The Winter Before

by Karen Crompton

  The Winter Before

  Copyright © 2021 by Karen Crompton

  authorkarencrompton.wordpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, without prior written consent of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, business, companies, events or locales is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Pink Ink Designs

  Editing by My Brother’s Editor

  Formatting by Champagne Book Design

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author—Karen Crompton

  Stay Connected

  This book is dedicated to those who fall often, but who pick themselves up again, and never stop trying to be better versions of themselves.

  There comes a time in everyone’s life, a defining moment that changes the way one thinks, the way one feels.

  It distorts vision, makes the heart beat in a rhythm so foreign it almost doesn’t seem real. But in that moment, you know your life will never be the same again.

  Your old life might still hover around the fringes, making its presence felt from time to time. But from that moment forward you will see the world differently, through new eyes.

  Your senses will become heightened. You’ll smell the rain coming well before the first storm clouds appear. You’ll sense the shift of seasons long before the colors change, or the river turns silver with ice.

  How do I know this? Because it happened to me.

  That moment.

  The moment when nothing and everything made sense. When hollow thoughts were suddenly filled with meaning and the air was so thick it was hard to breathe.

  But I wanted to breathe. More than anything else, I just wanted to breathe again.

  Isaac Stone moved to Woodlake, Montana, the year Olivia Parker started kindergarten. She remembered the day he arrived like it was just yesterday. Or at least she thought she did. Sometimes when you’re told a story often enough, the hazy lines between reality and imagination can fray a little around the edges.

  But Olivia knew she wasn’t imagining things.

  Isaac Stone wasn’t someone you easily forgot. He’d been the talk of the town well before he’d even arrived, a small boy with eyes as dark as his past, and lashes as long as the story that followed him.

  Isaac’s skin was like nothing Olivia had ever seen before. Pale, ghost-like, despite the dark purple flesh, like wrinkled wet fingers that marred one whole side of his face.

  And as children so often do, she found herself staring at him, the lonely boy sitting in the back corner of the brightly colored classroom.

  He terrified her. But he fascinated her more.

  The town of Woodlake was abuzz with the news of once local girl, Becky Stone, killed in a tragic house fire up north, in a tiny town called Peak Valley somewhere close to the border.

  Olivia had heard the whispered conversations, though she didn’t fully understand what it all meant. Something about a candle and curtains. And if the stories were to be believed, poor Becky was trapped under a fallen beam, burned alive, while her six-year-old son had been dragged to safety by a horrified neighbor.

  The newspaper articles written about the tragedy said the boy was wearing nothing but Superman underpants and a plain white T-shirt at the time. Olivia had been captivated by the fact that Isaac’s underpants had made front-page news. She couldn’t imagine anything more embarrassing. She wondered if he still owned them. She wondered if he still wore them. She wouldn’t have worn them anymore. She would have thrown them out.

  Isaac was eventually released from the hospital in Peak Valley and had come to Woodlake four months later, to live with his grandfather, Sandor Stone, a sixty-year-old widower who had no place, no need, or no desire to raise a young boy all on his own. Sandor was the only family Isaac had though—no one knew the boy’s biological father, Becky included, not if word on the street was anything to go by. But raise him Sandor did. And he did it with kindness, and patience, and an enormous amount of love in his heart. Isaac was the one thing Sandor never knew he always wanted, and the way he saw it, having Isaac around kept the very best part of his beautiful Becky alive.

  His daughter hadn’t survived.

  But Isaac had.

  He’d survived, he was alive, but he’d come to town covered in a web of horrific scars, both physically and emotionally. And a boy with scars stood out. He wasn’t the same as everyone else. He was different. And as Isaac grew, he noticed his differences with broad brush strokes. Sideway glances were like thick oil paint, burgundy, crimson, red-hot beneath his skin. Hushed murmurs were sloppy watercolors of gray, blue, and white, dripping cold down his back. And the constant scrutiny was a swirl of marbled green every time he closed his eyes.

  As he grew, he retreated more and more into himself. He rarely spoke, and he avoided any kind of attention. Isaac Stone became a recluse, aching for normality but losing sight of it the older he got. He just wanted to fit in. He wanted to be average. He wanted to be unexceptional.

  But Isaac Stone was anything but unexceptional.

  He was a mystery. And Olivia wanted to know more.

  After October of their freshman year, Isaac didn’t return to school, and rumors ran rampant throughout the town as to where he was, and what he was doing. Some folks even went so far as stating that he was ‘special needs’ and shouldn’t be in mainstream school anyway—though they didn’t use that word.

  They used a terrible word.

  But Isaac wasn’t backward, or slow. And he certainly wasn’t retarded. In fact, he was extremely intelligent, and so Sandor decided enough was enough and he homeschooled Isaac for the years that followed in the small cottage they shared over by Briar’s Creek.

  How the old man afforded it all—the endless surgeries, the skin grafts, buying enough groceries to feed a boy who seemed to outgrow his clothes every six months—was anyone’s guess. But he did. He did it somehow.

  After graduation, Isaac worked for Abe Hathaway at Hathaway’s Hardware—making repairs, quoting orders, and restocking the shelves in the warehouse out back. Over the years, he took on more responsibility and by the time Isaac was nineteen, he was in charge of ordering stock and had learned everything there was to know about managing a hardware store.r />
  Abe was a good man. He’d always been good to Isaac. And in time, Isaac had learned to trust Abe, to rely on him, and even to confide in him on occasion—but only on occasion, and only when Isaac was in the mood to talk.

  Which wasn’t very often.

  Sandor Stone passed away two years ago, on the eve of Isaac’s twenty-third birthday, in the springtime, when the wildflowers swayed in the tepid breeze and the long grass danced between cracks in the sidewalks.

  The town grieved his loss, but no one more than Isaac. He was all alone now. Maybe he preferred it that way, maybe he didn’t? And Olivia often wondered about the boy she used to stare at, living out there all by himself at Briar’s Creek—where the main road skirted the boundary of his property by a good mile and passersby had no reason to call in unless they were lost or looking for directions. But he was no longer a boy. He was a man now.

  She wondered about him often.

  And just like always, she wanted to know more.

  Olivia’s hair spilled around her shoulders as tears welled in her eyes. The funeral march played softly in the background and Reverend Rayleigh placed the last bouquet of flowers on the casket before taking his place behind the pulpit to begin the eulogy.

  It was early November in the small town of Woodlake, Montana.

  Through the stained glass windows that stretched across the back of the church, up behind the altar, Olivia could see the tips of the maple trees that surrounded the town square—the last leaves of fall clinging to near-naked branches that looked like skeletons swaying in the wind.

  It was cold outside. But the cold was nothing new, simply a sign of more to come, and it certainly wouldn’t stop the townsfolk of Woodlake from gathering together on a chilly Monday morning to bid farewell to one of their own.

  Mrs. Eleanor Ackerman had passed peacefully in her sleep the week before. She was eighty-six years old—a good run, some might say—but Olivia never found comfort in those kinds of words. It made her feel as if she shouldn’t grieve for something that had no place being there anymore.

  She glanced down at her slender wrist, at the gaudy plastic bracelet she’d worn especially for today. Why she’d kept it all these years, she wasn’t entirely sure.

  But she had, and maybe that meant something.

  Mrs. Ackerman squatted down beside Olivia’s wooden desk at the very front of the classroom. Olivia was small for her age, so she sat in the front row, that way she didn’t have to stretch to see over the taller children’s heads.

  “Is that for me, Mrs. Ackerman?” she asked, her blue eyes wide. “Is it a cookie? I love cookies.”

  Mrs. Ackerman laughed sweetly, shaking her head full of wiry, gray curls. “No, it’s even better than a cookie. And I think it will look beautiful on you.”

  Olivia gasped as Mrs. Ackerman uncurled her fingers to reveal a plastic bracelet composed of bright red cherries and shiny green beads, the kind you might get in a Cracker-Jack box.

  Mrs. Ackerman peeked quickly behind her, then slipped the bracelet over Olivia’s wrist and nodded, smiling again.

  Olivia couldn’t believe her luck. She’d never seen anything so lovely in all her life, and she adored the bracelet instantly.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Ackerman.”

  “Every time you look at it, Olivia, I want you to know something. I want you to know that someone thought you were worthy of it. That you are adored, that you are beautiful, and that you are loved.”

  Olivia wasn’t really sure what all that meant, but she knew she would try her hardest to remember. Adored. Beautiful. Loved. That wasn’t so hard.

  “I’ll take real good care of it. I promise.”

  Mrs. Ackerman patted Olivia on the head as she stood, her stiff knees complaining with the effort, and Olivia gazed down at her new cherry bracelet with tears brimming in her eyes, wondering how something so simple could suddenly mean so much to her.

  “Welcome, one and all,” began Reverend Rayleigh, making Olivia startle slightly.

  She’d been so lost in her thoughts of the bracelet and how it had come to be, that she almost forgot where she was. She sat up a little straighter, her back pressed firmly against the timber pew.

  “We have come together to repose the soul of our beloved Eleanor Ackerman. We pray today and always that you will forgive us our sins, dear Lord, and grant us comfort in our time of grief. Mrs. Ackerman was a gentle soul. A soft-spoken woman who kept mostly to herself—”

  Miss Harriett Clay scoffed loudly from her seat in the third row, as if she begged to differ.

  Stupid old busybody, Olivia thought to herself, but the preacher didn’t miss a beat and instead continued talking as if the entire congregation hadn’t just thought the very same thing too.

  “Eleanor loved teaching, and embroidery, she loved to read, and of course—” His voice suddenly caught in the back of his throat, as if the stirring of emotions lodged deep inside his chest didn’t know whether to go up or to come down. “And of course, she loved tending her lilies more than anything else…” He paused, pushing his glasses up higher on his nose as he looked out over the mourners. “I know I’m not alone in saying that Eleanor’s beautiful lily display was one of my favorite things come springtime.”

  Abe Hathaway sat directly in front of Olivia and she watched as he nodded, thick fingers pushing back through a head full of salt and pepper hair. Abe was a heavyset man in his late forties. He stood over six feet tall, so it wasn’t lost on Olivia when he leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on his knees, his shoulders shaking inside the sleeves of his black suit jacket as if he were fighting back tears.

  “Couldn’t agree more, Reverend,” muttered Caroline Hathaway, Abe’s wife, who was sitting right there beside him. She patted her husband’s back with an amiable smile on her face as she consoled him. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen a display quite so impressive. Those big ol’ half barrels on Eleanor’s porch were her pride and joy.”

  Harriett scoffed again, loudly, and this time Reverend Rayleigh slapped his hand down hard on the marble slab in front of him.

  It was so unexpected, so out of the blue, that the sharp sound echoed around the church, making Olivia jump an inch clean from her seat. The force of which sent a small leather Bible on the ledge in front of her skidding across the narrow aisle and she watched in horror as it landed square at the dusty boots of Kyle Mason.

  Her breath caught at the sight of him. The hairs on her arms all stood to attention, and she instantly felt sick.

  Kyle Mason was Sheriff Mason’s only son. And he was trouble.

  The kind of trouble Olivia didn’t want any part of.

  The way her body recoiled when he glanced her way should have been warning enough. Olivia should have known Kyle would think she’d done it as some kind of deliberate act to gain his attention. That was Kyle Mason, after all. But under the circumstances, she wasn’t thinking straight, and before she could stop herself, she met his beady green eyes across the narrow aisle, regretting it instantly.

  Kyle smirked.

  The man’s ego was big enough to fill the entire room and spill out onto the street beyond. Kyle Mason wasn’t exactly known for respecting women, or the law—something Olivia knew first-hand, and if it wasn’t for his father being the Sheriff of Woodlake, then Kyle would have likely been locked away years ago for crimes he committed without pause or consideration for anyone other than himself. He had confidence, and swagger, and a big mouth he didn’t know when to shut.

  Harriet Clay suddenly stood to her feet, stabbing the pointy end of her umbrella hard into the stone floor. “Might we hurry this along? This church of yours is positively freezing this morning, Reverend. Eleanor isn’t the only one growing stiff and cold in here, I’ll have you know!”

  Olivia instantly felt heat and temper rise in her cheeks. Who in their right mind would say something so callous? Harriett Clay—that’s who, and she was just about to give the horrid woman a piece of her mind when Mayor Dell rushed forward from
his seat a few rows back, making the donation box wobble on its rusty hinges.

  “For God’s sake, Harriett,” he snapped. He was usually a man of restraint, but Miss Clay had a way of unraveling his self-control. She was like one of those annoying loose threads that you just couldn’t help but pick, despite the consequences. “Is it too much to ask for a little respect on a day like today? Your only beef with Eleanor is that her tapestry took first prize last year, and you came in second.”

  “Go to hell, Clarence.”

  Now it must be said, the preacher wasn’t the least bit impressed with the exchanging of such harsh words in the house of the Lord, and so his tone was a little sharper than usual when he raised his voice, and lowered his eyes. “Excuse me, but do I need to remind you all where we are? And why we’re here?”

  Silence fell across the church, effectively quietening the hushed whispers that swirled around the room like a growing storm.

  “Does anyone else have anything of grave importance they feel the need to discuss before we continue?”

  Olivia heard Kyle chuckle under his breath, but she didn’t bother looking at him again.

  “Grave importance,” he muttered. “Good one.”

  “Well, actually… now that you mention it,” Mayor Dell ignored Kyle completely, and Harriett too for that matter. And as if he was suddenly eager to make good on the preacher’s liberal offer, he stepped out into the aisle. “There is one thing I’d like to address while I’ve got everyone’s attention.”

  Reverend Rayleigh sighed. He spun on his heels, collapsed into a wooden chair beside the pulpit, and stared up at the beams above, as if searching for some kind of divine intervention.

  “Mrs. Ackerman made an appointment to see me a while back,” continued Mayor Dell. “She wanted a plan set in place for when the time came. And, well… since we’re all here today, I guess that time is now.” He rubbed his fingers across his bushy brows, followed by a deep breath. “I’ll keep this brief. A meeting will be held in the church hall immediately after the service today for the reading of Mrs. Ackerman’s last will and testament. She requested that the entire town be in attendance. Apparently what little family she had down south are all dead and buried. Charlie’s been gone for years now, and since they never had children of their own, Mrs. Ackerman made it abundantly clear what she wanted to happen with her estate once she passed.”