MYSTERY WOMAN: Dawn Tripp's latest novel interwoven with local lore

The Herald News: MYSTERY WOMAN: Dawn Tripp's latest novel interwoven with local lore

By Linda Murphy
WESTPORT — The idea for author Dawn Tripp’s latest novel, “Game of Secrets” was almost as happenstance as a skull with a bullet hole rolling out of a pile of gravel. That skull, a real-life mystery that endures from the days when Route 88 was constructed in the agricultural town, sparked the author’s third book, a literary mystery in which secrets unfold over Scrabble games.

“I was sitting in Carl Lees' office, and he told me a story about when the state dug the fill for the new bridge. When they dumped it, there was a skull with a bullet hole in it,” she said, from a dock on the opposite side of the harbor as she pointed to the Route 88 bridge and referred to the well-known lawyer who has since passed away. “As soon as he said that I said, ‘Oh yeah.’ I didn’t set out to write a mystery, but you hear one little nugget, and everything falls together.”

In Tripp’s compelling novel, the skull with the bullet hole is thought to be the remains of Luce Weld, father of Jane Weld and the lover of Ada Varick, whose volatile ex-husband is the suspected killer.

The novel weaves back and forth over time as the two women, now seniors, play weekly Scrabble games at the Westport COA. The mystery surrounding the death of Luce Weld simmers beneath the chatty, purposeful games. “A lot of the way I work is like a game of Scrabble. I start with little scattered pieces that I build into a larger whole.

I thought about a few different games, but at the end of the day, it had to be a Scrabble game. In the book, how two women play Scrabble is a metaphor for how they live their lives,” said Tripp.

But there’s more at stake in the game than just the mystery of the death of Luce Weld in Tripp’s evocatively drawn character study of the two townie families. Jane’s daughter, Marne, is dating Varick’s son, Ray, despite her longstanding dislike of his older brother, Huck, an apparent lowlife.

Like most of the characters in the book, Huck is not a simple stereotype. Luce Weld, a despicable character in her last novel, “Season of Open Water,” is just as unlikeable this time around, but Tripp said she found a more complex side to the character by writing about him through the eyes of his daughter, who loved him. “Characters come to you from one side, and when you start to dig you find a darker place, but there’s nothing more gratifying than finding the other side of the character and rendering them in full,” she said.

“It’s like Huck. My first glimpse of Huck was of him as that boy in that car racing down the unfinished Route 88 thinking about a girl: I knew what he hid, what he was hiding from, what he feared, and what he loved,” she said of a scene inspired by locals’ stories of car racing on the highway that divided the town.

The image of that 14-year-old boy driving fast down Route 88 before it was finished was one of three images that Tripp said she started with four and half years ago at the inception of “Game of Secrets.” The others were the two women playing a game of Scrabble and the two lovers, Ada Varick and Luce Weld, meeting in an old cranberry barn down on the beach. “I didn’t know their names or the details of their lives, but I could tell it was going to be the last time they were together,” she said. “My stories start with a little tiny piece – it’s the little things that burn in me and make me want to know everything about that character.”

Tripp set the early years of the novel in the period of time when they started to build Route 88. “Every Westporter I’ve talked to said they felt that was the defining event that changed the town. It divided the town. I knew I wanted to set it in that time when they opened this span and they tore the old bridge down. I started to write out the characters' lives in connection to the construction of Route 88,” she said.

A graduate of Harvard University, Tripp spent summers in Westport, and she now lives in the town with her husband and two sons. Her first two novels, “Moon Tide,” and “The Season of Open Water,” winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, were both set in Westport.

“I feel in love with Westport’s physical landscape," she said. But, like any other town, it has a whole other landscape and that’s the landscape of all" the stories and all the lives that have been played out in a town like this. Those stories aren’t the basis of my novels, but that said, the town described in the novel revolves around the stories that are told, and the stories that are not told."

The novel will hit bookstands on July 5. Tripp will is scheduled to make appearances at the following locations. July 7, 4 p.m., Partners Village Store, 856 Main Road, Westport; July 19, 7 p.m., Baker Books, 69 State Road, Westport; July 21, 7 p.m., Westport Public Library. For more information, see www.dawntripp.com.