“Write that it wasn’t red,” Vicky said once. “We can at least narrow it down.”

She had recently started to talk about the buzzing and the voices she had heard. It was hard to remember what they’d said, but she remembered certain tones. An authoritative voice, a frightened voice, a monotonous voice.

Pablo talked about the hand that had touched him in the house. On his back, especially. And his arm. Always his arm. Maybe the hand that grabbed him in hallways wasn’t a ghost hand, but a memory that materialized, thought Vicky.

“I saw, you heard, Pablo felt,” said Gaspar. “We’re going to get somewhere with this.”

Vicky, leaning against the wall, put on an album she liked and said:

“We’re not going to find Adela, Gaspar.”

He touched the drawing, the blueprint, and clicked his tongue in displeasure because it seemed incomplete. He didn’t answer Vicky. They all thought it was possible to find her. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been there, recalling the steps in the darkness with the buzzing in their ears.

“Oh,” he told Pablo, changing the subject. “I found two more poets. Rupert Brooke, who died of an infection in the war when he was twenty-six. World War One. They called him the handsomest man in England, look up his photos. Did you read This Side of Paradise? Well, the title is from a poem of his. You guys don’t read enough. He was gay or bisexual. And Wilfred Owen, he was younger, twenty-five, and he died a week before the war ended, seriously. He’s great.

“Where’d you find them?”

“In a book of my mom’s about art and World War One. It has some incredible paintings. It’s a really sad book.”