Rather like the placement of a parlor chair relative to the fire, window, and bookshelf, a ghost’s choice of haunt is an intimate decision requiring exactitude and not a little wiggling about. The world has few caves or abbeys left for secret lurking. One could make a cozy living between the cobwebbed stacks of CDs at the local media outlet and expect little disturbance; but consider the occasional few boggarts who would wander those aisles, themselves halfway to ghostdom, and whether loafing the city crowd wouldn’t be less agitating than their sulking intrusions. When Roberta Humfidumf died, she had a mind to carry on at Humfidumf Manor as usually as anybody freshly bodiless could carry on. But the good dead aunt had a sister, a nephew, a niece, a butler, and a cocker spaniel who liked the Manor manner of living as it was and would rather dismiss Roberta to the afterlife, either the blue one or the burning one, than accommodate her strange new circumstances. If she wanted to stay, then she shouldn’t have died.

But the dying business couldn’t be helped, even the premature cases. As a girl Roberta had loved to fish with her father, wading knee-high into the river to catch a gullible trout for a pan-fried lunch. They played camp on such Sundays when the sky was fair, when the week’s rains hadn’t overflooded the river, before retiring at dusk to the Manor house and its sterile white corridors for a warming snack of tea and scones. As a good old auntie, Roberta continued to fish in the river for the fresh air and nostalgia, though the arthritis made each clambering into and out of it increasingly taxing, until one outing she slipped on the rocks and was borne downstream all the way to the delta, where it would have spit her out into the ocean to be dragged and drowned by the undertow if a kindly fisherman hadn’t timely plucked her from the water. In the midst of this gallant rescue, however, he had let go of the steering wheel. The captainless dinghy motored sidewise on the waves, beaching keel on rock in a collision that would surely have killed the two rivergoers; but they managed one with mild whiplash, the other a concussion, and walked away with their lives. The fisherman drove Roberta back to the Manor, where she invited him inside for plenty thanks in tea and scones, which happened to be zested with orange and arsenic. Now Roberta as the good aunt we know her perceived the strange taste and quickly came to the conclusion of poison—as every manor, mansion, hacienda, what have you, comes in its original deed with a complementary store of poison—and stuck her fingers down the fisherman’s throat. He spit up the poison and turned to help Roberta, but by then she was frothy and dead. Afraid to be found a stranger over the corpse, he left it on the kitchen tiles and drove off.

The spaniel found the body first. By the time the rest of the household arrived, he had eaten much of the hands and face. Good ghost Roberta glowered to learn that such a bad dog resided in her house, but what could she do? She spooked it with a pitcher of water, but the dog shook itself dry and continued its meal.

Soon the butler came in and clapped hands to cheeks at the ungodly mess. Roberta at this time had passed her first hour as a ghost, and she had already learned a few ghostly rules: translucence, levitation, fluidity, and a loosely controlled telekinesis (she could induce, say, the china cupboard to open, but, not knowing her own strength, might shatter the heirloom teacups and frisbee the saucers about the room—which she amused herself doing in the tedium of that interminable first hour, adding to the poor butler’s distress upon entry). She did not yet know if the living could see or hear her, so she watched him shoo the dog outside, sweep up the porcelain shards, rip the ugly frill curtains from the adjacent dining room, and, to her horror, shroud the body in them and drive it away. To be buried in those curtains! She must have a word with him about funerary decency—but first become visible, as he seemed not to have noticed her hovering crisscross applesauce over the countertop, nibbling the scones now that their poison couldn’t affect her. They really were a good batch, not that they excused the butler entirely of his irreverence.

“Bitters!” she cried upon his return. “Where are your shoes? There could be glass on the floor still.”

“I’ve enough to clean without tracking dirt all over the house,” he said, mop and bleach bucket in tow.

“So you can hear me!”

Roberta wisped over to the butler and delighted as he looked her square in the eyes.

“And see you and smell you,” he confirmed.

“What do I smell of?” she asked gingerly, for liquids seemed to pass through her now, making baths an ineffectual nicety. She hoped for a tolerable odor if she had to reek of it for eternity.

“River mud, scones, and death froth.”

She sighed in relief. “My thanks, then, for the orange zest. I’d hate to be bland. But you said nothing when you came in before. Did you not notice me?”

“Yes and no. You were there, but I had other matters to attend, a corpse to clean up, and the china—a shock indeed! Just because you will no longer dine with us, Miss Roberta, doesn’t give you the right to ruin our crockery.”

She had to agree. Tantrums were nuisance enough from the children; a grown murder victim ought to be ashamed, setting so unruly a precedent.

But no longer dine? Were there boundaries between her and the living now? Was she no longer allowed in her own house, her own deathplace? Was there an afterlife rulebook she could consult, and, if so, where had Bitters shelved it?

He answered that no such user’s manual existed, but that haunting impressionable youths would spoil their reformation. As if!Roberta argued the virtues of inclusion. Her niece and nephew must learn to carry on with all sorts of people, the undead included.

“But whatever shall we tell the children, that they’ll believe their good auntie Roberta is a ghost?”

“Just that’ll do, I think. Children are predisposed to believe anything.”

“Which is the principal issue,” fired Bitters. “Must we encourage that? Next they’ll be hunting leprechauns in the attic and resurrecting the great gnome crusades—remember how they trampled the flowerbeds last spring? If we acknowledge one ghost, we may as well champion all the extramundane, and just think of the petunias! We cannot abide such nonsense, and just when the frosts have cleared up.”

“Well if nonsense is what’s real and done,” reasoned Roberta, “then I haven’t any attachment to what you would call sense!”

“But we must mature the children. Their little fancies must be quashed to instill discipline and respectability. A ghost would be counterproductive.”

“Children must be children,” she said simply. “And the dead must be dead.”

“Oh, but don’t say it like that!”

“You killed me!”

For it was obvious that he, having prepared the scones that morning, had poisoned them, and Roberta. She held little grudge against Bitters, since all the poison really did was chuck her from her body, though if it had ended her existence entirely, she might have resented him.

“Yes,” said Bitters, “but I killed you kindly, didn’t I? And it was so tidy and final, I really hate to spoil a good ending.”

“Oh, it was a splendid ending. I even discovered an old recipe slip under the refrigerator as I went down—carrot soufflé! But it didn’t take, since I’m still here, so we must make the best of it with certain lifestyle adjustments, starting with the windows. It’s difficult to concentrate with that backdraft sucking me outside. Would you please close them?”

Bitters shook his head, extending a grave finger toward the yawning hatch. Roberta would have appealed to her sister Jemima, but the latter had hastily disappeared at the crack of dawn.

So Roberta kissed the children goodbye as they watched the Sunday cartoons. At least her wispiness didn’t block their view, or else they would have shouted her off, and what an unpleasant goodbye that would have been. Shimmying into her mink, with her green cloche and travel bag—stocked with the rest of Bitters’ scones, for a taste of home—she floated off Humfidumf grounds in search of a less unreceptive haunt.

Now the Manor occupied a vast strip of land near Gobbledygook Mountain, which tourists had begun to frequent in a new wave of romantic fervor for the outdoors. The town had erected a trolley to ferry happy families from the base to the peak. Roberta, hoping at such a height to wisp herself into the clouds and announce herself at heaven’s gates, paid the fare and rode the trolley up. But the happy families alongside her, everyone bundled and excited for adventure, save the infants who wailed as their ears popped with altitude, delighted Roberta. When they summited, she stayed in her seat, waiting for the trolleygoers to return with freshly made memories and peppermint hot cocoa from the mountaintop candyshop. Tickled by her company, Roberta decided to haunt the trolley car, spending the rest of her earthly stint in good cheer.

As the car emptied one morning, she noticed left under one of the seats the local paper, its front page screaming, “Harrowing Humfidumf Homicide!”

Harrowing, indeed. Roberta stared in horror at the picture of herself—rotted and maggoty in those ugly frill curtains! The sole living heiress of the Manor had been arrested for murder, alongside her accomplice the butler. Jemima had left town the morning of the gruesome deed while Bitters readied the poisoned scones for the sister Rogerta—Rogerta!—to find. But the unlucky widow was accompanied by a local fisherman, who witnessed the poisoning and reported to law enforcement, foiling Jemima Humfidumf’s plot to rid the mansion of her pesky sister. So the Manor was abandoned and boarded until such time as the nephew and niece, consigned now to foster care, came of age to live there. Why, thought Roberta, I could return!

But she hadn’t much attachment to the sterile white walls, nor the unpeopled gloominess of a big empty house. She enjoyed the excitement of the trolley, the travelers who saw her, sometimes spoke to her, sometimes ignored her, but never banished her. Tossing the last of the scones, she dug into her seat and rode the trolley up and down until she wisped away forever.