“Where are you taking us, Mr. Vance?” Eleanor asked, her fingers nervously picking at the frayed thread of her canvas bag on the floor. “If it’s a shelter… the county intake in Lancaster closed at six o’clock for the holiday. They won’t take walk-ins until December twenty-sixth.”
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“We aren’t going to a shelter, Eleanor,” Arthur said, keeping his eyes on the white ribbons of highway ahead.
“Then where?”
Arthur glanced at the dashboard clock. It was **9:48 PM**.
“We are going home,” Arthur said softly. “To a house that has had too many empty chairs for three years.”
***
***The estate in Lititz was known across the county as **Hawthorn Ridge**.
It sat three miles north of the historic Moravian village, atop a limestone bluff overlooking the winding waters of the Cocalico Creek, surrounded by eighty acres of rolling pastures, centuries-old white oaks, and dry-laid fieldstone walls that had stood since the Revolutionary War.
