The meeting of the Preservation Society had fired Ben’s creative furnace. Revolution and loss. Wealth and suffering. Tragedy and love. Perseverance. In Swannhaven he’d found something he hadn’t even known he was looking for.
He’d been imagining the conversation with his agent, telling her that the book he’d been writing wasn’t working. He had 37,150 words, according to the counter at the bottom of the page. Months of work, months of his life, and it was dead on the screen. Somehow both meandering and inert.
Ben should have felt sick about this, but he didn’t. He had a mug of fresh tea, a lively playlist humming in his ear, and a blank document on the screen in front of him. He’d also moved out of the kitchen and up to the attic. It was a vast, unfinished space comprised of many rooms. Ben had chosen a nook with a pair of broad windows set into the steeply pitched roof. The windows faced east and kept the room full of sunlight through the morning. A fresh start for a new book.
He rapped his fingertips lightly against the keys for a few moments before typing.
In God’s country, the Drop seemed like heaven itself.
He read it aloud, testing it. Seeing what it conjured in him. The old Bible he’d found in the basement was one piece of the Crofts’s hidden life that he’d already discovered, but the people who’d walked these halls over the centuries were the real prize. He thought again about those two spinster sisters who had died here, the last descendants of the Swann family, which had lived here from the beginning.
A family like that must have secrets to spare.
Ben had hoped to tell his agent something that would take the sting from the news about him starting over, and as he chewed on it he thought this new idea could be that good thing. A semi-famous writer who moves upstate and becomes so enchanted with his historic house that he sets his next novel there: That was a seductive hook. Ben understood the importance of such things. While his second book had been a hit, his first one had disappeared without a trace. With newspapers and magazines folding and book-review sections being cut, securing any measure of media attention for a work of fiction was a careful alchemy of black magic and divine luck. An angle like this gave the marketing and publicity teams something to hitch themselves to.
This was also something Caroline should be happy about. He doubted a bestselling author had ever set a novel at the bed-and-breakfasts in Exton or any of the other surrounding towns. This book would give their inn something that none of the others had.
Of course, Ben knew that good books were born of more than just a compelling setting and a hook. He needed his characters to be tested under stress. He needed danger and suspicion and horror and revelation, because these were the kinds of books that he wrote. But he had the feeling that a little research would be all the kindling he’d need to set the story ablaze.
He looked back at the sentence he had written.
In God’s country, the Drop seemed like heaven itself.
The cursor blinked at him, and he began to type.
And for a time, it was.
13
Ben thought restoring the home of those who’d preceded him at the Crofts might help him understand the satisfactions and trials of their lives. He also hoped that making some tangible progress on the house would improve Caroline’s mood. She’d been depressed since the meeting of the Preservation Society, eating little and sleeping less. It was not so deep as many of the episodes he’d seen her fall into, but he didn’t like the boys to see her this way. He assumed it had been set off by the stress of meeting so many new people at once, but he couldn’t be sure. Now Father Caleb’s impending visit seemed to have her on edge.
He’d promised to keep the priest to the first floor, veranda, and grounds. This was why he’d spent the last two afternoons on his tractor, working to make the fields closest to the Crofts more presentable.
The rains had fed wildflowers along the edge of the forest, and the scent of the freshly mowed grass was intoxicating in the warmth of the day. It took Ben back to the summer afternoons of his teen years, to that feeling of anticipation that swelled in his chest as soon as he and his brother hit the sidewalk outside their house. Life back then had been far from perfect, but at least it had been uncomplicated.
Around he went in minutely smaller squares. He imagined the track he left on the ground looking like the minotaur’s labyrinth from the air. By the time he finished, the sun was directly overhead, expunging the fields of shadow. Since leaving the city, he’d begun to notice such things.
He was trimming the edges of the gravel path when a shudder of movement drew his attention south to the tree line. A murder of crows rose toward the sky. As they flew for the valley, they darted and swarmed like smoke caught in the wind.
On impulse, Ben rerouted the tractor for the place where they’d taken flight. He was close to where he’d buried the dripping pieces of the deer two weeks ago, and his curiosity was piqued. It had been the shallowest of graves, and he wouldn’t be surprised if the birds had been undeterred by the scrim of soil he’d shoveled over the remains.
A part of Ben hoped that scavengers had indeed uncovered what was left of the poor creature. He’d never seen an animal torn apart like that, and he was curious what it might look like after some time in the wild. It was sure to be terrible: rotting intestines, maggot-infested viscera, bones gnawed to the marrow. But for the kinds of books Ben wrote, every experience—especially a horrible one—was another card in his deck. Ben had to see it.