Birds aren’t like people. They’re harder to catch because they fly around and you can’t talk to them and convince them it’s time to move on. Then you need to find someplace to release them. Grandma creeps toward the bookshelf, clucking her tongue at the bird like it’s a shy cat. It hops back, away from her, wary, and Grandma stills and coos at it again.

Shelly wonders what they look like to the women who hired them—and to all the other clients who’ve seen her and Grandma hopping around chasing phantoms. Weird, probably, but they get stuff done. She and Grandma always earn their weirdness.

Shelly puts the lemonade down on the coffee table and picks up a throw pillow from the couch. She moves around the edges of the room, past Hannah and her wife, who look worried. She waits until she’s sure the bird is entirely focused on Grandma, and then she whacks it with the pillow off the shelf and into Grandma’s waiting grasp.

Grandma bundles her hair up around the bird and holds it there until she’s sure it’s caught. She straightens up and smiles at Shelly. “Good job.”

Hannah, in the doorway, looks a little confused. “Was that you catching it?” she asks. “You’re done? I thought there’d be more to ghost hunting.”

“We caught it,” Grandma says. “We’ll take it with us when we go.”

“If it’s really gone after this, it’s two hundred dollars well spent,” says Hannah’s wife. “I’ll get my wallet.”

• • •

Shelly kind of wants to keep the bird. None of the ghosts she has hidden in her room are birds.

“We’ll let it out at the park,” Grandma says. The bird is still disgruntled but too wound up in her hair to escape. “It can fly around without hurting anything until it gets tired and decides to move on.”

“We could take it home and feed it,” Shelly says. “We have lots of milk.”

“It’s just a bird, Shelly,” Grandma says. “If it wasn’t for people sticking tall buildings everywhere, it wouldn’t be here at all. When I was a girl you never saw as many bird ghosts around as you do now. Everything was lower to the ground then. It wasn’t nearly as confusing for them.”

“Just because it’s a bird it doesn’t matter?”

“Because it’s a bird we should take it to a park with lots of trees and other birds and let it go free,” Grandma says. “Ghosts like it aren’t meant to stay forever. Most of the time it’s better to let ghosts fade. You know that.”

“Sometimes ghosts deserve to do their haunting. Some things need haunting.”