Chapter 1: The Doll in the Glass House The GPS announced that I had arrived, but I sat in my beat-up Honda Civic for a full five minutes, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turned the color of old parchment. The house in front of me wasn’t a home; it was a statement. It…

Chapter 1: The Scent of Mildew and Fear The radiator in Room 1B clanked and hissed, a familiar, rhythmic lullaby that had accompanied Martha Higgins through thirty-two years of teaching kindergarten. Outside, the November sky over upstate New York was the color of a bruised plum, threatening the first bitter snow of the season. Inside,…

Chapter 1: The Ghost in the Storm The radiator in the corner of the fictitiously named Oak Creek Police Precinct hissed and clanked, a dying mechanical beast trying to fight off the Ohio winter. It was 11:00 PM on Christmas Eve, and the world outside had turned into a white, howling void. The wind chill…

Chapter 1: The House That Went Quiet The snow in Upstate New York doesn’t fall gently; it accumulates like a debt, heavy and unforgiving. Arthur Vance knew a thing or two about heaviness. At sixty-five, he carried it in his knees, which creaked like old floorboards, and in his chest, where a hollow space had…

Chapter 1: The Storm and the Stranger The Vermont winter was not kind to the unprepared, and Arthur Sterling had spent seventy-two years ensuring he was never unprepared. His home, a sprawling structure of timber and stone perched on a ridge overlooking the White River Valley, was a fortress against the cold. Inside, the air…

Chapter 1: The Storm Outside and Within The rain in Oak Creek, Ohio, didn’t just fall; it assaulted the earth. It was a Tuesday night in late October, the kind of night where the wind rattled the automatic sliding doors of the Oak Creek General Hospital Emergency Room, making them hiss open and shut like…

Chapter 1: The Red Lines The radiator in Room 2B hissed and clanked, a familiar rhythm that Mrs. Evelyn Higgins had listened to for thirty-five years. Outside, the maple trees of Oak Creek, Ohio, were shedding their leaves, painting the playground in burnt orange and crispy browns. Inside, the air smelled of sharpened pencils, Elmer’s…