Mrs. Erickson smiled and set the basket on the desk. “You’re here alone today?”

“My partner has meetings.”

“Without you? How odd. But I’m glad you’re here.”

Kaylin found this mildly confusing because she had encountered Mrs. Erickson only once before, and as far as she knew, Severn always managed to avoid the damn front desk—which was annoying because she was certain he’d be better at it than she was.

Mrs. Erickson had baked soft buns with a hint of red at the edges—jam of some kind. She removed napkins from the top of the basket, and then placed two buns on them before offering them to Kaylin. “I should have made cookies instead—these are a bit crumbly and likely to cause a mess on the desk. I’m sorry, dear—I just wasn’t thinking.

“But I was told that these would be welcome today.”

And there it was. Mrs. Erickson had a ghost problem. Or a several-ghosts problem. Although not all of her visits involved reports about the doings of said ghosts, most did in one fashion or another. Investigations had been done—this was Elantra, after all, and ghosts were not quite as ridiculous as they sounded on the surface. This wasn’t to say that the Halls of Law believed in the existence of ghosts; rather, that there were many magical artifacts and echoes of older or ancient wars that somehow lingered, and the residue could cause confusion, panic, and, yes, a strong misidentification.

The Imperial Mages were sometimes interested in ghost reports, but couldn’t be fussed to actually sort out which of these reports were the products of too much alcohol at the wrong time, and which were genuinely of interest. The scut work was therefore left to the grunts who manned the desk.

Mrs. Erickson’s ghosts, however, had never become part of any case the Imperial Mages would find interesting. For one, they were remarkably mundane in both appearance and behavior; for two, their proclamations often involved the type of things that might annoy or disgust a well-bred Elantran old lady. Rats. An unexpected abundance of insects—cockroaches. Fruit flies.

Sometimes they involved the neighbor’s dogs—which the Hawks discovered did not actually exist; there might have been other neighborhood dogs that were causing sleepless nights, but Mrs. Erickson’s current neighbors didn’t have giant, man-eating dogs. Sometimes the ghosts, however, had led to smuggling arrests, albeit in indirect and unexpected ways. No one expected ghosts to be able to suss out the value of the composition of fabric, of all things.

On the other hand, on the tiny chance that Mrs. Erickson was not being advised by one of the many ghosts that haunted her, Kaylin agreed with the reported recommendation. Whatever these were, they were delicious.