About this book
The bell has not rung in forty years. Last night it rang twice. In 1985, five people vanished from the locked dining room of Blackmere House in the middle of dinner — the food still warm, the chairs overturned, no bodies ever found. The great bell above the house rang once that night, though its rope was cut and no hand was ever found to have rung it. The village of Lower Blackmere has whispered about it ever since: when the bell rings, someone under the roof dies within three days. Now the debt-drowned house must be sold, and paper conservator Wren Halloway has crossed the tidal causeway to inventory its papers before the auction. On her second night, the silenced bell rings twice. A locked tower. A housekeeper's journal that stops in October 1985. A bolted passage under the cellar, and a room behind the library that should not exist. As a storm cuts the causeway and the three days run down, Wren must uncover what the house has held for forty years — and decide whether the truth about that night is merely terrible, or something worse. A standalone gothic mystery of guilt, buried secrets, and a bell that will not stay silent. AI-generated