Richie nodded. He said, “I’d say it was lovely out here, back before all this.”

“It probably was,” I said. The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don’t trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals. When I was a teenager, that smell used to set me boiling, spark my muscles like electricity, bounce me off the walls of the caravan till my parents sprang me free to obey the call, bounding after whatever tantalizing once-in-a-lifetimes it promised. Now I know better. That smell is bad medicine. It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leave behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore. It had been in our man’s nose, two nights before, when he climbed down the scaffolding and went over the Spains’ wall.

Richie said, “They’ll say it’s haunted now. Kids.”

“Probably.”

“Be daring each other to run up and touch the door of the house. Go inside.”

Below us, the lampshades Jenny had bought for her cozy family kitchen were bright with yellow butterflies. One of them was missing, gone to Larry’s lab. “You’re talking like it’s going to be abandoned for good,” I said. “Dial down the negativity there, old son. Jenny’ll need to sell up, once she’s able. Wish her luck. She could do with it.”

Richie said bluntly, “A few more months and the whole estate’ll be abandoned. It’s dead in the water. No one’s gonna buy out here, and even if they were, there’s hundreds of houses to choose from. Are you telling me you’d pick that one?” He jerked his chin towards the window.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said. “And neither do you, not while you’re on the job, anyway.” I didn’t tell him: the ghosts I believe in weren’t trapped in the Spains’ bloodstains. They thronged the whole estate, whirling like great moths in and out of the empty doorways and over the expanses of cracked earth, battering against the sparse lighted windows, mouths stretched wide in silent howls: all the people who should have lived here. The young men who had dreamed of carrying their wives over these thresholds, the babies who should have been brought home from the hospital to soft nurseries in these rooms, the teenagers who should have had their first kisses leaning against lampposts that would never be lit. Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.