Get Centerville here