Chapter 1

      “Jacob, you haven’t touched your dessert. What’s wrong? Aren’t you feeling well?” Hazel Owens Gentry addressed her nephew in the same sweet-as-dandelion-wine tone of voice she’d used to reprimand him since he was a little boy. “It’s the last piece of mincemeat pie. I saved it just for you.”

       “I’m feeling great, Aunt H, really,” he hastened to assure her. Faded blue eyes regarded him from a face as brown and wrinkled as a berry. His aunt Hazel was an earth mother. She wasn’t completely happy unless she had someone to care for. “But I’m stuffed.” He smiled for her benefit. “I can’t eat another bite.”

       “It’s the soup,” Hazel fretted. “Too much pepper? Too much celery?”

       “The soup’s great, Aunt Hazel. You make the best leftover turkey soup in Tennessee.” He stretched the smile into a grin. “It’s great.”

       “There’s nothing wrong with the meal, sister.” Almeda, the eldest of his five Owens aunts, interrupted her sibling’s lament. “A fitting end for a noble bird.” She picked up her spoon. “Now stop fishing for compliments and sit down and eat yours before it gets cold. If the boy doesn’t want his pie he doesn’t have to eat it.”

       Jacob was thirty-four years old but Almeda had called him “the boy” when he was twenty-two and when he was twelve—the year he and his father had come to Holly Ridge, the family home near tiny Owenburg, Tennessee, at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, to live. He suspected she had called his late father, the only Owens brother, the same thing when he was young, as well.

       “I’ll eat the pie.” His middle aunt, Janet, added her two cents’ worth. “Mincemeat’s my favorite. And I’d hate to see it go to waste.”

       “It won’t go to waste.” Faye giggled and nudged her twin, Lois.

       “It’ll just go to your waist,” his youngest—by six minutes—aunt responded with a giggle of her own.

       “Girls.” Almeda waved her gnarled, beringed hand in their general direction. “Enough. Eat. The food’s getting cold.”

       Faye and Lois were sixty-nine years old and Almeda still referred to them as girls. That’s why Jacob knew he’d always be “the boy.” He handed the pie to his aunt Janet and bent his head to finish his soup, hiding his amusement at the good-natured bickering going on around him.

       He owed his sanity, if not his life, to this marvelous eccentric quintet of old ladies. Returning to Owenburg, to his aunts and to his roots three years before, after his wife and baby son were killed, had pulled him through the worst period of his life. For months after the freak accident that had destroyed his family and his happiness, he’d wanted nothing more than to crawl into a hole and die. But the aunts wouldn’t allow that. They’d descended on his little house in Knoxville near the University of Tennessee campus where he was an associate professor of microbiology and refused to leave without him. He’d given in finally, planning to stay in Owenburg a few days only, just to get them off his back, then return to Knoxville—and he didn’t know what.

       The few days had stretched into weeks, then months. He’d resigned from the university and taken a job teaching science at Owenburg High School. Three years later he was still here. He no longer thought about dying, but he didn’t think much about living, either. It was a trade-off, he supposed, if you wanted to analyze it, a defense mechanism. If you didn’t want to remember the past, you didn’t dare consider the future.

       If you didn’t allow yourself to feel, to care, you could get through the days. And more importantly, you could get through the nights. That was his immediate goal in life. To sleep through the night. He hadn’t quite made it yet, but he was working on it, and maybe in another ten or fifteen years he’d figure out how to do it.

       “The television weatherman said it’s going to get down to fifteen degrees tonight,” Faye commented, breaking into his thoughts.

       “It’s too damn early in the winter for it to be so cold.” Janet looked up from her pie with a scowl in the direction of the television.

       “Janet, that language isn’t appropriate at the dinner table,” Almeda said.

       “Oh, hell,” Janet muttered. “It’s nearly the twenty-first century. I’ll say damn if I want to.” Janet had taught physical education and American history at Owenburg High for forty-five years, retiring five years earlier. At seventy-two she still coached the Owenburg girls’ and women’s softball teams. She swam three times a week at the health club in Knoxville, making the forty-mile drive alone, in her 1972 Chevy Impala.

       “Be that as it may,” Almeda began, but Lois cut her short.

       “It’s sleeting outside,” she informed her sisters. “It’s so slippery I almost fell on my fanny taking Weezer’s food out to the barn.” Weezer was a huge, bad-tempered goose, the family “watchdog,” thirty-five years old and still going strong. Jacob had read somewhere that geese could live to be a hundred years old. In his opinion Weezer was certainly ornery enough to last that long.

       “If it gets as cold as they say,” Faye chimed in, “the ice on the ground will last all night.”

       “Oh, dear,” Hazel said, with a worried frown. “Think of all those pour souls traveling home from Thanksgiving with their families.”

       “And all the snowbirds heading down the interstate to Florida,” Janet added with a touch of acid.

       “Oh, yes,” Hazel said, ignoring the sarcasm. “I’ll remember to say a prayer for all of them. Maybe they’ll cancel school tomorrow, Jacob, and you can sleep in.” She reached across the table and patted her nephew’s hand.

       “I could use the extra day off,” he agreed. “But not for sleeping in. The woodpile’s getting low. I wouldn’t want to head over here for breakfast one morning and find the fire in the stove’s gone out.” He had his own cabin a hundred yards up the hill but he took a lot of meals, and spent a lot of time, at his aunts’ home.

       “No, indeed,” Almeda said, folding her napkin carefully before laying it beside her plate. “There’s been fire in that cookstove