The Ninth Bed

Tom Rackham clears the houses of the dead, and the bungalow on the Essex sea wall pays cash: four thousand pounds to burn everything a ninety-one-year-old woman owned. Nine beds made up in three rooms. Nine plates laid. Nine keepsakes wrapped in oilcloth, each labelled with a name. Tom sells what he should have burned, and something that drowned in 1953 goes looking for the beds he took away. His daughter is wearing one of the nine.