I’m in my room at around three, staring at the walls and lost for what to do next, when I hear gravel crunching in the driveway and see Germ riding her bike up to the house. She must have raced over from her house as soon as the bus dropped her off.

I step back from the window, and listen to the sound of her feet as she clomps up the stairs and knocks. She waits, then knocks again. Upstairs my mom stirs, but she never answers the door if she can help it.

Germ walks around to the side of the house and taps on the parlor windows.

“Rosie,” she calls up to my window, but I don’t answer. “Rosie, are you here?”

I tighten my hands around the cover on my bed. I want to hurry downstairs and open the door, but I stop myself. I’m a swirl of confusing feelings—anger at her, guilt about being angry, wanting her to stay safe and away.

After a while, Germ yells again. “Okay, I’m going!” she yells. “But I left some stuff by the front door.”

I hear her feet crunching across the gravel a few moments later, and step back to the window just in time to see her pedaling down the driveway and disappearing onto the trail that runs between her house and mine through the woods.

Once she’s gone, I walk down the stairs, open the front door, and find a pile of papers held down by a rock. On top is a note in Germ’s big, messy, greedy-for-the-page writing:

Found some interesting stuff at school and printed it out. I figured sometimes the internet might know more than ghosts do. Hope this helps.

I take the pile inside and sit down on the sofa, sifting through what turns out to be mostly printed newspaper articles, all about—for some reason I can’t guess at first—a man named Hezekiah Thomas. He lived in Seaport in the 1920s and was hanged following a strange and sad saga. I become more and more riveted as I read.

The saga begins with a woman named Helen Bixby, who moved to town when Hezekiah was twenty. He fell so in love with her that he learned carpentry and built her a house with his own hands as an engagement gift. Only, Helen Bixby turned him down and married someone else—and then lived happily with her husband just down the road, Hezekiah’s only neighbors.