She looked fragile, sitting in front of him. Sam had to remind himself not to put his arms around her. She’d told him what she wanted—no pity, no sympathy—and now, of all times, he needed to respect that. He put all his rage, all his sorrow, to the back of his brain to be processed at a more appropriate time and did what she needed him to do. Put the pieces together.

“It’s been the most puzzling aspect of the whole case,” he said. “All the different stories. Even discounting the smaller hauntings, there were so many people who claimed to know the ghost’s background, and not one of them agree. Now I see. I should have been focusing on the people who were haunted, not the ghost at all.”

He saw the relief cross her face when she realized he wasn’t going to press her further. “You really think it’s the answer?”

“Have I ever told you how I heard the first story? It was at Delmonico’s, the night I approached you. I was having the longest dinner of my life with this horrible old man and his son—”

“Harold Denton and Harry Denton junior,” Alva said. “I saw you with them. You’re right. They’re horrible.”

“And you came in, all red velvet and shiny hair, and they couldn’t wait to talk about you, which obviously was a lot more interesting than what they had been talking about, not that I remember what it was, because I wasn’t listening. And he—the older one; are they really both named Harry?—told me about the house.” He kept his voice easy, but his eyes were trained on her. “He told me the story about the mad revolutionary who tried to burn a house party alive.”

“The radical farmhand mass murderer,” Alva said, and Sam was pleased to hear a touch of her old dryness in the statement. “It was in the first letter you wrote me.”

“Now, old Harry had heard this story from someone else—he wasn’t haunted himself, and who knows how many people it got filtered through first—but if we assume it came from someone’s firsthand experience, who would that person likely be?”

“For the story to get to Harold Denton? Someone a lot like him. Older, probably. Rich. Male.”

“Exactly. And what are those people afraid of?”

Alva’s eyebrows snapped together. “People who want to take things from them. Losing their power.”

“Losing their power,” Sam repeated. “A good way to put it. The next ones I heard were from a former scullery maid, who’d worked at the house about thirty years ago. She said there was a lot of talk about the ghost, but two servants had stories she deemed … maybe not credible, exactly, but more so.”