Home to Cypresswood — Lucile Vernon Stevens

What web of deception was strangling the roots of Cypresswood? Nicole Bradfern believed she owed it to the father she had never really known to expose it...but was it worth her life?

A Family Reunion...
Nicole Bradfern hardly remembered the father who had deserted her and her mother so many years ago. Yet when he wrote saying he was ill and begging her to come and see him, she knew she must go. And with her mother dead, there was no reason why she shouldn't. But Nicole never did see Clement Bradfern. She reached Cypresswood on the day of his funeral and found the graceful old Southern mansion deserted except for Clement's granddaughter, Majel and Ron Ellsworth, a young architect and distant relative, who broke the sad news. Nicole would have gone right back home if Ron hadn't persuaded her to stay -- for a few days anyway. Meeting the rest of the family -- Gypsy, the lovely young widow of a stepbrother Nicole had never known; "poor relation" cousins Lydia and Walter; kind but vague Uncle Arthur, and domineering Aunt Agatha -- Nicole sensed a resentment that puzzled her and wondered if she had made the right decision. It wasn't until someone tried to kill her that she realized she may have made a fatal one....

As dark-haired Nicole Bradfern approached the long tree-lined driveway and saw Cypresswood for the first time, her immediate reaction was one of jumbled emotions. Nicole had been summoned to the home of her father -- whom she had not seen since she was five -- because he was ill and wanted to see her as a grown woman. She had resented this deserting her and her mother, now dead, for all these eighteen years -- yet she was curious and, in an odd way, strangely compassionate.


But Nicole was not ever to see Clement Bradfern again, for she had arrived on the day of his funeral and was greeted, instead, by Ron Ellsworth, a young architect-painter, who told her the sad news and said that he was a distant relative of the deceased wife of Clement's brother, Arthur. Later, Ron introduced Nicole to the other members of her father's family, none of whom Nicole had ever met before: Arthur Bradfern, who seemed a shadow of a man; lovely Gypsy Bradfern, the widow of Nicole's stepbrother; Walter Harris and his sister, Lydia, cousins of the Bradfern's; and Aunt Agatha, Clement's older sister and the autocratic ruler of Cypresswood.

But for Ron's insistence that she stay, Nicole would have left that day -- and would never have discovered that a fine-spun web of deception lay at the very roots upon which Cypresswood was founded.