It faded the way weather fades, not by stopping but by thinning — wall, then floor, then one last set from somewhere beneath them, three clean knocks, like a signature.
Ilsa unclenched her hand. The sphere had printed itself on her palm, a small round ghost of pressure, already fading.
"You see now," she whispered. "It isn't my sphere knocking, Marcus. It never was just mine. It's all of them, and yours is the house they knock through. Dahl put the set on the hill tonight and now they know the way."
He thought of Pearl's voice: maybe that's why he has to finish it.
"He's not going to wait for lawyers," Marcus said.
"No," Ilsa said. "Neither is it."
Chapter 16 — What Marcus Owes the House
June called at seven in the morning, which meant she had been awake since five, worrying in an organized way, and had finally decided that worry counted as a reason.
"You sound terrible," she said.
"I sound like a man who slept in a chair." Marcus stood at the kitchen counter with the phone wedged against his shoulder, watching the coffee maker think about it. His notebook lay open by the sink, last night's times written in a hand that got worse toward the bottom of the page. 2:47. Then again. Then again, the sets of three running over each other until there was no clean way to count them, and around four he had stopped writing times because the knocking had stopped pausing long enough to have any.
"A man named Keller called me yesterday," June said. "Very polite. Works for some holding company. He wanted to know if you were, and I wrote this down, 'emotionally attached to the property.' Marcus. Who asks a man's sister a question like that?"
"Somebody who wants the house and is pricing the man who comes with it."
"Then let him have it." She said it the way she said everything important — flat, level, no wobble in it. "Take the offer. You told me yourself he doubled it. Sell the place, come up here, sleep on my couch until you find your feet. You are forty-one years old and you are living in a ruin on a hill in a town that's been dying since before we were born, and now there is something knocking under the floor. I have been very patient about the knocking, Marcus. I want it noted that I have been patient."
"It is noted."
"I am running out."
He poured the coffee. Through the kitchen doorway he could see the hall, and past it the edge of the cellar door, shut, with the new hasp he'd put on it after the night he finally opened it. The tally marks were on the other side of that door. Fourteen of them. He had counted them so many times the number had stopped meaning men and started meaning something else, something with weight.
"You want to know what I've got in this house?" he said. "Everything. The settlement from the divorce — gone into the roof and the joists. The buyout from the partnership — gone into the well pump and the wiring. Two years of weekends. Carla got the condo and the savings and the dog, and I want you to know I miss the dog considerably more than the condo, and all I got was out. This house is what out bought me. If I sell it scared, for whatever a smiling man offers me in a hurry, I don't start over, June. I just end. There's a difference."
"There is also a difference between starting over and being found under a floor."
"I'm not going to be found under a floor."
"You don't know that. You don't know anything about what's down there, that's the whole point, that's the part that keeps me up at night — "
"I know it's my floor," Marcus said.
Silence on the line, the good kind, the kind June made when she was re-measuring a thing instead of arguing with it. In the doorway, without a sound, Ilsa had appeared with her own cup, the leather cord visible at her throat, the sphere resting against her skin where it lived now. She did not pretend she hadn't heard. She had stopped pretending things around him in the last week, and he found he was grateful for it in a way that had nothing to do with the house.
"He'd let you sell," Ilsa said quietly, when June's silence stretched. "That's the trap in it. It's a good offer. It's meant to be."
"I know," Marcus said.
"Then why?" June demanded, through the phone, at the same moment Ilsa's eyes asked it.
Marcus looked at the notebook. At the times, in his worsening hand. A carpenter's answer was the only one he had, and it sounded thin said aloud, and it was true all the same.
"Because when I bought this place I pried the first rotten board off the porch and I told it — " He stopped. He had never told anyone this. "I told it I wasn't another man who was going to let it fall. Everybody's let everything on this hill fall. The company, the town, the — " He thought of fourteen men, and a fifteenth who went down after them with a bell. "I'm not running from a sound under my own floor, June. If it's gas, I'll vent it. If it's water, I'll drain it. If it's a man, I'll deal with the man. And if it's none of those, I'll — measure it until it is."