“I heard you just fine. There are no ghosts—”

“I didn’t say I’m afraid of ghosts,” she interrupted. “Why would I be afraid of a ghost? They seem fine enough.”

Any other time he’d have pressed her on that particularly ridiculous avowal. “Then who are you—”

“Them,” she exclaimed, tossing her palms up in exasperation. “The men.”

She spoke as if he knew, or as if he should know precisely who in hell she was speaking of.

“The men.”

“Why are you repeating everything I say?”

Because she’d turned him upside down. As she always did. As she had since he’d found her peering inside his windows.

He tried again. “Which men are you afraid of?”

“My family hired Mr. Phippen to oversee the construction of our property, and he sent two men who I’m highly suspicious of.”

“Highly susp—” He stopped himself from repeating back what she’d said just as she gave him a pointed look. Val sighed. “This again.”

“Anyway,” she went on, “Mr. Phippen has supposedly assigned them the role of inventorying my father’s collection.”

“I take by your choice of the word ‘supposedly’ you don’t believe they are actually employed by Mr. Phippen.”

The lady chewed at the tip of an index finger. “I cannot say for certain. I do not know whether they are employees of Mr. Phippen’s who saw the wealth in my father’s artifacts and have gone rogue . . . or whether . . .” She let her voice drift off and her gaze linger with his.

She nodded once.

She expected something of him again.

She nodded again, this time more emphatically.

But for the life of him, he didn’t have a deuced idea of what that was.

Myrtle threw her hands up in what he’d come to find was her telling way of communicating her frustration. “Or whether they do not work for Mr. Phippen at all. That they are, in fact, pretending and have learned of my father’s collection and are here to rob from us.” When she finished, she folded her arms and nudged her chin his way.

He was silent a moment. “That is what you think?”

She bristled, and let her arms fall. “And you find it so hard to believe?”

“Well, let us see . . . One of the possibilities is that two men who were actually inventorying those items when your parents were still here are, in fact, not who they said they were, and that your parents had no idea of who was in their house, and that they were somehow men who had nothing to do with this Mr. Phippen? Do I have all of that?”

“Yes.” She jabbed a finger in the air as she spoke. “Yes. Yes. And yes.”

Val closed his eyes.

Val of two days ago would have left.

But not before he pointed out just how ridiculous, how fear-based the irrational conclusions she’d drawn, in fact, were.