Margot left the cases against the hallway wall and gently closed the door behind her. She felt like she’d been living in a constant daze of one step at a time for days. No future plans were allowed because the future was a blurry, amorphous thing, so she’d reduced her life to a string of singular goals, each being plucked out of the ether one after the other: Get to the funeral. Find someone who knows where the house is. Get the luggage inside.

And now?

Now, she needed to find a place to sleep.

Margot pressed her hands into the dip behind her hips and stretched her shoulders and back. The house, left unheated for days, was dark and chilled.

She crossed into the kitchen first. Mud had splashed onto the hem of her dress, and she leaned close to the sink as she dabbed it off. The photos dotting the fridge blended into a multicolor mirage in the corner of her eye, and she deliberately focused on the room’s other details to distract herself.

The kitchen looked as though it had last been renovated in the eighties, with wooden counters sagging from age and cracks running through the small tiles forming the splashboard, but vestiges of older history still clung in areas. The metal hooks by the door had collected smears from many fresh coats of paint, showing they had likely been a part of the house for generations.

Near the doorway was a tarnished bronze bell the size of Margot’s palm. A wire ran from it and disappeared into the wall. Margot approached it as she squeezed dampness from the dress’s hem. She’d never seen that kind of bell in person before, but she recognized its design. Somewhere else in the house would be a cord that the home’s owner could pull. The bell would ring then, alerting the staff that they were being summoned.

She tapped the bell’s side. It was stiff with age but still swung on its support, releasing a faint chime.

Most likely, the bell system hadn’t been touched for decades.

Margot left the kitchen. Opposite its entrance, across the hall, was another open archway. The room beyond was dark. It had windows looking over the porch and the field where Margot had parked her car, but thick curtains had been drawn across them. Margot could make out the faintest edges of the fabric where cold light bled around it. The rest of the room was lost in shadow.

She reached through the opening and blindly felt across the wall for a light switch. Her fingertips grazed wallpaper so old that cracks had begun to marble the surface.