That last kind was the real thing. Daniel was quiet, and the room was still except for the birch branch brushing the window frame now and then, softly, almost gently. “There was a ring,” he said at last, still looking at the ceiling.
“The one you took off me last night. What was wrong with it?” “Your story is one thing,” she said.
“Its story is another. I took it in years ago, thinking I could keep it inside this house and stop it from working. I was wrong.” “So it did this to me on purpose?”
“It did what it was made to do,” Eleanor said evenly. “You just happened to be the one wearing it.” Daniel turned his head and looked at the nightstand.
The ring was no longer there. Only the bare wood surface and the mug of cooled tea remained. “What now?” he asked.
Eleanor stood and smoothed her apron. “Now you eat,” she said. “Then you sleep some more. Then we talk.”
“About what?” She had already reached the door, but stopped and turned back. She looked at him briefly, but there was more in that look than in a long answer.
“About where the jewelry ended up,” she said, “and what we’re going to do about it.” She left, and in the kitchen water ran as she washed her hands before cooking. An ordinary household sound.
Outside, the birch brushed the window again. Daniel lay there staring at the same beams, the same white seams. But something in the room had changed—not the walls, not the furniture.
Something in the air had lightened, the way it does when someone opens a window that’s been shut too long. He didn’t know what she meant by “what we’re going to do.” But he noticed the word we.
And it was strange—a good kind of strange, unfamiliar, like a pair of work boots that pinch at first and then suddenly fit just right. Eleanor set a bowl of oatmeal on the table, sat across from him, and said without preamble, “We need to go to Pittsburgh.”
Daniel looked up from the bowl. “To find what you handed off,” she added, as if that were obvious. He set down his spoon.
“Those men are dead,” he said carefully. “They took the gold, split it up, passed it around—I don’t know to who or where. How are we supposed to find it?” “We find it,” Eleanor said simply.
It wasn’t really an answer. She wrapped both hands around her mug; steam rose from the tea. “These pieces aren’t ordinary,” she said.
“Each one carries something dark in it—illness, malice, something spoken over it. I took them from people so they wouldn’t get hurt. Kept them here, thinking I could hold them.”
Daniel looked at her. “And those men who took them—they died because of that?” he asked slowly.
“Yes,” Eleanor said, without emphasis. “You think that’s connected?” “I don’t think,” she said. “I know.”
Outside, a car passed and bounced over a pothole before disappearing around the bend. The house went quiet again except for the oatmeal bubbling softly on the stove over low heat. Daniel rubbed his temple.
“I don’t know where they put the stuff,” he said. “They took the box, counted it out, split it up. I didn’t see who took what…”
