Mrs. Kay gave a satisfied nod and sat down. “It’s not a story for maiden ears,” she explained, pouring herself a second cup of tea. “But it’s a familiar one, for all that. The tale goes that the ghost was a young servant girl who was seduced by the son of the house. She found herself … in a certain situation, you know, and went to him to tell him she was, and he looked her in the face and told her that he’d never been with her and if she was in such a situation it must be by one of the countless other men she’d slept with. She drowned herself in the pond the very next night.”

Mrs. Kay added two cubes of sugar, stirring them in with a thoughtful air. “Maybe I should have let Alice hear it, after all. She won’t always live in a house like this one.”

Sam lingered another thirty minutes, but there was little more Mrs. Kay could tell him, at least until he had better-formulated questions to ask her. He took his leave, along with two more cookies for the road, and strode back down the tree- and brownstone-lined street deep in contemplation. Three different ghost stories, all collected within a three-week time span—how many more were there? Was it possible there was more than one ghost at the site?

He needed to visit Liefdehuis, and soon.

Hearing the rattle of the elevated railway as he approached the 30th Street Station, he jogged up the iron staircase and caught the train just as it pulled up. Making his way towards an empty bench near the back, he wondered idly how long it would be before passenger trains like this would be run electrically—the small locomotives this line used were an improvement over the stationary steam engines it had first relied on, but not ideal for either long-distance or long-term use. He pulled out his notebook and jotted down a few musings on the matter and then turned the page, smoothed it carefully, and started his third letter to Mrs. Webster.

Dear Mrs. Webster, he wrote—a pleasurable action in itself, to write the name of a beautiful woman—I have just left the house of a woman formerly employed as a scullery maid by the de Boers at Liefdehuis.…

He summarized the stories Mrs. Kay had told him, including a few of his own observations and thoughts, before renewing his plea for access. The first two letters had not received a reply, but as he wrote, Sam was filled with confidence. She had reason to be cautious, but how could she resist a possible ghost infestation?