LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      Trinity Chadwick was coming home. It was October and the maples would be ablaze, scorching hill and dale and turning every crag and cranny burnished and bright.

      Scarlet Falls, Massachusetts, had mapleleaves in autumn and crimsonwildflowers called crested celosia in spring.

      The red leaves and flowers hadn’t given the town its name, though.

       Blood was red, too.

      Trinity took a deep breath. She’d opened the vent in the bus window as far as it would slide. The fortifying air of the New England countryside was bracing, but oxygen had little to do with the process of shoring up each and every fiber of her being. Awareness was everything.

      Scarlet Falls was beautiful, but it was also haunted.

      She’d lived with the idyllic and the horrifying her whole life. Nursing school in Boston hadn’t been all that different. Simple on the surface, butscrabble and scrap underneath.

      Trinity slowly reached down to finger the bandages on her left arm beneath her black wool pea coat. She’d been lucky. The flames that had engulfed her apartment had killed one friend and badly injured another. The crisp air she’d drawn in now threatened to release in a whimper of remembered fear and pain, but Trinity instead forced it through tight lips in a controlled sigh.

      Her arm had been burned when she’d dragged her roommate to safety after the girl had collapsed from smoke inhalation. Other friends—fellow nursing students—had held her back when she would have returned to the burning building. Though she’d been singed and burned, and even now spoke with a smoky rasp to her voice, the press had zeroed in on her “heroics,” ambushing her for interviews.

      She wasn’t a hero.

      She’d left most of her salvaged belongings, her car and the fall semester of her third year behind in order to escape. As the bus wheezed up the final crimson-decked hillside before it crested the rise by the light of the setting sun and began its decent into Scarlet Falls, Trinity couldn’t help thinking about frying pans and fires.

      * * *

      The town had a main street that had been constructed more or less during themid–eighteen hundreds. The neighborhood sprawled outward with clapboard and picket fencing. Several churches sat on picturesque high ground with spiky steeples piercing the sky. At least one of them was much older and plainer than its fellows, more Puritan than Victorian, its leeside hunched over and seeming to protect a cemetery of very old graves.

      Trinity looked away from worn tombstones and lopsided crypts as the bus labored by. She turned her face toward the distant black gleam of glassy water on the horizon. A mere glimpse of High Lake was enough to send chilly fingers of dread down her spine. So she faced forward, lifting her chin rather than cowering in the corner of her seat. Her stop was near the river. As the bus approached, the gloaming light softly illuminated the covered bridge that spanned the flowing water. She would have to cross it on foot and climb the last rise to Hillhaven.

      Then she would be home.

      No one would be there to greet her. Her parents were finally retired from their respective jobs as teacher and postal worker. They had saved for years for their current extended trip to Europe. Trinity hadn’t called to tell them about the fire or her burns. Just as she’d never told them about The Girl in Blue.

      She would be alone at Hillhaven, which would be both a boon and a curse.

      The bus pulled away in a fog of diesel exhaust and a cacophony of grinding gears. Trinity was left with a stuffed backpack and a constricted chest in the deepening twilight of evening.

      A dog barked in the distance. The river was low and gently lapping over rock and driftwood after a long, dry summer. High Lake was all the way across town and out of sight now, even if she should look in its direction.

      She didn’t.

      Trinity shouldered her bag over her uninjured right arm and turned to face the dark maw of the bridge. How long did she stand there, rooted in place and not looking toward the lake, while the bus drove out of sight? Night had descended in a cool wash of sensory deprivation and inky blackness. She was an adult now. Well past the age where darkness should have been a threat to her. Nevertheless, her heart rate increased. In a place where having your senses peeled might mean the difference between life and death, limited visibility should be frightening.

       Nothing to see here, move along. One foot in front of the other.

      Her footsteps echoed on the old oak boards beneath her feet. The noise was creaky and low. Scree. Scree. Scree. It was a long way across the river in the echoing belly of the bridge. Too long.

      A child’s laughter rang out softly behind her.

      Trinity paused to look back. Useless, but instinctive. She couldn’t stop herself.

      There was no one there.

      She

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