TWENTY
CHAPTER ONE
THIS WAS, WITHOUT QUESTION, the craziest thing she had ever done.
Lucy Drake stood on the front porch of her great-aunt’s house, shivering at the cold, damp breeze that slid under her jacket.
She ought to just find a hotel somewhere in Hope’s Crossing to spend the night, instead of standing here on the dark and rather creepy-under-the-circumstances doorstep of a massive Victorian mansion after midnight in the middle of an April rainstorm.
If she had an ounce of brains or sense, that is exactly what she would do—climb back into her BMW and head for the nearest hotel. Hope’s Crossing was overflowing with them, and on a shoulder-season April night when the ski tourists were gone, she could probably find hundreds of empty rooms.
Then again, if she had either of those things—brains or sense—she wouldn’t be in this situation. Right now, she would probably be at the end of an eighteen-hour workday, heading back to her quiet condo on Lake Washington with another few hours of work ahead of her before she finally crashed.
Another gust of freezing wind whined fitfully under the eaves and sent the branches of the red maple beside the porch clawing across the roof like skeletal fingers.
She zipped up her coat and reached for the doorknob of the house. Crazy, she might be, but she didn’t need to be cold and crazy, too.
The door was locked, of course. What else had she expected, when Iris House had been empty since December and Annabelle’s shocking death? Even though she had known it would be locked, she still felt a hard kernel of panic in her gut at one more obstacle.
What if she couldn’t get in tonight? What if she could never get in? Where would she go? She had come all this way, two days of driving from Seattle. She had subleased her condo, packed all her belongings, brought everything with her. She would be stranded without a home, without shelter, in a town where the two people she cared most about in the world were both gone.
The lateness of the hour and her own exhaustion from the stress of the past week pressed in on her, macerating her control. She felt it slipping through her fingers like fine-grained sand but she forced herself to take a deep breath.
Okay. Calm. She could handle this. She had fully expected the door to be locked. No one had lived here for months. If she had showed up on the doorstep of the old house and found it wasn’t secure, then she would have cause to worry.
This wasn’t a problem. She knew right where her great-aunt always hid the spare key—assuming no one had changed the locks, of course....
She wasn’t going to go there yet. Instead, she turned on the flashlight app of her phone and used the small glow it provided to guide her way around the corner of the wraparound porch.
The chains of the old wood porch swing clanked and rattled as she sat down, a familiar and oddly comforting sound. She reached for the armrest closest to the front door with one hand, aiming the light from her phone with the other.
After a little fumbling, her fingers found the catch and she opened the tiny, clever hidden compartment Annabelle had created herself inside the armrest.
Only someone who knew the magic secret of the porch swing could ever find the hollowed-out hiding place. She reached inside and felt around until her fingers encountered the ice-cold metal of the key to Iris House.
“Thank you, Annabelle,” she murmured.
She discovered that no one had changed the locks when she inserted the key and turned it. See, there was a bright spot. Next hurdle: What if the security code had been changed since her last visit?
Knowing she didn’t have a moment to spare, she didn’t take time to savor the scents of rosemary and lemon wood polish and home that greeted her inside.
Instead, she bolted to the keypad for the state-of-the-art security system Annabelle had installed several years ago. Her fingers fumbled on the keypad but she managed to type in the numbers that corresponded with the letters H-O-P-E.
The system announced it was now disarmed. Only then did she let herself sigh with relief, trying not to notice how the small sound echoed through the empty space.
She flipped the light switch in the entryway, with its parquet floor and the magnificent curving staircase made up of dozens of intricately turned balusters.
How many times had she rushed into this entryway during the two years she’d lived here during her teen years and called to Annabelle she was home before dropping her books on the bottom step to take up to her room later?
Suddenly she had an image of when she’d first arrived at fifteen, her heart angry and battered, showing up at a distant relative’s home with everything she owned in bags at her feet.
Apparently, things hadn’t changed that much in seventeen years—except this time her bags were still out in the car.
She turned around, half expecting Annabelle to come bustling through the doorway from the kitchen in one of those zip-up half aprons she always wore that had a hundred pockets, arms outstretched and ready to wrap her into a soft, sweet-smelling embrace.
That familiar sense of disorienting loss gnawed through her as she remembered Annabelle wouldn’t bustle through that door ever again.
She felt something dig into her palm and realized she was still clutching the key from the front porch. She slid it onto the table, making a mental note to return it to its hiding place later then took another of her cleansing breaths.
Right now she needed to focus. She desperately needed sleep and a chance to regroup and regain a little perspective.
The air inside Iris House was stale, cold. She walked through turning on lights as she headed for the thermostat outside the main-floor bedroom Annabelle had used the past few years when it became harder for her to reach the second or third floors.
The heating system thermostat was set for sixty-two degrees, probably to keep the pipes from freezing during the winter, but the actual temperature read in the mid-fifties.
She tried turning the heating system off and then on again—about the sum total of her HVAC expertise. When no answering whoosh of warm air responded through the vents, she frowned. Annabelle used to complain the pilot light in the furnace could be tricky at times. Apparently this was one of those times.
Lucy was torn between laughter and tears. What did a girl have to do to catch a break around here? She had walked away from everything and packed up her life to come here, seeking the security and safety she had always found at Iris House.
With all the possible complications that could have ensnarled her journey here from Seattle, she had finally made it and now a stupid pilot light would be the one thing keeping her from reaching her goal of staying here.
It didn’t have to be a stumbling block. Last time she counted, the old house had nine fireplaces and she had seen a pile of seasoned firewood against the garage
