own work, in a way. To see what the living can’t see. Notice what they can’t notice but is being written across the envelopes of their skins. Ellen, for instance: she clenches her jaw when she’s nervous but pretending not to be and twitches ever so slightly just below her right eyelid. Pratt strokes his sideburns and wipes his stubbled chin and doesn’t know that the base of his neck is damp enough that I can taste it, like the fog before it sweeps in. Yet he’s not really sweating; he isn’t nervous at all, I think, but curious and alert, and that dampness is part of him. It’s the kind of stickiness a fly might have on the tip of its tongue.
Ellen is telling him, rightly, that the Lambry Timber Company was one of the greatest in the North till the mills closed down, one by one, done in by wars and progress. What riches were left trickled their way down to Alice, the last Lambry in the village, who at least had enough to live on and be the hermit she was, shut up for the most part with her paintings and shells and bits of sea glass. And Manoel.
“And her heirs have no interest in keeping up the place,” Pratt says matter-of-factly, pushing open the great pocket doors between the parlor and the dining room.
“They live in the city. They don’t care for it up here. Too isolated for them.”
“It would take a hardy breed to live here year-round.”
“I like to think we’re hardy, sure. But we’re a good place for vacationers, too. For weekends. For pretending life is quiet and refined, the way it used to be.”
“I believe that’s a big part of the attraction for the Danes. Do you think they’ll be good keepers of the Lambry legacy?” He curls his hand around the back of one of my Chippendale chairs.
“No, to be honest. They basically want to blow everything inside up. I mean, in addition to blowing up the ghost that might live here. I mean resettling the ghost.”
I don’t like it, her using that lying word.
“I know that’s the correct term, these days,” she says. “Isn’t it?”
“I prefer to think of cleaning as organizing. Everything into its place.”
“So … I know there are really only a few of you cleaners who are actually top-notch.” She steps in front of a mirror and rubs a little dust from her suit sleeve. “I googled you. They say you’re one of the best in the state. I’m glad Mr. Dane got a hold of you.”
“Thank you.”
“But I also read that you’ve all been so successful at what you do that the ghost population is getting a bit … thin? That there just aren’t as many hauntings as reported before?”
“And yet, there always seems to be just one more. Well now. Look at this.”
He’s come to the Glass Room. The shimmering dome of air and light that Alice had made because I told her to.
“The conservatory. And over here is the kitchen. The Danes want to blow it out, too. The pantry is this way.”
“We’ll get to that in just a minute.”
“But don’t you think we could get on with … it?”
Pratt doesn’t seem to hear the impatience in her voice. He walks forward instead, into the light and sheen, facing the sweep of the cove.
He says, without looking back at Ellen, “I wonder: do you have a listing that’s more beautiful—valuable—than this one?”
“Not right now. Not even close.”
He gazes through the prisms and panes, the ocean broken up into a hundred, smaller oceans. I often stop to stare at this view, too.
“Amazing,” he says.
“Shouldn’t we keep going? Get to the pantry?”
“Impatience is the enemy. You said the village had cleaners in before.”
“You think they didn’t take enough time to do the job right?”
“I’m certain of it.”
“All right.” She breathes and seems to relax.
“Next we’ll take the charge in the pantry.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I need to see what kind of anger has been here, what kind of impulse.”
“You mean—how mad the Danes were?”
“No.” He shakes his head and looks down at the cove. “Not living anger. Not the kind of anger you or I would feel. At least—” But he doesn’t finish his sentence. “Imagine,” he shifts, still gazing at the spray bursting against the rocks, “a wave that has no outlet. Like those waves out there hitting on the beach. Again and again and again. Unsettled souls are like that. Trapped. They