The Keeper

In 1947, a man named Jack Wilkes came home drunk at four in the morning to a house full of blood. What he found upstairs, and what answered him afterward, has never fully left the property at 124 Aldrich Road.

Seventy-eight years later, Olivia Parker falls in love with the house on sight-the live oaks, the quiet, a half-mile from the nearest neighbor. She's fourteen weeks pregnant and finally letting herself hope again. That's reason enough.

The first letter is waiting before they've finished unpacking. No stamp. No return address. Handwriting like something pressed into another century. It welcomes them home. It already knows about the baby. It signs itself The Keeper of 124 Aldrich-and it wants them to understand that the house, and everything inside it, has always belonged to someone else.

Every family who's owned this house left within the year. None of them took anything with them. None of them were ever found.

Olivia and her husband have already put everything they have into these walls, and there's nowhere left to run to now. The Keeper is patient. It has been patient for a very long time. And it has just found something worth waiting for.