The Bell Tolls at Traeger Hall

Waverly

Darkness encased Traeger Hall like a shroud.

The darkness never lifted either. It hadn’t lifted since I arrived a year ago at the impressionable age of eighteen.

It wasn’t an altogether awful place, of course.

In fact, it was a mansion in comparison to the surrounding farmhouses and cottages in its vicinity.

But, even if the sun was shining, somehow Traeger Hall remained in the shadows, perched on the top of a hill overlooking the small town of Newton Creek.

And it was that shadowy, secretive lordship that gave my spirit pause.

Leopold Traeger, my uncle by marriage, settled in Newton Creek decades earlier as a young man.

He built his sawmill, soon realized great success, and as a result the town rose up around the creek that powered the mill.

Besides owning and operating the sawmill, he eventually became owner of the Newton Creek Bank plus several other properties, a veritable lord of his own fiefdom, all nestled among the rolling farmland of the state of Wisconsin.

Uncle Leopold made sure everyone knew who owned the bulk of Newton Creek when he moved into what became known as Traeger Hall, erected on the area’s highest hill and flanked by oak trees on its eastern and western ends.

The great house was rectangular and crafted entirely of brick, including a veranda that featured right angles only and a bell tower on its east side.

This bell tower—or so my aunt, who married Leopold five years prior to my arrival, told me—was added on to the house shortly before their wedding.

Its massive bell had never been rung and was so heavy the wind couldn’t budge it even in the fiercest of storms. It was quite certain, then, that human hands were ringing it when a person heard the Traeger Hall bell.

However, I was told it would never be rung except in the event of an attack of a deadly foe, which was something Leopold Traeger predicted would happen sooner or later.

Because he’d lost his mind. At least that was my theory.

The demons Greed and Ego had eaten his faculties—if I gave them names—leaving his mind riddled with decay.

Why else would he run back and forth in the halls at all hours of the night, sneaking around in the shadows one moment and all but howling at the moon the next?

I was convinced he was so consumed by himself that the ultimate stroke to his arrogance was to believe someone, somewhere, was devising his murder.

Oh, that we could all be so famous as to be first on the list for someone to kill!

On second thought, I preferred my anonymity, although even that was hard to come by now that I lived in Traeger Hall and put up with the pompous, heavy-handed dominance Uncle Leopold lorded over my aunt and myself as her ward.

“Remember your composure, Waverly.” Uncle Leopold’s stern voice raised goose pimples along my arms. I was not a mild-mannered niece by any stretch, and yet when it came to my uncle, he could silence me with a look from those steel-gray eyes of his—and a strike from the back of his hand, which had been executed a few times.

I therefore learned my lesson: I listened—or seethed rather—in silence.

“I have given you respite here at Traeger Hall, and you are representative of our entire enterprise.”

Uncle’s gray sideburns twitched along with his jaw. His mustache covered his upper lip and hung down on either side of his mouth like inverted antlers. Under my quiet perusal, his face hardened.

“Have I made myself clear?” he added.

“Yes, Uncle.” My meekness was not feigned.

I quailed under his sour expression. There was a reason Uncle Leopold had been awarded such influence over Newton Creek.

There was nothing so intimidating as a man with a heightened sense of omnipotence, especially when time and again he’d been proven to be in the right.

That was both the gift and the problem of Uncle Leopold.

He only argued when he knew for a fact he was correct, and it seemed he was always correct.

He was beyond mathematical equations of rational thought, common sense being his primary demand of others, and he reserved little space for unreasonable emotion.

And yet I still believed he was verging on a state of insanity.

I, however, was not.

Still, Uncle Leopold was confronting my display of tears or, as he put it, my “irrational emotional outburst.” For which there was little grace.

I had dared to mourn my dead sparrow. A little feathered creature I had nursed along all summer after it had careened into the window of the front parlor.

It had been a tiny ray of sunshine in this otherwise questionable world of Traeger Hall, and now it was dead.

No gratitude was given to Mrs. Carp’s cat who roamed Newton Creek as if equal in authority to Uncle Leopold, master of the house.

“God is aware of all His creatures, Uncle.” It was my attempt to put him in his place.

Uncle Leopold was unimpressed.

“And He understands that when they die, such is the wages of sin.”

Uncle’s eyes bored into my own. I lifted my chin, then tilted it back down as his eyebrow raised. Where was my aunt when I needed her? She and I weren’t particularly close, but she at least would take my side on occasion. Rarely, though, and probably not in defense of a dead bird.

“Am I not allowed to grieve?” I realized immediately that I should not have asked such a question.

Uncle Leopold cleared the space between us, his face pressing downward and terribly close to mine. He reached to grip my upper arm with a bruising effect that made every nurturing moment with my beloved sparrow a luxury not worth the price.

“It was a bird,” he gritted out, far more furious than he should be over my show of emotion.

That my existence made him so angry confused me and, to be honest, frightened me as well.

“Birds come and go,” he continued in a patronizing tone. “Crying about it is a ridiculous waste of time when we have more important things to attend to.” Another raised eyebrow was the exclamation point at the end of my uncle’s sentence.

In that moment—and not for the first time—I wished him dead.