Eberly Hardware smelled of kerosene and cut pine, same as always. Walt Eberly was at the counter with his reading glasses down his nose, and there was a man standing in front of him that Marcus had never seen, which in Briar Hollow meant the man had been in town about ten minutes.
"—dark hair, thirtyish, might be traveling hurt," the man was saying. "Could've come through on foot, could've caught a ride. I'm trying to do this the polite way before it becomes paperwork."
He was in his thirties, clean-shaven, with boots too new for the mud outside and a soft, reasonable voice. His hands were empty and open on the counter, palms up, the way men arrange their hands when they've been taught to.
Walt shook his head slowly. "Can't say I've seen her."
"There's one more thing." The man smiled like he was embarrassed to ask. "She carries a family piece. A little iron ball, about marble-size, on a leather cord. Sentimental. Her people are anxious to have it back, and there's a reward if it turns up. Nobody's in trouble. It's a family matter."
Marcus stopped at the bin of galvanized nails with his hand halfway in, and made himself keep moving, kept scooping nails into a paper sack like a man who had not just heard his own kitchen described from the inside.
The bell over the door went, and Sheriff Ada Prescott came in with the rain on her shoulders, shaking off her hat. She nodded to Walt, took in the stranger the way she took in weather — once, whole — and set a flashlight on the counter.
"Batteries," she said. "And whatever he's selling, Walt, I'd hear the price before I bought."
"Jesse Krell," the man said easily, and offered her a card before she asked. "I do recovery work. Families, mostly. Missing persons who don't know they're missing."
"Recovery work." Prescott turned the card over, read the back, which was blank, Marcus could see it from the nail bin. "And this woman — she got a name?"
"She does. I'd rather keep it between me and the family, Sheriff. She's not wanted for anything. She's ill. She wanders."
"Uh-huh." Prescott put the card in her shirt pocket instead of handing it back. "Well, Mr. Krell. You find her wandering anywhere in my county, you call my office before you recover her. That's not a courtesy. That's how it's done here."
"Of course." The smile stayed exactly where it was. "I'd expect nothing less."
"Where are you staying, while you ask around?"
"Motel, out by the highway. Room six." He said it readily, a man with nothing arranged behind his face. "I'll write the number on the card next time. Didn't think."
"There won't need to be a next time if you find her fast," Prescott said, and turned to her batteries, done with him in the way that ends conversations in Briar Hollow — not rudely, just completely, like a door set to in its frame.
Krell touched Walt a nod, Marcus a nod — nothing in it, nothing personal, a man counting heads out of habit — and went out into the rain with his collar up. Through the front window Marcus watched him cross the street not to a car but to the diner, unhurried, a man settling in.
"That fellow," Walt said, weighing Marcus's nails, "is a glass of water with something in it."
"Been in long?" Marcus said.
"Long enough to ask at the diner, the motel, and the gas station. Asking about a woman and a marble." Walt folded the sack. "You get a lot of that, restoring houses? People asking about marbles?"
"First time," Marcus said, and paid, and got his tar and his hasp and his lamp oil into the truck. He sat a moment with the engine running and the rain blurring the windshield, having an argument with himself at the speed of the wipers. He could walk across the street to the courthouse annex and tell Ada Prescott everything — the woman, the sphere, the knocking, all of it — in about four minutes. He could feel how much he wanted to. It would be a relief shaped exactly like handing somebody else a heavy box.
What stopped him was not loyalty, yet. It was arithmetic. Ilsa had run from men with cards and reasonable voices for years and stayed alive doing it, and the one thing she had asked of him, underneath all the rules about the sphere, was don't hand me to anyone. If he carried her story into an office before she said so, he was just Krell with a local accent.
He drove home at a speed the truck complained about, and found Ilsa in the kitchen doorway where she'd plainly been standing a while, listening to the road the way she did now, the sphere a small dark weight at her throat.
"There's a man in town," Marcus said. "Asking about a woman with dark hair. And a little iron ball on a cord. Says there's a reward. Says nobody's in trouble."
Ilsa went still in the specific way she had, which was not freezing so much as listening deeper.
"Sheriff took his card," Marcus said. "His name—"
"Jesse Krell," Ilsa said.
Marcus stared at her. "How did you—"
"Because Dahl only has one man who does the asking in daylight," she said. "The rest of them do the other kind. Krell is the one who smiles first." She put her hand flat over the sphere, holding it against her skin through her shirt, an old reflex by now. "He cut me in Ohio with the diner full of people, Mr. Hale. He isn't the kind that gives up at a county line."
"Then we have—"