Ned smiled. "She told a few of her friends this ghost story, and they told a few and, well, now it's . . ."

"The talk of the school? Let's make a rule: While we're out on a date-this is a date, isn't it?"

Ned nodded emphatically-oh yes, this was a date, all right.

"When we're out on a date, no talk about Melissa. It's like shop talk for you, and a little un-romantic for me, frankly."

He smiled. "You're absolutely right, Alison. So tell me about you. You grew up in this area?"

I nodded. "I grew up in Harbor Haven, spent a couple of years at two different colleges, dropped out, worked at HouseCenter, got married, moved up to Bayonne with my husband, had . . ."

"Don't say her name," he teased. "It's a rule."

"Right. So we moved back down here, first to a little house in Red Bank. My ex paid for Melissa to go to school in Harbor Haven because I knew the schools were good."

Ned tilted his head. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. But then The Swi . . . Steven and I decided to divorce, and I remembered that I hadn't always wanted to work at HouseCenter or in a lumberyard. I wanted to open a guesthouse in Harbor Haven. So I started looking for the right house, and we ended up . . . well, you know where we live now."

"I think it'll make a great guesthouse," Ned said after the waiter took our order for souvlaki and pastitsio. "I'd still love to come by and see it."

"I'd love to show you around," I heard myself say. Boy, he seemed eager. I mean, I'm not bad-looking by any means, but I don't usually inspire men to pursue me quite so fervently.

"As long as the ghosts don't object," he said with a twinkle-yes, an actual twinkle!-in his eye.

"So tell me about yourself," I said, shifting gears with the ease of a twelve-year-old tractor-trailer with rusted gears.

"I don't have a very interesting story," Ned told me. "I grew up in Seattle."

"Right away, that's interesting to a Jersey girl," I said.

"Well, for me, it was cold and rainy," he answered. "And I got out of there as quickly as I could, when I was eighteen."

"You escaped to the tropical climate of New Jersey?"

Our waiter appeared at that moment with our appetizers, which consisted mostly of breaded and baked cheese, and olives (because it was a Greek restaurant and you have to have olives).

"New Jersey wasn't my initial destination," Ned told me when the coast was once again clear. "Actually, it was Peru."

"Peru!" Heads turned at other tables. Oops.

"Yes, you might have heard of it. It's in South America. Go south and make a right at Brazil."

I pursed my lips to indicate that his drollness had found its mark. "Okay," I practically whispered. "But why Peru?"

"I was fascinated with the history of the Incas, and I wanted to see it for myself. But I spent all my money getting there, and didn't have a nuevo sol or a college degree to my name. So I picked up work in construction and in a copper mine."

"It's a good thing you don't have an interesting story," I told him.

Ned mimicked my "droll" face. "Long story short, I got lonely for America, and American history, so I saved up my wages and found my way back here."

"To Harbor Haven?"

"Eventually. First I went to college and got degrees in history and education, and then I taught up in Poughkeepsie, New York, for a while. But when the history teacher job opened up in Harbor Haven, I jumped at it."

"Why?"

"For an American history nut like me, there are few better places," Ned said. "The Revolutionary War is all over New Jersey, and that's my favorite period to explore. So I'm very, very happy to be here."

Another period of silence accompanied the arrival of our dinners, which I for one was already far too stuffed to consider. I took a few bites to be polite-okay, I ate half of it, but it was really delicious.

"I wasn't aware the shore areas had much in the way of Revolutionary history," I said. "I thought it was all further north and west, in Morristown and in Trenton where Washington crossed the Delaware." Sure, I know a little New Jersey history. But not that much-I was an English major at Drew and a business major at Monmouth University before I dropped out altogether.

"Not at all," Ned told me through bites of his lamb. "There was a constant watch on the shore, even if just to try to spot ships heading for the ports of New York or Newark. And Washington himself spent a lot of time on the shore. He actually loved it here."

"Big George was a shore bunny?"

Ned laughed, and was even suave enough that he managed not to have souvlaki come out his nose. "I wouldn't have put it that way, but yes. Washington became very enamored of the Jersey Shore, and apparently had his eye on some property here."

"Here?"

"Well, in Harbor Haven, although that wasn't the name of the town then." Ned nodded. "But in the summer of 1778, Washington spent a good deal of time attacking the British in Freehold, not far from here."

"I know where Freehold is, Ned. Bruce Springsteen is from Freehold. It's the closest thing New Jersey has to Mecca."

"Well, during that time, the story goes that Washington found exactly the parcel of land he was looking for in what became Harbor Haven."

"No kidding! Which parcel was it?"

"Yours," Ned said.

Twenty-six.

Ned didn't know much more than that, but promised to "research it with a friend of mine at Princeton." We hadn't discussed anyone else more than two hundred years old again that evening, and over Ned's protests, I drove him home after dinner rather than back to my house.

I told him I did that because I was tired, but the fact was, I was hoping that postponing the tour would force us to have another date, and the strategy worked-he asked me out again for Tuesday night. Then I dropped him off and, dammit, he didn't insist I come inside his place, either.

Nothing's perfect.

"This is beginning to make sense." Paul spoke very slowly the next afternoon. He was kneeling-hovering, really-next to the radiator cover in the dining room, while I finished detailing the paint on the molding around the ceiling. I'd been reserving the ladder-related activities for whenever Maxie wasn't around, and I knew she and Melissa were upstairs watching episodes of Gilmore Girls on Hulu.

"It is?" I'd learned in the past two days that George Washington was among the people who had once had designs on my house; that my real estate agent, Terry Wright, was dead from what seemed to be a really coincidental heart attack; and that Kerin Murphy had taken something from Terry's office and given it to a mysterious woman. I still didn't know anything about either of my original dilemmas: who had killed Maxie and Paul, and who was leaving me threatening e-mails. "How is what making sense?"

I interrupted the conversation to take a cell phone call from Jeannie, who wanted to know every possible detail about my date with Ned. I told her I was in the middle of a repair-because I was always in the middle of a repair-and that I'd call her back. Which I intended to do, in a couple of days.

When I hung up, Paul was engaged in trying to move a quarter, which I'd left on the radiator cover at his request. He had told me it took intense concentration for him to move physical objects (unlike Maxie, who seemed able to move objects with little to no difficulty; your classic bratty poltergeist), and he wanted to become more proficient at it. So his answer came after a long pause, and in gasps.

"The part about . . . George Washington . . . doesn't make any sense yet," he began. "But it does point to the idea that this property is more valuable than you or Maxie might have expected, and that could be a motive for murder. It's obvious."

"To you, maybe." I wanted to paint a narrow mauve stripe under the white molding on the ceiling, and I had put up blue painter's masking tape at very careful one-inch parallels to the molding in order to achieve it. I was using a thin brush to get the color where I wanted it and nowhere else.

"Simple." Paul flicked at the quarter, but his finger went through the wooden radiator cover and disappeared. "Damn." The hand came back out. "Someone wants to get their . . . hands on this house, possibly for a reason that has historical . . . implications. . . ." He bit his lower lip and stopped talking. Then, instead of stabbing at the quarter, he moved his finger slowly toward it. "They tried to scare . . . Maxie out, but she wouldn't go, and so the next . . . tactic was more violent, and I was . . . careless so I . . . paid the price, as well."

It was the first time I'd heard him refer to himself so casually in the past tense, and the moment sent a shiver up my spine.

I decided to lighten the moment. "So tell me," I asked, changing the subject. "What made you become a private eye?"

"Private eye?" the dead man asked me. "I was an independent investigator."

"Okay, so why? A nice boy like you. You couldn't be an accountant, like your brother Irving?"

"Ma," he said, playing along with the joke, "you always liked Irving better than me. You got him a new bike, and I had to keep the tricycle until I got my driver's license."

His finger made contact with the quarter, and it moved about two inches across the surface of the radiator box. Paul smiled and exhaled. "There."

"Nice work," I said. "If I ever need a quarter moved, I know the guy to call. Now, come on: why an *independent investigator'?"

"I started off as a consultant with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Toronto," Paul said, once again working on the quarter, this time attempting to pick it up with his thumb and forefinger. "I worked on some profiling-my background was in psychology-and I helped make some arrests. But I wanted to come to America, and I made my way down through New York State until I got here. I talked to the state police about what I'd been doing for the RCMP, but they had no use for it, and I was tired of wandering. I met this sergeant at the state police who suggested getting an investigator's license, and since it was the only thing I was ever good at, I figured I'd go ahead. Worked for a year at an agency in Camden, and then I moved here to begin on my own. And just when I was getting started . . ." He stopped, sighed, and then looked at me. "Right now, let's concentrate on figuring out who's after you, and how to keep you alive."

"Could it be Kerin Murphy?" I asked. "I'd really like it to be Kerin Murphy."

"Why?"

"I already don't like her."

"Well, she certainly is involved in something . . ." he said. He made another grab at the quarter and missed.

"It's better when you move more slowly," I told him, pointing at the quarter with my paintbrush. "When you grab at it, you always go through."

Paul looked at me a moment, then looked at his hand, as if that was going to tell him something, and nodded. I guess it did tell him something. He turned his attention again to the quarter.

"Terry Wright might have been the person sending the e-mails to you and Maxie and making threatening phone calls to the Prestons," he said, moving his hand very slowly toward the coin.

I needed to move the ladder. "Oh please," I said. "Terry sold us the property-why would she want us gone? Plus, she was as threatening as a piece of angel food cake."

"Kerin Murphy, or someone she knew, was threatened enough to steal Terry's address book, or appointment calendar." Paul had a point. Paul always had a damn point, and it always made things more complicated for me. He stared intently at the quarter. "I'll have to ask some other ghosts about the interaction with objects," he said to himself.

"You can talk to other ghosts besides Maxie?" I asked. "How can you do that if you can't leave the property?"

Paul stopped and considered. "It's hard to explain," he said. "Occasionally, other people who have died are sort of . . . available to us. It's not just thought projection, but it's less than talking. You can sort of send out questions, and you get answers, but you don't always know where they're coming from."

"Sounds like Facebook," I said. "Wait a minute." I paused, brush in mid-air. "Doesn't that mean you can just find and ask Terry what happened to her? Will she be back at the real estate office?"

"No, everybody's circumstances seem to be unique to them," Paul said, not looking at me. "Not all ghosts are tied to one place, and not all people who die appear as ghosts. Terry Wright seems to be one of those; I would know if she was available to talk to. Some ghosts can move around and some can't. In the same way that Maxie can move things easily, but it's much more difficult for me. I don't know why-maybe I'll know more when I've been dead longer."

"So how do we proceed from here?" I asked. "Any other dead detectives you can ask on the Ghosternet?"

"No." Paul looked annoyed, but he pushed on. "So . . . to make a plan, we need to operate on a theory. And the only one we have now is that Kerin and someone she's working with are the people trying to scare everybody out of this house. So we assume it's because they want this house or something in it. Maybe the best way to get them to stop trying to scare you out of the house is to convince them . . ." His hand moved down, into the radiator cover, and then came up through its top, and when it did, the quarter came up with it. He held it aloft. "Aha!"

"Convince them of what?"

Paul beamed, looking at the quarter, which he moved from one hand to the next, very slowly. "Convince them that whatever it is they want, you have it."

Twenty-seven.

"I didn't think I'd hear from you again," Adam Morris said. He walked from the door, where he'd let me in, to his desk, and gestured that I should sit in the low-slung leather chair in front of it. Indeed, I hadn't expected him to be in his office on a Saturday-I'd expected to get voice mail-but there he was, plotting to take over the world, or at least part of the Jersey Shore.

I chose the stiffer, but less-cruel-to-animals, fabric-covered seat a few feet away. I pulled it to the desk and sat down. This was the first stop on Paul's prescribed tour-o-suspects (which meant my reinterviewing everyone, in person this time, including the planning board), so I'd have to pace myself. No sense showing any hostility yet.

Adam's assistant, Bianca, (no doubt thrilled to be working on the weekend) was the usual woman in her early-to-mid-twenties with the kind of lovely face that looked like you could have seen it on a dozen other lovely women the same day. Adam had shown a less-than-genial side of himself when he hollered at her through the door that he wasn't taking any visitors without appointments, and then, just like last time over the phone, had changed his mind when he heard I was here to discuss 123 Seafront. My name wouldn't open any doors in this town, but my address apparently would.

His office was attractive in an institutional way. There wasn't anything the least bit personal in it-no photographs of family on the desk, no pictures or diplomas on the walls. A few paintings, mostly of buildings Adam had developed.

Adam himself was equally attractive, and equally impersonal. He was a handsome, dark-haired man whose face I would be at a loss to describe ten minutes after I left.

"Well, I said I'd be thinking about your offer on my house," I told him. "And I'm here to give you my decision. Are you still interested in buying it?"

"Possibly." Adam Morris was nothing if not a keen negotiator. "It would depend on the price."

"Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in selling at any price," I said, and waited for the eruption.

There was none.

Paul had been emphatic in his advice that I not "play games" with Adam, that I stick to the script Paul had worked out, but seriously, what fun is there in doing something if you know how every part of it will go before you start? Especially if you can irritate a man you instinctively don't like? The rules were already going by the wayside.

"I'm sorry to hear it," Adam answered, showing not one second of disappointment or anger. "I would have liked to include that property in the development, but I guess we'll have to work around it."

"The development would continue anyway, even without my house?"

Adam nodded. "Oh yes, absolutely," he said. "We'd always planned on continuing the project either way. It just would have been easier, and more aesthetically pleasing, to include that piece of property. Too bad we can't."

Visions of condos surrounding my quaint little guesthouse-condos whose owners would probably rent them out during the summer months as vacation homes-once again filled my head. I could actually hear my income projections hit the ground and keep tunneling. I pictured Melissa and myself living in a homemade tent on Seafoam Avenue next to a sign reading, "Will See Ghosts for Food." I could picture all the happy vacationers going by with boogie boards and beach umbrellas toward their rented new-construction condos, while Melissa and I were bundled up in unseasonable overcoats, scarves and hats with earflaps.

"Are you all right?" he asked. I must have seemed like I was going to pass out. But only because I was.

"I don't know. "What . . . how much . . . where is the land you've already acquired?" I asked.