The Watchful Landlady

Cora Bell has run the six flats on Sudbury Row for thirty years. She knows every tenant, every draft, every spirit who patrols the second-floor landing at night. She has kept the building's protections renewed every spring since her mother handed her the ledger. She has missed two springs. The new couple on the top floor knocked out a wall last month. Now something is moving through the plaster, something the household spirits will not name. It is learning the routines of the people Cora is responsible for. To seal it out, Cora must read the full ledger aloud at midnight — every name of every tenant who has died under this roof. Including the one she has never been able to say.