The Lexus turned off the paved township road onto an unplowed, quarter-mile private drive lined with towering Norway spruces bowed heavy beneath four inches of pristine, unblemished white snow.
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As the car crested the final ridge, the headlights swept across the facade of the house.
It was an architectural masterpiece of colonial Pennsylvania masonry: two-foot-thick walls of native fieldstone quarried on the property in 1840, cedar-shingled dormers, deep-set double-hung windows with dark green shutters, and three massive chimneys of split granite sending faint ribbons of sweet hickory smoke into the falling snow from pilot flues.
A single carriage lamp with a beveled glass housing burned above the wide, three-inch-thick white oak front door, casting a warm, honey-colored circle of light across the flagstone porch.
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Chloe stirred in the back seat.
Her eyelids fluttered open, her small hands rubbing her eyes as the car came to a gentle, motionless stop beneath the timber portico. She looked through the tinted side glass at the soaring fieldstone chimneys, at the snow-covered oaks, and at the warm, golden light spilling from the first-floor library windows.
