Mrs. Potts’s duplex is a mirror of their own. Shelly follows Grandma and Mrs. Potts through the kitchen and down the hallway. Mrs. Potts uses the big room—the one Shelly’s mom uses for a bedroom—as a living room. The cats are curled up together on the couch, and Shelly can hear the ghosts under the floor as soon as she steps inside the room.

“Oh,” she says. “It’s mice.”

“Mice?” Mrs. Potts repeats, alarmed. “Louisa, I promise you I don’t have mice. The cats hunt anything that tries to get in.”

“No, Edna, ghost mice,” says Grandma. “Your cats are probably the reason you’re having an issue. They’re doing too good a job.”

Mrs. Potts relaxes a bit, walking over to give one of the cats a pat. “They do like to bring me back presents.”

Shelly can see why her mom isn’t a big fan of cats. Ghosts are one thing—dead mice are another. “It sounds like they’re in the floor,” Shelly says, sitting down on the rug and knocking on it. A skittering sound under the floorboards makes Mrs. Potts shiver. Mice shouldn’t be hard to get rid of, but Shelly’s never had to get ghosts out of a floor before.

Grandma reaches up to undo her braided hair and lets it fall out, loose and free. “What do you think about the air vents?” she asks Shelly. “I think they could work.”

Animal ghosts tend to be simple—the spirits of creatures that haven’t realized they’re dead yet. Being outside helps them fade away because a ghost removed from an anchor—whether that’s its home, where it died, a favorite place, or a grave—will start to fade unless someone tries to keep it around. The dead aren’t made to stick around in the world of the living forever, although some ghosts are stronger than others, more concrete and settled in their death.

Shelly and her grandma use their hair like a net, like a fishing lure. They let ghosts cling to them and act as a hook to carry the dead to new places, places where they won’t be tied to anything and will be able to fade. Sometimes they offer comfort—they burn sweetgrass and feed ghosts warm milk—and sometimes they just let a spirit fade, let it travel to where it’s going because it doesn’t need much more than a nudge to carry on.

Shelly doesn’t really want to stick her hair down an air vent and hope it gets full of mice, but the vents are in the floor and Grandma is old.

“Vents might work,” she says. “I can do it.”

“Your mother is going to kill me,” says Grandma. “Then she’s going to regret killing me when I come back to haunt her.”