“ ‘Quinn, my family has tried to do it. They’ve used the resources of the Mayfair Legacy to try to find both the child and the man and they can’t do it. I don’t need your vow that you’ll try. I don’t want you even to think about trying. I only need you to listen to me. I only need your vow that you won’t ever tell another human being what I told you.’

“I kissed her.

“ ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘We’ll have other children, you and I.’

“ ‘Oh, that would be so lovely,’ she said. ‘So very lovely.’

“We snuggled down into the covers, taking off each other’s clothes, button by button and zipper by zipper, and then we were naked where I had always slept so chaste with Little Ida or Big Ramona. I felt the bed was being properly christened, and I was happy.

“Then I slept.

“In my dream Rebecca came knocking on the door. It was as if I was awake, but I knew that I wasn’t. And in the dream I told her she had to go away. I told her I had done all that I could do for her. We fought, she and I. We fought at the head of the staircase. She went wild against me, and I forced her down the stairs, telling her she had to leave Blackwood Manor, that she was dead and gone and that she had to accept it.

“She sat down on the last step and began to cry piteously.

“ ‘You can’t come anymore,’ I told her. ‘The Light’s waiting for you. God’s waiting for you. I believe in the Light.’

“The living room was full of mourners again, and I could hear the cadence of the Rosary rising like a tide, the Hail Mary, Full of Grace, and then I saw Virginia Lee sit up from her coffin again, her hands clasped, and at once she made her graceful ballet step to the floor, her skirts billowing, and she came to snatch up Rebecca, and together they were hurtling through the front door of the house, the two ghosts, Virginia Lee and Rebecca, and I heard Virginia Lee cry out, ‘You come again to trouble my house, do you? You bring me down from the Light!’

“Rebecca screamed. A life for my life. A death for my death.

“All was silence. I sat on the steps in the dream, wishing I could wake up and be back upstairs in bed where I belonged, but I couldn’t.

“A life for my life, she’d said. Did she want mine? Nothing I’d done had satisfied her. It wasn’t enough.

“Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up. It was Virginia Lee, very lively and pretty, though she wore her funeral blue dress.