He did not say any of that. He said, "We're putting a vent in this cellar and a detector, and nobody sleeps over this floor until we do," which was the same sentence, in carpenter.
Chapter 12 — The Barn
The barn woke him before the sound did — that was how Marcus thought of it afterward. A change in the night. The horses he didn't own, the dogs he didn't keep: he had none of the usual alarms. What he had was a year of sleeping over a floor that knocked, and it had tuned him like a piano wire. He came awake all at once at some small hour with Ilsa already standing in the bedroom doorway, fully dressed, the sphere's cord in her fist.
"Someone is in your barn," she said.
He got his boots and the shotgun and did not turn on a single light. The yard was moonless, the dark total and blue. The barn door, which he had barred at dusk out of new habit, stood open by the width of a man.
Later, he would be proud of how little noise they made. At the time there was only the wet grass cold through his socks where a bootlace had missed, and Ilsa at his shoulder moving like water, and the barn's breath coming out of the open door — hay, old oil, and a stranger's cigarette smoke, fresh.
The man was at the workbench with a penlight in his teeth, going through the coffee can of bolts and the drawers of Marcus's tools with quick, professional hands, looking for something small. Looking for something the size of a marble.
Marcus racked the shotgun. In the enclosed dark the sound was enormous.
"Hands where I can see them," he said. "Both of them. Now."
The penlight fell. The man turned — young, lean, a face Marcus half-knew from the hardware store's parking lot, from a truck with out-of-state plates — and smiled with his hands up in an easy, practiced way, and said, "Easy, buddy. Easy. I'm just—"
He moved on just. Fast, low, not at Marcus but sideways, for the dark of the stalls — and Ilsa, who had been nothing but a shape at the door, stepped into the gap with the fire poker from beside the forge and swung it once, flat and hard, across the front of the workbench. Tools jumped and rang. The man checked, one half-second, and that was the half-second the shotgun bought back.
"Out," Marcus said. "The way you came. Leave the dark behind you."
The man went — unhurried at the end, brazen, walking backward three steps before he turned and ran, and they let him run because the alternative was shooting a fleeing back in the dark and neither of them, Marcus understood later, had it in them that night. His truck started somewhere down the hill road with its lights off and was gone into the black pines.
They searched the barn by lantern before the sky had properly lightened, both of them moving the way people move in a place that has been touched. Nothing was taken — that was the hell of it. Hoe, harness, feed sacks, the good chain saw: all present. The man had not come to steal anything Marcus owned. He had opened every small container methodically, the way a man looks through a kitchen for a key: the coffee can of bolts tipped and rifled, the tobacco tin of screws, the cigar box of faucet washers on the high shelf. Marcus stood holding the lantern and understood that in the man's mind the whole barn, the whole house, the whole hill was just a house-sized drawer, and somewhere in it was a little iron ball.
"See how he works," Ilsa said. "He does not smash. He sorts. Krell was always the careful one." She said the name flatly, a confirmation rather than a guess. "It is him. It was always going to be him, eventually — Dahl keeps him the way you keep a good dog, Marcus. On other people's property."
Outside, the wet grass held the story for anyone who cared to read it: one set of prints coming up from the road on the dew, unhurried, a man walking like he belonged; the same set going down again at a run. Marcus stood in the cold yard, shotgun in hand, and felt the anger arrive properly at last — not fear, anger, the clean carpenter's outrage of it. A man had stood in his barn and sorted through his life with a light in his teeth.
Ilsa found the cigarette case at dawn, though the man had not smoked in the barn — he had smoked waiting, earlier, in the lee of the barn wall, and dropped it when he went in. Heavy, silver-colored, good quality gone cheap at the edges, and stamped into the lid in neat corporate letters: a stylized K inside a diamond, and under it, KESTREL HOLDINGS — SAFETY FIRST.
"Souvenir," Ilsa said. "His kind keeps them. Like a union card."
Sheriff Ada Prescott arrived at nine with the sun up and the coffee made, because Marcus had finally done the thing he'd been avoiding for weeks and called her. She turned the case over twice in her big hand and read the stamp and then looked at Marcus for a long moment over it.
"Well," she said. "Now I have questions that aren't about ghosts."
"Ask," Marcus said.
"Who's she?" Prescott said, nodding at Ilsa, who had not sat down, who was standing at the window with her arms folded in the posture of a woman deciding whether to run before or after breakfast. "Because a man with a Dahl company cigarette case does not break into a barn in Briar Hollow looking for tack. And a woman nobody in this county has ever seen is standing in your kitchen not being introduced. So. From the top, Mr. Hale. And this time — " the sheriff set the case down on his table like a card played face up, " — all of it."