Chapter 1 — The Bowing of the Three Willows
For sixty years the three willows along the Buckwha had been weeping. This August they began, very quietly, to bow. In the first chapter, Mike O'Donnel rises at five to a valley wearing its mist like a second coat, and counts the wrong things one by one: the willows leaning down-valley toward the village; a child half-hidden in a photograph he has walked past for eight months; six cats fixed on a place at the foot of the largest tree where nothing, quite, can be seen; a stranger in a long coat for August walking the old rail bed; and a white stone, dew-fresh, with a Celtic cross cut into its face. A man does not, in eighty years, learn to read the difference between a stranger and a returning man. Mike has it in him anyway — and what walks the village's way this week has been waiting a great deal longer than sixty years. Chapter 1 of The Weeping Willows Inn, a serialized gothic mystery.
