Marcus looked at Ilsa. Ilsa looked at the sphere's cord disappearing under her collar, at the window, at the hill.
"Her name is Ilsa Marek," Marcus said. "Her great-grandfather was the night watchman at the Kestrel Mine."
Prescott went very still. Then she took out her notebook, and sat down, and poured herself the coffee nobody had offered her.
"Tomasz Marek," she said. "Lord. All right. From the top, then. Both of you."
Chapter 13 — Keeper's Daughter
Babka told the story the way other grandmothers told recipes — from the middle, with her hands busy, expecting you to keep up.
Ilsa told it the same way, years later, in Ada Prescott's interview room that was also a break room, with a vending machine humming through the wall and the sheriff's pen going steady in her notebook. Not from the beginning. From the cord.
"The cord is older than me," she said. "Babka wore it sixty years. My mother wore it nine. It is not jewelry. It is a job that hangs around your neck."
Her earliest memory was the weight of it — no. Her earliest memory was the rules, because Babka made the rules into a game before Ilsa was old enough to be afraid of them. Never bury it. Never take it below ground. Never let it out of a keeper's hands into the hands of a man who wants the set. And the fourth rule, the one Babka never made a game of, spoken only once that Ilsa remembered, the winter she was nine and the knocking had come through the boarding-house wall in Wheeling like something asking to be let in out of the cold: If they ever take it from you, zlatko, do not live in the house where you lost it.
"I asked why," Ilsa said. "She said, the ones who lost theirs heard the knocking in the walls, after. A year of it, maybe less. Every keeper who lost a sphere is dead or in a locked ward or sold everything and ran. Fourteen spheres went out into the world after 1911. Thirteen are lost. The keepers who lost them — " she turned her coffee cup a quarter turn, precisely, " — my family kept a list. We were the list."
Prescott's pen paused. "And you've carried it since when?"
"Since I was seventeen. Babka died on a Tuesday. The sphere was cold that whole first winter, did you know that? It learns the new keeper. By spring it was warm." She laughed once, at herself. "You are writing none of this down, Sheriff."
"I'm writing carried since seventeen," Prescott said mildly. "The rest is color. Go on."
The running started before she'd understood it as running. A man at Babka's funeral who knew too much about the family. A landlord in Columbus who'd been paid to describe her. She learned the shape of it the way you learn weather — Vernon Dahl did not send letters, he sent interest, the way damp arrives in a wall. Collectors. Antiquarians. Men with clean hands and a story about a museum, a buyer, a debt her family owed the Kestrel estate. Then, when she was twenty-six and living under her middle name in a town in Ohio, the men stopped having stories.
"Jesse Krell," she said, and her hand went, without asking her, to her left side — the old place, below the ribs, where the cut had gone in crooked when she'd twisted. "He came through the screen door of a house I was renting. I had the sphere in my sleeping fist — I sleep holding it, that is not a figure of speech, Sheriff, that is the job — and he had a knife and he was polite. He said, 'Mr. Dahl would rather pay you.' I said no with the lamp, and the chair, and then with my feet, and he got the knife in anyway, here, as I went out the window. I ran four miles in my socks to a truck stop and a woman trucker took one look and gave me her jacket and her route south and never asked. There are good people. I keep a list of those, too."
"And Briar Hollow?" Prescott said.
"Briar Hollow is where the bell is. Where the shaft is. Babka always said if it ever got bad — if the running got to be the whole of my life — that the sphere wanted to be near the hill, and a keeper near the hill would not be alone in it." Ilsa looked down at her hands. "I did not believe her. I came because I was out of money and out of road and the fever took the choice out of my hands at Marcus Hale's gate. That is the whole confession. I did not bring the trouble. I am only the latest place it stopped."
Prescott was quiet a moment. Then she did a thing Ilsa had not expected from any law in any county: she closed the notebook.
"Here's where we are," the sheriff said. "You're a material witness to a breaking-and-entering and a knife assault in Ohio I'm going to verify with one phone call. You are not a suspect in anything in my county. And that man in the barn is going to come back." She stood, gathering the cigarette case in its evidence bag. "Mr. Hale's hiding you was a crime of manners, not law, far as I can tell. But hiding season is over, Ms. Marek. From here we do it in the light, or we lose."
That night, at the farmhouse, Marcus asked her why she hadn't told him the Ohio part before — the knife part, all of it, in order.