ABOUT THE BOOK
When her aunt steps off a
grain elevator into the emptiness of a prairie evening, Mira Piper loses her
one protector. Chloe, her flighty mother, impulsively drags her daughter to Bramblewood,
an isolated spiritualist retreat in northern Michigan, run by the enigmatic Dr.
Virgil Simon.
Then one winter's day Troy Farrington arrives, to fulfill his
mother's dying wish and deliver her letter to the doctor. But calamity strikes
and he finds himself a captive, tended by a sympathetic Mira. Haunted by her
dead aunt and desperate to escape Bramblewood, Mira makes a devil's deal with
Dr. Simon. But fulfillment comes with a steep cost...betrayal.
AN EXCERPT
I remember the way she fell.
I remember, too, the moment just
before it happened, when I came home from my summer job at the snow cone stand
and found the house empty.
Aunt Charlotte had not set foot
outside her bedroom for days, and now suddenly she was gone. She left a candle
burning on the kitchen table, a damp towel on the bathroom floor, an empty shot
glass on the nightstand. Her bedroom smelled of rose lotion and whiskey.
One of her straw sandals lay in the
living room. The other lay on its side in the hall, as if she had hastily
kicked it off on her way out the door. It meant trouble, all right, if Aunt
Charlotte was barefoot. She never did anything sane when she was barefoot.
I picked up the sandals and stepped
outside. A fat bumblebee ascended from one of the peonies by the porch steps,
drunk with nectar. He banged stupidly against the screen door once, twice, and
then careened around the house, clearly annoyed.
My gaze swept across our small yard
and down the country road to the grain elevator. From somewhere far away came
the discordant wail of a train. I glanced along the tracks and out into the
cornfield before turning back to the grain elevator. What I saw there made me
drop the sandals.
SPECIAL LINKS
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