Introduction

“This book has ghosts, mystery, a journal from the 1800s, history, and a spot of romance – what more could I want from a book, right? How about top notch writing, unforgettable characters, and superb storytelling? Yep, Hemlock Hollow has it all and then some. This book is a definite MUST-READ!!”--A Bookish Way of Life

Caroline McAlister, college professor and life-long skeptic, is reeling from the loss of her father and her marriage. Her once promising career has come to a standstill. She didn’t realize her father held onto the family cabin until he bequeathed it to her, and with it, the ghost who haunted her childhood. When she discovers a century-old journal in the attic, she awakens the voice of Carson Quinn. The journal reveals Carson’s love for the same hollow that enthralled Caroline growing up. A little sleuthing uncovers rumors that the kind, curious boy in the journal grew up to murder his brother. Caroline plunges into the project of exonerating Carson, only to find herself in the throes of a personal past she’s spent her life trying to avoid. Hemlock Hollow is about how we forever haunt the places we love and how they haunt us in return.

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Excerpt

**Excerpted from Hemlock Hollow, forthcoming from Regal House publishing on December 6th, 2022, available now: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/hemlock-hollow/

In the process of renovating the cabin her late father has bequeathed her, archaeologist Caroline McAlister unearths a century old journal, an unsolved murder, and the ghosts of a past she has run from her entire adult life. Hemlock Hollow is about how the places we love haunt us, and how we haunt them in return.

Chapter 1

The box wasn’t much to look at. Old and metal, at one point it had probably been gray. Over the years it had oxidized green. There were three clasps on the front, now corroded with grit and rust. Micah and his crew had discovered it in the attic and carted it through the old cabin to the card table we had set up out back. Decades of dirt and dust left a trail through the loft, down the stairs, and up the hill. More crumbled onto the tarp I had laid out.

My family had owned the cabin for my entire life, and I had never seen this box before. It had been sitting in an attic I didn’t know existed, waiting to be found for who knows how long.

“What do you say, Caroline?” Micah asked, wiping his brow with a bandana. He tugged at his scraggily beard. “Should we open it?”

I pondered the box. Whether to toss it and its mystery contents into the giant waste bin out front, or to open it and take the plunge into a dark past that I had spent a lifetime trying to escape.

Down the hill, Micah’s crew continued with their demolition work, their sledgehammers echoing through the hollow. Up the mountain a crow cawed.

“Well?” Micah asked. “I can get a crowbar.”

I sighed, my reluctance giving way to curiosity and compulsion. “If you get me a blowtorch and a flathead screwdriver, I can open this. I am an archaeologist after all.”

“That so?” His eyes widened. He took off his Wilco hat and ran a hand through his untamed hair. “Like Indiana Jones?”

Everyone’s favorite archaeologist was in no way an archaeologist, but rather than lecture my general contractor, I shook my head. “No. More interpretive than old Indy. Less running from boulders and ghosts, more thinking about the ancient stars and writing about them.”

“You best watch what you say. Opening that box may release the spirit of the hollow.” He chuckled, winked, and plunged down the mountain to his old pickup truck.

I laughed at his joke, but that was exactly what I was afraid of.

The summer I turned twelve, Delores Appleton and Martha Boston, my two best friends at the time, had come up from Greensboro to spend the month of July at the cabin with me. We all shared a double bed upstairs. Oh, the late-night conversations we had! Even now in middle age, I blush at the suppositions we made about sex and boys and romance.

Late one night, Delores and Martha had dozed off. I knew this because Delores snored, and Martha had the deep breathing of the truly asleep. I woke having to use the bathroom. It was so dark that I couldn't tell if I had opened my eyes or not. I pushed down the covers and tuned my senses to the night. Outside, a breeze rustled the tall hemlocks. A spray of needles and tiny cones skittered down the tin roof. Katydids, so raucous in the early evening, had quieted to a low dirge. Everyone lay fast asleep; Mom and Dad in their bedroom on the main floor, Andrew, my brother, in his bedroom across from mine upstairs, the girls in the bed with me. The only bathroom was downstairs.

As I steeled myself to climb from the bed, the old stairs creaked as if someone was coming up. I swiveled my head to better listen. Another step squeaked. Higher this time. Closer. I waited, clenching my urgent bladder. The next step let out a long and drawn-out sigh, as if the climber had sunk a heavy foot slowly. My mind ran through the possibilities. It could be my father, climbing up to check on us. I waited for his balding head to emerge in the stairwell. Another step followed, this time barely perceptible. My heart pounded. A step creaked near the top of the stairs. Maybe it was my mother.

As if on cue, everything fell silent, even the katydids outside. The air stilled. All the hair on my body stood straight out. A bone-deep chill chased the covers up my neck. I was overcome with the sense that somebody was in the room with us, somebody who wasn't family and who wasn't exactly alive.

The visage of a bearded sorrowful man in a brown suit flashed through my mind like an afterimage. Anguish seized me. I had never felt anything like that before. A twelve-year-old should never feel such despair.

He was standing at the end of the bed. Though I didn't dare look, I knew he was there. I buried my face in my pillow. He moved beside me, his breath heavy in my ear.

I shuddered at the thirty-year-old memory and wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans It had been since grad school that I’d actually worked with artifacts. These days I spent a lot of time looking at the stars from sites where ancient peoples had done the same thing. But I did remember a trick or two. I began chipping away at the crust of the thing. Soon Micah returned with the blowtorch and screwdriver and handed both to me.

I lit the blowtorch, which induced a broad grin. “Nice,” he said, far too enthralled at my ability work a tool.

I held the torch just close enough to heat the three clasps for the metal to start to expand.

“You don’t by chance have any liquid nitrogen, do you?” I asked.

He scrunched his eyes. “No.”

I killed the torch. Without chemicals, I’d have to apply brute force. Using the screwdriver, I worked the clasps until they gave way. I slid the lid up, moving it bit by bit until it let go and popped open.

My heart jumped. Dozens of pairs of eyes caught the light of day. They searched the world from a scattering of old photos. Nestled among the photos was a journal. It was leather-bound, stained at the edges, but cinched tight.

Seeming to understand the importance of the moment, Micah left me alone with the past. I removed my work gloves and replaced them with a pair of latex gloves from my first aid kit.

I weighed the journal in my hands. Made of high-quality leather, it had a rawhide tassel that held its flaps shut in a protective hug. Despite the gloves and the heat, my hands were trembling. Whose fingers had last touched this journal? Who had tied this bowknot that I was now delicately undoing?

I separated the ends of the rawhide and opened the book. The first page bore a fine, penciled drawing of a boulder strewn creek surrounded by giant, perfectly rendered hemlocks. Looking back up the hollow, I knew it was a depiction of this very place. The second page was titled: The Journal of Carson J. Quinn.

Carson Quinn. The name echoed across the chasm of time. All the way back from my childhood. Carson Quinn. I remembered. He was the murderer.

The Journal of Carson J. Quinn

January 3, 1886

Gramps gave me this journal for Christmas this winter, and I’m just now getting down to putting something in it. I’m not much for writing, so I was not quite sure what to do with it. It’s right nice, practically waterproof. I imagine Mr. Charles Darwin had something similar on his voyage on the Beagle. He would need as much waterproofing as possible what with all the storms and oceans and other perils. I’m only thirteen and must content myself to wanderings I can do on foot. One day I’ll set out on some fantastical voyage to yon, like Mr. Darwin, and this journal might well accompany me.

Gramps has everything Mr. Darwin has ever written in his library. He has lots of other books as well. Being a lawyer and all, he has shelves of law books, like Blackstone’s commentaries and such. He also has all the ancient classics like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and St. Augustine. Of these I have little interest. But I’ve read nearly all of his natural history collection: Andre & Francois Michaux’s books on Oaks, Flora, and Sylva of North America, Von Humbolt’s Travels to the New World, William Bartram’s Travels, the travel accounts of John Lawson, Thomas Harriot, and Mark Catesby, and all of the books he has by Thoreau and Emerson. One day I shall travel into the great Wilderness like these men. Until then, I shall content myself with what wild bounty exists around me here in Daisy.

I held Carson Quinn’s journal in my hand, distant past and present slamming hard together. I didn’t know what I thought would be in the box, but certainly not the journal of a boy who would grow into the man Old Man Duncan had told us murdered his brother over a woman. I set it to the side and turned my attention to the other contents of the box.

There were the photos. Some appeared older than the cabin itself. They crumbled in my hands, so I spread them carefully onto a flattened-out newspaper. A somber family stared back. In one photo a dashing young man gazed confidently into the distance, his pressed soldier's uniform sporting a chest full of shiny medals. There was a similar photo, but much older of a severe looking man who appeared to be a Union soldier from the Civil War. He seemed as stern as a Sphinx.

One photo featured a large group of people. Based on the bride and groom at the center, it was a wedding. The guests were spread out across the wide stone steps of a massive white house, bigger than any residence in Hickory Nut Gap. The somber brood gazed from behind the happy couple. Another photo showed what appeared to be four generations of a family sitting on a wide porch. Not a single one of them wore a smile. Their clothes were so dark. The women had dresses that covered every inch of their bodies from ankle to chin. The men all wore suits and bolo ties with slicked down hair and various stages of beards.

My heart jumped. There, in the back row stood a scowling young man with a dark beard. I could feel his breath on my neck. He was calling from beyond the grave. That was him, the ghost. His eyes bore into my own. When I placed the picture aside, he alone from the group of people seemed to track me. My arms bristled with goose bumps. I covered the photo and took in the tops of the swaying hemlocks, knowing full well those eyes still searched for mine. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Both Caroline and Carson become enthralled by the same hollow a century apart. Explore how the place that they both come to love is also the source and/or setting of their greatest suffering. Do you have a similar place? If so, describe it.

2. On multiple occasions, Caroline encounters a ghost, yet she remains uncertain of whether she believes in the paranormal. Do you think that to be haunted by something requires you to believe in it?

3. At the end of the 19th Century, when the journal is set, economic forces and technological advances were transforming Appalachia. We don’t see the direct impact in the book. In your opinion, how will those changes impact families such as the Quinns versus families such as the Fallons and Morgans?

4. In many ways, Caroline benefits from being born a century after Carson was born. After all, Marinda could not have gone to UNC-Chapel Hill like Caroline did. How would Marinda’s life have been different were she born in the same place a century later? What would have been different for Marinda in the late Twentieth Century?

5. This novel isn’t a traditional romance, but it is about love and loss. In what ways do different characters express their love for one another and/or for the hollow?

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»	Hemlock Hollow website

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