CHAPTER 1
CLARA
The grave is shallow, or maybe it just feels that way because the earth is still soft from the thaw last week. Mud clings to my boots like it’s trying to pull me in after her, and the wind has the gall to keep blowing the same direction it did when we laid my parents to rest on this same slope years ago. Silverpine never changes. It just circles back around, season after season, blanketed in snow, pretending it’s prettier than it is brutal.
I wrap my arms around my coat, mostly to keep from falling apart in front of the six people who braved the cold to say goodbye to Gran. Six. That’s all that’s left of a lifetime of friends, festival committee members, old bridge partners, former guests who used to come up from the city just for her blackberry scones. And now they’re gone, or too old to brave the mountain roads. Or dead. Most likely dead.
“Clara, honey.” Delilah—Dee to literally everyone in town—rubs my back with one of her bear-paw hands. Her glove’s knitted in candy cane stripes, which doesn’t match her black coat at all. “You sure you don’t want to come back to the café? I’ve got a whole fresh batch of cinnamon rolls. Still warm.”
I shake my head. “I need to see it.”
“The lodge? Now?”
“Now,” I say, because if I don’t, I’m afraid I’ll lose the nerve. “I need to know how bad it really is.”
Dee doesn’t argue. She just tucks a loose strand of her wine-red curls into her scarf, squeezes my shoulder, and hands me the keys with a tight smile. “You know where to find me if the place collapses on your head.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I mutter.
The drive up the hill feels longer than I remember. Snow piles in thick drifts along the road, swallowing the edges like a white-mouthed wolf ready to devour anything not nailed down. The lodge crouches at the top of the ridge, dark against the falling dusk, its wooden bones creaking in the cold wind. I cut the engine and stare at the place I haven’t set foot in since college.
It looks... smaller. Sadder. Like it gave up waiting.
The paint’s peeled in long curling strips, like the house tried to molt and forgot halfway through. One shutter hangs by a single rusted hinge, swinging slow and lazy in the breeze. Gran would’ve cursed it in three languages and fixed it herself with nothing but fishing line and pure stubbornness.
I swallow the knot forming in my throat and crunch through the snow to the front porch. The key sticks, of course, and I have to hip-check the door to get it open.
The smell hits me first: dust, cedar, old memories, and something vaguely animal. Possibly raccoon. Possibly worse. I flick the lights on, and nothing happens.
“Perfect,” I mutter.
The silence inside the lodge is a kind of loud that presses on my ears. I leave the door cracked just enough to catch some outside light and fumble around for the emergency lantern I know Gran kept near the foyer. After a few seconds of blindgroping, my hand closes around cold metal, and I sigh. Small victories.
The flame flickers to life, casting golden shadows over the lodge’s long, familiar spine. The great room still has its two-story fireplace, although half the mantle has crumbled. The moose head above it—Clarence, if I remember right—is missing an antler and most of his dignity. The carpet is musty and threadbare. Someone, probably time, has knocked over the coat rack. A squirrel chitters at me from the second-floor railing like he’s claiming squatter’s rights.
“Yeah, well, you’re not on the deed, buddy,” I snap.
Except apparently, neither am I.
By the time I’ve checked the pipes (two leaks, one full rupture), the furnace (dead), and the roof (somewhat questionable), it’s fully dark outside. I sit on the creaky couch wrapped in a blanket I found in the linen closet, sipping instant cocoa from a chipped mug and telling myself I can do this.
I can fix this.
Gran trusted me with this place. She didn’t leave it to me just so I could let some big-city developer gut it and put in a yoga spa with kombucha on tap.
I close my eyes and rest my head back against the wood-paneled wall. The annual Winter Festival is in two weeks. If I can get even half the lodge operational by then, maybe I can buy some time. Show the town that this place is still worth saving.
And maybe prove to myself that I’m not just a schoolteacher playing house with ghosts.
The next morning, I walk into the Silverpine Town Hall still smelling faintly of mildew and squirrel spray. Dee meets me at the front desk with a paper cup of coffee and a look that’s half worry, half amusement.
“You got raccoon under your eyes,” she says, handing me the cup.
I sip. “Didn’t sleep. The pipes sang me a lullaby.”
“Ah, the sweet sounds of feral plumbing.” She leans in. “Listen, I don’t want to make you nervous, but Thorne put you on the agenda right after the new business permits. That usually means someone’s trying to pull a fast one.”
“Wonderful,” I mutter, pushing the door to the council chamber open.
