She sat on the couch with her back against a folded blanket, a mug of broth in her lap, and the iron sphere resting against the base of her throat. Marcus had found a length of soft cotton cord in a sewing drawer left by the Wren estate. She had refused it at first. Then, after looking at the red mark the leather had left on her neck, she allowed him to thread the sphere onto the cotton and tie it loosely enough that she could slip two fingers underneath.
Her own hand returned to it every few minutes, not from habit, he thought, but from confirmation.
"My family has kept it since 1911," she said.
"The year the mine went down."
"You know that much?"
"Everybody in a coal town knows when the mine went down. Fourteen men. The Kestrel collapse. They blamed the watchman."
Her expression sharpened. "They did."
"The watchman was your—"
"Great-grandfather. Tomasz Marek."
Marcus remembered the diner counter, the hardware store, the sudden silences. "Nobody mentioned him by name."
"No. They wouldn't."
She told it slowly, with pauses to drink and gather herself, and Marcus didn't interrupt.
After the collapse, when it became clear the fourteen men underground were not coming up alive, their widows had gone to the blacksmith with the cracked mine bell. The bell had rung to call shifts, to mark accidents, to summon men from the valley. It had cracked during the disaster—how, exactly, depended on who told the story. The widows had it broken for metal and cast into spheres, fourteen grief irons, one for each man left below.
"They believed the dead were restless because the living had lied about how they died," Ilsa said. "Not ghosts the way children mean. More like a debt with nowhere to go. While a sphere stayed above ground with a keeper, the knocking dead knew where home was. They could rest."
"And your family kept one?"
"Not one. The first. The master sphere. It was cast from the crown of the bell, and it was given to my great-grandmother because her husband was the one they blamed. The Mareks kept it to remember he was innocent, even when the town needed him guilty."
Marcus glanced toward the kitchen floor. He had been trying not to think about the three knocks, which was like trying not to think about a toothache.
"Fourteen spheres," he said. "Where are the others?"
"Gone. Lost, sold, buried with keepers who broke the rules, stolen by people who thought they were curiosities. A few ended in museums under wrong names. One went into a river. One by one."
"And yours is the last?"
"The last above ground with a keeper."
She wrapped both hands around the mug. Her knuckles were scraped from the gate, her nails broken. On her left side, under the fresh dressing, the knife wound had begun to itch as it healed, and she kept shifting to keep her shirt from touching it.
"What are the rules?" Marcus asked.
Ilsa studied him, weighing how much truth he had earned.
"Never bury it. Never let it be taken below ground. Never leave it off the keeper longer than you must. Never hand it to a collector."
"Collector meaning—"
"Vernon Dahl."
The name meant nothing to Marcus. "Who's he?"
"A rich man who collects the Hollow's sins and calls them history." Her voice flattened. "His family served the Kestrels. He has spent years buying the other spheres. He says he wants the set preserved. What he wants is the last witness in a glass case where he owns the key."
"And he sent someone after you?"
"He sent several someones. The last one had a knife."
Her fingers pressed the sphere.
Marcus looked at the injury on her left side, then at the gate beyond the window. The storm had washed the drive clean. No one in town knew she was here—unless someone had seen him carrying her in, and no one could have. The road had been empty.
"You came here on purpose?" he asked.
"I came because the house was above the old office. Because my grandmother said if I ever had nowhere else, the hill would know me." She shook her head once. "I didn't know anyone had bought it. I thought it was still empty."
"Lucky for you it wasn't."
"Lucky for me you cut the cord instead of leaving me to strangle." She touched the cotton replacement without warmth. "Don't make a habit of it."
That surprised a laugh out of him. It surprised her too, judging by the small, reluctant change in her face.
Outside, Briar Hollow lay ordinary in the morning light. A coal truck ground down the valley road. Someone's dog barked. Marcus's unfinished house smelled of coffee, wet wood, and antiseptic.
Under the floor there was only silence.
He did not believe in curses or restless dead. He believed a woman had run from violent men, believed she had been cut and hunted, believed Vernon Dahl—whoever he was—might be exactly the kind of rich bastard who bought history to lock it away.
The knocking was harder.
Ilsa saw the doubt and didn't argue with it. She finished her broth and set the mug aside.
"You don't have to believe what it is," she said. "Believe this: Dahl will come for it. And while I am under your roof, Marcus Hale, you should not let that sphere leave my skin at night."
From the kitchen, the coffee tin sat empty on the counter.
Marcus looked at it longer than he needed to before he put it back in the cabinet.
Chapter 6 — The Man Asking Questions
The list in Marcus's shirt pocket had been there three days: roofing tar, three-inch screws, lamp oil, weather stripping for the back door, and a new hasp for the barn. He added a fourth day by writing just go to town across the bottom of it in carpenter's pencil, underlined twice, the way he settled arguments with himself.