Martin’s spirit was in the warehouse. Jesse didn’t believe Anna when she told him, but two of the lights that hung from the ceiling beams blew out during the week and Anna was certain Martin had made it happen. She’d never believed in spirits before, but now she did, utterly and completely. The lights were up too high for her and Jesse to fix, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything. She didn’t even care about painting the mural … except that she’d added a hammer to the painting before Jesse’s arrival the day before. He hadn’t even noticed, which had struck her as amusing for some reason.

“Why you laughin’?” Jesse had looked suspicious. “That ain’t no real laugh.”

Anna’d tightened her lips to hold back her laughter. The hammer was practically right in front of him and he didn’t see it. It didn’t seem all that funny to her later, but at that moment, she’d nearly been in hysterics. She’d thought she should add some drops of blood dripping from the hammer’s claw.

“You done lost your marbles,” Jesse had said, worry in his dark eyes.

She knew she’d lost her marbles. Every once in a while, she thought she found them again and in those moments she knew clearly that her mind was going downhill but it was easier to just keep plowing forward than to find a way to fix the mess she’d made.

The doctor came to the house on Friday afternoon. Miss Myrtle insisted that Anna see him, and he came upstairs to her room and listened to her heart and her lungs and looked into her throat and her ears.

“You are very slender for your height,” he announced, tweaking the end of his waxy mustache, “and Miss Myrtle is afraid you’re not getting enough to eat.”

“I don’t have much of an appetite lately,” Anna said. “It must be the weather.”

“Try to eat more,” he said. “You need to put some meat on your bones.”

The word “bones” made Anna think of the skull in the window of the Mill Village house and she thought she was going to start laughing right then and there. It was a monumental struggle to prevent the burst of laughter from leaving her mouth, but she succeeded.

“Do you sleep well?” the doctor asked.

“Perfectly,” she said, but in her mind she added, Except for the nightmares. They were wretched things, the nightmares. If she thought the doctor had a pill to make them go away, she would have told him about them.

“Do you feel melancholy?” he asked.