From a distance, Wildwood looked like any other white, two story farm house of its era. It had stood there atop a gentle hill for more than one hundred years, standing guard over the surrounding countryside. It had endured humid summers, frigid winters, the Great Depression and a civil war. It had sheltered happiness, heartbreak, childbirth, and death. For the last four decades it had sheltered the Gideon family who had bought it the last year of the previous century and turned Wildwood from a house into a home, albeit, not exactly a typical one.