OLD WOMAN
Old Woman is set in Clay Corners, Virginia in 1999 but flashes back to an earlier time when
Genevieve Clay has a love affair with James Abel "Clark" Clarksdale, a soldier she meets when
he passes through Clay Corners with his military unit in 1942. Genevieve Clay's obsessive love
for Clark is central to the plot of Old Woman, although there are other loves and lives directly
connected to Genevieve and impact her destiny. Even though fate allows Genevieve only seven
clandestine meetings with her lover Clark, not even death erases her haunting love for him.
In addition to Genevieve's love affair with Clark, there is Tiny Clay's love for Mollie Mae
Bell, a prostitute. From the liaison between him and this woman a child is born but adopted by
Janet and Jarrett Lehman, a childless couple living on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Ten years after
adopting this baby the Lehmans have their own child Penny. As an adult Penny finds her way to
Clay Corners where she faces almost certain death at the hands of her adopted sister, Stephanie, a
successful lawyer, who had moved to Clay Corners twenty years earlier. Will ex-convict Jasper
Banks help Penny escape from her nemesis, or will he run away for fear of being returned to jail.
Jackson Toler is an attorney who looks after Genevieve Clay's financial affairs. He and his
wife Ashland are secondary characters in the story but touch Genevieve Clay's life more through
their indifference than in a direct fashion.
During the 1994 Labor Day Weekend Genevieve Clay believes that after fifty years Clark has
come back to see her in ghostly form, when she glimpses Jasper Banks through her basement
window. At the time of Genevieve's sighting she is astonished to find a woman hiding in her
basement and angrily confronts her visitor whom she wrongly believes to be Stephanie Lehman.
Later Stephanie does go over to Genevieve's house to sneer over her recent discovery that she is
Tiny Clay's daughter and rightful heir, since earlier that evening Mollie Mae Bell on her deathbed
revealed the identity of Stephanie's biological parents to her. Mollie Mae Bell's confession of this
long kept secret results in murder, even though it is hidden until the last day of 1999.
