"Miss Jessel?"

    I looked up to see Peter Quint, the valet at Bly, where I was working up until the time I had that unfortunate fatal carriage accident a year ago. I had always liked Quint. He had short-cropped red hair and an unerring eye for dress. "Quint!" I set aside the file on someone named Armbruster, who had been caught in the permabrane since 1867, ten years ago.

    Peter Quint owned a costume shop. After his fall on an icy path one night near Bly when he was coming home late from the local pub, he tumbled through the permabrane and found himself in possession of a costume shop, since it reflected his truest self and he had been a decent man. In Terra Simplex, the closest he could get to beautiful clothing was to hire himself out as valet to Edward Delavan, the Harley Street gentleman who owned Bly, a vast country estate, and who had been my employer as well.

    "It's Master Miles," he said. Miles Delavan was nine when I had the fatal accident, leaving him and his little sister Flora without a governess. "He's been articulating me lately."

    "Has he?" Articulations—"ghost sightings"—occur when a Terran is in some sort of need. They're eerie and diaphanous, and utterly useless, of course, unless the Eutopian responds. Then we achieve all the crude materiality of old Terra Simplex."I've felt it getting stronger, Miss, more frequent, so I've been turning up at Bly. I saw you there." His eyes widened. "Twice."

    I thought. "So Flora has been articulating me."

    "Haven't you felt it?"

    "No." I looked down at my fingernails that were finally the right length and shape, forever. "I've been preoccupied with cold cases." It sounded so feeble. What could it possibly matter if Armbruster spends another decade caught in the permabrane, when my lovely little Flora Delavan is articulating me? Was I nothing more than a researcher of the equivocally dead?

    "Then just now, Miss, I was outside on the terrace, at the French windows, like—" Peter Quint smacked my desk with his cap. "That pie-eyed chinless governess Mr. Delavan went and hired—" He turned, glowering, addressing the walls. "—was bedevilling Master Miles something terrible."

    "How so?"

    "Was he bad, was he telling his mates dirty stories, was he palling around with that devil Peter Quint—"

    "You?" I was astounded. He had worn one of Mr. Delavan's waistcoats once without asking, but that was as bad as Peter Quint got. He was a friend to all, made excellent wassail, played lawn bowls with Master Miles and dolly orphanage with Miss Flora, and he still had his eye on Giles the stable boy, although they were for the time being separated by the permabrane. I watched him scuff a thin film of old mud from his shoe, which he studied. There was something more. "What else, Quint? What else was she—what's her name?—"

    "Eloise Dalrymple."

    "What else was Miss Dalrymple saying?"

    "Well, more like suggesting, Miss—"

    "Go on."

    "That you and I—" One of his hands made a couple of quick circles in the air, then he stared at me meaningfully. When he said nothing and only fixed me with a look, I finally understood. As I stood up, my chair fell over.

    "She said these things to Master Miles?" I hadn't felt so black brained and crushed—and very nearly magnificent—since the night of the carriage accident.

    "And Master Miles, he just—fell down."

    "Fell down?" At that, five other enquiry agents turned to look at us. I rounded my desk and set my trembling hands on Peter Quint's fine satin waistcoat. "Dead, Quint?"

    "No, Miss, at least I don't think so because I did a quick check of the permabrane, and he's nowhere to be found. His eyes were open, but he looked something terrible, and the Dalrymple woman was shrieking. That's when I came to find you."

    "We're going to Bly, Quint." I called across to Edgar, the legendary director of Ectopolis Enquiries, who had just come in from the street. I could feel the intelligence in his keen grey eyes from all the way across the room. He always cut a fine figure in his black greatcoat, lightly holding his malacca cane. Without taking his eyes from my face, he drew off his white kid gloves. "Edgar," I said, grabbing Peter Quint's arm. "I'm off to Terra Simplex."

    "Crime in progress, Charlotte?"

    "I won't know until I get there."

    "Be mindful of things hidden in plain sight."

    My coworkers watched impassively as Peter Quint and I, Miss Jessel, raised our arms in two graceful curves straight out in front of us, sending us headlong back through the permabrane.

    Peter Quint and I exploded through the permabrane on the grounds at the back of the house. Bly, the country home of Edward Delavan, was a grand sloping estate, where nothing else living achieved the same scale as the property itself. The lake was larger than you would expect, the gardens more artful and sprawling than you would care to tend, the woods disappearing into a horizon too far to attempt. Despite the size, it was always curiously devoid of life. Birdsong seemed inconsequential, perhaps even mistaken. Animals were small and secretive, nothing anyone would care to stalk and bring to the table. Voices were extinguished in the complacent green vastness that was Edward Delavan's Bly.

    We made it up to the locked French doors of the drawing room. Inside two women were shrieking, hurtling into each other, stepping on each other's hems. I recognized the hysterical maid Noreen. The other woman was the menace that Quint called Eloise Dalrymple. I knew the type. Eyes the size of chestnuts, all pleading and romantic, a lower lip she sucked back in a way someone had once told her was charming or girlish or some other such rot.

    What could Edward Delavan, the guardian of his niece and nephew Miles and Flora, have been thinking hiring this swooning product of some country vicarage? These two women were aflutter, nearly swooning with some dangerous combination of horror and thrill. I watched their trampled skirts disappear through the drawing room door, which one of them drew shut with a slam.

    Then Peter Quint pointed.

    Miles lay on his back on the Turkish rug. In a second we had permeated the glass and kneeled at the boy's side. His hair was damp with sweat, his eyes staring, his body totally inert.

    "You must have missed him in the permabrane," I whispered, glancing quickly at Quint. "It had to be his heart. She frightened him to death." I wanted to howl and break something, something as broken as the teacup near Miles, something as broken as the mechanical toy that had landed near a table leg...