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the help of a book called
Everyone Poops
—but I still felt a little sheepish drawing attention to bodily functions, especially because I had no intention of using a bathroom. I just wanted to snoop.
    Tad looked up distractedly. “Down the hall, then take a left. It’ll be on your right.”
    “Thanks.” I made a quick escape and closed the door quietly behind me. The hall stretched all the way to the rear of the building, and I walked back slowly, peeping into one gloomy room after another. You forget that the only windows in these buildings are the grand ones in the front and the considerably less grand ones overlooking the alleys in the back.
    I turned the corner and there he was, the ghost of a butler. He was dressed in a formal uniform: dark gray tails over a pale gray vest. Though he didn’t wear gloves, there were links in his cuffs, and his feathery white hair appeared to have resisted a recent effort to smooth it into place.
    “Hello,” I said. Though he was clearly stunned that I could see him, he bowed politely. His sweet, faded gallantry just about broke my heart.
    “Who are you?” I asked gently.
    “John Grady,” he answered. “Ma’am.” He pronounced it “Mum.”
    “Did you … work here?” I asked. I often meet the ghosts of lonely old men who had lived for their jobs—ushers and waiters and doormen who had eaten most of their meals at lunch counters and spent most of their nights in boardinghouse rooms, counting the hours until they could return to life at work.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “For the Winslows?”
    “For Miss Edlyn’s family, ma’am, the Shand-Thompsons. In London, and in Brighton in the summer. My Mairead, God rest her soul, she was Miss Edlyn’s—Mrs. Winslow’s—nurse.”
    “After she got sick?” I was guessing.
    “No, ma’am—when she was born. And every day of her life until—”
    He broke off. I nodded.
    “You came here with her? From England?”
    Now he smiled. “We did, indeed. The missus and I, we like to say we were His Lordship’s wedding gift. So Miss Edlyn wouldn’t be alone in America. We loved her like our own.”
    Suddenly, I heard voices; Tad or Sylvia had opened the study door. I hated to interrupt John Grady’s sweet reminiscences, but I had to.
    “We don’t have much time. Could I ask you …?”
    He nodded.
    “Why are you here?”
    “The deed, to the house in Swansea. I kept it in Gwennie’s rhyme book—
The Butterfly’s Ball.”
    I heard footsteps approaching and recognized just whose they were.
    “Gwennie?” I whispered.
    “Our daughter. She and Miss Edlyn were like—”
    The footsteps were nearly upon us.
    “I’ll come back,” I whispered.
    “Don’t go!” he moaned, loudly enough that Tad would have heard him, if Tad could hear the voices of ghosts. I wheeled around sharply, nearly colliding with all six and a half feet of the family executor as he rounded the corner. Which would have put me nose to chest, given my height of five six.
    “Oh, sorry!” I said.
    Tad nodded distractedly. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he responded, hurrying off down the hall, right through the spot where the butler’s ghost had hovered, before he had faded into the air. I thought that if I waited around for a moment or two, Mr. Grady might reappear. So I did. But he didn’t. Leaving me with the problem of how I was going to get back into this house, so that I could help him.
    Help him do what? I haven’t explained that part, have I?
    Earthbound spirits are just the ghosts of people who get stuck between this world and whatever comes next, assuming there
is
a next, which I firmly believe there is. But I can’t see into it. I don’t know any more about it than any other living person. What I
can
see is almost like a doorway of light, and when ghosts are finally at peace, they walk right through the light into …who knows? Whatever’s on the other side.
    The doorway appears when a person is dying. When a spirit leaves its body after the