Winter People

 Winter People

By Jennifer McMahon

Whew! This was a scary one! I don't read a lot of ghost stories, but I picked this one up while gathering

Kessler at a neighbor's house; she casually asked me if I wanted a book I could read in two days. Of course! It took me a bit longer than that, but only because school is still in session.

The draw for the neighbor, and me, was the fact that the story takes place in Vermont. My second in a row! The narrative switches back and forth between the present day and 1908, the year of some strange happenings in the small town of West Hall, Vermont. The latter-day protagonist is Sara Shea, whose diaries make up the bulk of the older thread of the story. Her tale begins shortly after the death of her beloved daughter, Gertie, a child she had hoped would stay after a string of miscarriages and one infant death. It was not to be. Stricken with grief, Sara calls upon a spell given to her by her one-time "nanny" -- it's hard to find an apt title for her -- a mysterious woman with some vague ties to Native American ancestry. The spell allows a person to revive a dead person at a portal that happens to be on Sara's property. Gertie "lives" again.

As that story unfolds, we learn of a modern-day disappearance. Alice, a mother of two who now inhabits Sara's old house, has suddenly gone missing. It's an all-too-familiar occurrence in West Hall, that some blame on supernatural forces that seem to reside in the Devil's Hand, the rock formation behind Sara's old house where the portal resides. Alice's two daughters' search for their mother leads them to a secret hideaway beneath their mother's bed, which contains a gun and two driver's licenses. Thinking the people in the ID might hold a clue to Alice's whereabouts, they head to Connecticut. There, they encounter more than they bargained for. Spoiler alert: The trail of the licenses leads the elder daughter, Ruthie, to her long-lost aunt; it turns out Alice isn't her real mother.

Meanwhile, an artist named Katherine is trying to unravel another mystery. Her husband, also stricken with grief after the death of a child, has died on his way home from West Hall. Katherine has no idea why he would be there, and moves to the town to try to piece together some kind of explanation for the unraveling of her life. 

The threads of the story come together one snowy night, when the long-lost -- and mighty unstable -- aunt burst in on Alice's kids and, at gunpoint, demands to know everything they can tell her about their mother. Katherine, too, makes an appearance, and she learns that her husband had come to West Hall after discovering Sara's recipe for making the dead walk again. 

And so it is that the five of them trudge in the middle of the night to the Devil's Hand, and squeeze into a cave that leads to a well-appointed cave. Someone -- something? -- is living there. Gertie, we learn, is alive. Or at least as alive as one can be after dying. She is holding Alice, who, it turns out, was something like her caretaker for many years, but apparently hadn't been as attentive as Gertie had wanted. All but the deranged aunt escape -- but not before Katherine executes the spell. Will another "sleeper" join Gertie?

The book certainly was a page Turner.