This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning when the October rain drummed against Eleanor Hartwell's apartment windows like skeletal fingers tapping for entry. She had been grading papers at her kitchen table, red pen poised over another student's confused interpretation of Hamlet's soliloquy, when the postman's knock interrupted her thoughts. The envelope bore her name in elegant script, the return address listing a law firm in Salem, Massachusetts that she had never heard of.

Eleanor set down her pen and opened the letter with the same methodical care she applied to everything in her life. At thirty-two, she had built a comfortable existence teaching English literature at the local community college, living alone in her modest apartment with her books and her cat, Ophelia. She preferred the predictable rhythm of academic life to the chaos that had marked her childhood, moving from one foster home to another after her parents died in a car accident when she was seven.

The letter's contents made her read it twice before the words truly sank in. She had inherited a house. Not just any house, but a Victorian mansion in Salem from a great-aunt she had never known existed. Margaret Hartwell, according to the lawyer's careful prose, had been her father's aunt and had left the property to Eleanor as her sole surviving relative. The only condition was that Eleanor must take possession within thirty days of the letter's date, or the inheritance would pass to a historical preservation society.

Eleanor stared at the accompanying photograph of the house, a imposing three-story structure with ornate gingerbread trim and tall windows that seemed to watch her from the glossy surface. Something about those windows made her shiver, though she attributed it to the morning chill seeping through her apartment's single-pane glass.