first lie she’d ever told and she instinctively knew it would come at a very high cost. But she didn’t want to be just like her mother, even though it would mean she was no longer her mommy’s special girl.
Alexa couldn’t bear to see her mother’s disappointment. Her heart ached as she closed her eyes, lay back down and pretended to go to sleep. It wasn’t until she heard her mother leave the room that she opened them again and looked toward the end of her bed, knowing the man was still there. Nor had he been fooled.
He stared at her with that one dark eye, then he gave her a conspiratorial wink and vanished.
Alexa shut her eyes tight, fighting tears. She didn’t want to see dead people. She didn’t want them to talk to her. She told herself she wouldn’t see them again. Nor would she see the future.
And she didn’t for twenty-three years.
Chapter One
Marshall Chisholm was no carpenter. He was learning that the hard way, he thought. He put down his hammer for the day and turned to gaze out at the Montana landscape through what would one day be his finished bay window.
While he spent most of his days on the back of a horse herding cattle, he’d fallen in love with this house the moment he’d seen it. Not that there was anything special about it—or even the view. The house was a two-story farmhouse that had been built in the late 1930s. But it had good bones, as they say, and it had spoken to him the moment he’d walked in. Not that he would ever admit that.
There was something about the place that appealed to him even though it had been vacant for many years. He’d known it would take a lot of work, but he’d been eager to get started on it.
Along with the house, Marshall liked the view of the rolling prairie. It stretched out across this vast part of Montana as if endless. Out here, he felt on top of the world. Through every window he could see to the horizon with nothing to break that view on three sides but sagebrush and Black Angus cattle—his family’s cattle.
The Chisholm Cattle Company ran more head of cattle than any other in the state and that took a lot of country. He also liked that as far as he could see, this was Chisholm land, most of it running to the horizon.
On the fourth side, the side this upstairs bedroom window faced, there were rolling grain fields and pasture, with only one structure on the horizon.
Marshall squinted as he noticed something different about the old three-story mansion in the distance. He’d looked at it many times since moving into this house. But this time he saw something odd.
Someone was over there.
That was such a rare occurrence that he picked up the binoculars he kept by the window and, peering through them, brought the huge mansion into focus.
He’d heard there had once been a small settlement around the mansion called Wellington, but all the other buildings had been gone for years. The only structure that remained was the monster of a mansion, or Wellington Manor as the locals called it.
The massive, old place must have dwarfed the other buildings that had been there years before and would have been ostentatious even in these times, let alone a hundred years ago. He’d heard stories for years about the family and the house, though he’d never believed them. People liked to think that old places had ghosts.
The last resident of Wellington Manor had died a year ago, an old spinster niece of the original owner, Jedidiah Wellington. Marshall had heard the place was tied up in an estate.
He frowned as he noticed there was a small red sports car parked under the cottonwood trees that flanked the house. The cottonwoods were fed by a small spring-fed creek that ended in a pond at the end of the row of trees. Marshall liked to swim in the pond since it was halfway between his house and the mansion.
As he scanned the scene, he saw that there was also a dark-colored large SUV parked behind the sports car.
How odd, he thought as he lowered the binoculars. Was it possible someone had bought the place? Or could it be squatters? His father had told him that drug dealers coming out of Canada would often stay in abandoned farmhouses, but he’d never seen anyone around Wellington Manor in the past year since it had been empty. The Canadian border was only about thirty miles away. The closest town to the south, Whitehorse, was another twenty miles. So the dirt road up to this part of the county didn’t get a lot of traffic—let alone tourists. He supposed it could be drug runners.
Marshall took one more look through the binoculars and saw yet another vehicle coming up the long tree-lined drive to the mansion, this one a small white SUV.
He didn’t know anyone who’d even been inside the mansion. Apparently Jedidiah Wellington and his family kept to themselves, and so had the old-maid niece who’d been the last one to live there.
His curiosity piqued and tired of carpentry work for the day, Marshall decided to saddle up and ride over to see what was going on.
ALEXA CROSS PULLED UP TO THE monstrous house with growing unease. The house looked like a hotel, looming three stories up with wings off four sides—not what she’d expected at all. When her brother had told her at the wedding that he and his new bride were remodeling her family’s old house in Montana, she’d pictured something smaller, set in the mountains with lots of rock and wood. Not this ugly monstrosity.
As she stared at the house, she thought of his recent call saying he needed her to come out for a visit. She’d heard something in his voice that had scared her.
“What’s wrong? Is it Sierra?”
“No,” Landon had said, clearly irritated. “My wife’s fine. We’re fine.”
Alexa wished now she’d never voiced her misgivings about her brother’s hasty marriage. But she couldn’t help worrying that he’d made a mistake and was now realizing it.
Both university students, Landon and Sierra had met while working in Yellowstone Park for the summer and had fallen in love. Alexa hadn’t even gotten a chance to meet Sierra before the wedding held at the old hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs until the day before the ceremony.
Sierra Wellington wasn’t the woman Alexa would have chosen for her brother, but she’d seen at once what had attracted Landon to the petite, pretty blonde. Landon, like Alexa, had taken after their mother. He had the curly, dark hair, the dark eyes and olive skin of what was rumored to be fortune-telling, gypsy ancestors.
The contrast between Landon and Sierra, Alexa was sure, had been part of their attraction for each other. That and a common denominator called Montana. Both had a tie to the state. Landon’s father had allegedly been born here—at least that was what their mother had told them. Neither Alexa nor Landon had ever met the man. Nor had their mother apparently bothered to get the man’s last name at the time of Landon’s conception.
Sierra’s roots ran deeper in Montana, with several generations of Montanans and a family house that still stood in what had been a town named after her great-great-grandfather.
“It’s this house,” her brother had said on the phone. “There’s something wrong with it.” When Landon had told her about the idea he and Sierra had to turn the mansion she’d inherited into a bed-and-breakfast, Alexa hadn’t shared their enthusiasm.
“You mean structurally?” she’d asked, relieved it was nothing more earth-shattering than a construction problem. Neither her brother nor his wife knew anything about running a bed-and-breakfast, and Alexa questioned the feasibility when the closest town was Whitehorse—apparently a small western town with a declining population. Not to mention that this wide-open prairie part of Montana wasn’t the one most tourists came to see.
She’d kept her reservations about their plan to herself though, fearing alienating her brother, who seemed as excited about the prospect as his wife.
“I know this is asking a lot, but I need you to come out here,” Landon had said. “I want you to see the house and tell