“I suppose,” I said, with some difficulty. “Perhaps if he could be convinced to burn that atrocious hat.”
Jenny laughed, a bubbling, honest laugh. “Oh, I know! I know! I’ve given up on that battle. Don’t worry—he’ll wear it less often come spring.” Her pretty giggle was infectious, and I found myself chuckling, too. “There is someone, though, isn’t there?” Jenny asked.
“I—well, I haven’t—no. Not really.” Strong cheekbones, deep brown eyes, and curls of jet-black hair beneath a police cap snuck back into my mind, and my cheeks grew hot again. “No.”
Jenny sighed. “Don’t waste time. Life is too short for unrequited love. Take it from an expert.” She swept across the woodwork and greenery toward the center of the room. Her weightless steps stirred the blades of grass like a faint breeze. “Fetch a bit of bread from the chest, would you?” she called back.
I glanced behind me and found, against the wall, a simple wooden crate containing a few loaves of dry bread. I selected one and trotted along the path to catch up. The floorboards tapered off into a grassy mound, where the ghostly lady sat perched on a wrought-iron park bench facing the pond. She patted the seat for me to join her.
“Why did you come here, then?” she asked as I sat down.
“It was your idea,” I said. “It is nice, though, you’re right. Very peaceful.”
“Not to the pond, silly. Why did you come to work for Jackaby?”
“Oh, that—well. It happened rather quickly, I guess,” I said. “I’ve been in eastern Europe for much of this past year, and only recently docked in the States. Just looking for work, I suppose. Any job would do, so long as it paid for a roof over my head. And there was a posting . . .”
A mallard fluttered over the surface of the pond toward us, etching a shallow wake with one webbed toe before landing at the water’s edge. I broke a chunk off the loaf and tore it up as I spoke, tossing the crumbs into the nearby grass.
“Now that I’ve gotten involved—I don’t know. It’s all rather exciting, of course, and more than a bit unbelievable. I should very much like to help solve mysteries and save lives. I fancy there are worse ways to earn a day’s wages.”
“He’s quite mad, you know. But adventure can be very appealing.”
I nodded, watching the duck waddle up the bank and begin nibbling at the crumbs. “My father was a bit of an adventurer,” I found myself telling her. “Although I’m not sure he would fully approve of my current situation.”
I chose not to mention that I had carefully avoided knowing what my parents thought for the past several months. Since making the decision to abscond with the tuition money to fund my travels, I had deliberately kept out of touch. I had sent an occasional postcard, assuring them of my safety and well-being, but never with a return address, nor any way to trace my current whereabouts with any real precision.
My mother worried, I knew, but my father . . . For my entire life, I had revered the man, and for my entire life, I had heeded his command to stay behind as the dutiful daughter while he marched into discovery. It was not that his word no longer held its power over me, but just the opposite. Secretly, I feared that if he gained the chance to summon me back home to safe monotony, I could only oblige.
Jenny’s voice gently broke the silence I had left. “Spending too much time around Jackaby can be . . . dangerous. That doesn’t frighten you?”
“Well, yes, it does a bit, I suppose,” I admitted. I had been getting similar warnings all day, from that unpleasant woman at the telegraph office to Inspector Marlowe—even Jackaby didn’t seem to think I could handle the job. “But today—I don’t know how to explain it. It was so easy to get caught up in it. It felt so natural. Like how you think things ought to be when you’re a child and you’ve been reading storybooks and listening to fairy tales. I guess I forgot about being frightened because it felt good to finally be in the adventure.”
Jenny sighed and tossed her head back. She said something very softly, which might have been, “And that’s what makes him so dangerous.”
The duck polished off the bread crumbs and sauntered up for more. He was a stately fellow, with a deeply black head and back, accented in greens and purples. His wings were brown and hung like a prim vest over his white underbelly. His chest was a dappled, reddish color, and it puffed out slightly, like a cravat, tapering away into the white beneath. He came within a few feet and waited, expectantly. I tossed him another handful of crumbs.
“There was a woman,” I recalled. “After Jackaby and I left, there was a woman crying. The victim had a picture of her in his room. The whole thing wasn’t sad—I mean, it was grisly and tragic—but it wasn’t really sad until there was that woman crying. That part didn’t feel like the adventures you read about in books. Jackaby says it isn’t over, either. We met a man today who Jackaby believes will be dead by morning.”
Jenny nodded solemnly, and we watched the duck peck at the bread crumbs for a bit. “You aren’t the first assistant he’s worked with, you know.”
I nodded. “He told me. A handful of them quit on him . . . and wasn’t there someone who stayed on?” I remembered the cryptic journal page I had stumbled upon downstairs, and a grim thought occurred to me. “Is that you, then? You didn’t—you know—during one of his cases, did you?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Die? No, that happened long before I met Mr. Jackaby. And I never worked for the man, if that’s what you thought. This place was my family’s. A number of occupants attempted to move in before he did, but apparently having a resident ghost isn’t good for property values, and word spreads. The lot fell to the city, and that Mayor Spade fellow called on Jackaby in the hopes he could do some sort of exorcism. That was how we met.” She smiled at the memory.
“I take it he didn’t exorcise you?”
She laughed softly. “No, he didn’t exorcise me. He spoke to me. Like a person. He made a pot of tea—even asked my permission to use the kitchen first, and just made a pot of tea. We sat at the table and chatted. It was the first proper chat I’d had in a decade. He poured me a cup and just let it get cold in front of me while we talked about this and that. He was very straightforward. He had no qualms about Spade trying to sell the place, told me the man had every right to. ‘If every dead person decided to keep their property, we’d have nowhere for the living to live,’ he said, which was fair. But he told Spade that I had every right to stay as well. ‘No malevolent spirits, no call for eviction,’ I think he said. And that was that. A week later, Spade gave the place to him.”