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Chauncey sighed and shifted his position, now laying his head on one of my slippered feet. He’d been so quiet during my conversation with Hazel that I’d almost forgotten he was there.

But I supposed that to him, none of this was terribly unusual, just two of his people having a conversation, their voices a reassuring murmur in the background.

Somewhere down the block, a car door slammed loud enough for me to hear it all the way in the back of the house. Almost as if the sound had awoken her from her reverie, Hazel turned away from the window and settled herself in the kitchen chair opposite mine.

“Now,” she said, expression bright and brisk and entirely Hazel, “let’s go over the rules. Pay attention, because some of them are going to matter quite soon.”

“Should I get another cup of coffee?” I asked, since my mug was almost drained by that point.

“If you think it will help.”

I dislodged Chauncey from my feet — but gently — and went to pour myself some more. When I returned to my chair, he immediately put his snout on one foot.

But I didn’t mind. It felt good to have him there, to have the physical reminder that it wasn’t so horribly strange to be talking to a ghost.

Well, not if you were a Cosgrove woman, anyway.

With that out of the way, Hazel got down to business.

Ghosts were always tethered to the place where they’d died. She could move through all the rooms in the house and even go out into the garden and onto the front porch, but she couldn’t pass the property line. Apparently, she’d tried, but every time her foot had crossed some invisible boundary, she’d found herself back in the house, sometimes in her chair in the parlor, sometimes in the bedroom where she’d died.

“Other ghosts have similar constraints,” she told me. “Every once in a great while, they’ll be tethered to an object rather than to a place, but that’s rare. You’ll find out more as time goes on.”

“And you really can’t remember how you died?” I asked. At first, that notion seemed strange to me, but then again, people couldn’t remember when they were born, either. The idea had a kind of symmetry to it, I supposed.

“No,” she replied. Rather than look wistful, she appeared matter-of-fact, the way she was about almost everything. “I’d had a quiet day — spent some time in the garden, sat on the front porch with a book. It was warm, and I wanted to be outside. I had soup for dinner, and then I was tired and went upstairs to bed. And that was the end.” She stopped there, her gaze now far away. “I was ninety-five years old, Lorelei. No one questions your death when you’re that old. And I can’t remember anything except waking up and seeing my body on the bed.”

Even though it was warm enough in the kitchen, a little trickle of cold worked its way down my spine. I didn’t want to think about how I’d react if I opened my eyes and saw my dead body lying there in front of me.

If I’d died in the hospital, would I have been stuck there for all eternity?

“Do you know why some people are ghosts, and some aren’t?” I asked, and she shook her head.

“Not really. Often, it’s because they have some unfinished business to take care of, but that’s not always the case. I certainly don’t think I left anything unfinished, not at ninety-five. And I’ve been in places where I knew people were killed — Whiskey Row has a rough history — but I didn’t always see their ghosts. It’s one of those mysteries of life…or death, I suppose, depending on how you look at it.”

The whole time she was speaking, she hadn’t seemed particularly concerned about any of this. Then again, she’d had ninety-five years to get used to the concept of her own mortality.

All the more reason to wonder why she’d decided to linger here as a ghost in the first place.

Her tone turned brisk again. “Ghosts aren’t angels. They’re as fallible as they were in their human lives, which means they can lie. They can also simply be wrong, sometimes because of incomplete information, or sometimes just because they’ve been ghosts for so long that past events have become blurred over time.” Those smoky gray eyes, so like my own even though she wasn’t a direct relation, met mine for a moment. “I’m a trustworthy ghost, Lorelei, but you should never assume that every ghost you meet will be.”

Every ghost I meet. I wasn’t sure I really liked the sound of that. Talking with Hazel was one thing. Talking to some random dead guy?

That I didn’t know about. Okay, I played with the aesthetics of death and mourning — the black clothes, the gothabilly music, the memento mori tattoo I’d gotten on my ankle right before my parents’ ill-fated trip to Lake Havasu and which they’d never known about — but having a ghost stare me in the face and tell me his life…and death…story was something else altogether.

However, it didn’t seem as if I had much of a choice about any of this, either. And that meant I needed to suck it up and learn as much as I possibly could.

“Regular people can’t see ghosts,” she went on. “Ever. Anyone who says they’re having a seance and talking to spirits is lying.”

Now I raised an eyebrow. “So you’re trying to tell me that all those people over the centuries who’ve claimed to communicate with spirits have been lying their asses off?”

For a moment, she looked almost uncomfortable. “All right, let’s say that’s a gray area. Communicating through crystal balls and Ouija boards is outside my area of expertise. What I do know is that no one who doesn’t have the Cosgrove gift can have ghosts appear to them as living people.”

Okay, that still sounded a bit like hedging to me, but I’d allow it for now.

“It can be entertaining, I suppose,” Hazel went on. “But, as I said, ghosts aren’t always reliable sources. You shouldn’t believe everything a ghost tells you any more than you’d believe what you read in one of those grocery store rags your great-aunt Eva used to swear by.”

Not much chance of that. The only time I’d ever glanced at one of those was when they had a particularly lurid headline that I thought was funny. Even as a child, I’d known that stuff was pure b.s.