Page 118 of The Turning of the Tables

I nodded.

He ran a hand over the shining surface. “Works brilliantly, too,” he said. “Thanks for helping him with it.”

“Oh, um. Sure.” I shrugged, the color rising even higher up my neck. Hopefully he just thought I was shy.

“Ask him why he’s blushing,”came a sardonic and creepy voice from behind me, making me jump a little, even though I knew who it belonged to.

“You can keep that to yourself,” I muttered under my breath to Lady Sylvia Randolph as the ghost laughed a spine-chilling laugh at me.

Ward sighed, although I could see the corners of his lips were turned up in amusement. “Sylvia, please don’t harass the nice people who come here to do favors for us.”

“It’s not harassment,”the ghost argued, gliding past me—I got out of the way quickly. I hadn’t ever made physical contact with a ghost, at least that I knew of, and I didn’t particularly want to find out what it would feel like to touch an insubstantial dead woman… as opposed to the very physical dead people I used to touch for work all the time. Somehow bodies were less disturbing than ghosts. To me, anyway.

“What would you call it, then?” Ward asked her.

“Witty banter,”she replied cheerfully, then turned to smile at me.“Isn’t that right, darling?”

I wasn’t going to argue with a dead woman, although I didn’t disagree with her, exactly. She didn’t seem malicious, anyway. “Yes, ma’am,” I agreed.

“I like him,”she said to Ward.“We can keep him.”

Ward rolled his grey eyes. “Thank you for that, Sylvia.” He turned his attention back to me. “I have a job for you, Mays,” he said.

“A job?” I repeated. I couldn’t make myself get too excited. I didn’t want a meaningless pity job, even if I did want something more interesting to do than stacking cans.

Ward pushed a decently-sized box toward me across the table. I stepped into the room to look at what was inside, finding folds of fabric that weren’t immediately identifiable. “What do you need me to do?” I asked him.

“Well, for one thing, we were hoping you could tell us about how old this is,” he replied. “And what’s on it.”

“Can I touch it?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

I carefully pulled out the green fabric, which, upon further examination, appeared to be what I would have imagined a woman’s day dress might have looked like in the nineteenth century, although I wasn’t sure if it was actually that old. Some of the small communities around where I’d grown up had strict rules about clothing—Mennonites and Amish—and I’d seen quite a few modern women wearing clothes that were pretty dated in style, although not this fancy, when I was a kid. “This looks like blood,” I said, referring to several rusty brown stains on the fabric.

Ward nodded. “If it is, it isn’t human,” he told me. “If you can tell us what itisthat would be helpful.”

I nodded, myself. “Probably,” I replied, thinking about what I had the capacity to do with the equipment and supplies I had in the storage locker I kept. It had been awhile since I’d been in there, and I wasn’t entirely sure what chemicals I did and didn’t have.

“Obviously, we’ll cover the cost of any supplies you need,” Ward said smoothly, and I felt my neck heat again.

“That wasn’t?—”

“When I saidjob, I meant it,” the medium told me firmly. “We need your skills, and we’re willing to pay for them. And whatever you need to do them.”

I nodded, still a little embarrassed, but also aware that, practically speaking, this was going to be one of the only ways I’d get to keep doing what I actually liked doing. And I could use the money. “Where did it come from?” I asked.

“One of our Lost Lineage families has had this in a trunk in their attic for at least a decade or two,” Ward replied. “They have a story about what it is and who it belonged to, but I’d like to get some actual scientific confirmation of those details.”

I nodded. “I’ll see what I can do,” I told him. “I can probably tell you what kind of blood this is, if it is blood. If not, I can probably figure out what it is. Whether or not I can give you a date or date range could be more difficult, but I’ll do what I can.”

Ward smiled at me. “Great.”

I hadn’t beenin the storage unit for a while—months. At first, I’d been excited about having a chance to do lab work again, but now that I’d gotten here, I discovered that being in here with all my old lab equipment post-firing only made me more depressed about the state of my ex-employment.

But I’d told Ward I would test the fabric he’d given me, and so I was going to do it, whether it made me even morebitter about my life circumstances or not. He’d also ordered me to bill him for everything I used for every test, even if I didn’t have to go out and buy it because I already had some.

It was clearly a pity job.