Page 30 of 13 Nights

...a great wrong done in the name of ambition. My fiancé has secured his position through the destruction of his brother's, and I cannot in conscience remain silent, though silence is what duty demands of me. The truth of what Friedrich did to Severin...

The scan cuts off. Hoffman's note explains that Marburg holds only this partial fragment. Her records show that a complete photographic copy of the full document was sent to a Walter Hadley in New York during a research inquiry in the 1990s.

The Hadley accession number appears in the correspondence, but the final digits are illegible in the archived carbon.

I know that name. My mother's notes reference the same Hadley accession code. The complete copy of Margarethe's confession isn't in Marburg. It's in Tom Hadley's restricted collection, in a bookshop on Main Street, guarded by a man who thinks keeping me ignorant will keep me alive.

But one detail stops me. If Walter Hadley requested the full confession during my mother's investigation, why wasn't it in her files? She had copies of everything else. The warning fragment is the only document missing from her drawer, and now a second document connected to her inquiry is also absent from her records. That's a pattern, and it isn't accidental.

I grab my coat.

Tom is behind the counter when I walk in. The shop is open, a few tourists browsing the local history section, and the look on his face when he sees me is the particular blend of resignation and dread I've come to expect.

"I need the accession number for the Brandt family papers," I say. "The Hadley code referenced in my mother's correspondence files. You know the one."

"Ashley."

"Margarethe von Brandt wrote a partial confession. The Marburg archive has the first page. Your family has a complete photographic copy, sent to your father during my mother's inquiry. I need the accession number to locate it in your collection."

Tom glances at the browsing tourists and lowers his voice. "My family preserved those records to protect people. Not to fuel an investigation that's going to get you killed."

"Wanting to protect me doesn't make your interpretation of the danger correct."

"And wanting answers doesn't make you immortal."

The line lands hard enough that I have to respect it. Tom isn't stupid, and he isn't cruel. He's a man who watched his father carry this burden and inherited it along with the bookshop, the filing cabinets, and the knowledge that the Horseman is real. That Eliza Marsh vanished. That my mother fled.

"I need the manifestation records," I say. "The observation logs, the dates, whatever your family has documented about the pattern. If you won't give me the accession number, give me enough data to understand what's happening."

Tom studies me for a long time. Then he disappears into the back room and returns with a cardboard file box.

"These are copies. My father made them after your mother left. He believed that if the Horseman ever began changing, someone outside the family would need to understand the pattern." He sets the box on the counter. "The accession number for the Brandt papers isn't in there."

"I didn't expect it would be."

"Ashley." His voice drops. "I'm not giving you this to help your investigation. I'm giving you this so you can see what we've seen for two hundred years and make an informed decision about whether to keep going. Read the records. Understand the danger. Then decide."

"I've already decided."

"Then at least decide with evidence instead of stubbornness." He pauses. "I need your word you won't publish anything identifying my family."

"You have it."

He lets me take the box.

The cottage is quiet for the rest of the afternoon. I spread the Hadley copies across the kitchen table and photograph every page.

The observation logs go back generations, handwritten entries in fading ink, each one documenting a manifestation with the clinical precision of people who've learned to treat the impossible as routine: dates, duration, weather conditions, witnesses.

The physical evidence notes are sparser but more unsettling. Hoofprints in mud that lasted until the first rain. A section of fence rail split by an unseen impact decades before Tom was born. A cracked windowpane during Prohibition with no explanation.

The Eliza Marsh entry is in the early section of the collection, the handwriting slightly different from the later generations. I capture it separately.

The afternoon light slants through the kitchen windows, turning the old paper gold. I reach for my coffee mug, and my hand freezes.

The table looks different. Older. The surface shows ring stains that aren't mine, a lamp I don't own casting warm light from the corner, papers spread in a script I recognize from the locked drawer. My mother's writing. My mother's lamp. Her coffee rings on a table that was hers before it was mine.

The lamp has a crack in the ceramic base, a distinctive diagonal fracture running through blue glaze. I stare at it, trying to memorize the detail, and then I blink and it's gone.