Stormy said, “Kurt had more keys than a prison warden, but none of them work.” She looked at me. “Why would he lead us here?”

“Vengeance, I guess. Even the wicked feel justified in wanting vengeance.”

I thought of the kitchen, the collection of “pigurines” and the needlework samplers that suggested a time before Kurt, when Roberta had evidently led a simple but happy life in this house. I recalled the moment when the framed samplers rattled against the walls and the pigs clinked against one another, as if in a mild earthquake—just as Kurt’s angry spirit had manifested.

Evidently my expression revealed my alarm, because Stormy said, “What’s wrong?”

Before I could reply, the spirit of Kurt rose into the room, as though for the past few minutes he’d been wandering and lost between the kitchen ceiling and the bedroom floor. Once more, he manifested with his mortal wounds, soaked in blood, a demonic figure around which the air was smoky, murky, as if he pulled with him some of the darkness from the realm of the dead where he belonged. Glaring at Roberta and then at me, he pointed repeatedly to the meat cleaver in his neck, as if I might have failed to notice it. Thrusting an accusatory finger at the woman who killed him, he looked equally furious and exasperated, having apparently reached the conclusion that I had the IQ of an amoeba.

“You’ve already gotten the justice you deserved,” I told him. “You don’t belong here anymore. Just move on.”

Roberta said, “Who’re you talkin’ to?”

Enraged by my failure to beat the woman to death with either the martial-arts baton or the rolling pin, Kurt pulled the cleaver from his neck and threw it at me. Because it wasn’t a real blade, only the idea of one, it passed harmlessly through me.

“You can’t do any more damage in this world,” I told him.

“Who’s he talkin’ to?” Roberta asked Stormy.

“Nobody,” Stormy said. “He’s just quirky. Are there other keys?”

“Quirky?” Kristen was alarmed by the possibility of an encounter with another homicidal lunatic. “What do you mean, quirky?”

“Peculiar,” Stormy replied. “But in a good way. He’s quirky but adorable.” To Roberta, she said again, “Are there any other keys?”

His head now seated firmly on his neck, face contorted by fury, Kurt raised his hands, and from his palms issued concentric pulses of energy visible to me but to no one else.

I said, “Uh-oh.”

Spirits lingering in this world have only one way to harm the rest of us. If their lives were marbled with many evil acts, if they are spiritually malignant to a sufficient degree, they are able to convert their demonic rage into destructive energy and vent it upon the inanimate.

Kurt was going poltergeist.

“There’s no point in this,” I counseled him. “All you’re doing is delaying the inevitable and ensuring yourself greater suffering when you finally cross over.”

“He’s weird,” Kristen said, referring to me.