And then something else occurred to me. Had he seen Mariama and Shani’s ghosts? Was that why he’d disappeared?

Could ghosts even see one another? Interact with one another?

Years and years of questions bubbled up inside me, but it was so strange to be able to ask them of a ghost. Stranger still that my fear had dissipated. Was I still under a spell?

Once again I found myself heading into dangerous territory, spurning Papa’s warning and flirting with disaster. One door had already been breached because of my wanton disregard of the rules. Would my connection with a ghost open yet another?

“What’s it like?” I heard myself ask him. “Behind the veil, I mean.”

“It’s called the Gray. The place in between the Dark and the Light.”

The place, he’d said. Not the time. The distinction seemed significant.

“Does it still hurt? From where you were shot?”

“There’s no pain,” he said. “There’s nothing really.”

“But you feel something. You must. You’re here because you want vengeance. That means you’re still capable of human emotion.”

“I’m here because I can’t…” His ghostly voice trailed off.

“You can’t what?”

“Rest,” he said wearily. “Something is keeping me here.”

“And you think if we expose your killer, you’ll be released?”

“Yes.”

I thought about that for a moment. His urgent need to find the killer corroborated what I’d always suspected. Not all ghosts were drawn through the veil by their rapacious hunger for human warmth or their insatiable desire to rejoin the living. Some were earthbound for reasons beyond their control. Apparently, Robert Fremont was one of them. I wondered if Shani was another. If Mariama’s ghost kept Devlin chained to her by his guilt and grief, did those same emotions keep Shani bound to him?

“Can you see them?” I asked.