BRJSpring26Web - Flipbook - Page 26
Mysterious t ewksbury
and took me to visit Bird Haven Farm in the early 1970s, when I was
around 7 or 8 years old. Though it was just minutes from our house in
Pottersville, the winding drive up Hollow Brook Road felt like a world and
a century away. It had been almost forty years since Harriet and her husband and best friend, Russell, discovered and restored the forlorn cottage
in Tewksbury, and she had been spending more time there since his death
in 1965.
In my imagination, Nancy Drew9s creator was a dark, driven,
and enigmatic woman, and I pictured Bird Haven Farm as a mysterious place that was hiding something; a skeleton behind a false
bookcase, a ghost in a haunted attic. But to my relief, and perhaps
a little disappointment, the Carolyn Keene that I met in the form
of Harriet Adams, was just a warm and generous woman who
treasured children and loved to tell them stories.
And I discovered that the mysteries that kept restless Nancy
Drew always on the case, weren9t hidden in a secret passageway - they all
came from Harriet9s pen. They were scribbled down in a yellow writing
tablet, on a card table, in the corner of her second story bedroom and it
was here that Harriet died of a heart attack in 1982. She had been watching
The Wizard of Oz for the first time and went upstairs during a break in the
movie to rest. Her family heard her stumble but she was already gone by
the time they ran upstairs to check on her. In the corner of the room, the
yellow tablet on her card table was opened to a fresh page with heading,
