Several people have asked me about the cover of the book. Who is the girl on the cover?
The answer is “I don’t know.” Many years ago when I started to write the novel, I found an unidentified tintype on eBay of a young, dark-haired woman who, in my mind’s eye, resembled the character of Limery Clark.
Limery, of course, was loosely based on Frances Maria Buell, the 16-year-old who was murdered in 1832 in Gustavus, Ohio by her stepfather, Ira Gardner.
There are no photographs of Maria (pronounced Mariah) because photography only came into existence around the time of her death. She was said to have been a “brunette beauty,” but no other details of her appearance are known.
After I purchased the tintype on eBay, I tucked it away in a drawer and sort of forgot about it. (Btw, I also found a tintype of a young man who, in my mind’s eye, resembled the character of Aaron, and I will probably use that one for the cover of the sequel.)
Anyway, when it came time to design a cover for the book, I dug out the old tintype and started thinking about what I could do with it.
The first problem with the unknown woman in the tintype was her clothing. She is wearing an outfit that was all the rage in the 1870s (which is probably when the tintype was taken), but I wanted clothing that looked more like 1825. Thus, with the help of Photoshop I erased the collar of her dress and created another one that would have been more in keeping with the correct time period.
The next problem was her hair. Limery is described as having long, lustrous, wavy, dark hair, and I wanted the girl on the cover to have billowing waves of hair that sort of stretched out across the page. Photoshop to the rescue again!
I also Photoshopped the girl’s skin to make it flawless, and I enhanced the light in her eyes to give her a more ethereal, faraway look.
The next challenge occurred in regard to the white deer. I do have several photographs of a white deer that lives in Mill Creek Park in Youngstown, Ohio, but that particular deer is young, without antlers, and none of the photos were right for the cover.
So I found a photo of a brown buck I had taken in the fall of 2020 and adjusted the coloring of the hide so that it looked white.
For the background of the cover I selected a moody October sky over a field somewhere along a back road in Northeastern Ohio.
We had some initial problems when formatting the cover, and the first batch of books that Amazon printed showed some distortion to the girl’s face. (Ughh…)
Thus I had to make some changes to the dimensions and resubmit the cover. I am happy to say that the cover on the current edition of the book looks the way it is supposed to look. (Phew!)
It is unlikely that I will ever know the identity of the unknown girl in the tintype, but whoever she is, I think she makes a good Limery.
