He was shaking. He had to sit down on my bed, or he probably would have fallen down.

‘So . . .’ he said. ‘So it’s true. It really was . . . the ghost?’

‘It really was.’

He digested that. ‘And why were you down at the school?’

‘It’s a long story,’ I said. ‘But I promise you, it doesn’t have anything to do with gangs.’

He blinked at me. ‘Does it have to do with . . . the ghost?’

‘Not the one who visited you. But yes, it had to do with a ghost.’

David’s lips moved, but I don’t think he was really aware he was speaking. What came out of his mouth was an astonished, ‘There’s more than one?’

‘Oh, there’s way more than one,’ I said.

He stared at me some more. ‘And you . . . you can see them?’

‘David,’ I said. ‘This isn’t really something I’m all that comfortable discussing—’

‘Have you seen the one from last night? The one who woke me up?’

‘Yes, David. I’ve seen him.’

‘Do you know who he is? How he died, I mean?’

I shook my head. ‘No. Remember? You were going to look it up for me.’

David brightened. ‘Oh, yeah! I forgot. I checked some books out yesterday – stay here a minute. Don’t go anywhere.’

He ran from the room, all of his recent shock forgotten. I stayed where I was, exactly as he’d told me to. I wondered if Jesse was somewhere nearby, listening. I figured it would serve him right if he were.

David was back in a flash, bringing with him a large pile of dusty, oversize books. They looked really ancient, and when he sat down beside me and eagerly began leafing through them, I saw that they were every bit as old as they looked. None of them had been published after nineteen ten. The oldest had been published in eighteen forty-nine.

‘Look,’ David said, flipping through a large, leather-bound volume entitled My Monterey. My Monterey had been written by one Colonel Harold Clemmings. The colonel had a rather dry narrative style, but there were pictures to look at, which helped, even if they were in black and white.

‘Look,’ David said again, turning to a reproduction of a photograph of the house we were sitting in. Only the house looked a good deal different, having no porch and no carport. Also, the trees around it were much smaller. ‘Look, see, here’s the house when it was a hotel. Or a boarding house, as they called it back then. It says here the house had a pretty bad reputation. A lot of people were murdered here. Colonel Clemmings goes into detail about all of them. Do you suppose the ghost who came to me last night is one of them? One of the people who died here, I mean?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Most likely.’

David began reading out loud – quickly and intelligently, and without stumbling over the big, old-fashioned words – the different stories of people who had died in what Colonel Clemmings referred to as the House in the Hills.