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and cooking demonstrations, and at the end they were going to cook and serve a health food banquet in the restaurant, and charge a big fee to attend. The profits would be donated to the Harmonious Reality School Parents Association to pay for things like ... health food cooking classes. It all sounded completely stupid, especially since, as far as I understood it, Gypsy Boots thought you should eat practically everything raw and uncooked.

CHAPTER 12

Ghost Detective
    I saw that guy, Ken Ahara, again. He was in the garden of the Hermione Hotel, creeping around in the bushes. He had a sort of box with a shoulder strap attached, and a rubber tube coming from it with a rubber bulb in the middle. It looked a little like the thing in the doctor's office they use to check your blood pressure. He was sticking the end of the rubber hose here and there, and squeezing the rubber bulb.
    I walked up to him. He was halfway under a bush. "What are you doing?" I asked him.
    "Collecting specimens," he said. Then he looked up.
    "Oh! You're the little girl I met at Clifton's Cafeteria, with Mr. Billy."
    I just love it when people call me "little girl." "And you're the guy who studies ghosts but never saw one before that day," I said.
    "Well, I hope to see many more," Ken Ahara said, standing up and dusting off the knees of his Joe College khaki trousers. "Mr. Billy says this is the ghostiest place he has ever seen."
    So, Billy has thrown in with the ghost experts at Cal Tech,
I thought. I should have known he would not be able to resist the stinky cheese lab.
    "Have you ever seen a ghost here, young lady?" Ken Ahara asked.
    I like being called "young lady" almost as well as being called "little girl." "Asking this young
woman
about ghosts is like asking someone from Argentina about the principal products and exports of Paraguay," I said.
    "You mean like cotton, tobacco, coffee, sugar cane, and cottonseed, soybean, peanut, coconut palm, castor bean, and sunflower oils?" Ken Ahara asked.
    "What is that gimmick you're using?" I asked him.
    "It's a sniffer," Ken Ahara said. "Same as the gas company uses. See, there's a gauge on top, and it's calibrated to register any ectoplasmic traces it picks up."
    "Picking any up?" I asked.
    "Not so far," Ken Ahara said. "I might do better in the interior of the building, but Mr. Glanvill, the manager, said I may not sniff inside."
    "So what do you think of a ghost who suddenly stops showing up in her regular haunting spots?" I asked.
    "It's really rare for that to happen," Ken Ahara said. "Most ghosts keep to a fairly regular schedule and stay in one haunting territory, very often one specific spot."
    "Is there anything that would make a ghost go away altogether?"
    "Well, if it was exorcised, or someone called in a professional de-ghoster. In time past, there was a fair amount of that. People didn't want ghosts around."
    "They didn't? Why not?"
    "Well, to this day," Ken Ahara said, "people are frequently uneasy with ghosts. I think it may be because they feel ghosts can walk in on them in the bathroom whenever they want."
    "Ewwww."
    "But they don't take into account that there are always mirrors in bathrooms. Ghosts dislike mirrors."
    "That's true," I lied. "They find it unnerving not to be able to see their reflections—makes them feel sort of ... dead. And if you're a ghost, you can never know if you have spinach stuck in your teeth unless someone tells you. By the way, my name is Yggdrasil Birnbaum. I'll let you get on with your sniffing."
    I left Ken Ahara crawling around under the bushes. Of course, he was all wrong about the mirrors. Rudolph Valentino spends hours looking into one and combing his hair.

CHAPTER 13

Atomic Bomb
    There is a regular hotel-type desk or counter in the lobby, but there is never anyone standing behind it. People who live in the hotel just go behind the counter to get their mail out of the little cubbyholes, or to get to the office of Mr. Glanvill, the manager.
    The person