They returned to the hut with the shrine to find everyone in a sober mood. Jesus and Pepper and Pita sat on the floor. Jesus’s face was impassive while Pita appeared both quietly angry and terrified. Pepper seemed to be dozing. Nitro stood by himself in a far corner, his back to everyone.

Pita looked at Elizaveta. “Did you tell him?”

She nodded.

“Well?” Pita said to Jack, and it was almost a challenge.

“We have all night and nothing to do.” He shrugged. “You want to hold a séance, let’s hold one. The question is, do you know how to?”

“Pepper does. He performed one before on his show. He’ll be the medium.”

Elizaveta had seen the episode of Mexico’s Scariest Places to which Pita was referring. It had focused on a haunted vicarage in Todo Santos, a small coastal town at the foothills of the Sierra de la Laguana Mountains. According to the locals Pepper interviewed, supernatural events had been documented there since the nineteen twenties when the chaplain, who kept a journal of the goings-on, claimed an unseen force would tear his laundry off the line and toss him out of his favorite chair. In the following decades several different priests claimed to have seen the apparition of an old woman dressed in gray. In the eighties, the vicarage was turned into a café, which included a guesthouse. One guest that Pepper tracked down said she had been staying in the guestroom in 1987 and was awoken in the middle of the night to find three old women staring at her. She turned on the light and could still see them for a few moments, though they were blurry, before they disappeared.

Pepper and his crew held a séance in the guesthouse, which resulted in strange noises, automatic writing, and the table levitating. The Travel Network received close to one hundred complaints, mostly from religious groups that took offence to the show’s pagan subject matter.

“Pepper?” Pita said. “Hey—are you sleeping? Wake up. You need to tell us what to do.”

Pepper opened his eyes. Yes, he really didn’t look well, Elizaveta thought. His complexion remained grim, and his bouncy energy was gone. In fact, he seemed downright lethargic. She wondered whether he was drained from the ordeal of discovering Miguel’s body, or whether he had come down with something.

Pepper cleared his throat and said, “First we need to decide who’s participating in the séance. The number must be divisible by three.”

Pita counted everyone present. “Good, we have six!”

“No,” Pepper said, shaking his head. “Rosa can’t participate. Children can’t participate.”

“I’ll sit it out with her,” Jack said.

Pita frowned. “That leaves us with four.”

“Count me out too,” Nitro said.