It was almost a week before Lilly-Rose discovered the tiny GPS device hidden in the bottom of her textbook bag. It happened one day after accounting class.

She took a bus to the funeral home where the hospital had sent Sue Young's body for cremation. It was a red-brick ranch-style house in a neighborhood of nothing but red-brick ranch-style houses. No one would suspect it was a funeral home if it were not for the big white sign in the front yard.

The undertaker was named Mr. Booker. He had tiny eyes and undersized hands. His blond hair was a tad too long for a man his age, especially one who dressed in a black suit and black bow tie. Mr. Booker smiled as he read the card Lilly-Rose handed him, which explained her hearing problems.

Meanwhile, she fished around in her book bag for a pen, felt something like a thumb drive, and pulled it out. At first that is what she thought it was, a thumb drive, but it wasn't one of hers. She had only one, which she kept attached to her key chain.

Then she realized it wasn't a thumb drive at all.

By then, the undertaker had written on Lilly-Rose's note pad that he had tried to find Sue Young's next of kin, but failed. Just by chance, he was sufficiently familiar with Hmong customs to know that burial was more appropriate.

"The Hmong require an elaborate, protracted, and beautiful burial ritual. They're animists, a bit like Japanese Shintoists. They don't practice cremation, though. In fact, they preserve the body carefully to ensure reincarnation, both as a spirit in their Laotian homeland and in the land where they died."

He opened a drawer in the desk behind which he was sitting and riffled through some file folders. As he handed her something he had found there, she read his lips: "This may interest you."

It was a tri-fold, glossy brochure from the Hmong Association of Northern Wisconsin, entitled, "Tips for Funeral Directors – The Hmong Funeral Ritual."

Lilly-Rose said thank you. She glanced through the brochure.

"It says the body should not be embalmed."

"It's illegal to bury a body without first embalming it."

She nodded and thought, then handed him another note: "Did any of her family contact you? Any friends in the area?"

"No," the funeral director wrote as he shook his head. "No kin. No interested parties. I assumed she was a mail-order bride or maybe a call girl, but the man who lived in the apartment above hers told me he had never seen any men with her. He didn't know anything about her. So I embalmed the body and had the county pay for a pauper's funeral. You'll have to contact them if you want to visit the grave."

In fact, Lilly-Rose did want to visit the grave, because she needed to be close to Sue Young to use her second sight to best advantage. So she had Mr. Booker write down the address of the county office she needed to contact.

"The word 'embalm' is a nice word, isn't it?" Lilly-Rose wrote. "It reminds me of Egyptian mummies stuffed with frankincense and myrrh and makes the process sound cleansing and comforting."

His eyebrows shot up and he said something about using formaldehyde.

*

The Chalk Ghost decided to fill the two-flat with her spirit. She went into the attic. The windows were nailed shut. The drafts Jim was plagued with in his apartment did not come from them. She peeked out them at the neighbors -- the young couple on one side, the elderly couple on the other.

'What did they do wrong?' she wanted to know. 'Why do I feel so angry at them, too? I want to hurt them.'

She sunk down into the moldy basement. The black garbage bags filled with her mementos were long gone. The recycle bin held nothing but damp, yellow newspapers.

She made them flutter in a phantom wind until a headline caught her ghostly eye: "Hmong Gang Linked to Triple Murder, Kidnapping" That made her angry, too. She didn't know why. It was just wrong. Everything was wrong.