Mandy couldn’t help it—she sat perfectly still, ears straining for any sound from the next room. She kept her eyes on the rod, so she could at least give the impression of focusing on it instead of what was going on outside, but Sol would probably know. If anyone on the team was likely to guess how good her hearing was, it would be him.

Him or Morgan, who was off investigating the sound they were pretending not to worry about. Mandy was embarrassingly relieved that she’d left the wand behind.

She was distracted by something moving out of the corner of her eye; when she turned to look, she found Robert taking pictures of the object with his cell phone—thorough as always. She would ask him, later, to send them to her, just as she’d ask Emma for a copy of her notes. The more information she had, the more she could do with it.

“Cat,” she said quietly, trying not to flinch as she heard a second [i]thud[/i], loud enough that the others probably heard it, too, “you said that you don’t see as many ghosts now as you used to. How many were there before? Did you notice specific ones had disappeared, or do you just feel the places where they’re supposed to be? Or...something else?”

Mandy bit her tongue before she could say anything else. In her mind, those three questions had already splintered into others, many more that to untrained ears would sound almost the same. Specificity was key, and even as she tried not to overwhelm Cat by giving her more questions at a time than she could answer, she worried that she hadn’t asked the right ones.

[i]She can’t have seen the ghosts of everyone who’s ever died in Seattle,[/i] Mandy thought, unable to stop her brain as easily as she’d stopped her mouth. [i]Unless it’s like being at a  party, where you can hear the people closest to you, and everyone else just blends into a dull roar.[/i] You would notice if a room full of people gradually started to empty, even if you didn’t necessarily see each one leave or know who they were.

Still, she didn’t know enough about ghosts or how they worked—how many people, for example, actually became ghosts, and what the requirements were—to come up with a working theory. If Cat couldn’t tell her, this was going to require research.