Linda Hall - Storm Warning

She felt a chill run down her spine, and headed down to her kitchen to call Steve.

“Steve, someone threw something through my window. The window’s broken.”

“I’ll be right there.”

She sat at her kitchen table and tried to think of a reasonable explanation for all of this. She could not stop shivering despite the warmth of this sunny morning. Because she was remembering other things she should have taken note of doors left unlocked when she knew she had locked them, windows closed when she knew she had left them open. What was going on?

In a few minutes, Steve was there. She went outside, down her porch steps and across the flagstone path and ended up in his arms. Steve was here. She was safe now.

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When people ask award-winning author Linda Hall when it was that she got the “bug” for writing, she answers that she was probably born with a pencil in her hand. Linda has always loved reading and would read far into the night, way past when she was supposed to turn her lights out. She still enjoys reading and probably reads a novel a week.

She also loved to write, and drove her childhood friends crazy wanting to spend summer afternoons making up group stories. She’s carried that love into adulthood with twelve novels.

Linda has been married for thirty-five years to a wonderful and supportive husband who reads everything she writes and who is always her first editor. The Halls have two children and three grandchildren.

Growing up in New Jersey, her love of the ocean was nurtured during many trips to the shore. When she’s not writing, she and her husband enjoy sailing the St. John River system and the coast of Maine in their twenty-eight-foot sailboat, Gypsy Rover II.

Linda loves to hear from her readers and can be contacted at Linda@writerhall.com. She invites her readers to her Web site which includes her blog and pictures of her sailboat: http://writerhall.com.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Lord, You have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.

—Psalms 90:1

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

EPILOGUE

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

The storm took her by surprise. Somehow, lost in a long and elaborate daydream on this sunny, glorious day, Nori Edwards hadn’t seen the sky blackening behind her. She was paddling across the silky water of Whisper Lake, oblivious. It should have been a clue when a sudden gust of wind whipped her hair across her cheek. It wasn’t. She merely sighed, stopped, braced the paddle on the top of her kayak, and wound her hair more securely back into its ponytail, and kept crossing the bay from Twin Peaks Island.

The distant rumbling of thunder concerned her only slightly. In the two weeks she’d lived here, she’d experienced only one brief five-minute thundershower. The thunder was nothing to worry about, she thought. She’d be home and dry in the lodge at Trail’s End before any serious rain fell. If it even fell at all. She was strong and her arms easily fell into the rhythm of her strokes.

She had taken a little time off from the backbreaking work of unpacking, cleaning, clearing brush, sweeping out cabins and unpacking in her lodge, for a relaxing paddle out on the lake. She’d gotten in the habit of doing this, heading out on the lake for an hour or two each afternoon.

When she’d bought this property, known as Trail’s End, she’d been assured by the real estate agent that people from Whisper Lake Crossing would be lining up to work for her on the cleanup and repairs.

What he hadn’t told her was that every worker, every contractor, every builder, tradesman and handyman from Bangor to Portland was working on the northern Maine highway infrastructure.

Maybe she was going to have to take her search further afield and put an ad in the Shawnigan Sentinel. The town of Shawnigan was nine miles farther down the lake and much bigger than Whisper Lake Crossing.

On the first day she’d walked through the place, she had fallen under its spell. She’d stood on the wide wooden porch and taken in the deep, green smell of the pines, the gently lapping lake. The sun shimmered on it and turned it almost golden. But it was when the agent took her up to the loft that there was no turning back. Log lined, with wide, high, sunlit walls, a massive brick fireplace and cathedral ceilings, it offered a stunning view of Whisper Lake. It would be the perfect orientation for her art studio.

She had stood at the windows and looked out on the lake and thought, I want this place. I have a good feeling about this place. This place can finally be a home for me and my family.

She would buy it. She and her daughters would live in the lodge. They would rent out the cabins. This would be a good place to start a new business, a good place to start over, a good place to paint again.

But that dream would never be realized unless she got some help.

It was getting cooler. She rested from her paddling and zipped her nylon windbreaker to her neck. It was the beginning of June and it was still chilly enough for a sweatshirt underneath. It wasn’t the howling wind, two-foot waves and claps of thunder that finally caught her attention—it was the sudden, curious quiet. She stopped, felt a ripple of unease.

The sky to her right was blackening. The distant droning of motorboats was gone. The trees had stilled. Even the birds had stopped their chirping. This sunny, pleasant afternoon on the lake had gone slate-gray and silent. She looked around her. She was farther from home than she realized, farther than she wanted to be. Kayaks should hug the shoreline, not go right out in the middle of the lake. Yet here she was, between the island and the shore.

She located her dock on the hazy horizon and started pushing toward it. She smelled the rain before she actually felt it. Heavy, humid, brassy, it caught in her nostrils. She choked, felt exposed out here, a tiny low-slung boat on a massive body of water.

Thick dollops of water fell here and there. And then the wind started. At first it merely ruffled the lake around her. Gradually, it increased into a snarl.

And then all at once it was bearing down on her and she found herself paddling directly into it. She seemed to be getting nowhere. She zagged a little to the right. Maybe she would have a better chance at the wind if she didn’t face it square on.

It’s not like she hadn’t been warned about the lake. That was a constant theme around Whisper Lake Crossing.

“Whisper Lake,” said a woman named Alma whom she’d met at Marlene’s Café. “You bought them cottages out there? Them Trail’s End cabins? Well, all I can say is mind the lake. She got a mind of her own, she does.” And then the woman had gone off shaking her head and muttering, “Bad place, bad place.”