The man sighed and walked from the dig site over to the car. As he got closer, Willa recognized him as Dave Jeffries. They had all gone to high school together. He’d been on the football team, and was still thick in the chest, though less from muscle these days. “What’s up, Dave?” Colin asked as soon as Dave stopped in front of him.

“Just after you left, we dug up something else.” He held up a heavy rusted cast-iron frying pan, still crusted with dirt.

Colin took it from him and studied it. “A frying pan?”

“Yep.”

“This just gets more interesting.”

Dave smiled when he saw Willa. “Willa Jackson,” he said, pushing his hard hat back. “I almost never see you around. Remember that time you programmed the period bell to ring every five minutes? That was great. We kept filing out into the hallway every five minutes, and the teachers kept trying to get us back into the classrooms.” He gave her an assessing look, then wagged his finger between her and Colin. “You and the Stick Man aren’t together, are you? Because you could give ol’ Dave a try if you’re lonely.”

“Tempting offer, Dave,” Willa said. “But no thanks.”

Dave laughed and punched Colin on the arm with what seemed like entirely too much force. But what did she know? Maybe it was a man thing. “Good luck,” he said to Colin.

As soon as he walked away, Willa turned to Colin and said, “Stick Man?”

“That’s what they used to call me in high school. Thanks to Dave.”

“Because you’re so tall?”

“That’s what everyone thought.”

She waited, then said, “You’re not going to tell me?”

He sighed. “Dave called me Stick Man because he said I acted like I had a stick up my ass.”

Willa was so surprised that she laughed without meaning to. She put her hand to her mouth and said, “Sorry.”

“Well, to be fair, it was true. I was a little rigid. It was how the men I knew acted, so I thought I was supposed to act that way, too. Guys like Dave loved to make fun of guys like me, guys who seemed to have no concept of fun. I can’t tell you how great it felt our senior year when everyone thought I was the Joker. They looked at me and thought, Wow, I didn’t know he had that in him.”

“I remember that feeling,” she said. Then, before they could get into another discussion about bravery, or her apparent lack of it now, she asked, “So, what did you want to show me here?”

He took off his sunglasses and hooked them on the collar of his shirt, then motioned for her to follow him up the steps to the front portico of the house. The place was huge, much larger than she’d imagined from a distance. It overwhelmed her. She’d spent so much time watching this place from a distance that it felt faintly surreal to actually be climbing the steps, to actually touch the columns.

“While digging up the stump of the peach tree today, we found some buried treasure. A suitcase and a fedora. And apparently a frying pan,” he added, giving the rusty thing a spin in his hand. “When they showed me the fedora, it gave me chills, because every kid who has broken into the Madam for the past forty years has claimed to see a floating fedora in the house. My grandmother used to scare us by telling us stories of the ghost who lived here.”

“Did you ever see it?” she asked.

“I kept my eyes closed the one time I broke in here with my friends,” he said. “And I will deny that if you ever tell another person.”

She gave him an odd look. Who would she tell?

“What about you?” he asked. “Did you ever see it?”

“I never broke in,” she said.

“Are you kidding me? All the stunts you pulled, and you never once broke into the Madam?”

“I’ve never been this close to it before.” She actually reached out and touched the side of the house, as if to make sure it was real.

“Why not?”

She let her hand drop, afraid that she looked silly. “For the same reason everyone else broke in. Ghosts. My grandmother told me those stories, too.”

“You’re afraid of ghosts?” he asked.

“I just think things that are laid to rest should stay there,” she said, realizing she sounded a lot like her grandmother. She stepped over to the suitcase sitting on the edge of the portico. It was made of black leather that was rotting and covered in dirt, but it was still surprisingly intact. The contents of the suitcase had been removed and were lined up neatly beside it, next to the fedora.

She crouched down and looked through everything, though she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as if she’d recognize anything from the time her grandmother lived here. Her grandmother’s life, as far as Georgie was concerned, started after she left this place.

The suitcase items were mostly dated men’s clothing in cotton and linen. But there was also a disintegrating newspaper and an open scrapbook. She carefully lifted the pages of the scrapbook and looked through it. It was bulging with clippings, its pages yellow and brittle with glue. Whoever this belonged to liked to follow what movie stars were doing in the 1930s. That seemed to be the purpose of the book. But every so often there were real photos. They were very old, of blurry people in an orchard of some sort.

“Do these trees in the background look like the peach tree that was planted here?” she asked, and Colin looked over her shoulder. He was considerably closer to her than she thought he needed to be, and there was no doubt in her mind that he was doing it on purpose.

“Yes, they do. Interesting clue.”

As she looked through the rest of the book, she found a high school diploma from Upton Orphan School for Boys in Upton, Texas, made out to someone named Tucker Devlin.

“Does any of this seem familiar?” Colin asked from behind her, where he was still arcing over her like a wave.

“Not really, just …” She stopped when she reached the last page. There was a single photo of a handsome man in a light suit, wearing a fedora, maybe the same fedora buried with the suitcase. He looked like he knew he was beautiful. He looked like he could get anything he wanted.

“What?” Colin asked.

“I don’t know. There’s something familiar about him.” Willa closed the scrapbook, not able to figure it out.

“That Asheville newspaper in the suitcase dates this back to August 1936, the year your family moved out,” Colin said as he stepped back.

“That was the month and year the Women’s Society Club formed, according to the invitations your sister sent,” Willa added as she stood. “I don’t know anything about this. Sorry. Some of my grandmother’s things are stored in my attic. Maybe there’s a clue to this Tucker Devlin person. I could look.”

“That would be great.” He smiled. “Would you like to see the inside of the house?”

It took everything she had not to shout, Yes, please!

He went to the huge eight-panel door with the hand-blown bull’s-eye glass on either side of it. There was a brass plaque to the left that read THE HISTORIC BLUE RIDGE MADAM INN. The door looked like it would be heavy, but it clicked open easily.

Her hands were actually shaking as she stepped inside to a cool blast from the past. The first thing she saw was the grand staircase hugging the wall in a long, curving slope. At the top of the staircase was a portrait of a woman with dark hair and gray eyes, wearing a stunning dark blue gown. She looked down on the lobby with a wistful expression.

It was overwhelming to think her grandmother had lived here like this. It was a hard thing to reconcile, the grandmother she knew and the one who had once flitted through these rooms, these lovely, opulent rooms. She wanted so desperately to feel connected to this place, to feel … something. But as she looked around, she couldn’t feel a thing.

Not a single thing.

The foyer had been turned into a lobby, and there was a dark cherry check-in desk to the side. A woman in jeans and a T-shirt was on the phone. When she saw Colin, she gave him a wave.