Anna opened another letter, scanning the contents before making a note on the pad next to her. Folding it, she tucked it back into its envelope and sorted it into the right box before going to select another. A knock at her door had her looking up and a smile crossed her face to see John there.

"What a pleasant surprise." She gestured to the seat before her. "The children are off with their parents on a trip to the lake so I've got the afternoon."

"I hear they've given you a lot of afternoons since Mr. Branson and Lady Edith decided to come for a visit." John took a seat, noting the boxes. "What've you got there?"

"I'm sorting the letters for information." Anna tapped one box. "This one is filled with those where they talked about mundane things. I think they were both trying to improve their reading and writing skills because the spelling and grammar dramatically improve as they move along."

"How'd they improve it?"

"Practice." Anna sighed, setting down her pen. "I think they started reading together and then writing to one another as a way to get better."

"Why were they improving their reading and writing?"

Anna sighed, "From what I've… gathered about them, Anna Cotton was the children's nurse with little to no formal education. She could barely read and write when she wrote the first letter and he was not much better. A hired laborer who proved his skills with work but not with the pen."

"Then how'd they learn?"

"I think the mistress of the house at the time took a bit of pity on them and allowed the maid, at least, to sit in on the lessons since a few of her first letters look more like practice lines from a primer." Anna pulled one out to show John. "John Higgins's responses suggest he had rudimentary skills he then cultivated during their interactions."

"That's not the kind of romance one reads about normally." John read through the letter quickly and then returned it. "Partners who fell in love through study and a mutual desire for greater education."

"There's nothing more romantic than the written word, Mr. Bates, or else poetry wouldn't exit." Anna shrugged, "And maybe it's not what we might consider romantic after the horrors we've all lived through but it seemed to be what they needed. Someone to rely on when they were at a vulnerable stage."

"Nothing more vulnerable than admitting you're imperfect."

"Exactly."

They sat in silence a moment until John cleared his throat and pointed to the other boxes. "What about these?"

Anna tapped another box, "This one is where they start to express feelings for one another. The kinds of feelings a man with a wife back in Ireland shouldn't have for another woman."

"The kind of feelings a black woman shouldn't have had for a white man either I'm guessing."

"You'd be right in that assumption."

"They took a big risk even admitting they felt anything at all for one another."

"Exactly." Anna flipped through another set, tapping them against her desk. "But that's not what's been bothering me most."

"What's bothering your more than the shirking of convention and the flouting of laws on multiple levels of eternal repercussion?"

She swept her hands over the letters before her. "How'd they all get to the same place?"

"If he kept his and he kept hers then…"

"Then why were they in the same place?" Anna pointed to them, "If he kept hers and she kept his then they would've been half the conversation and in two different places. They're secret hideaways, as it were."

"Maybe they kept them in the same place. A kind of secret location for safer exchanges so no one would see them handing one another letters in broad daylight where they could get caught and punished."

"But the house was burned to the ground. Any place they might've hidden them would've been burned as well and yet I found these, untouched, in a blackened trunk in the attic." Anna shook her head, "Who collected the letters, put them in order, and then stored them away?"

John sucked the inside of his cheek, "We've been under the assumption this house only has two ghosts. What if they're not the only spirits in this house that want this mystery solved."

"What mystery? She died when the Union soldiers burned the house down and… Well, I actually have no idea what happened to him but he's definitely dead now." Anna leaned back in her chair, "This whole thing is a tragedy playing out before my eyes."

"What about that room in the basement?" John shrugged as Anna frowned at him. "What if they hid their letters together there so no one would find them?"

"In the trunk?"

"And then, someone renovates the house and stacks all the items in the attic." John thumbed his fingers over the letters. "It's a possibility."

"Rings about as true as anything else." Anna chewed on her lip, "But if they found the passage then why not put it in the plans for the house?"

"I'm not following."

"I don't think Lady Mary has any idea there's a secret tunnel from this room that leads under the house. And since she's been focusing all of her renovations on the upper levels of the house because the foundation's not damaged, that suggests whomever sold her the house didn't know either."

"Then the ghosts wanted you to find the passage."

"The ghosts who also moved the letters and the trunk to the top of the house?" Anna raised an eyebrow, "Pardon my unrestrained skepticism about all of this but ghosts or spirits or souls or whatever you want to call them don't usually take up the habit of heavy lifting. They're incorporeal and therefore can't do more than disturb things in the natural world. Flutter the page of a book or send a whisper of wind past your ear, that sort of thing. Not haul a trunk to an attic and make sure to drop chronologically sorted letters into it so someone can find it years later."

"You're thinking far too much about this."

"And perhaps you're taking it a bit too much on faith." Anna stopped herself, closing her eyes to take a breath. "I've seen too much in my life, Mr. Bates, to believe that these coincidences are all working out for us because we're the first people to listen to some troubled spirits."

"Not me. Everything I've seen just tells me there are more of them out there than we realize." John paused, "What if we're not the first to have encountered these spirits?"

Anna narrowed her eyes, "Now you've gone from suggesting we're particularly special to saying we're not special at all."

"Not that we're not special but that we're in the right place at the right time because others have also been in the right place at the right time. A series of seemingly unrelated incidents to put us on the cusp of helping these ghosts move on to the next stage of their existence."

"Heaven?"

"If they believe in that version of the afterlife, sure." John waved his hands as if to bat away clutter from the air between them. "My point is, time might move differently to those who occupy a dimension where the body isn't an issue."

"They still live on this plane, in a way." Anna sat back in her chair, folding her hands on her lap. "They've been here for a hundred years Mr. Bates, or close enough to it. If they're still wandering here then they're trapped and it doesn't matter if they've not got bodies or anything to ground them here. They're lost and they need to move on."

"That's what we're here to do."

"How? By reading their private thoughts and watching their tragic love story play out before our eyes to the point where I feel the shot deeper and deeper in my back every night?" Anna let all the breath leave her body. "I'm a very religious person Mr. Bates and I believe, with all of my soul, that there's a reason they're spirits are trapped but I don't think I'm the person to help free them."

"We might be the only people who can." John stopped, reaching over her desk to pull the copy of the book by Jack Ross toward him. "Maybe he knows."

"Knows what?"

"Knows if there were others who claimed to know anything about being haunted in this house."

"I thought we already said it wasn't a haunting."

"In my experience, people who live in houses possessed by ghosts, whether malignant or not, are haunted." John flipped through the index of the book and then found something that sent him to another set of pages. "He's got a sort segment here on the implication that there's been spiritual activity in the area."

"We're near the border with Louisiana and there's more than enough spiritual energy there to bleed over in our direction." Anna propped her head on her fist, elbow on the arm of her chair. "Most of those stories, even if we're being generous, are false."

"But even a blind squirrel finds a nut and Mr. Ross has done us the distinct pleasure of weeding out the folklore myths to give us the most believable stories." John put the open book on the last of the letters to sort. "What do you make of this?"

Anna leaned forward to read the details on the page.

Beginning just after the end of the Civil War, once General Sherman's troop had finished their war of violent attrition in the area, few of the plantations stood as they once did. Of the few that survived, Sun Meadow stands prominent among them. Though a burned husk, the bones of the house avoided most of the fire damage inflicted on the structure and stood through a tornado that swept through the area in late 1866. A tornado that, it is rumored, was sent to protect the house from carpetbaggers and squatters intent on the property.

The original owners, the Grantham family, fled to New Jersey and suffered significant persecution under the accusations of being Georgian plantation owners. They never argued against the matter and endured physical assault and public defamation until a group of escaped salves, recently returned from Canada, attributed their escape to the Grantham family. It was later discovered, from others along the infamous and noble Underground Railroad, that the Grantham family had been a crucial location on the way to the north because of their many secret passages and expert hiding places that went unnoticed due to their significant position in the community.

All evidence of the Grantham family's involvement in the Underground Railroad was thought lost to all but supposition and first-hand accounts until the turn of the century when, by what seemed another twist of spiritual protection, one of the secret hideaways was found. Stashed inside were the quilts used as signals for escaped slaves, the coded communications between other abolitionists in the area and more organized groups to the north, and a list of names taken down to record who made it to the house and further beyond to help attempt reunification with lost family members.

Other supernatural events surrounding the house seem to revolve around its defense and protection fro looters who claim to hear the spirits call out warnings to stay away, those who have attempted to buy the property but felt unwelcome by the presence of the house itself, and even attempted renovations that might disrupt the original structure that stands as much a pillar of justice and moral rightness as any structure recognized along the line of a railroad very could even find.

Anna looked up, "What's Sun Meadow?"

"This house and the surrounding land were once part of a plantation called Sun Meadow." John shrugged, "It's been parceled out so Lady Mary only owns a fraction of the original plantation but she owns over seventy percent of it and has, with a bit of help from me, been buying the rest of the land to restore the property."

"Why?"

"The Granthams are her family, on her mother's side." John gave a little laugh. "They relocated to New Jersey and never moved back. They kept hold of the property but when the Depression struck they had to sell off parts of it to keep themselves afloat."

"Oh." Anna stroked her finger along the page. "This seems to suggest the house is defended by these spirits."

"Why not?"

Anna shrugged, her eyes trying to communicate the madness she felt was obvious in the suggestion. "That suggests this house is… hallowed ground or something."

"This house bears significance for those who've gone before."

"And they're defending it for what? For the salvation of two spirits?"

"Maybe those two spirits are just the two who've spoken to you." John sighed, "I live in the outbuildings Ms. Smith. There've been nights when the insomnia is bad and I wander the grounds that I think I smell food being cooked or that I hear songs or maybe the gentle tones of conversation. Places that have held this much life are hard to ignore."

Anna studied him, her fingers running over one another. "And you believe those spirits are restless too?"

"Maybe they have been in the past. The same spirits that drove away squatters and those who'd destroy the house could be the same ones who gather here as a focal point." John went on to explain. "If they're lost then perhaps they need a place to gather. This place, with all the history and tragedy and good intentions locked in its very bones, would be the perfect place. A place to try and find the path to the next life."

She bit the insides of her cheeks and then took a deep breath. "I want to speak to Mr. Ross."

John laughed, "I don't think it's as simple as that."

"It'll have to be because I want to read the other accounts he used for this." She jabbed her finger at the book. "The way he talks about it he's read some things that convinced him there are spirits here."

John puffed out his cheeks and then nodded. "I might know someone who could tell us how to contact him."

"Who?"

"I'm sure if the Lady Mary invited the noted local historian, Jack Ross, to study the old plantation house at Sun Meadow he'd find it hard to refuse." John pushed himself to stand and shook his head when Anna tried to hand him back the book. "You might enjoy reading the rest of it. Maybe even to your students."

"They're not going to find local history too fascinating when we just finished discussing the invasion of William the Conqueror in England."

"1066, what a year." John put a firm hand on his cane and teethed his lip before speaking again. "When I found you in the passageway, you mentioned that Ms. Cotton and Mr. Higgins had been down there."

Anna did not meet John's eyes, going back to sorting the letters. "That's right."

"What did you see?"

She stopped and then raised her eyes to meet his, "A very private moment I felt bad to have intruded on."

John nodded and then twitched one of his shoulders. "What if they wanted you to see it?"

"Who wants someone else to see them when they're in a moment of passion?" Anna shivered, "I hate that term."

"It's not a wonderful one, that's for sure." John chuckled, "But I know-"

"No, I don't think you do." Anna stopped herself, "That was rude, I apologize."

"It's nothing."

"But it's not." Anna stood in a hurry, walking away from the desk and everything it represented about a life that wasn't hers and yet leaked onto her own as if it wished to usurp her. "I saw a private moment between two people who shouldn't have loved one another. Two people who could never be together. Two people who would be separated by more than just their circumstances but also by death. They loved one another, risked everything from their reputations to a lynching to have that moment among the few they could scrounge for themselves, and yet they still lost each other. They couldn't…"

Anna pressed her palm to her forehead, scrunching her eyes closed against the emotions tearing through her to try and find the ones that were, without a doubt, hers and hers alone. "It's… It's too much for me to handle, Mr. Bates, and I don't want to bear the burden of their story."

He put a gentle hand over hers, drawing it away from her face and holding it until Anna opened her eyes to look at him. "It's not easy, Ms. Smith, but they wouldn't have chosen you if they thought you weren't equal to the task."

"I don't feel equal to it."

"But you could be the conduit for two lost spirits to find one another and then move forward." John covered her hand so both of his hands wrapped hers. "It may not help to think of it this way, but there is honor in being chosen for something like this."

"I didn't ask for this."

"They didn't ask for it either." John met her eyes. "There's something about you, Anna Smith, that makes you the perfect person to help settle their eternal affairs."

"What makes me perfect?"

"You're compassionate, passionate, and inquisitive. Anyone else would've ruled it children's stories, ignored the prompts, and felt nothing for people they've never met. But you took this story into yourself. You made it yours, in a way, and because of that you're the reason their story will be told. You'll help them find the peace they need." John released her hands. "If I were a ghost I'd be honored to find someone as lovely as you to help me. A lady like yourself to save my lost soul."

"I'm not a lady and I don't pretend to be."

"You're a lady to me, Ms. Smith, and I've never met a finer one." John nodded at her, "I'm off to prevail upon Lady Mary for a way to meet a local historian, if you care to join me."

Anna took a breath and shook her head, "I feel there's more for me to do here, with these letters."

John smiled, nodding. "Then best of luck to you Ms. Smith."

She waited for him to leave the room and then settled down at her desk again, pulling the next letter toward her to scan the contents before sorting it into the appropriate box. When she ran out of letters Anna sat back, the five boxes organized before her and tempting her, as if with voices, to start reading the story before her. As she contemplated them a noise drew her from her moment. A moment she hid in the bottom drawer of her desk with the book by Jack Ross.

Anna left the study, pushing into the foyer but she heard nothing and saw no one. Distant scuffles from the kitchen rang out as something fell and a quick reprimand ensued. A creak of an upstairs floorboard allowed Anna to track the progress of someone higher in the house while the steady thump of tools on the house told her the workmen had yet to finish for the day. But none of them were the noise that pulled her from her desk.

With a hand on the door, to return to her archival work, Anna shivered as if a line of cold water went down her back. She turned and jumped back hard enough to jar the door when she came face-to-face with the woman she recognized as Anna Cotton. The woman who appeared before her in the passageway under the house and in her vision.

The woman who now put a hand forward as if to place it over Anna's mouth.

"Please don't call out. Someone'll hear you and I can't appear to them the way I can to you. They'll think you're mad."

"Aren't I?" Anna whispered, keeping her voice down as her eyes darted along the hallway as if searching for someone else to help her understand the specter before her. "I'm seeing visions. I'm seeing you."

"Because I need you to see me." The Anna before her pulled at her fingers in a motion Anna just stopped herself copying. "I need your help."

"Why me?"

"Because you're a lot like me." Anna Cotton smiled, "Appearances aside."

"How are we alike?"

"Temperament, behavior, attitude, and perspective." Anna Cotton gave a little laugh. "It's why we were friends."

"We've never met." Anna paused, "This moment aside, of course."

"We met a long time ago." Anna shook her head but Ms. Cotton continued. "In the life before this one we were friends. Kindred spirits, as it were."

"And now you're using me to get to the life after this one?"

"That's the end goal but there's more before that can happen."

"What else is there?"

Anna Cotton extended her hand to Anna, "So much more, if you're willing to help me put this all to rest."

Anna studied the hand before her and then tried to put her own there. To her surprise it rested on something solid for a moment before falling through. But as it fell through so did Anna and she could not stop the half gasp, half sob as she saw herself in the house as it had been a hundred years ago.

"I need to tell you a story, Anna May Smith, so you can tell me the ending."