Bailey Fish is finding mystery and adventure on the shores of Lake Anna.
Eleven-year-old Bailey, who has just moved to Louisa County from Florida, is the fictional heroine of Linda Salisbury's new children's book "The Wild Women of Lake Anna."
Bailey has come to Louisa to live with her grandmother while her mother is working in Central America. At first she doesn't like it because it's so different from what she's used to, but then she gets involved in solving a mystery, and starts to think she might enjoy her new life.
"Wild Women" is just the beginning of Bailey's adventures. Salisbury already has written the second in the series, "The No Sisters Sisters Club," although it isn't ready for the bookstores yet, and she is hard at work on a third volume.
Salisbury, like Bailey, recently moved to Louisa from Florida. She and her husband, Jim, live about a mile from the shores of Lake Anna. Their house is not far from Contrary Creek, which plays a part in Bailey's first adventure. The Salisburys drive into Mineral to pick up cat food, as did Bailey, and get ice cream cones at a nearby country store, just as Bailey does.
"I was taking notes, writing things down," Salisbury said, explaining her place descriptions in the book. "I use bits and pieces to make something new."
Right now she's waiting for April and May, the time frame for Bailey's next adventure, to see what flowers are out and what insects are around so that she can get those details right.
"I don't want to say there are daddy longlegs on the porch if they aren't here then," Salisbury said with a smile.
Spring was over when she moved to the area in June.
Salisbury dictated her first story when she was 4 years old.
"I taught myself to read. My grandmother used to send us boxes of books, and I couldn't wait around for somebody to read them to me," she said.
In her adult life, she has been writing for nearly 30 years, although this is her first children's book.
She started writing a consumer action column for a newspaper in Auburn, N.Y., in 1976, then was hired to cover the police beat. She moved to Florida in 1978, and worked as a reporter for the Sarasota Herald Tribune before making a career change to public relations in 1983. That was when she started writing her weekly personal column as a freelancer. Four years later, she was back on the staff of the Sarasota Herald Tribune, where she stayed, writing editorials and the weekly column, until she retired in February 2004.
Some of her weekly newspaper columns have been collected in two volumes, "Read My Lips: No New Pets" and "Goodbye Tomato, Hello Florida." She and her husband also have published a guidebook to Charlotte County, Fla., and a self-help book for would-be authors.
They own Tabby House publishing company, through which they published their own books as well as those of other authors.
The move to Virginia coincided with her retirement from the paper. The couple had decided to come here a year earlier. Salisbury's husband was familiar with the area, having worked in Fredericksburg for several years, and he had relatives here.
Like the geography, many of Salisbury's characters are drawn from what she knows.
Mae, a glamorous World War I spy who shows up in "Wild Women" as a great-great-aunt of Bailey's, was actually a relative of Salisbury's, and it's her commendation from the War Department that's pictured at the back of the book. The great-grandmother who kept preserved biology specimens in her basement is drawn from Salisbury's grandmother, who did the same thing.
Bailey's grandmother is called Sugar after a woman Salisbury knew in Florida who wanted everyone in the family to call her "Sugar" because it didn't carry an age connotation like "Grandma."
Other threads from Salisbury's life are woven into Bailey's story.
Sugar loves to go "treasure hunting" at yard sales and secondhand shops, and Bailey gets a handmade quilt for her bed at a yard sale. Salisbury makes what she calls "country quilts" and frequents yard sales and landfill swap centers. She was eager to show a visitor a fine Japanese print that she'd found at the Louisa landfill.
"Somebody just left it there!" Salisbury said, astonished.
Her grandmother, too, was prone to prowling around looking for discarded "treasures."
The illustrations in the book are drawn by Salisbury's son, Christopher Grotke.
Salisbury writes in a large, airy room above the garage, with windows on three sides looking out at the surrounding woods. There are shelves filled with books, many of them the children's classics that Sugar has for Bailey to read.
"The characters become so real that they're with you, always," Salisbury said.
The first time she walked into the room, shortly after the modular house had been assembled, she said she felt Bailey right at her elbow as she looked out the back window.
Salisbury started working on "Wild Women" before she left Florida, but after she knew she was moving to Louisa. Once she didn't have the weekly column, she needed another creative outlet. She writes restaurant reviews for The Free Lance-Star, but "writing this kind of book is something I've always wanted to do," Salisbury said.
Bailey is the same age as a young girl Salisbury mentored in Florida. Her work with that girl gave her insight into that age group, and carried over in the plot, as well. Bailey becomes a "reading partner" for a younger girl at school, much as Salisbury was for her young friend.
Salisbury enjoys learning about the history of Louisa County, and has worked a lot of historical tidbits into her story. A major plot point in the first book is the existence of gold mines throughout the area, and the second book will refer to Jack Jouett's historic midnight ride from Louisa to Charlottesville in 1781 to warn Thomas Jefferson that the Redcoats were coming to capture him.
Salisbury was reluctant to say much about the plot of the second book.
"I want it to be a surprise," she said.
All she would divulge is that it involves an abandoned house and some unexpected people who come into Bailey's life.
Salisbury said she's come to love one of those characters, although "she's really annoying!"
"The No Sisters Sisters Club" is due to be published this fall. In the meantime, "The Wild Women of Lake Anna" is available at Jabberwocky and The Wounded Bookstore in Fredericksburg, at various locations in Louisa County and on amazon.com.
Salisbury will be signing copies at Jabberwocky at 2 p.m. on April 23. She is also going to be at Culpeper Days in Culpeper on May 7.
To reach LUCIA ANDERSON: 540/374-5405 landerson@freelancestar.com