She pushed her chair away and stood up. “I need a breath of fresh air,” she said, enunciating each word so no one would notice something was wrong. “Excuse me.”

Sam pushed through the door into the glare and grayness of the winter afternoon, looking for Alva.

She couldn’t have gotten far … there. The lot next to the Blue Stag was empty and overgrown, but it fronted a pasture, and there she was, looking over the fence at a pair of bedraggled sheep. He walked towards her.

She stood bolt upright, as he was beginning to realize she always did. Shoulders squared like a soldier’s, arms folded in front of her. She looked dismayed and confounded, a general who’s just seen his entire army routed by vastly inferior forces.

He leaned on the fence next to her.

“I loathe sheep,” Alva said.

Sam digested this. “I see,” he said, feeling his way. It didn’t seem like sheep were what she was upset about, but he was willing to wait for the connection.

“Stupid animals. Always in a herd. Goats are better. I met a goat once. He belonged to a painter I knew in Paris, and he went to parties and salons and everything. He once ate the ruffle off a dress I was wearing, but the dress looked much better afterwards.”

This was a pretty arbitrary distinction between species, but Sam wasn’t about to get into an argument about the comparative intelligence of barnyard animals, or even party-going animals, so he settled for an encouraging nod.

“He died a few weeks before I sailed,” Alva said. “Drank himself to death.”

Sam frowned. “The goat?”

“The painter,” Alva said, still staring at the sheep. They were great fluffy things, gray from the mud, with little wooly curls poking out in all directions. “Maybe the goat too. I don’t know what happened to him. Listen here, you don’t believe this nonsense, do you?”

“That a goat could drink himself to death?” He was fully at sea now.

Alva let out an impatient huff. “The stuff Miller said. About ghosts. Plural! Ghosts!”

“I believe he and his men think they saw something,” Sam said.

She sighed. “Yes. Or he does, at least. He wasn’t faking. But his men could have been playing a joke on him. They could all be in on it together.”

“It’s put them out of work,” Sam said. “They’d have to be abnormally committed to it.”

“So, children from the village, maybe.”

“Could be,” Sam said, turning to watch her profile. “Could also be they saw what they said they saw.”

“No,” she said, her lips compressed in a firm, thin line. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“Why are you so determined that there not be?”