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ripped across my fingers and disappeared with the young woman’s shade. Only a lingering shriek in my ear and a pain in my hand, as if it had been abraded by the ghost’s passage through my grip, remained as the silver mist of the Grey stood momentarily empty around me.
    Panting a little with surprise, I backed out of the Grey. As I returned to the normal world, Chaos heaved a sigh and started looking around for something else to bedevil. My ghost was gone. I put the ferret back on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, watching her make several sniffling searches of the room’s perimeter before she gave it the mustelid all clear. Then she ran back to me and put her front paws on my shin before scrambling onto my boot and trying to climb my leg to the top of the mattress.
    “Lunatic,” I chided, picking her up and plopping her on the bedspread. Chaos immediately began rolling around on her back, wiggling and rubbing her ears against the cheap comforter. I stood up and went to the bathroom mirror as the ferret bounced and writhed around on the bed, digging at the comforter until she could get under it and snorkel around, raising a moving, giggling lump like Bugs Bunny burrowing to Texas in a Warner Brothers cartoon.
    Staring at my reflection, I mimicked the mouth shapes the ghost had made while she said her name. When I thought I had them right, I tried giving them voice. “Ahhh . . . llll . . . nnn. . . . Aaaannahhh . . . Anna.” I sounded like an idiot and looked like a moron, but I kept trying. “Mmm . . . buh . . . puh . . . Buh’trovna. Puh’trovna . . . Petrovna . . . ? Anna Petrovna?” I called her name, reaching for the Grey as I did. “Anna Petrovna! Where are you?” But the only sound was a distant kind of gasp and then silence, as if something had disappeared and left nothing but a void.
    It was a strange name to come from the Grey like that. I didn’t like the coincidence of another weak ghost, like Leung, reaching out to me and vanishing, especially not a strange Russian girl who should never have been out on the Peninsula in that era. I’d dealt before with a Russian ghost who had no business being where and what he was, but he’d been strong, willful, and dangerous. Anna Petrovna was weak and helpless and . . . gone. Now there was a hole where she should have been, as if she’d been hacked from the fabric of the Grey with a dull ax. A chill ran down my back.
    Chaos tumbled out of the bedclothes and thumped onto the floor, throwing herself into a frenzied war dance and baring her teeth at the blanket in her ire. I smiled, distracted from my unhappy thoughts, and picked the ferret up to toss her gently back onto the bed where she bounced around crazily with her fur on end, chuckling until she was exhausted and flopped flat as a ferret-fur rug across the nearest pillow.
    “Well, I guess you’re ready for bed, then,” I muttered, scooping the limp animal up and depositing her in her travel cage. She flounced into her nest of old sweatshirt fabric while I finished setting up the cage. I could hear her issuing tiny ferret snores by the time I’d returned with her filled water bottle and food dish.
    I shed my clothes onto the furniture and burrowed into my own ferret-disarrayed bed, falling asleep as quickly as Chaos had. I had a lot to do in the morning....

FOUR
    S ix hours of sleep was less than I’d wanted, but I needed to start early since it was Friday and I wanted to get the paper trail wrapped up quickly enough that I could get back up into the mountains before dark. I did as much of a workout as I could manage in a hotel room with no equipment; then I showered and dressed while running interference in the ferret’s plans for world domination through shoe theft.
    I got to the Clallam County courthouse as the building opened for the day. The modern low-rise of glass and concrete was just behind and around the corner from the graceful brick-and-marble edifice of the original courthouse