He nodded doubtfully, visibly consigning her to the category of “city people who think they know better but don’t,” and clucked to the horses. As the coach crunched away over the remaining stones, Alva picked her way carefully over the cratered ground, breathing steadily. These panics still came upon her suddenly, although they were better than they had been. The trick to controlling them was to think very firmly about very mundane things: gravel, or the taste of different kinds of tea, or the recent quotes for window manufacturing.

The door had been replaced since the last time she’d touched it, but it was still cold and unhealthily damp. More important, it was unlocked, meaning the crew hadn’t bothered to lock up before abandoning the job. Alva frowned, took out the notebook she’d brought with her for just this purpose, and made a note. Then she stepped inside.

The front windows had been broken for years, perhaps decades. The crew had taken down some of the boards covering them, so the cold winter sunshine could seep in, but the meager light barely permeated the darkness within. Alva stopped in the doorway, feeling blind and strangely vulnerable while her eyes adjusted. Slowly shapes appeared, lumps in stygian shades of gray and brown. The crew had apparently been in the process of knocking a wall down when they’d left—Alva squinted at her paper and made another note. She wasn’t going to pay them a single dime they hadn’t earned.

The house smelled of rot and mold—those damp trees again. She made her way cautiously towards the lumps, and frowned when she realized they were tools.

“At least I’ll have hostages for good behavior,” she murmured, but as she peered around the room her confusion grew. What kind of crew left their tools behind when they abandoned a job? She saw several hammers, three different kinds of saw, and at least five different tools she didn’t know the name for. It was as though they’d just dropped everything right in the middle of the workday and rushed off, leaving their equipment to lie where it fell.

The smell of rotting fruit wafted from an open lunch pail—they’d been gone for several days at least, then. She pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders. It was very cold in the house, somehow even colder than it had been outside. It was the damp, she told herself; it made it seem that way. Cold enough the fruit in the pail should have frozen instead of rotting …

Well, obviously it had rotted, so that was a silly thing to think. She was letting those letters from Professor Moore go to her head. Ridiculous how he seemed to not only believe in ghosts but also think they were a wonderful thing to have. Or not to have, she thought, remembering the Moores’ rambunctious debate about ghost ownership.