Chapter 1 - ECHOES OVER EVERGREEN (SUMMARY)
Twenty-year-old Matt, homeless and surviving day-to-day, makes his annual pilgrimage to Evergreen Cemetery outside St. Louis to tend the grave of his mother, Rose Carter. A wealthy stranger in a designer coat named Marianne Bennett arrives, grieving and furious. She reveals that Rose was never Matt’s biological mother—she stole him when he was four weeks old. Showing him birth records and photographs proving Matt is actually Matthew Bennett, Marianne reveals she was his birth mother and Rose was a hired kidnapper who changed her mind and ran. As Marianne explains that a powerful, ruthless family member—the older man beside Matt’s late father Victor in old newspaper clippings—funded the abduction, a black tinted SUV crawls through the cemetery gates and parks directly by Rose’s freshly scraped headstone.
