Chapter 1
It would be a cold day in hell before Sal Moretti allowed his employees at the Island Times newspaper to go home early. The picturesque little hamlet of Bar Harbor, Maine, certainly wasn’t hell. In fact, to hikers and mountain bikers and cruise ship passengers and lobster lovers and vacationing families from all over the world who flocked to Mount Desert Island for the breathtaking scenery of Acadia National Park, it was a nature lover’s paradise.
But that was during the summer months. Today, on this midafternoon during a particularly brutal February, the temperature was hovering just below ten degrees and outside the picture window of the main office where Hayley Powell sat at her desk, all she could see was a white blanket of snow. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen it come down so hard.
Hayley stood up and poured herself a cup of hot coffee from the pot she had just brewed and took a big gulp to warm herself up. Sal had allowed her to turn the thermostat up a few degrees earlier that morning, but kept a watchful eye to make sure she didn’t crank it too high and send his heating bill soaring.
She had dressed appropriately for the workday. Long underwear. Flannel shirt. Bulky wool sweater. Jeans. Fleece snow pants over the jeans. Big clunky boots. But looking outside at the nasty weather still chilled her bones.
Bruce Linney, the paper’s handsome crime reporter, with whom Hayley maintained a love-hate relationship, ambled out to the front office to get some coffee. He wore an expensive black cashmere sweater and khaki pants.
“Hayley, would you mind running out and picking up some of those delicious warm blueberry muffins from the Morning Glory Bakery?” he said. “I’m sure the reporters would appreciate it.”
“Of course, Bruce. Let me just get my dogsled team ready and I’ll be on my merry way,” Hayley said, shaking her head.
She couldn’t believe he was serious.
Maybe their relationship was more tolerate-hate.
“Is that you being sarcastic?” Bruce sighed.
“That’s me saying no, Bruce!” Hayley said. “The Morning Glory is clear across town and the streets aren’t plowed yet and even if they were, the roads are so icy I’d probably lose control of my car and skid right off the town pier!”
“Man, Hayley, sometimes you can be such a drama queen,” Bruce said, shrugging. “I just asked for some muffins. Maybe if you thought ahead, you would have considered the weather reports, and whipped up some of your own muffins in your kitchen this morning so you wouldn’t have to go out in this nasty storm to buy us some now.”
“You’re not getting muffins, Bruce!” Hayley said.
Sal Moretti charged out of his office and bellowed, “Would you two pipe down? This is a newspaper, not a marriage counselor’s office!”
Hayley and Bruce exchanged a look and called a silent truce. They both knew it was best not to tick off the boss right now, because Sal was already on edge. His wife had left him for a week to go visit her mother in North Carolina, so there was no one to take care of him at home.
And this was painfully obvious. His shirts were wrinkled. There were a half-dozen empty bottles of Tums on his desk from all the late-night gorging on pepperoni pizza. The poor guy was scattered and off his game. It was clear he missed his wife terribly and didn’t like being home alone.
“They’re saying on the Weather Channel that this storm’s only going to get worse. So I think we should all just call it a day and go home,” Sal said.
Stunned silence.
Sal was dismissing the staff for the day?
And it wasn’t even three o’clock in the afternoon.
Bruce did his best Rod Serling voice. “You’re about to enter another dimension. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!”
“Shut up, Bruce,” Sal snapped. “I want everybody to be careful driving home. It’s a mess out there.”
Sal rubbed his eyes and ambled back to his office.
Hayley wasn’t going to wait for him to change his mind. She quickly shut down her computer and grabbed her green L.L.Bean winter jacket from the office closet. She threw it on, laced up her black boots, and was out the door.
She carefully navigated the frozen walkway from the office to the street. But she still nearly lost her balance on the slippery ice and had to flap her arms like a crazy person to keep herself from falling flat on her back.
Once she managed to reach her white Subaru wagon, which was parked up the street, she pulled on a pair of mittens her mother had knitted her twenty years ago and began brushing all the fresh snow off the car. Then, she clicked the remote key to unlock the doors, and rummaged through all the kids’ athletic equipment and empty fast-food cartons and discarded paper coffee cups in the back seat to find her red wooden-handled ice scraper.
Hayley began hacking at the clumps of ice that had formed on her windshield, clearing enough so she could at least see where she was going on the short drive home. Then she climbed behind the wheel, shut the door, started the engine, and cranked up the heat. She waited a few minutes for the car to warm up before slowly pulling away from the curb.
She could hear the wheels crunching through the snow and she hadn’t even maneuvered the vehicle all the way into the street before the car hit a patch of ice and began slipping and sliding into the opposite lane. Luckily, no one was stupid enough to be out driving in this mess and there were no cars to collide with, so Hayley counted her blessings.
Hayley stayed focused, never taking her eyes off the road, gently pressing her foot down on the accelerator; not too much, just enough to keep the car going in a forward motion. She didn’t want to chance losing control again and smashing into a tree or a fire hydrant or, God forbid, a storefront window.
What was normally a five-minute drive home took thirty minutes, but Hayley finally managed to get herself and her Subaru home safely. She turned into the driveway of her gray two-story house. Well, it was gray when she left for work this morning. Now it was completely white. At least the snow covered the fact that her house was in desperate need of a new coat of paint. Which she couldn’t afford. Maybe she would get a nice tax refund this year, which she could use to paint the house in the spring.
Wishful thinking.
Lex Bansfield, the man Hayley had been dating off and on for the past year and a half, usually would clear her driveway with his snowplow truck during a storm, but he hadn’t had a chance to swing by yet, so Hayley assumed he was busy clearing the roads on the expansive seaside estate where he worked as a caretaker.
It was slow going, the tires of her Subaru skidding through the mound of snow piled high in the driveway as she pulled in and opened the garage door with her remote. Hayley had to press her foot harder down on the accelerator to keep the car moving forward. Then, suddenly, without warning, the tires freed themselves from the packed snow and the car took off, speeding toward the open doorway of the garage. Hayley slammed on the brakes to stop the vehicle before it hurtled through the garage and crashed right through the back wall and into her neighbor’s adjoining yard. Luckily the car squealed to an abrupt stop just inches from the wall.
And Hayley breathed a deep sigh of relief.
The last thing she needed right now was a costly repair. She got out of the car and was about to head into the house when she stopped.
She distinctly heard a creaking sound.
Hayley looked around.
Nothing appeared out of the ordinary.
She couldn’t make out where the sound had come from.
She continued to walk out of the garage.
Another creak.
This time louder.
What was that?
It seemed to be coming from the roof.
She looked up.
One of the wooden beams supporting the roof looked warped. As if it was bending and about to snap in half. That couldn’t be.
She knew she would need to reinforce the roof at some point. Lex had warned her many times. But she just didn’t have the money to do it right now. Besides, Lex told her she was probably fine unless there was a lot of weight on it. Only then might it give way to the pressure.
But there wasn’t a squirrel or a raccoon up there climbing around and putting extra weight on it so it looked like she was in the clear.
Wait.
It was true there wasn’t a small animal on top of her roof.
But there was about two-and-a-half feet of heavy snowfall.
The wooden beam suddenly snapped and Hayley heard a rumbling sound. She dashed out of the garage just as she caught a glimpse of the entire roof over her garage caving in, landing on top of her white Subaru wagon and crushing it.
No. This was not happening.
Hayley just stood there in a state of shock. Flakes of snow landed on her rosy red cheeks. She was about to cry, but choked back the tears. She was afraid if she did cry, the tears would freeze right on her face.
She heard her white shih tzu (with pronounced underbite), Leroy, inside the house barking, undoubtedly spooked from the thunderous crash of the roof collapsing. Hayley decided to deal with the garage when the snow stopped. But with her car buried underneath the rubble, she was probably going to have to borrow some snowshoes to get to the office the next morning.
Hayley entered the house through the back door into the kitchen. Leroy was there, jumping up and down to greet her. The sight of her devoted pup instantly put Hayley at ease, and the little guy leapt into her arms when she knelt down to say hello. He began licking frantically at her face, attracted to the wet snow. Hayley noticed Leroy’s nose was running and he was shivering. She set him down and took off her coat. That’s when she realized the temperature inside the house felt like twenty degrees. Maybe even colder. She knew she had left the heat on when she went to work. What could have possibly happened?
Dear God, no.
Not the furnace.
Lex had also warned her that her furnace was barely hanging on and the odds of it making it through another winter weren’t very good. She had brushed off his comments, not because she didn’t believe him, but mostly because she just couldn’t bear the thought of having to invest in a new one. She just didn’t have the money. Hayley opened the door to the basement, snapped on the light, and descended the stairs, with Leroy scampering right behind her.
When she reached the bottom of the steps, she knew in her gut the situation was dire. She touched the furnace. Ice cold. She played with the buttons and readings. Nothing.
It was dead.
And she was screwed.
Unable to hold it in any longer, Hayley finally started to cry. Why was all this happening at once? How was she ever going to pay for all this? She sat down on the bottom step of the basement and let the waterworks flow.
She was going to allow herself a few minutes of self-pity, and then she would steel herself and work on solving the problems at hand.
Her cell phone rang.
Hayley reached into the back pocket of her snow pants and pulled out her phone. It was Gemma. Calling from her dad’s in Iowa.
Hayley’s two kids, sixteen-year-old Gemma and fourteen-year-old Dustin, were spending the winter break with their dad, Hayley’s ex-husband, in Des Moines, Iowa, where he worked as a manager at Walmart.
Hayley got a lump in her throat. She missed them. The three of them were a team, and now faced with all this sudden adversity, she wished they were home with her to calm her nerves. Just having them around made her feel better. But they were so far away and she felt so alone right now.
Hayley wiped away the tears, cleared her throat, composed herself, and then clicked on the phone.
“Gemma, honey, how are you?”
“It’s freezing here, Mom. I wish we were back in Bar Harbor.”
“It’s pretty much the same here, so you’re not missing anything. How’s your brother?”
“The same. Still annoying. Dad’s got a new girlfriend. Nice, but trying too hard to impress us. Just like the last three. What’s going on with you?”
“Not much,” Hayley said. “I just got home from work.”
“It’s only three o’clock there. Are you sick?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine. You sound stressed,” Gemma said.
“No, Gemma, everything’s just fine. Believe me.”
But things were not fine.
Not fine at all.
And they were about to get a whole lot worse, because a collapsed roof, a crushed car, and a busted furnace would soon be the least of Hayley Powell’s problems.