A week after the white stone, Mike O'Donnel finds a second offering tied to the middle willow with a length of red thread: a sprig of rowan — the mountain ash, his late mother's charm against ill will and the wandering dead. He hasn't seen one since the year she died. Someone has carried it a long way to leave it here. Chapter 2 of The Three Weeping Willows of Little Gap — "The Sprig of the Mountain Ash." Ruthie comes over with the Thursday groceries and the kind of love that won't let a man hide; the willows keep their counsel; and Mike picks up the phone to call the one person who'll know how to look. A serialized gothic mystery by Wallace Thorne. New chapters released regularly — subscribe to follow the story from the beginning.

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.