Page 10 of 13 Nights

"Ghost" is a conclusion, and I don't have enough evidence to reach it. What I have is contradictory, incomplete, and maddening, which means I need more of it.

My phone buzzes at noon. Lena, checking in the way she has every day since I moved.

How's the writing going?

I send her a photo of the Headless Horseman yard inflatable three houses down the lane, the one with the motion sensor that makes its arm wave at passing cars.

Research is going great.

That's not what I asked.

Novel is taking a brief nap. I'm working on something else.

Define 'something else.'

Background for the book. Historical stuff. Weird paper trail my mother left behind.

A pause long enough that I can practically hear her deciding which line of interrogation to pursue. Lena thinks in leverage and timing, always has.

Weird how?

Weird enough to be interesting. I'll call you tonight.

You said that yesterday.

And I called you yesterday.

No. I called you.

I laugh hard enough that the coffee I'm holding threatens to become a problem.

That's Lena. She can make me laugh from a hundred miles away through a text bubble, and the laughter always lands in the part of me that's been clenched since long before I moved here.

I close the thread and pull up the browser. The von Lossberg unit. Deployment records. Casualty reports from White Plains. I'm deep in an academic database when I realize I'm not researching for my novel anymore.

I'm building a verification file on a man whose existence contradicts every operating principle I have. His historical details check out, but checking out is easy when the sources are public. The irregularity in Johann Brandt's paperwork is harder to explain away, and the man on my porch hasn't mentioned it. Not yet. Tonight I intend to find out what happens when I do.

My mother found that detail. Her correspondence with Marburg asks about the regiment's deployment records and a name discrepancy she couldn't resolve without access to files the university wouldn't fund her to visit. She was pulling on something larger than a formatting discrepancy.

I need primary sources. Tom's shop has the best local collection, and my mother's notes reference something called the Hadley collection.

Tom's last name is Hadley. When he told me his family had been in Sleepy Hollow for generations, it sounded like local color. It sounds different now.

Sleepy Hollow in daylight is in full October performance. A hay wagon draped in fake cobwebs idles outside a café. Across the street, a man in a tricorn hat hands out flyers for a ghost tour that promises "the REAL story of the Headless Horseman" in letters large enough to read from the sidewalk.

The real story. I have a video on my phone that would rearrange every ghost tour operator's understanding of their own town, and I'm still not certain what it shows.

Tom is sorting a delivery behind the counter when I come in. He straightens up, and his expression lands somewhere between pleased and watchful.

"Back again," he says. "Should I be flattered or worried?"

"Depends on how helpful you feel like being." I set my bag on the counter and pull out my phone. "I'm looking for primary sources on Hessian conscription practices. Specifically the Regiment von Lossberg. Debtor substitution records from 1776."

His hands pause on the book he's holding. "That's specific."

"I'm an investigative journalist—specifics are my stock and trade."

"We've got secondary sources. Barrett's analysis of the Hessian campaigns, the Lowell translation of the field journals. I can pull those for you."