Years ago, Penn's lover was attacked in the woods, and most think Penn is to blame ... including Penn. Ever since, he's been a prisoner in his home and his mind. When world renowned architect Ewan Parish arrives to construct a secure, enclosed walkway through those woods, Penn is surprised, suspicious, and also fearful.<br><br>Ewan is intrigued by the mysterious, reclusive Penn, his journals, and the beautiful artwork he's drawn, which Ewan recreates in the walkway's iron scrollwork. Determined to free Penn, Ewan sets out to unravel the mystery that has resulted in Penn's imprisonment by his family and conscience all these years.

Penn's Woodland

Del had led us to a well pit, barely four-by-four and eight feet deep, where I found him crouched in one corner, beside the water pump for the cabin, shaken, bloody, shirtless, but alive.


One week later, Delaware, Virginia, Georgia, and Delaware Dupree, Jr. were properly laid to rest. Virginia and Delaware’s bodies were found at the gazebo, where Georgia had apparently brought them to reunite us all. Once she’d discovered I had escaped, she had taken off in search of me, we figured. What happened next, along the walkway, in the unfinished prison she had called to be constructed, no supposition was needed to recount for police.


Though I had free run of the house, I still spent much of my time in my room. The door was open, and I had company quite often—my nephew, Del, who had a room on the other side of the house. “If only…one of us…had been hit…by wanderlust,” I jested with him. “We may have met…years ago.”


Chapter 36