The Hollow Beneath the Gallows Tree
Caleb March came back to Greyhollow to bury a father, not to dig up a graveyard's worth of secrets. But when Old Harlan, the last keeper of the town's buried shame, presses a leather ledger into his hands on his deathbed, Caleb inherits a list of six children vanished beneath the shadow of the gallows tree over a hundred years ago. Now the Unseen Knower is stalking the streets again, Della Voss is hearing her dead brother's voice in the walls, and the archive of every hushed-up crime in Greyhollow's history has been reduced to cinders. As Caleb traces the bloodline of Sheriff Ezekiel Pike, the Counting Girl who tallied the dead, and the spectral women condemned for witchcraft, he realizes the ledger was never meant to be read, it was meant to be fed. The tree is hungry. Della's bloodline makes her the seventh name on a list that doesn't end. With Maren Halloran's ghost begging him to stop and the ghost of Aaron Voss warning him too late, Caleb faces an impossible choice: burn the ledger and damn the lost children to oblivion forever, or open it and let the gallows tree claim Della as payment for every sin Greyhollow ever swallowed. In a town where the dead keep the books, the only escape is to rewrite what they remember.