Winter Keeping

Winter comes to Harrow, and the lake does not sleep under the ice.Nora Ellery stayed. She keeps the drowned town's terrible bargain now, the way her grandmother did and her great-grandmother before her, and she had let herself believe the worst was behind her. Then the Renner girl, taken by the water one October afternoon and gone a hundred and four days, walks up out of the frozen lake on a January morning: warm, breathing, dry, and remembering nothing. The town calls it a miracle. Nora knows better. Nothing the lake gives back is a gift. It is a door, and it has been left open.Soon the water is finding people who never went near the shore, rising in locked cellars and dry kitchens, leaving small wet footprints that do not dry. The drowned bell tolls under the ice where no bell should ring. And the thing wearing the Renner girl's face is patient, and tender, and counting down to the dark of the moon.To close the door, Nora will have to teach a mother the oldest and cruelest words in the keeper's book, cut a hole in the ice at the place the girl was taken, and trust that a family can give back what the lake most wants to keep. There is no winning against Harrow Lake. There is only the keeping, and the cost of it.The Winter Keeping is the second book in the Harrow Lake supernatural horror series: a dread-forward gothic of drowned towns and inherited debts, an off-page hunger older than the dam, and a keeper who has learned that the only mercy the water understands is the one you pay for yourself. Do not go out on the ice.