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anymore.”
    â€œOh, we’re less than an hour away,” Jessie replied. “Besides, I want Abby growing up hiking in the woods and catching fish in the brook, not hiking up Second Avenue and catching subways.”
    She smiled, looking around at the family property. It was good to be home. The maples glowed with a greenness as vivid as Jessie remembered from her childhood. The tall fir trees still resembled the protective sentinels she’d imagined they were as a kid. The birds hooted in the trees as they always did; the brook that cut through the property still babbled like it had in the days when it lulled her to sleep. The family owned seventeen and a half acres—most of it had come from Mom’s family, though when she’d married Dad, they’d bought the lot next door as well, adding to their domain. Aunt Paulette had gotten her share some time ago—as well as the little cottage that had once housed the estate caretaker, back when the Clarksons had employed servants. But, being childless, she was leaving it all to Jessie and Monica, so the land was definitely staying in the family.
    Jessie had told Monica that with the money she hoped to make on this new book, she planned to buy her half of the estate, including Mom’s house. She also wanted to pay her and Todd back for helping her move to New York five years before.
    That seemed like such a long time ago now. Jessie no longer even thought about Emil or the baby boy she’d miscarried—well, at least she didn’t think about them much. She’d found herself again, the girl she’d been in high school, not the angry rebel of college or the madwoman bent on self-destruction, as she’d been during her time with Emil. She looked forward to being back here in Sayer’s Brook, reestablishing herself as part of the community, and bringing Abby up in the same place. If some in the neighborhood and the town still remembered her wilder past—the swarms of blue-uniformed policemen that had once swept across these very same green hills, looking for Emil and his stashes of drugs—well, then, Jessie would just have to show them that she had grown up and changed. People had loved Mom in Sayer’s Brook. Jessie hoped they’d love her and Abby as well.
    â€œWait a minute,” she suddenly said, pausing in their trek up the hill. Mom’s house was still a few yards away, but Jessie had noticed something in the trees to her right. “What is that?” she asked, pointing.
    A brick structure loomed over the tops of the maples.
    â€œThat’s John Manning’s house,” Monica told her.
    Then Jessie remembered. John Manning. The bestselling horror writer. He’d bought a portion of their property the year Jessie had moved to New York. No wonder she didn’t remember right away. She’d been dealing with horrors far more real at that moment than Manning’s vampires and werewolves. So she’d never met him, just heard about him from Monica. But now she was remembering something else. . . .
    â€œWasn’t there,” she asked, “some kind of scandal a couple years ago . . . ?”
    â€œYeah,” Todd was saying, lifting an eyebrow over at the house. “John Manning. The guy who killed his wife.”
    â€œTodd,” Monica scolded again. “What did I say about voices carrying?”
    â€œHe killed his wife?” little Abby asked.
    â€œNo, sweetie, that’s not what your uncle said,” Abby’s nanny, Inga, piped in, taking the child’s hand and leading her a few feet away, pointing at a flock of geese that had landed near the brook.
    Jessie was grateful to Inga. She was a lithe but sturdy German girl of nineteen. With all of Jessie’s writing deadlines and interviews over the past year, Inga had been indispensable. Inga had spent more and more time with Jessie and Abby, becoming part of the family. It seemed only natural to invite her to