“There’s a word for a destructive spirit,” I said. “Something like…polyanthus.”

“That’s a flower,” Stormy said.

“Or maybe it’s poltroon.”

“That’s a craven coward,” she said.

“Polonaise?”

“A Polish dance.”

“Well, I’m just a fry cook.”

The fracas on the second floor seemed to be winding down.

“Poltergeist,” said Roberta.

“No,” I said, “I don’t think that’s it.”

“That’s it, all right,” Stormy said.

“Poltergeist,” Roberta insisted.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”

Kristen looked at me as if I were a candidate for the Idiots’ Hall of Fame, which was a look that I had seen before on the faces of a number of pretty girls. “What the hell’s wrong with you? Of course it’s poltergeist.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I said.

“I don’t. We’re not talking about what happened up there. We’re just talking about a word.”

“Well,” I said, “if it wasn’t a pollinosis up there, then what was it?”

“Hay fever,” Stormy said, defining the word pollinosis.

“Poltergeist,” Roberta repeated. “But we ain’t never gonna say what it was, if we know what’s good for us.”

“Polonium,” I suggested.

Stormy said, “A radioactive element.”

The battered woman continued: “What we best say is Kurt done trashed the room while alive. Knocked me around some, too, give me all these bruises, black eye. Then he tried takin’ Kristen out to the shed, to the old cold cellar deep down under, where he done killed poor Hannah and hung her body, where he’d soon of killed and hung me, too. We say how I caught up with him, me all crazy with fear, and my mind snapped, and I chopped him to save Kristen.”

Beginning to shake violently again, Roberta broke into tears.

Kristen put an arm around her and said, “You saved me.”

In the house, all had gone quiet.

Before either of the women could start to wonder why Stormy and I had shown up in the first place, my girl said, “It’s over now. You two wait here. We’ll drive out to the highway, where there’s cell-phone service, and we’ll call the police.”

In my experience, the spirits of truly evil people didn’t linger long in this world, if at all. When they were reluctant to cross to the Other Side, they were soon taken across against their will, as if by a bill collector for some lender to whom they owed a big debt.

Because I couldn’t share that knowledge with these women without blowing my fry-cook cover, I worried that we were leaving them in a state of high anxiety. “Will you be all right here? The sun’s pretty hot. You could move onto the shade of the porch. It’ll be safe on the porch.”

“I’ll keep myself right here,” Roberta said, “and to hell with the porch.”

“It’s over now,” I assured them. “It really is. Or you could move into the shade of the cottonwoods. I mean, if you don’t think the porch is safe. But it is safe. The porch, I mean.”