I wondered what the two cops would say if I told them I'd talked to a ghost the night before. I wondered how fast they'd write us off as charlatans. I thought again of the hard hand gripping my arm, and I had to close my eyes for a minute. How could it be that Josiah Poundstone's ghost was there? I had thought I had the whole thing straight in my mind, the whole life-after-death procedure, but now I stood on shaky ground.

I noticed the traffic outside was getting heavier, and the sky was getting darker. As we sat in the diner with the two detectives, the afternoon had drawn to a close. I had an almost irresistible urge to go back to the cemetery, to see if the ghost was still there, what it was up to. What did ghosts do? Were they there when a human wasn't there to react to them? Did they materialize when they wanted to communicate, or were they always…

"Harper," Tolliver said gently. "Are you ready to go?"

"Oh, sure," I said, hastily pulling my jacket back on. The detectives were standing, their coats zipped and buttoned, and from their expressions, they'd been waiting for me to respond for some time.

"Daydreaming," I said. "Sorry." I did my best to look alert and normal, but that's not always my best thing anyway, and I don't think I was very successful. "Maybe our run tired me more than I thought."

Given a valid-sounding reason for my distracted state, the two cops looked a bit happier, though Lacey would never be my best friend. "You need to go back to the hotel and get some rest," he said. "Don't go getting into any more trouble while you're here in Memphis. We'll get back with you after we've talked to the Morgensterns."

"Right, thanks," Tolliver said. After their car had left, we paid our part of the bill and left the diner. "What was that all about?" Tolliver asked when we were in the car and trying to make a left turn into traffic to go back to the Cleveland.

I told him the questions I'd been asking myself.

"I can see where that's interesting, and I would like to know the answers, too," he said. "But from now on, you should have your thinking sessions when you're safe in bed, or something. You had a pretty strange expression on your face."

"Did I look weird?" I asked, oddly hurt.

"Not strange-ugly," he said instantly. "Strange, as in, 'not there.'"

"Oh," I said.

Finally, he took advantage of a hole in the ever-swelling traffic going out of downtown. We were headed back toward the river before I spoke again. "You know who I'd like to talk to again?"

"Who?"

"Victor. But you talk about peculiar, it would seem real peculiar if we called him and asked him to come to see us."

"Yeah. No way we can do that."