The Counting Well

The sign at the edge of Sivo Brdo reads POPULATION: 113. It's been repainted so recently the letters are still wet.
Nina Kovač, a hydro-acoustic engineer, arrives in the Slovenian Karst to find out where a river goes when it vanishes into the earth. What she finds is a village of silent watchers who stand in their doorways at her arrival, a bell that tolls at dusk, and an entire community that gathers at the old stone well to count itself, aloud, every night.
The first night Nina lowers a hydrophone into the dark. It records two overlapping heartbeats. It records a child's voice counting slowly upward: a hundred and twelve, a hundred and thirteen...
And then, a hundred and fourteen.
The last word on the recording is her name.
Now the villagers are smiling. Their clothes drip onto dry cobblestones. Their breath does not fog in the November cold. And somewhere beneath the church, in a vault older than the village itself, a hundred and thirteen stone chairs are waiting, one of them carved with a number that has never been spoken.
Nina has one warning, given in a voice she has not heard in two years: do not say the last number.
She has until dusk to work out which one that is.
A slow-drowning nightmare of guilt, inheritance, and the terrible things done for love, set in the limestone hills of Slovenia. Six chapters. One count. No one leaves the way they came.