A Competitor Appears
Corva Stanhope arrived at fourteen Kirby Lane at ten-fifteen on Saturday morning, which was forty-five minutes after I had asked her not to, in a mid-size Audi with a Wake County plate and a bumper sticker that said *INTUITION IS INFRASTRUCTURE*. I was on the porch. I had brought Dee, who was going to sit in the car and not go inside, because the second presence had, overnight, grown interested.
Corva was thirty-one. She was wearing a linen jumpsuit the colour of good butter and a great many thin gold bracelets, and her hair was the kind of honey blonde that requires maintenance. She had a tote bag from an independent bookstore in Durham. She was, and this is the part I want to be fair about, very good at what she did. I had heard of her by reputation before I had heard of her by name. She had cleared a listed house in Cary in under four hours the previous winter, which had been a complicated house, and she had not charged the widow for it, which had been gracious. She also had an Instagram, on which she posted photographs of herself in front of tasteful wallpaper with captions like *the spirits do not respect your timeline*, which is the kind of thing I, personally, would not do, but which I am old enough to understand the market for.
"Marcelline Halloran," she said, coming up the walk.
"Corva."
"I'm glad we're doing this in person. I was worried we'd end up on the phone."