“I guess that decides it, huh?” She squinted against the sky. Wispy clouds chased one another across the hazy blue, scarcely touching the sun. “If I’m talking about preparing for the night, I guess that means I’m staying.”
She’d promised herself four weeks to see if she could handle being the owner of Gallows Hill. At that moment, four weeks seemed like an insurmountable length of time.
She’d try one more night, she decided. If nothing bad happened—if she slept through with no bells or effigies haunting her—then she’d consider the four weeks again.
Margot pushed away from the fence. In the far distance, something chimed. Margot fell still, frowning as she listened. The noise fell quiet before she could catch it properly, but she was fairly sure she knew it. The bells.
Someone’s in the house again.
Her heart squirmed in her throat, choking her. She made to turn, to rush back the way she’d come, to catch up to Kant and the others at the distillery, but then hesitated.
The fence was old. Many of the posts were rotting into the ground, and the crossbars were fracturing from wear and age.
But inexplicably, rows of wire ran along the fence. They formed straight lines, positioned just above the horizontal bars, and as far as she could see, covered the length of the fence. Margot reached out a finger and plucked one. Far in the distance, the bells rang.
“Oh,” Margot whispered. The chimes seemed to hang in the air for longer than they should, and the following silence left her cold and clammy.
She’d had it all wrong. The bells in the house weren’t left over from some centuries-old staffing arrangement. And there weren’t levers inside the house to pull.
The wires were connected to the fence. The bells were an alarm system.
16
Margot’s body turned to water. She sagged back against the fence post. In the distant house, bells rang as she put pressure on the wires. They were faint but unmistakable, a grim siren carried on the wind.
The bells warn when someone crosses over the fence line. They rang more than once last night, though. So…someone crossed the fence multiple times? Or multiple people?
Her mouth was dry. She hadn’t drunk anything since that morning, and it was beginning to pull on her, a slow, slinking headache forming behind burning eyes.
This doesn’t change anything. You already believed someone from town walked to your house last night. This just confirms it.
Her eyes turned toward the opening in the fence. There was a gate, but it was left wide open, wedged in a groove it had gouged in the earth. It had been left open the previous night too.
Why would someone climb the fence when they could just walk in?