“Morning, sir, ma’am,” she said, staring at Sam as though he personally were responsible for the design of the sun and moon. “Mrs. Kay’s in the sitting room.”

“Waiting impatiently for you,” Mrs. Kay said, appearing in the sitting room doorway. “I’ve expected you for an hour past.”

“My apologies, ma’am,” Sam said, his eyes twinkling.

“Never mind, you scoundrel,” she said. “You can still have your cookies.”

Sam made a direct line to the plate sitting on a low coffee table in the middle of the room and helped himself to two.

“I have news,” Mrs. Kay said, in a low, thrumming voice that clearly indicated a missed opportunity in the theater. “Oh, sit, sit.”

She ushered them into chairs.

“I went to see Mr. Hargedy yesterday afternoon, after you left. What he wanted to know is, is there a chance your Mary de Boer is old Rose de Boer?”

Sam frowned and pulled his notebook out, flipping through it until he came to a page with a tiny family tree drawn on it. “Mary Rose de Boer,” he confirmed, looking up sharply. “So he did know her.”

“I clean forgot about her,” Mrs. Kay said. “Of course now I’m remembering a couple of quiet bits of gossip about it. She’s not showing up in your research because they packed her off to an asylum when she was merely a child and, after, did their damnedest to pretend she never existed, poor thing. That was in … must have been my mother’s time, but Mr. Hargedy’s father, he was the first butler, and he knew Miss Rose as a child, so he never forgot.”

“They put her in an asylum?” Alva repeated.

Mrs. Kay nodded. “She was a little different, apparently. Mr. Hargedy says his father never held with the asylum bit, though, says it never sat right with him. He never thought she had any harm in her, couldn’t understand why they’d ship off their own daughter. You think she’s the one haunting the place?”

“It’s possible,” Sam said, scribbling notes as he spoke. “Her death date roughly matches with the first accounts of hauntings.”

“Rose de Boer,” Mrs. Kay mused. “Well, I guess if ever there was a woman who was owed justice and didn’t get it, it was her, but don’t ghosts have to haunt the place they died? As far as Mr. Hargedy knows, she died in the same place she lived: the New York Hospital.”

“She spent her whole life there?” Sam asked, his jaw tensing. “They just … left her? What cause had they to do so?”

“To hear Mr. Hargedy tell it, she was simply a frightened little rabbit when she was a child. But she’d have fits, see, screaming and carrying on, and it got so the family couldn’t have guests in the house without them hearing. So off she went.”