Chapter 1

The big man with the full snow-white beard and heavy leather leggings, buttery soft from years of use, pulled the pine tree through the snowdrifts in my front yard with ease. He made it look more like a branch that had fallen during a windstorm than the ten-foot-tall, unwieldy thing that it was.

“Where do you want it this year, Lucy?” Willie asked when we got to the front door.

“Same place as always,” I answered. “By the window wall. The stand is ready and waiting for it.”

“You could try a different spot.” He amended his statement a half-second later, “But then you wouldn’t be able to see your tree and your lake at the same time.”

He knew me well. We knew each other well. After fifty years of friendship, we should.

Willie tamped the base of the perfectly shaped pine on the ground to “knock off the snow and any hitchhiking critters,” as he said every year. Five or six years ago, two tiny chipmunks hopped out when we were decorating that year’s tree. It took us all night to wrangle the pair he called Chip and Dale, so now he always made sure we were clear of “rodents” before bringing it inside. While he held the tree upright, I removed some of the lower boughs with my tiny chainsaw. I’d use them to decorate the mantel and other areas of the house.

“Got to let the branches warm up and settle into place,” Willie noted, securing the trunk into the stand and then centering the tree inside a twenty-four-inch square galvanized tub. The same one we always used. “Something bothering you, Lucy? You’re quiet and don’t seem like your usual chipper self. Yule tree day has always been one of your favorites.”

I stared out at my lake and pine forest as though an answer to that question different from the one in my head would appear there. No such luck. “Effie had a vision.”

Willie paused and looked at me as he positioned the stepladder next to the tree, ready to string the lights when the branches were ready for them. “What was this one?”

Along with being located in one of the most beautiful spots in a state full of beautiful places, Whispering Pines was loaded with unique people. Most of the folks here followed Wicca. There were also fifty or so carnies, I’d lost count of the exact total, who ran a circus in the northeast quadrant. And then there was the small band of fortune tellers. Effie Crane was not only a teller, she was one of the first people I’d let move here—an Original—and became one of my dearest friends.

“Change is coming,” I intoned, mimicking her voice.

Willie set the lights on the ladder and faced me. “What kind of change?”

I couldn’t answer.

“Lucy?”

“Someone’s going to die.”

He must’ve seen the answer to “Who?” on my face. “Let’s not talk about it. Not today.”

“You know she’s never wrong.” I stared up at him as he looked away. The innocent act, looking away, sent an unexpected shot of loneliness through me. “But you’re right. No one is dying today. I’ve got stew in the slow cooker. It should be ready. Let me warm up some biscuits and we can have lunch.”

Stew was one of the few things I could make well. Otherwise, I was a pro at opening boxes and thawing out frozen meals.

“Excellent as always,” Willie praised after the first few mouthfuls.

He had three bowls of savory meat and vegetables and a half dozen flaky biscuits while I filled him in on the general goings-on in the village. Willie preferred the privacy and seclusion of his few acres in the northwest corner of my two-thousand-acre property. Most people didn’t fit well in his world. Hadn’t since his wife died almost sixty years earlier.

“Loved that woman to the depths of my soul,” he confessed the first time we talked about her. “Still do. Always will.”

A year after she died far too young, Will Haggerty made sure the millions his business had made were safe and secure, sold all of his possessions except the essentials, and told his second in command he was moving to the woods. Some unexplainable force brought him to my little hamlet, as it had thousands of people over the years. He liked the idea of having some people nearby, but not too many, so asked if he could build a cabin on my property in exchange for a monthly rental payment he insisted on giving me. I said yes, and he built an impressive log cabin by hand and outfitted it with the latest and greatest technology. Via weekly phone calls at first and then emails and video conferences when that came into being, Willie and his COO kept the business running and successful.

After my beloved Keven died ten years ago, Willie and I became close. There was no hanky-panky going on, as plenty of the villagers gossiped, just the deep affection of friends who shared a similar heartache.

“Are you going to leave me any leftovers?” I teased when he reached for the ladle again. “I was hoping to have another bowl for dinner tonight.”

He pulled his hand away. “Sorry. Your stew is just so good. I only get a homemade meal once a week.”

By homemade, he meant a meal on someone else’s dishes eaten while sitting at someone else’s table.

I gathered our bowls and glasses and brought them to the sink. “You get my homemade meals once a week. I’ve had plenty of your cooking too. You do fine, Willie.”

He grunted. “Food is better when someone else makes it for you.”

After putting my dinner into the refrigerator and washing the dishes we’d used, we went back to my tree. Once Willie had the lights on, perfectly spaced as always, I retrieved a box of ornaments from where they sat on one of my two couches.

“I’ve got ornaments, pinecones, and orange slices ready for hanging.”

Dulcie Barlow—dear Goddess, how I missed her—our kids, and I made small pentacles and other Yule-themed figurines out of twigs for our first Yule tree in 1967. Careful packaging and a bit of mending now and then meant they were still usable. I always dried new orange slices every year, though, and added short lengths of twine to hang them. The smell of the oranges drying in my oven was as heavenly today as it was when Dulcie first did it fifty years ago.

Willie and I finished with a garland of popcorn and cranberries, some feathers I’d collected during walks through the woods, and then topped my tree with an impressive antler rack a generous buck had dropped in my front yard as an Imbolc gift one February. In a few weeks, Willie would take the tree—free of ornaments and lights—out onto the lake where birds and critters would eat the berries, popcorn, and orange slices that I left in place. In the spring, the tree would break through the ice and become a habitat for the fish.

“Beautiful as always,” Willie praised as we stood back to admire it. His voice grew gruff when he added, “I look forward to this day every year, you know. Have since you first asked for my help twenty-some years ago.”

Before then, since Keven was almost always away on business, my son helped me find and harvest a tree. Then he left for college in 1979.

I blinked my suddenly stinging eyes. “You’re coming to the Yule celebration on Thursday, aren’t you?”

“I’ll be there. Always am.” Willie shrugged into his heavy jacket, held my gaze for a few seconds longer than usual, then placed a caring kiss on my forehead. “See you Thursday.”

After doing a little straightening and tossing in some laundry, I made a cup of tea and was about to sit with it when the phone rang. The caller ID said it was my granddaughter, Jayne. We hadn’t talked in a long time. There had been plenty of emails, but I hadn’t heard her voice in months.

“Hello, Dearest,” I greeted and settled onto the couch near the tree with my tea.

“Hi, Gran.” Heavy tension filled those two words. And she must have felt worse than she sounded because while we talked a couple of times a year, it was always me calling her. She, like most kids her age, preferred texting. I didn’t have a cell phone, though. No need. There was no cell service in the village.

“Oh my, what’s wrong?”

She proceeded to tell me about how for months her partner at work had been having many, many personal problems and ended up shooting and killing their confidential informant right in front of her.

“It was awful, Gran,” Jayne confided, sniffling. “To make it worse, I knew about Randy’s issues and never told anyone. You know, that code of silence stuff police officers live by.”

“Tell me you’re getting help with this,” I pleaded.

“I am, but I needed to hear a friendly voice. Naturally, Mom won’t talk about it. My failure to soldier through is too embarrassing for her. My sister is too wrapped up in her own world to deal with anyone else. Dad is overseas again—” Her voice broke.

“You know you can talk to me anytime.”

“That’s why I called.” She sniffed. “The pressure at work got so bad I ended up quitting. And Jonah and I broke up.”

“Oh, Jayne.” My heart hurt for my girl.

“Crap. What’s she doing here? Sorry, Mom just pulled into the driveway. I gotta go. If she hears me talking to you, she’ll lecture me about whining, then tell me I should be out there looking new job instead of lazing around on the phone. You know how she is. Move on. Pull yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps and all that.” She blew out a breath, and her voice broke as she added, “Maybe I should ask if anyone was ever shot to death in front of her.”

Jayne had been so proud of her job. She absolutely loved being a police detective. “I’m so sorry, honey. You know you can say anything to me. Call me back when we’ll have plenty of time to talk.”

“I will.”

“I’ll call you if I don’t hear from you soon. I mean it.”

She laughed a little at that. “I know you do. Love you, Gran.”

“And I love you, Dearest.”

I sat for a minute, staring out at my trees and lake, lost in thoughts over the mess that was my son’s family. Because of a mistake I made, Dillon ran from his problems and spent most of his time at dig sites overseas. He rarely came home, leaving his wife to care for their daughters. That worked well enough for a while, and then the three O’Shea women went their own ways. Georgia buried herself in the day spa she opened a couple of years ago. Rosalyn was busy with college and her boyfriend. Jayne had been a rising star in the police department dating a rising star in the Madison political world.

“So much of this is my fault. How can I possibly fix it?”

I was about to go downstairs and move my wet clothes to the dryer when someone pounded on my front door. I opened it to find a young woman in her mid-twenties standing there in a threadbare jacket.

“Please,” she begged, “I need help.”