My mother and Mr. Barlow had been gone only a week when Grace said she saw no reason why all three of us couldn’t go to Aspen now; she kept our reservation for a suite at the Jerome.

“Tell Grace to go to Aspen by herself, but if she insists on taking Matthew, you should go with them,” Em said. Without generalizing about ghosts to Em, I suspected it was too soon for my mother’s ghost to show up—wherever Little Ray might make an appearance. Em hadn’t forgotten my mom’s heartfelt plea—to get her out of the Jerome, if she ended up there—but Em had made Matthew her priority. “Tell Grace to reserve a second room. Grace can do her Paul Goode business, you can do your ghost business. Matthew and I have our own room—no ghost gets near that boy if he’s with me,” Em said.

“It’s weird enough with Em already,” was Grace’s first response to Em’s idea about traveling with us. “Besides, it’s too late to book a second room at the Jerome.”

With my mom and Mr. Barlow gone, a pall was cast over our East Dorset house. We’d all asked Molly to stay with us, but the old patroller was keeping to herself in the Manchester house. It was Em’s theory that Molly was going through Little Ray’s things, as Em had gone through Nora’s. “What you should do, Longhand Man, is go back to your writing—that’s what the snowshoer would tell you to do,” Em said.

I hadn’t been at my desk—I’d not even looked at my writing notebooks during the first week my mother and Elliot Barlow were gone. As Molly had said, what was written in the snow was clear, but it was like the snowshoer to have more to say; it was like the little English teacher to let a literary quotation speak for her.

The notebook I’d most recently been writing in lay open on my desk. In the blank space below the last sentence I’d written, in the small but perfect penmanship of the experienced copy editor she’d become, Elliot Barlow had quoted Herman Melville—an excerpt near the beginning of a long sentence, one the snowshoer knew I would know. It was one of the passages my grandmother had repeated when she was reading Moby-Dick to me—a passage she’d later asked me to read to her. “Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried,” was all Mr. Barlow had written in my notebook; there’s more about “the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.”