“Ye take much longer and someone’ll spot us.”
It was too late for that. She twisted the fabric of her nightdress in her hands.
“We’re hurrying the best we can.” One of the men below moved to pile things into the open crate. “Just be careful of that there rock so your crate doesn’t topple as well.”
Two more men with a handcart approached from the opposite direction. “Only one more load left. We’ll see you at the wagon.”
The wagon? What were these men doing that needed a wagon? And why use the alley instead of the road that ran along the front of the building? Aileen leaned a bit closer.
Two of the men passed the ones working to clean up the spill, then hurried down the alley toward the harbor. Through the patchy moonlight, she could just make out the shadowed forms heading to…
Not the harbor.
Had they stopped at the back of the bank?
She gripped the molding beside the window. Surely she wasn’t watching the bank being robbed.
She glanced down at the objects littering the alley. Could it be money? It seemed too heavy, but mayhap the bills were bundled together.
She shifted nearer the window. If she could find a spot where the moonlight reached the ground, mayhap she could see?—
One of the men jerked his head up in her direction.
Her heart thundered against her ribs, its beating so loud the workers below likely heard it.
The man stayed where he was, his head still angled up. She shifted back just a bit, then froze.
He didn’t move.
She shifted another little bit, then paused again. Silence filled the street below. The next time she moved, she shifted far enough that the wall blocked the man from view.
“We need to be done. Now. Get a move on it,” a terse voice echoed from below.
She didn’t know how long she stood there, her back pressed to the wall, her chest heaving with frightened breaths she didn’t dare let all the way out. It might have been minutes or it might have been hours before footsteps thudded on the packed earth of the alley. If the handcart had moved, its wheels gave nary a creak.
And yet she stood there, perfectly still, as though if she moved an inch someone would burst through her bedroom door and haul her away. When her hands finally stopped trembling and her breathing calmed, she shifted to peek out the window. The night that greeted her was as still and dark as the burial shroud that had covered her father back in Ireland.
What should she do? She wasn’t about to step foot outside the building now to alert the sheriff, not with strange men about. Morning would be here soon enough, and she could go then.
But what if that man had seen her? Would the robbers realize she’d turned them in?
Ding-a-ling. Ding-a-ling.
Isaac Cummings twisted on his bed and groaned. What had possessed him to hang a bellpull outside the sheriff’s office below his apartment?
Ding-a-ling. Ding-a-ling.
Well, besides the part about wanting Eagle Harbor to be a secure town where people didn’t fear for their safety.
Ding-a-ling. Ding-a-ling.
But he also wanted sleep. Was there anything wrong with that? He cracked an eyelid to glance out the second-floor window where the bell hung.
Morning. Kind of. He yawned and rubbed his eyes. Though after a night of staying up late to break up three different bar fights, the faint pink hue spreading across the sky shouldn’t count as morning.
Ding-a-ling. Ding-a-ling.
He groaned again. Putting a bell up had seemed like a good idea when he’d done it. But
