Prologue
A thousand cannon burst at once and lightning split the sky, exploding gnarled branches of Garden’s Gate’s two-hundred-year-old oak, planted before the Revolution was a glint in Patriots’ eyes. Surely that storm was God speaking —shouting judgment —across No Creek and the world in a tornado of fire and wind and rain.
By His mercy, sheets of pelting rain quenched the flames that shot up in the tree before the house caught fire. But it never kept that oak from crashing through the attic roof to slam open a door into a world none of us knew, one that would forever change our lives and what we’d long believed true about No Creek, the Belvideres, and ourselves. I reckon a violent, sudden storm can do that —rattle old bones and raise ghosts from the dead.