What clings to old things is usually angry or tired. What clings to this cradleboard is watchful. It has been lurking since 1931...
Nell Lone Hill can hear it: a wrong that was never made right. People call her the curse-breaker. She hates the word, because you can't break something like that. You can only close it.
Before a repatriation to Arizona, she inspects nineteen pieces, the cradleboard among them. Nell needs the fee. On the form, she writes: unremarkable.
Then she learns that a museum employee has been waking up in the dark building at night for days and doesn't know why. The woman's three-year-old daughter has stopped responding to anyone.
Nell has two weeks, and every case she closes costs her a memory. In the old registrar's office, she finds the cradleboard's catalog card, filled out in 1968 by her grandmother.
Do not keep.
The Cradleboard is the first book in The Curse-Breaker series: quiet, creeping horror about the things museums keep, and the debts that come with them.
