“He split,” I said, “he’s off ghosting somewhere,” and I got out of the car.

As she joined me at the entrance to the driveway, Stormy said, “Why Elvis and not Buddy Holly?”

“I don’t know.”

“Buddy Holly was twenty-three when he died. So young. You’d think he’d be more reluctant than Elvis to cross over.”

I said, “Buddy Holly went down in a plane crash one winter night. On the other hand, Elvis was sitting on a toilet when he died, maybe of an overdose, and he collapsed into a puddle of his own vomit.”

“So you’re saying maybe he lingers here out of mortification?”

“Not just that. But it’s conceivably a factor.”

As we followed the driveway into the cottonwood grove, she said, “I doubt that anyone on the Other Side cares how we died, only how we lived. Tell him that. I mean, if he comes around again.”

“He’ll come around. Even if he didn’t want me to help him cross over, he’d come around to stare moon-eyed at you.”

She was surprised. “He stares moon-eyed at me?”

“He’s in love with you, I think.”

“That’s kind of weird.”

“Regardless of his other faults, he was always a gentleman in life. He wouldn’t materialize in your bathroom and watch you naked in the shower or anything. Anyway, I guess I’m glad he’s dead, so I don’t have to compete with him.”

“If he wasn’t dead, he’d be like sixty-five. You being a quarter his age, he wouldn’t be much competition.”

“I wish you’d said any instead of much.”

She smiled and pinched my cheek. “Yes, my sweet griddle boy, I’m sure you do.”

We followed the oiled-dirt driveway only twenty feet or so into the woods before leaving it for the cover of the trees. I wanted to circle the house, staying in the woods, to reconnoiter it from every angle, before deciding on an approach.

This being the Mojave in spring, the day was warm, the air oven-dry and very still. Dead leaves crunched underfoot, and occasionally a bird took wing through the branches overhead, startled into flight.

I felt someone watching me, but that didn’t mean anything. Because of my paranormal abilities, because I had to make my way through the world of the living and the dead, I sometimes felt that I must be under observation by a hostile presence when in fact I wasn’t.

In a whisper, Stormy said, “I feel as if we’re being watched.”

To spare her the fear of being tracked by malevolent and unseen enemies, I said, “Watch out for rattlesnakes.”

Three

The house didn’t look like the place where Norman Bates dressed in his mother’s clothes and sharpened the cutlery with which he would stab women to death in the family motel. Neither was it constructed of gingerbread and gumdrops to lure unsuspecting children into the home of the woodland witch, there to be roasted in an oven.

The simple two-story residence was freshly painted white with pale-yellow trim. A swing on the front porch; basket ferns hanging from brass chains. A pair of bentwood rocking chairs on the back porch. Furnishing the green lawn were a birdbath, four ceramic garden gnomes seated at a table that was a giant ceramic mushroom, a half-dozen cast-concrete pastel-blue rabbits four or five times life-size, and a powder-blue wheelbarrow used as a planter that overflowed with vine geraniums offering a wealth of scarlet flowers.