The grating, wailing noise echoed around her. It was deep, painful. Metallic. Leafless branches tapped on the roof above her head, the walls to her sides. It was impossible to track any of the noises. But they seemed to be getting closer. Closing in on her. Looming right above her, pinpricks of harsh light staring down at her as she cowered—

Margot opened her eyes and drew a rasping, desperate gulp of air in the same second.

Nothing stood over her.

At the shed’s opposite side, near the open door, implements and tools and furniture caught the glaring, hazy light. A bale of hay had been suspended from the ceiling. It was almost exactly where the woman’s head had been. The wind through the open door tugged at it, making strands of loose hay quiver.

“No,” Margot whispered. No, I didn’t imagine it. No, I wasn’t mistaking a bale of hay moving in the wind for a woman’s hair. What I saw was real.

And yet, she was alone in the shed. Moving carefully, Margot rose. She took the stepladder with her, holding it against her chest like a shield.

The aching, grinding noise was coming from outside again. Margot stepped over a box of power cables, keeping her back to the wall as she scanned the indistinct clusters of tools. As she got closer to the door, she turned a wary eye toward the suspended hay. It was exactly where the woman had stood. She couldn’t have been there without her head passing through it.

I didn’t imagine it.

Yet, what had she seen exactly? A woman’s outline that moved in a way that didn’t seem human. Two pinpricks of light. And the wailing…which had been caused by the open door.

The shed had been very dark. Nothing, including the woman, had been visible with any kind of clarity.

“I didn’t imagine it,” she said, but there was slightly less conviction in the words this time.

She shoved outside, breathing too heavily. Cold sweat stuck her clothes to her skin. Margot dropped the stepladder from the defensive posture and held it under one arm as she backed away from the shed, scanning its dark insides a final time.

Next to it, the second shed’s door, half-buried under the leafless maple branches, groaned as the wind pulled at it.

Margot broke into a jog as she returned to the house. She left the stepladder in the hallway while she turned to the kitchen and dunked her face under running tap water. The cold felt good on her flaming skin. She let herself relax there for a moment, draped over the sink, water pouring across her face and spilling into her hair.

I need to know more about this house. More about the people who lived here. Whether…a woman with windblown hair once grieved for a man named Ezra.