He looked toward the counter, where Ms. Geary busied herself with checking in items and pretending not to be listening in.

Glancing down, he nodded at his shoes.

I stifled a victory smirk, almost feeling sorry for him.

“Actually,” I said, softening my tone, “there was something weird that happened the night we moved in.”

Slowly, he lifted his eyes to mine, trying, I could tell, to gauge my level of sincerity.

“I heard this voice coming through the wall. It was this . . . guy.”

Though Hipster Glasses didn’t ask what the voice had said, that exact question swirled in his widening and too-serious scowl-stare.

So I went in for the kill.

“He said his name was Buddy Holly, and to tell you he wants his glasses back.”

With that, I marched past him, shooting one last glance to Ms. Geary, who I swear smiled, though she never looked up.

“Hey,” Glasses called to me. I stopped but didn’t turn around.

“You know who Buddy Holly is?” he asked.

Overhead, the bell rang.

I glanced back at him from over one shoulder. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“Well, you should give me your phone number,” he called, apparently no longer caring about what Ms. Geary had to think of any of this. “Just in case it turns out there is.”

“Don’t you already know it?”

I spun quickly so he wouldn’t see me grin and, with that, hurried into the crowded hall.

FOUR

Zedok

The saw’s cry had ripped through the halls of my side of the house—a harpy feasting upon its still-living prey, gleeful in its viciousness.

The man responsible for creating the infernal racket, Mr. Armand, stood in the center of the parlor, this version of which, with its cracked-plaster walls and pockmarked ceiling, scarcely resembled my own.

A pair of safety glasses shielded the man’s eyes as he worked. Eyes that did not see me, though I stood just beneath the archway leading into the parlor, between the open pocket doors.

I had watched Mr. Armand this way for over an hour. With such a horrid noise filling both versions of the house, what else was there to do but stew at him?

If he felt my presence, he never let on.

Not that I had expected him to. I had been in Mr. Armand’s dreams as well as Stephanie’s, and he had seen me no better than she had. Though since his work centered on uplifting the travesty this side of the house had become, I had indulged in the temptation to direct his mind’s eye toward images of the mansion as it had once been.

He would not be staying long enough to achieve even halfway similar results. Still, I’d taken small pleasure in informing him just how to get it right.

Large and powerfully built with dark brown hair, beard, and mustache, Mr. Armand reminded me of the shipyard workers I had glimpsed when I first arrived in America. And in that moment, with his eyes on his work but his mind so clearly elsewhere, I had to wonder which of us more closely resembled a ghost.