One day when Mrs. Kendall needed to travel off-island, her younger son arrived to look after the house in her stead. "He felt the eight o'clock earthquake and saw the moving light, but what really upset him was when he saw Louise herself move through the front parlor, pushing her walker ahead of her. He never offered to relieve me again," she said with a chuckle.

Her older son also experienced a strange incident. Once when he accompanied his mother on an errand in the upstairs rooms, he glanced down at his arm to see a line of blood trickling from a long scratch. He had no idea how he'd incurred the superficial, yet dramatic-looking, injury.

At last, Mrs. Kendall grew jittery about remaining in the house. She wanted to honor her promise to the twins and yet wondered how long her nerves could stand the haunting. The lawyers and auction houses were taking their time and she knew she could never tell them to speed things up because the Crawford ghosts annoyed her. Instead, over a coffee klatch with the Caribbean-born housekeeper next door, she poured out her troubles.

The housekeeper listened with sympathy and, in her lilting dialect said, "Happens back home all the time. After a burial sometimes, spirits get all riled up. They walk around, bust things, pull the bedcovers off you in the middle of the night. What we do is, we go to the pharmacist. He prepares something to help us sleep."

"Well, I'm not taking sleeping pills!" objected Mrs. Kendall.

The housekeeper nodded sagely. "No need to. Time's almost up."

"What do you mean?" asked Mrs. Kendall.

"Fort days and forty nights," the woman announced with impressive conviction. "That's how long it takes for the spirits to calm down. After that you'll have no trouble."

Mrs. Kendall kept her eye on the calendar. Sure enough, on the fortieth day following the anniversary of Louise Crawford's death, the house settled down. No more 8:00 P.M. elephant herds stomping overhead, no more rattling of antique glass, no more bed sittings or roving lights or closing doors or apparitions. The Crawford twins had passed over into the next realm, perhaps to reside with their parents, perhaps not. It would be comforting to think that even if, in the afterworld, it takes forty days and forty nights to allow it to rest in peace.