He went back downstairs into the shady yard.

He told Greaves he wanted a six-month lease. Greaves shook his head. He didn’t know about that.

My client wants a quick sale, he said. She hasn’t said a word to me about leasing.

Well, give me an option to buy, then. If she’s been wanting a quick sale for two years and you haven’t gotten it yet then I don’t see what six months would hurt. I’d think she’d be glad to lease.

Greaves looked pained, as if Binder had maligned his ability to sell real estate. Well, it’s not that I couldn’t have moved the place, Mr. Binder. It’s the times. There’s a recession on, money’s tight, and the interest rate is higher than a cat’s back.

Binder was watching him. To say nothing of the place’s unsavory reputation, he said.

Greaves took off his glasses, wiped them gently with tissue he took out of his shirt pocket. Without the glasses his blue eyes looked vulnerable and defenseless. When he put them on he looked at Binder with an expression almost of amusement. Now where did you hear that, Mr. Binder? Surely not from banker Qualls?

No. Not from Mr. Qualls the banker. I read a book about this place.

Say you did? Oh, I got your number now. The famous Beale haunting. All that stuff in the eighteen hundreds. Do you mean to stand here in the cold light of day and tell me man to man that you believe any of that bullshit?

Binder just watched him, enjoying himself, imagining Greaves trying to figure out just how much he knew, amused too at the thought that the tales Greaves wanted to shield him from were the very tales that had brought him six hundred and fifty miles from Chicago, a hundred and thirty-five years too late.

You only got half my number, Binder said. I heard about the other stuff, too. He was shooting blind and in the dark here, but knew with a blood-quickening certainty that he had been right.

Greaves bit. You mean that Swaw business in the thirties? Mr. Binder, he said, looking away across the fields toward where the horizon ran, lush green folding into an austere blue of distance. You take a piece of land, any piece of land, and if a man had the longevity and the inclination to just sit and watch it for a hundred and fifty years, no telling what he’d see. You’d be surprised. People ain’t never been anything else besides people and ever now and then they’re going to slip up and do the same sickening things folks’ve been known to slip up and do before. And that don’t affect the land, neither. It don’t haunt it or cheapen it or wear it out.