"There were fourteen houses," she said. "Fourteen women who took a piece of that bell into their kitchens and parlors and kept it the way you keep a photograph of somebody the sea took. And there were my people, who kept the first one — the one off the crown of the bell, where the crack started. The master. Babka said the others were letters. Ours was the address they were mailed to."
It was late. Marcus was mending the hasp at the kitchen table by lamplight because his hands went looking for work when his mind was full, and Ilsa sat across from him with her tea gone cold, telling it because the night was long and he had finally asked the right question: What happened to the people who lost theirs?
"Millie Kovich kept hers forty-one years," Ilsa said. "Pittsburgh side of the river, a brick house with a porch. In 1962 a nephew she'd raised stole it out of her dresser to pawn — he thought it was a bearing, imagine, a ball bearing off a grave. She heard the first knock that night, inside her bedroom wall. Three. Then three more. She told the priest it was her husband asking to be let in out of the cold, and do you know, Mr. Hale, in a way she was right, because that's exactly what it was. She stopped sleeping. She stopped eating, because she said a woman doesn't sit down to dinner with somebody knocking. They found her in February, in her chair, facing the wall. The doctor wrote heart. Babka wrote something else in the family book. Babka wrote: counted out."
The hasp clicked under Marcus's hands. He set the screwdriver down.
"There was a man — not a widow, a keeper by marriage, down in the Kanawha valley — who sold his wife's sphere to a traveling collector in 1974, for four hundred dollars, which in 1974 was a truck. The knocking started in his walls the night the collector's train left the county. He tore that house apart looking for it. I don't mean he looked hard. I mean he took the plaster off the studs with a claw hammer, room by room, listening. When they finally got him into the state hospital he was still listening — the nurses said he would put his ear to the wall of the ward at night and go calm, the way other men calm down at music, because at least in the hospital the walls knocked back on a schedule he—" She stopped. "They sold the house for nothing. There was nothing left of it to sell. Four hundred dollars."
"And the ones who just — lost them," Marcus said. "Estate sales. Grandkids. The thing Pearl said."
"Most of them," Ilsa said. "And do you want to know the strange mercy of it? Most of them never heard anything at all. Because the sphere went to a drawer, or a pawnshop shelf, or a collector's case — somewhere kept, at least, even if it wasn't held. Babka used to say the dead are patient with accidents. What they are not patient with—" She turned the sphere once on its cord, the way she did. "—is being dropped out of the world. Sold into a box and shut. Forgotten on purpose. A keeper who loses hers by living is forgiven. A keeper who lets go of it — the knocking finds them, and it does not stop at one house. It followed the Kovich boy to three apartments. He gave the pawn ticket to a priest in the end and slept in the church a month."
"There was one more," Ilsa said, "that Babka would only tell after the dishes were done, like it needed the table cleared. A keeper down near Beckley who quarreled with God in 1949 — her man had come home from the war wrong and then not come home from the river at all — and she walked out one night and threw her sphere off the bridge, to be rid of it. She told Babka the knocking after that did not stay in her house. It went under every bridge she crossed and every floor she slept on, hers or anyone's, patient as weather, three and three and three, until the spring flood dropped and she waded out into the mud up to her knees with the whole town's laundry on the lines watching, and found it by grace or by stubbornness, in a pool under the piling, exactly where the river had set it down gentle as an egg. She kept it in her apron pocket the rest of her life. She said the dead don't punish, Mr. Hale. She said they persist. There's a difference, and the difference is the whole of it."
The lamp burned lower. Outside, the hill was doing its ordinary dark.
"Your grandmother," Marcus said. "How did she—"
"Babka kept hers sixty-three years and died in her own bed at ninety-one with the sphere warm in her hand and all her wits arranged around her like furniture," Ilsa said, "and she made me promise two things on the last night, and neither of them was keep it safe. The first was: never bury it, child — the ground is where they are, and you do not mail a letter into the fire. The second was: if it is ever taken from you, do not go mad and do not go quiet. Go and tell it in a room where they write things down." Her mouth did something dry and almost amused. "I have not managed the second one yet. I have been running instead. Running is the family talent on my father's side."
"How many keepers are left?" Marcus asked.
Ilsa closed her hand around the sphere and held it to her skin, and the old house, listening the way houses do, said nothing at all.
"One," she said.
Chapter 10 — The Buyer