One night was all it took for Isaiah and Nigel to start feeling at home in their new flat. Their first morning there began the same way their mornings always do – it was as if they’d never left their old home in the capital. They cuddled for a few minutes after waking up, had coffee in the kitchen and went out for a stroll. As they left Muriel Greenwood street and its residential buildings, the town suddenly opened up before them. Strona was truly a remarkable place, built on a cascading hillside with green mountains rising in the background. Funiculars connected the different levels of the city, constantly going up and down, delivering their precious cargo of people to their intended locations. Trams and cars traversed the streets, rushing past the gorgeous architecture. Each building in Strona seemed to have a story to tell, a history that reached back to far before any of the current citizens were born. Walking down its streets, Isaiah and Nigel couldn’t help but feel like they were sucked into this history, becoming just another small part of a bigger tale that would continue long after they were gone. It was exciting and humbling at the same time.

On the other hand, they realized that their landlord was right to describe the town as a touch conventional. They never were the type to conceal their emotions in public: it would be abundantly clear to anyone who saw them in the streets that their relationship was a romantic one. And yet, while no one paid much attention to that back where they used to live, in Strona it seemed to genuinely rub some people the wrong way. No one really said or did anything to them during their morning walk, but disapproval occasionally reared its ugly head, be it in an uncomfortably long stare, a hushed gasp or silence that would turn to frantic whispers when they walked by. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but they would have to adapt to it.

After stopping by a lovely open-air market and making a call in the payphone, they returned home. As Nigel started preparing lunch, Isaiah got down to business. He sat down at the dining room table; in front of him, a notebook and pencil to make notes, and the class photo that was the first lead in his final case. He took it into his hands again, and the same voice repeated the same line from before: “I miss you.”

To you, a whispering photograph might seem unusual. To Isaiah, it was nothing new. He’d encountered similar objects hundreds of times during his career as a spiritual investigator. What he was dealing with was, in technical terms, a lingering spirit – essentially the ghost of a deceased human that decided to stick around in the mortal world for a bit longer by tethering itself to something. Spirits don’t linger unless they have a good reason to do so: nine times out of ten, it’s because the person died with problems unsolved, words unspoken or some other regret or burden pressing down on their heart. Their soul refuses to move on and attaches itself to an object, usually something that has significance or sentimental value to the deceased. It remains like this until it settles its score with the living, after which its bond to the material world is finally broken and it is free to ascend to what people call the Great Beyond.

Isaiah was able to hear these lingering spirits. It’s not a terribly common gift: by some estimates, only 1 person out of 100 is born with the predisposition for such a talent, and only 1 out of 100 of them will ever actually hone it in such a way to be able to use it deliberately. Isaiah was that one in-ten-thousand. His ability to hear the residual thoughts of these spirits made him of great use in the police force. It goes without saying that people whose lives are taken away from them violently leave plenty of loose ends behinds: they are the ones who most frequently stay lingering, and by listening to them one can often find important clues about their death. Isaiah’s involvement was instrumental in solving many a murder case all over the country, and for this he was considered one of the most valuable members of the capital’s spiritual division.

The case of the photograph laid out in front of him, however, was not going to be an easy one. To put it simply, lingering spirits tend to be far more talkative than the one clinging to the class picture. They don’t just repeat one line: they share more of their past, sometimes in vivid enough detail that it can be connected to the circumstances of their death. Isaiah had never encountered one that stubbornly stuck to just one sentence. It would indicate a very strong emotional connection with someone still alive, one powerful enough to drown out everything else. Of course, seeing as the photograph was five decades old, the spirit might’ve been holding on in vain, waiting for someone who was long deceased.

Isaiah jotted this down in his notebook – writing notes always helped him keep track of everything he knew about a particular case. He went on to add some more important observations.

First of all, the photograph didn’t actually belong to their landlord: he was currently in possession of it, but he found it on a desk where it was left behind by an unknown person. This person was obviously an important piece of the puzzle, but there was no way of knowing their identity for now. The key take-away was that the spirit probably had no connection to their landlord, unless he lied about how he obtained the photo, which Isaiah would have to investigate.

Secondly, the spirit was most likely either someone in the picture or addressing someone in the picture. The former option necessitated looking into whether any of the people in the photo had died in the meantime, and if so, learning as much as possible about the way they died. The latter option required digging deeper into the men’s connections to others, in order to find out who would miss them and why. These were hardly the only two possible scenarios, but they were the most probable, and it made sense exploring them first.

Lastly, the voice Isaiah heard in his head belonged to a young male, and the specters of his feelings that survived into the afterlife made it clear that he was missing more than just a passing acquaintance. The strength of the emotion suggested a family member, close friend or romantic partner. People who died in old age couldn’t be the spirit by default – the information pointed to someone whose life was cut short in one way or another, and who cared deeply for someone that outlived them.

With all his thoughts put to paper, Isaiah was ready for the initial stage of his investigation. He was going to interview his first lead.

Not long after he collected his thoughts and questions into the notebook, just as the smell of shallots started spreading from the kitchen, there was a knock on the door. Isaiah opened it, and stood face to face with the wide, wrinkled and smiling face of their landlord.

“Lovely to see you chaps again so soon, we need to make this a daily thing,” he said with a laugh, shaking Isaiah’s hand vigorously. “Something smells good!”

“You can stay for lunch if you’d like!” Nigel called from the kitchen.

“’Fraid I can’t do that, the missus has me running a few errands after this, so I can’t stay long. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”

Isaiah showed him to the dining room and offered him a seat opposite to himself. Sure enough, as the landlord placed his corpulent frame into the chair, he noticed his class photo on the table.

“Well I’ll be,” the landlord said as he laid eyes on his photograph. “I could’ve sworn that I took this with me yesterday.”

“You did, kind of,” Isaiah said repentantly, scratching the back of his head. “I took it before you left and hid it away. I’m sorry I did that; I should’ve just asked you for it.”

“Why would you take it?” the landlord raised an eyebrow. “Oh gods, you’re not one of those ‘uns who get a kick out of stealing things, are you? Because I can’t deal with that again!”

“Heavens no! There’s a lingering spirit around it. That’s what caught my attention.”

“Oh,” the landlord perked up, and then took the photo into his hands, gazing into it as Isaiah’s words sank in. “Oh.”

A complete silence took over, as if the room itself was anticipating for the interview to begin.