He seemed disappointed, as if all he’d wanted was to scare someone and she’d robbed him of the chance. So she pretended to be frightened by the next ghost she met, an old woman in the kitchen who was making knives float.
“Ahhhh!” Hildy cried. “What’s happening to my knives! I must be losing my mind!”
The old woman ghost seemed pleased, so she stepped back and raised her arms to make the knives float even higher—and then tripped over another ghost who was crawling on the floor behind her. The old lady ghost went sprawling and the knives clattered onto the counter.
“What do you think you’re doing down there?” the old woman ghost shouted at the crawling ghost. “Can’t you see I’m trying to work?”
“You should watch where you’re going!” the crawling ghost shouted back.
“Watch where I’m going?”
Hildy started to laugh; she couldn’t help it. The two ghosts stopped bickering and stared at her.
“I think she can see us,” said the crawling ghost.
“Yes, obviously,” said the old woman ghost. “And she isn’t frightened in the least.”
“No—I was!” Hildy said, stifling her laughter. “Honestly!”
The old woman ghost stood up and dusted herself off. “You’re clearly humoring me,” she said. “I’ve never been so humiliated in all my death.”
Hildy didn’t know what to do. She had tried being herself and that hadn’t worked, and she’d tried acting like she thought the ghosts wanted her to, and that hadn’t worked, either. Discouraged, she went to the hallway where the ghosts were lined up to use the bathroom and said, “Does anyone want to be my friend? I’m very nice, and I know lots of scary stories about living people that you might enjoy hearing.” But the ghosts shuffled their feet and looked at the floor and said nothing. They could see her desperation, and it made them feel awkward.
After a long silence she slouched away, her face burning with embarrassment. She sat on the porch and watched the plague ghosts dance in the yard. It seemed she had failed. You can’t force people to be friends with you—not even dead people.
Feeling ignored was even worse than feeling alone, so Hildy made plans to sell the house. The first five people who came to look at it were scared away before they even got through the front door. Hildy attempted to make the house somewhat less ghost-infested by selling some of the haunted furnishings back to their original owners. She wrote a letter to the man in Portugal asking if he’d be interested in taking back his wailing bureau. He replied straightaway. He didn’t want the bureau, he said, but hoped she was doing well. And he signed the letter like this: “Your friend, João.”
Hildy stared at the words for several minutes. Could she really call this man her friend? Or was he just being . . . friendly?
She wrote him back. She kept the tone of her letter light and breezy. She lied and told him she was doing fine, and asked how he was doing. She signed the letter like this: “Your friend, Hildy.”
João and Hildy exchanged a few more letters. They were short and simple, just casual pleasantries and observations about the weather. Hildy still wasn’t sure whether João actually considered her a friend or if he was just being polite. But then he closed a letter with this: “If you should ever find yourself in Coimbra, I would be honored if you paid me a visit.”
She booked a rail ticket to Portugal that very day, packed a trunk full of clothes that night, and early the next morning a carriage arrived to whisk her off to the train station.
“Good-bye, ghosts!” she called out cheerfully from the front door. “I’ll be back in a few weeks!”
The ghosts made no reply. She heard something shatter in the kitchen. Hildy shrugged and started toward the carriage.
It took a hot, dusty week of travel to reach João’s house in Coimbra. During the long journey she tried to armor herself against inevitable disappointment. Hildy and João got along fine in letters, but she knew that in person he probably wouldn’t like her, because no one did. She had to expect it or the pain of yet another rejection would surely crush her.
She arrived at his house, a spectral-looking mansion on a hill that seemed to watch her from cracked-window eyes. As Hildy walked toward its porch, a wave of black crows took off screaming from a dead oak in the front yard. She noticed a ghost swinging by a noose from the railing of the third-floor balcony, and waved to it. The ghost waved back, confused.
João answered the door and showed her inside. He was kind and gracious, and took Hildy’s dusty traveling coat from her and laid out saucers of cinnamon-flavored milk tea and cakes. João made pleasant small talk, asking about her journey, about how the weather had been along the way, and about how they served tea where she came from. But Hildy kept tripping over her answers and felt absolutely sure she was making a fool of herself, and the more she thought about how foolish she sounded, the more difficult she found it to say anything at all. Finally, after an especially awkward silence, João asked, “Have I done something to offend you?” and Hildy knew she’d ruined the best chance she ever had to make a real friend. To hide the tears she felt coming, she got up from the table and ran into the next room.
João didn’t come after her right away, but let Hildy have her privacy. She stood in the corner of his study and cried silently into her hands, furious at herself and so, so embarrassed. Then, after a few minutes, she heard a thud behind her and turned around. The ghost of a young girl was standing at a desk, knocking pens and paperweights onto the floor.