I shivered. That part wasn’t real, of course—the ghost part. “Everyone here looks like a ghost. How will I even know which one she is?”

“You always know when she’s about, because you hear her song in the air. Haunting, it was.” Then she began to hum, eyes closed.

It was the song—the same one I’d always heard in my dreams. The lost melody that even now was returning to me in odd ways.

“Please. Won’t you help her?”

I swallowed, afraid to promise anything. Afraid to face another night in the dark.

In the transition of patients for the second lunch shift, I snuck away and slipped out the front doors with a nod to the guards. I lifted my hem from the rain-soaked ground and looked about for a gatehouse, anyplace the records Clara mentioned might be stored, but there was nothing. Only the oddly placed tombstones jutting from the hillside at every angle. I thought for a fleeting moment of Dr. Turner, standing there alone with his lantern, and wondered how he fared.

I returned and asked the guards about the records.

“That room over there,” said the stoutest one, with a little wave toward what I’d always thought to be a closet. I nodded my thanks and hurried over, an eerie fear in my stomach. Crates and boxes of files lay shoved into recessed shelves and scattered across a rutted old table. I dug through everything, file after file, a little sick at how many there were. Yet Rosamond Swansea was not among them. Not even a “Rose.”

I smoothed my hair, my skirts, and ducked out of the little room into the now-empty hallway. How much time had passed? Had I been missed? Voices echoed from a distance, and I hurried toward them, but in the corridor, the whisper of skirts, a soft footfall. A small noise.

I turned, half expecting to see the ghost.

It was Nurse Duffy, her face sharply accented in the gaslights. “There you are, you idle bones.” She grabbed me by the flesh of my upper arm and dragged me along the corridor, away from that file room.

Shaken more than I cared to admit, I stumbled after her without a backward glance.

“You’ll have double duty, you know. Seeing as you have so much time to spare.”

“What, you want me in two places at once now?”

“Two rounds of night shift. You’re on again tonight . . . and tomorrow.” She huffed as she paced down the dark hall. “See if that leaves you all fresh and pretty.”

Pretty?

She turned to stare into my face. “All this effort, and he’ll never even notice you. Not after a couple nights on rounds.”

“Who?”

“I know what you’re after. Turner isn’t what you think he is, and it’s best you stay away.”