“I’m sure I don’t know what more I could tell you,” Mrs. Kay said. “But come on in. I had a fresh batch of those cookies made just for you, Professor Moore.”

Alva and Sam followed her into a small sitting room completely fitted in the latest style, or rather the latest style as it was diluted to the masses through ladies’ magazines. Choosing an armchair upholstered in brocade stiff with newness, Alva looked around the room, wishing she could take notes. This new class of working families who had enough money to furnish their houses in the latest style, to compete with their neighbors and accumulate status through interior decoration, had been so far out of her world the first time she’d lived in New York. Now they were her audience, and she needed to know them a lot better.

However, that would have to wait. Hauntings took priority.

“We’ve learned more about the Liefdehuis ghost,” Sam was saying. “And we have some names to pass by you.”

“Ooh,” Mrs. Kay said. “You mean—Professor Moore, are you saying there really is a ghost?”

“We believe there is,” he said.

“Oh my,” she said, leaning back and placing a small, heavily ringed hand upon her generous bosom. “Well, my goodness. Imagine that. I worked in a haunted house!”

Change that to two years dining out.

“Mrs. Kay, do you remember a Mary de Boer? We think she was a daughter of the original builder, died in ’38, right when you started working there.”

“Mary de Boer,” Mrs. Kay repeated. “It doesn’t sound familiar. How did she die?”

“We don’t really know. She would have been in her mid-sixties at the time, but she doesn’t show up in any of the contemporary accounts of the family, and we haven’t found any other records.”

Alva and Mrs. Kay exchanged a look. Women were a lot easier to misplace than men, when it came to records. “If she never married,” Mrs. Kay said, “there probably wouldn’t be. You have a death certificate?”

“Just a notation in the family Bible,” Sam said.

“Could be someone got the date wrong and she died earlier. I certainly never heard of her, so either she married and nobody bothered to write it down or she died before I started working there.”

Sam nodded and made some notes in his little book. “What about Edward de Boer? Died in ’31?”

“Now him I remember from my time before I worked there, because he got down to the village fairly regularly. I remember my mother warning my older sister off him. Handsome, he was, slender and fair. Pretty as a picture, you might say, but not as good as he ought to be on the inside.” She made a wry little face. “Though how many are, one might ask.”

Alva leaned forward. “Did he die in the house?”