The Hollow House on Marrow Lane

Mara Ellison, forty-four and freshly divorced, buys a condemned Victorian in Eureka Springs sight unseen, planning to turn it into a bed and breakfast with the last of her mother's inheritance. The price is absurdly low, and the town has been trying to sell the house for decades. From 1911 to 1934 it was the Marsh Home, a maternity home for unwed mothers. The girls who went in were recorded as having "gone home." None of them did. Every Halloween, the house gives one of them back for a single night, from sundown to sunup: warm, solid, remembering everything, and wrong in exactly one small way. As October narrows toward the thirty-first, Mara finds a wall of penciled names in a sealed nursery, letters in her dead mother's handwriting dated after her mother could have written them, and a locket engraved with a name her family buried in silence: Wren. Her family has been paying the house's terms for three generations. This year, the house has chosen its price.