FIRST PAGE: The Winter People by Phyllis A. Whitney, Fawcett Crest, 1970.

The Winter People by Phyllis Whitney PB Paperback 1970 Vintage Gothic – Monster Books and Items

SYNOPSIS:

From her first glimpse of Glen Chandler, young Dina Blake was enchanted. Their courtship was swift, passionate, and filled with the kind of excitement Dina never knew existed.

She was certain their marriage would last forever...until he brought her to the family estate at High Towers. Then, slowly, relentlessly, Dina became aware that Glen's twin sister possessed her brother in a way Dina never could.

Suddenly Dina found herself alone in a house of strangers. She could no longer trust Glen's love and she knew his sister would stop at nothing to destroy their marriage. Not even murder.

The author of Columbella, Silverhill, and Hunter's Green has surpassed even those bestsellers in this superb new novel of love and terror, of a courageous young wife's confrontation with ultimate evil.

"The atmosphere...is truly eerie....Guaranteed to induce 'goose bumps' in the most jaded reader."

"Excellent....Suspense is beautifully sustained....Another winning...novel."

PAGE 1:

I was asleep, and then I was awake, listening.

I could hear the snow hissing at the windows, hear the storm behind it and the rushing sound the wind made through the pine trees. But the sound that had wakened me was inside the house. A key had been slipped into a lock.

My hand reached automatically across the bed to find Glen, even as I remembered that after the quarrel late that afternoon he had hurled himself from the house, taken the Jaguar and gone roaring down the steep, winding drive to the road. Yet he had not been angry with me. The quarrel had been with her. I pushed myself up in bed, drawing the quilt around me against sharp cold and stared through blackness toward the closed door to the hall.

The sound came again. A key turning.

In the few weeks I had lived at High Towers there had never been a key in the lock of Glen's room. Our room--though I was still too much a bride, too unaccustomed to the house to feel at home in it. There was no other sound from the hallway. No whisper of retreating steps, no exhaled breath. There was only an intense listening on either side of the door. My side and hers. And there was the deep, frightened thudding of my heart. I knew what she had done. But I did not know why.

Soundlessly I rolled out of bed into the chill of the big room and went in bare feet across the cold floor. At the door I grasped the china knob and turned it ever so slightly. Against pressure. Her fingers were on it too, opposing mine.

The small explosion of laughter startled me when it came--a sound of pleased triumph, probably because I had found her out so quickly. Without troubling further to be quiet, she went away down the hall to her own room and left me to turn the knob as I pleased. Helplessly.

She had locked me into the room I shared with Glen. And Glen was gone. He could not help me because he was somewhere out in the heavy snow that blew across northern New Jersey hills. Blew across the frozen lake, far below the cliff on which the house had stood in all its arrogant pretension for the last eighty years.

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The Winter People by Phyllis Whitney PB Paperback 1970 Vintage Gothic – Monster Books and Items