I took the seat behind the desk and waited for the tingles to leave my spine and my pulse to return to normal. A dusty chalkboard stood against the wall. I tried to make out any words, but they had been smeared to obscurity, if they had ever been legible at all. Several notes had been circled and connected in a sort of web, but all that remained now were the ghosts of the lines.

Ghosts.

I glanced up at the ceiling. Directly above me sat the impeccably tidy room with its polished floors and neatly tucked bed. And something else.

I shook my head. It wasn’t that I did not believe in ghosts; it was that I believed in them in the same noncommittal way that I believed in giant squids or lucky coins or Belgium. They were things that probably existed, but I had never had any occasion to really care one way or another. I had never given ghosts much thought—except, perhaps, as a frightened child gazing into shadows at bedtime.

Jackaby, I was rapidly discovering, had a way of opening that corner of my brain. It was a quiet little corner in which I had lived when I was younger. It was a corner in which anything was possible, where magic was not an improbable daydream, but an obvious fact—if still only just out of reach. In those days I had known there must be monsters in the world, but I would happily accept them, knowing that, by the same logic, there must also be wizards and wands and flying carpets. I had never really closed that part of my mind, just slowly stopped visiting it as I grew older. I had left it unlocked like the jumbled treasure room upstairs, waiting for someone to come poking about.

Where was Jackaby? Surely he should have returned by now. I thought about Swift and all those steps, but even the hobbling commissioner must have reached the room after such a wait. I found the mason jar, which Jackaby—or one of his previous assistants—had indiscreetly labeled BAIL MONEY in bold letters, and pulled it off the shelf. Stuffed in wads and rolls, there must have been over two hundred dollars in the thing! I gawped at the sum. How much should I bring? I had never bailed anyone out of jail before. I wouldn’t feel safe walking down the street with half a year’s wages in my pockets.

Fortunately, before I had to make a decision, I heard the lobby door bang shut. I tucked the jar back on the shelf and zigzagged quickly down the crooked hallway. Jackaby had just hung his hat beside mine on the rack when I poked my head into the lobby.

“Oh, hello, Miss Rook. Had a chance to look around a bit?”

“Just a bit,” I hedged.