The Orchard at Cape Mercy
A stolen apple, a burned barn, and the neighbor who stayed
Roselyn Denise Chambers · Chambers Abroad, book 5
Coming soon 55,903 words · ~199 pages · EPUB
She left the orchard at eighteen. She came home at thirty-three to find a stranger picking her grandfather's apples.
Clem Rafuse is a fruit-tree scientist in Ontario who hasn't been home for the harvest in fifteen years. Then her grandfather has a stroke on a ladder, and she drives fifteen hundred kilometers to the family orchard on Nova Scotia's Minas Basin. There she finds Ezra Vail, a retired Halifax firefighter who bought the farm next door, running the harvest and doing it the right way.
The Rafuses own something no one else in the world has: the Mercy Pippin, a russet apple with red flesh that grows on one dying tree planted in 1881. Her grandfather grafted forty young trees to save it.
Then the young trees disappear in the night. Someone cuts a ring round the old tree's trunk. A big fruit company unveils "its" new apple at the church fall fair. And the neighbor Clem is starting to trust knows something he isn't telling her.
With the Fundy tide rising twice a day, a grandfather who can only spell his warnings one letter at a time, and a cider barn about to burn, Clem has to decide what she came home for, and who she can believe.
The Orchard at Cape Mercy is a slow-burn Canadian romance with a real mystery at its heart, set in apple country at Thanksgiving: three turkeys and one oven, a pumpkin weigh-off that ends in a recount, a church lady who keeps the only records that matter, and a truck lost to the Bay of Fundy.
For readers who want:
• A homecoming slow burn between two people who both know how to keep quiet • A mystery you can solve with a paring knife and a fair ledger from 1912 • Nova Scotia in the fall: dikes, tides, cider, and a whole village watching • A family that argues about gravy and would die for each other • A happy ending that has to be earned
A standalone novel with a happy ending.
Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A stroke and its aftermath; a barn fire; a parent's death before the story begins.