"That is the stupidest, most you thing I have ever heard," June said, and he could hear the tears in it, and the pride under the tears, in about equal measure. "Call me every night. Every night, Marcus. If I don't hear from you by nine, I am calling that sheriff."
"I'll call."
He hung up. Ilsa stood in the doorway a moment longer, holding her cup in both hands.
"Your sister loves you very much," she said.
"She has a strange way of — no. She has exactly the right way of showing it." He picked up the notebook and squared it on the counter, the way a man squares a board before a cut. "Tonight I do it properly. Times. Places in the floor. Which boards, which wall. Whatever's under there, it has a pattern, and patterns can be read."
Ilsa looked at the cellar door. "It can," she said. "That's what frightens me about it."
Chapter 17 — The Log Book
Pearl Odom kept the county archive in the basement of the courthouse, in a room that smelled of damp paper and floor wax, and she received Marcus's questions the way she received everything — by pulling a chair out with her foot and telling him to sit where the light was.
"You want to know about the watchman's log," she said. It was not a question. Pearl had a way of knowing what a person had come for before they finished deciding how to ask it.
"I want to know if there was one."
"There was one." She hauled a gray document box onto the table between them, not urgently, like a woman setting down something she had carried a long way. "Understand what a night watchman was, Marcus. He wasn't a guard. He was the mine's memory. Twice a shift he walked the workings with a safety lamp and a slate, and he wrote the gas readings down — where, and how much, and what the air was doing — and he signed it. The company's copy went in the office safe. Marek kept his own book besides, in oilskin, because his English was better in writing than the company's clerk liked, and because he trusted paper more than men. His widow said so. It's in the letters."
"And the company's copy?"
"Burned. Office fire, 1913, very convenient, very complete — the safe, the files, the lot." She opened the box. "Marek's book was listed among his effects. I found the inventory years ago, doing the cataloging nobody else wanted. Listen to this." She did not read aloud; Pearl never performed. She turned the sheet so he could see the clerk's hand, faded to brown: Effects of the deceased, T. Marek: coat, lamp, log book in oilskin wrap. Not recovered.
Marcus read it twice. "Not recovered."
"The book went down with him, Marcus. Down the vent shaft, after the collapse, when he went down to reach those men and the shaft was capped behind him with the company's blessing and the truth still in his coat." She closed the box with great care, both hands flat on the lid. "For a hundred years the official story has been that Ambrose Kestrel was a respectable man who suffered a terrible accident, and that the watchman's negligence killed fourteen miners. That story is not just a story. It is a legal instrument. The settlement the families signed in 1912 — the money the widows lived on, the money that bought their silence — all of it rests on the disaster being an accident and the blame being Marek's."
"If the log shows the gas reading that night — "
"And Kestrel's order to send the crew down anyway — and there are families in this county who were told for a century that their grandfathers' killer was a Polish watchman who couldn't read a lamp — " Pearl's voice stayed level, but her hands had not moved from the box. "Then it wasn't an accident. It was fourteen counts of a crime with a famous name on it, and every contract built on the settlement is built on sand. Including the mineral rights. Kestrel's heirs sold the coal rights generations ago, but the gas rights under this hill sat in a family holding company all this time. Vernon Dahl's company. Do you know what a gas-storage deal is, Marcus?"
"Roughly. You pump gas down into the old workings and take it out when the price is right."
"You pump it down and you certify — to the utility, to the state, to the insurers — that the geology is sound and the history is clean. And two counties over, this spring, an old mine took a neighborhood's front yards down with it, and now there is a state mine-safety review working its way county by county, looking at every capped shaft and every disaster file in West Virginia." She finally lifted her hands from the box. "If that review comes to Briar Hollow, and if there is one scrap of new evidence that 1911 was a crime and not an accident — a log book, say, surfacing out of a dead man's coat — the deal dies, the rights are worthless, and the Dahl family name is attached to the word negligent in the newspapers. Vernon Dahl does not want the master sphere because it completes a pretty set, Marcus. He wants it because it's the last thing above ground that still points down. And he wants your house because your house is the lid, and you are the only man alive who might lift it for love or money — so he is trying money first."
Marcus sat with that. The fluorescent light hummed. Somewhere above them the courthouse went about its small business — deeds, licenses, fines — the whole paper machinery of the living, sitting on top of a room where an old woman guarded the paper of the dead.
"The log is the real treasure," he said at last. "Not the sphere."