Winter’s Ledger
When her estranged father dies leaving behind a general store and forty years of handwritten ledgers, Odile returns to the snowbound town she swore she’d never see again — and discovers that a life can be read in what a person chooses to write down, and what they leave out.
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Winter’s Ledger
Turn the page below to read Winter’s Ledger from the first line to the last — the complete book, chapter by chapter.
Chapter One: The Telephone Call
The call came on a Tuesday, while Odile had a hymnal open on the bench in front of her, its spine split clean down the signatures, a water stain blooming brown across the endpaper like a continent no one had named. She had been working the old glue out of the gutter with a bone folder, slow as dentistry, when her assistant knocked and said there was a man on the line asking for a Miss Brassard, and that he'd already called twice.
1The man introduced himself as Aldous Fenn, notary, of Thaw's Landing, and he said her father's name the way a person says a word they have rehearsed, carefully, to get it right the first time. Lucien Brassard had been found Sunday morning by the rural carrier, who'd noticed the CLOSED sign in the window of the store was hung upside down, which it never was, not in forty years, and had gone around back and found the door unlocked and the stove cold and Lucien on the floor behind the counter as if he had knelt down to reach something on a low shelf and simply not gotten up.
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