The people who lived in RJ’s amazing old building accepted its magical quirks.

Marci and Joanie, the sweet young female couple, so very much in love that their eyes strayed tenderly to each other in the middle of dinner or tea or working in the kitchen. Hidalgo and Juan, a middle-aged male couple who both worked in construction. A family from Sweden named Lindström with twin boys, both toddlers. None of them questioned the miracle.

But after seeing the ghost, Hiyako, practical without being hard-headed, needed some facts before accepting RJ’s invitation to move in.

First thing the next morning, she crouched and walked through the little door to the corridors between the apartments. She walked with her flashlight from door to door and come to an oddly wedge-shaped end of the corridor, as though it went on at an angle to the rest of the building but a cement wall had just happened to come across it. She pressed sensitive fingertips to the wall. The wedge went deep and her fingers could not reach to the very end of the sharp tip. She touched and listened, ear pressed to the rough wall. She heard nothing and sensed nothing. Thoughtfully she walked back, her feet leading her calmly to the door she’d come out of, even though it looked just like all the others.

Mortals in fairy tales dared not question gifts from the fey for fear gold coins would vanish into a handful of dried leaves in the morning sun. Hiyako did not fear this. If the miracle was to be withdrawn just because she needed to satisfy herself that it was honorable, so be it. She would release it and bless those who still believed.

She spent a peaceful dry day at the Main Library in the History Center on the 6th floor, researching the odd building. It was called the Carmelcita Manor and it had been built in 1912, just a few years after the great earthquake and fire of 1906, on land purchased from tycoon Adolph Sutro by a man named Joseph Grandbanks. He intrigued Hiyako, this quiet man of the last century, and she spent some time digging out anything she could find about him.

He was a leader of a local temperance union, and an upright Christian in a quiet way. Every place his name appeared in the records was in association with something Hiyako felt good about. He had worked behind-the-scenes to buy and preserve what became Muir Woods. He had started a fund for Emperor Norton, the half-crazy old man who thought he was emperor of the world but who lived on handouts. Shakespeare readings and children’s Easter Egg hunts – he’d even written an article for William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner the Sunday before the Earthquake. Hiyako scanned through microfilm archives to read it: in the color comics section among racist stereotypes of German Katzenjammer Kids and Chinese Yellow Kids was a sweet little set of colored patterns you could cut out and wrap around wet eggs. The weepy newspaper ink would dye them for Easter.

Hiyako had no idea if it would have worked but she liked the man for it.

And he had built the collection of apartment buildings that included RJ’s, tucked into a little dell at the edge of one of the “residence parks” that sprang up after the earthquake and fire. The residence parks were the pre-WWI version of tract homes: neighborhoods planned to feel like the suburbs but just a train or trolly ride away from downtown San Francisco. They had curving boulevards, lush trees, pillars and gateways, and mostly contained single-family houses. They were also available to whites only.

But Grandbanks had built Spanish-style apartment buildings. And through one of those wonderful coincidences that seemed to surround the building, Hiyako discovered that he had rented the apartments robustly to Hispanics, Asians and to what were surely gay and lesbian couples, though they wouldn’t have been called that then.

The coincidence was that Ms. Lillian Queensland, a librarian with hair like sculpted snow and actual pince-nez on a chocolate beaded chain, was the next-door neighbor of the great grandniece of Joseph Grandbanks. She was in charge of the 29 boxes called the Small Manuscript Collection.

“Box 27,” she told Hiyako, “contains a letter from Mr. Grandbanks to William Seward, his nephew and business partner, and a list of names. Mr. Seward was Millicent’s grandfather, and I remember the day she donated his letters to the collection. Fill out this form and wait in the viewing room.”

Signs reminded people sternly to handle the hundred-year-old paper with great care and to take all notes on a laptop. No pens or pencils were allowed for fear someone would write in the manuscripts, and you had to put on gloves they gave you for fear your sweat would stain the paper. No cell phone photography was officially allowed but Hiyako saw at least one other person slip his phone out, silence it and hold it suspiciously near to a paper. As she waited, she felt her heart quicken.

A young slip of a man with slicked-back hair and horn-rim glasses glided in and deposited two folders in front of her. She unwound the brown string from the wheels that held the first folder closed and gently pulled it open.

The letter to Seward held only one reference to the Carmelcita but that reference took Hiyako by the heart. “Our pleasant gateway at the edge of Forest Hills Extension is now connected in the way we have discussed, you and I. Water and gas and all important matters.” The words “all important matters” were underlined.

The second document was a long list of names with one of two marks beside each. Hiyako quickly saw that the marks indicated who should contact each person, Grandbanks or his nephew Seward. In several cases there was a cryptic remark, “Perhaps Santa?” Hiyako could make no sense out of the thought that “Santa” would deal with something. Did they even call him Santa in 1912?

She examined the list more closely. Many of the names were Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. Many of the names of couples who would share an apartment were two men or two women or a single person with a child. This was a list of people who might have difficulty finding a nice place to live.

So odd. He had built the apartment, then assembled the people he felt should live in it. How had he found these names, some of whom were clearly strangers to him? What was he looking for? Blushing, she slipped her phone out as the other man had done and, trying to look like she was just checking for messages, took photographs of the two documents quickly and returned them hoping her face was not red.

By now she’d been in the library for hours and her head felt dry and dusty. But she went back to the newspaper archives, moved by some instinct, and searched for references to William Seward. The first thing she found was an announcement of his marriage. He had married a Carmen Pilar Ortega and the San Francisco Examiner spoke of her with tongue-in-cheek awe which made gentle Hiyako want to spit. She had been a prominent curandera in her native Mexico and was known as La Santa de Corona.

There was a picture of her with half lidded eyes that seemed to look up to heaven. She was the ghost Hiyako had seen last night.

As she walked to the bus through busy Civic Center plaza, under landscaped trees and past the homeless with their bulging but organized shopping carts, Hiyako thought. She’d found nothing she would consider “evil” about the building where RJ lived. Mystery, yes. Purpose, yes. She could with good conscience follow her heart, marry RJ and live in his wonderful home.

And if she got to meet the ghost of “Santa” again, so much the better.

A homeless man in an ancient tweed jacket said, “’Scuse me sister, spare lil change?” Kind-hearted Hiyako usually drew the line at giving money that would just go to booze and she liked to think she was free of superstition. But she gave the old fellow five dollars for good luck.

That had been five years ago. Hiyako had married RJ (he’d taken her last name as a gesture of respect) and moved in. She’d felt the ghost of the old curandera many times and smelt her dried rose-petal fragrance, but she’d seen her only once again.

And now she sat at the kitchen table and drank her tea and RJ drank his coffee and they fretted about Jasmine. That very morning Jasmine had called her “Mommy” instead of Yako for the first time (not “Mama,” that was reserved for the mother she had lost). She had hugged them both with a serious face, like she knew she was going on a big journey, opened the little door and slipped inside. Hiyako remembered the click as the latch caught.

That had been hours ago. And if they were to be any help to Jasmine, they had to let go of this orgy of parental angst. They knew what they had been told, what they had hinted at but dared not tell Giles.

She put her hand on RJ’s arm. Startled, he looked up at her, then nodded and went to his fine old drafting table that he’d built with his dad. She saw that he felt old Frank’s gruff presence, his liver spotted, steady hands planing and sanding the wood upon which his son would create.

But when Hiyako took up her flute a wave of shame washed through her. She had once read a horrible book that sprang from the worst of New-Age-EST-Me-First selfishness masquerading as spirituality. In that book a character had been stoned to death (or crucified or something, she remembered only the disgusted horror she’d felt) while all his friends focused on meditations and self-improvement. This was good, the author implied, this was wholesome, this was spiritual growth.

How could she sit cross-legged on her zafu and create art while a little girl she loved dearly faced danger? She and RJ were selfish people for agreeing to this. She nearly flung her precious flute across the room, where it and her spirit would have cracked.

But with steady hands she brought the shakuhachi to her lips. The storm inside roiled but her hands closed the necessary stops, her lungs filled and, like Nakao Tozan so many years ago, she channeled all of her self-hatred and worry into the column of air that flowed across her palate and through her careful lips.

She willed herself to believe that the yarn of music helped, for she knew that if she rushed into the corridors between the worlds she would find only that cement wall that Jasmine seemingly walked right through.