Jeannie and Melissa, drawn by loud voices, came into the hallway. Jeannie stared at her husband. "Who kissed you?" she demanded.

Melissa, for the first time I'd noticed, looked disapprovingly at Maxie, who seemed not to notice in the euphoria of her moment.

"When I kiss 'em, they stay kissed," Maxie hooted, back on the ceiling again. Then she looked down at Jeannie. "He married her?" she chortled.

I looked up with fire in my eyes, and Tony noticed. "You can see her, can't you?" Then he stopped, his eyes widened a little, and he said, "It was a her, wasn't it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," I told him.

"I've been wanting to do that for weeks," Maxie gloated. "Damn, that felt good!"

"It was horrible," Tony said, and Maxie stopped dead (pardon the expression) in what would have been her tracks. "I don't know what it was, but it was like being kissed by a hungry animal."

"That was the good part," Maxie protested.

"What the hell is going on?" Jeannie said.

Melissa sighed. "It was Maxie," she told Jeannie.

Tony dropped down into a sitting position. "Oh Lord," he said. "It was a guy."

"No, no-Maxie is the girl." The girl who, at the moment, was looking at Tony with a murderous rage in her eyes.

"What girl?" Jeannie asked, her eyes narrowing. "Alison, did you kiss Tony?"

"What? No!" I looked at Melissa. "We have to tell Jeannie."

"Tell Jeannie?" Jeannie repeated. "Tell Jeannie what?"

Melissa-as always, disturbingly calm under pressure-looked Jeannie in the face. "We have two ghosts in the house," she said very matter-of-factly.

Jeannie looked at her for a moment, then blinked. "Of course you do, Liss," she said.

"No," I told her. "Really. There are two ghosts in this house, and one of them just kissed Tony."

Tony was still searching the ceiling and breathing hard. "They live in the house?" he asked.

"If you call it living."

"Oh, come on," Jeannie said, scanning our faces. "What's the gag?"

"No gag," I said. "Ghosts." I pointed at Maxie, who was scowling at Jeannie and shaking her head.

"I guess he didn't marry her for her mind," Maxie said.

"Oh, cut it out," Jeannie said, and walked out toward the kitchen, shaking her head.

I looked up at Maxie, who huffed and flew up into the ceiling, vanishing from sight.

"Okay." Tony set his jaw. "I'm . . . listening. Now, tell me all about these ghosts."

So I did. Tony listened intently, stopping to ask questions only when I didn't explain something quickly enough for his taste. Occasionally Melissa would add something (like the unfortunate moment she felt it was necessary to mention that Maxie was "really pretty"). When we'd gotten through the whole sordid story, Tony's mouth was more or less puckered, and twisted to the left side of his face.

That meant he was thinking.

"So you think maybe it's one of those *unfinished business' things? If you find this George Washington thing, they'll be able to move on to Heaven, or something?"

I shrugged. "For all I know, nothing will happen. Or maybe their next stop from here is a body shop in Indianapolis. But either way, I have to find that deed before Thursday night, or rumor has it I'll be joining Paul and Maxie in haunting this place."

Tony's teeth clenched. "Nothing's going to happen to you," he promised. "I fixed the wall, and I'll fix this. Jeannie and I are on it twenty-four/seven as of right now."

It took a lot of convincing, but Tony deemphasized the afterlife angle and emphasized the immediate-danger-to-Alison angle and, ghosts or not, Jeannie agreed we needed guarding. The two of them got sleeping bags out of Tony's truck (he's always prepared) and announced their intention to camp out in the upstairs bedrooms. "We'll be your first guests!" Jeannie said, pretending nobody had mentioned dead people in the room or a specter kissing her husband. She's a trouper. But her eyes were still suspicious.

I was too tired and spent for paranoia, however, so I went upstairs, where I saw no dead people, and went to bed after making sure Melissa did the same.

And when I came downstairs in the morning, the patch on the wall had been smashed in. I looked up at the ceiling and screamed.

"Maaaaaxiiiiiieeee!"

Forty.

"It wasn't me," Maxie said for the seventeenth time. "Why won't you believe me?"

My eyebrows met in the middle. "What reason have you ever given me to believe you about anything?" I asked the ghost.

Maxie stamped her foot, but she was three feet in the air. "I'm telling the truth!"

Melissa rubbed her eyes as she walked into the hallway. "What's going on now?" she asked. Just another day in Spook House.

I exhaled, and looked at Maxie. "Face it. You didn't like the way Tony reacted to your kiss. You got mad, and as soon as we went upstairs, you picked up the mallet"-I pointed to the rubber mallet left lying on the floor next to the once-again-gaping hole-"and you punched in the patch we'd been working on so hard. Just admit it."

Paul, standing in a corner with his arms folded, shook his head. "Not this time, Alison. I saw Maxie when you two left, and she didn't come down here. She was busy upstairs . . ."

Maxie looked at him threateningly. "Don't you dare," she said.

"I have to," Paul answered her. "She was crying," he told me.

If there was one thing I didn't want to do, it was admit that Maxie hadn't done anything wrong. "All right, fine," I said, defiantly. "If Maxie didn't break the wall, who did? How come you guys didn't hear someone smashing in my wall?"

Paul gave Maxie a glance, and she turned her head away from him. "We went outside to get a change of scenery," he said. "We were at the limit of the property in the back, almost an acre away. I didn't see anyone drive up, and we didn't hear anything in the house. Why didn't you hear it?"

I didn't answer. Paul looked at the floor. Maxie dropped through it.

"You know, you should give Maxie a break." Paul raised his head and looked me straight in the eye.

I told Melissa to go shower and get ready for school. She protested ("This is going to be the good part"), but she went.

I turned toward Paul once Liss had gone. "You want me to be nice to Maxie? After everything she's-"

Paul cut me off. "She's had about as bad a turn as a girl can get. She's dead. Is it really that much to ask that you two lighten up on her?" he said.

I couldn't answer that.

Paul shook his head. "There's no time for this bickering now. We need to focus on finding that deed, Alison. That seems to be the only way to save you."

"Tell me something I don't know."

"Let's think about this." Paul closed his eyes. His lips didn't exactly pucker, but they tightened around his teeth. This was deep consideration. "I don't think it's an outrageous assumption that whoever is after this deed is the same person-or people-who killed Maxie and me."

"Agreed," I said. It seemed appropriate at the time.

"So let's consider who that could be." Paul opened his eyes and looked at me. "We've been going about this the wrong way."

"Obviously."

"We've been spending so much time on the house, on the motive, that we've completely ignored opportunity. We can assume, based on the information you got from the newspaper editor, that the poison had to be administered at some point during our dinner at Cafe Linguine."

"Right. So who was there that night who might have wanted you two out of the way?"

"That's the problem. Almost everyone." Paul wrinkled his forehead. It was adorable. "After the planning board meeting ended, the whole board, the mayor-and even Adam Morris, as I recall-came to the restaurant. Morris or the mayor might have been upset about the vote going against the new construction."

"Was Kerin Murphy there?" I asked hopefully. I was holding out for Kerin being evil.

"I don't remember seeing her there," Paul answered. "But I hadn't seen her then, so it's possible she was."

"That's grasping at straws," I pointed out.

"We haven't got much. The point is, it would have been easy enough for any of them to slip something into our wine."

I gave him a look. "How?" I asked. "I've seen the restaurant. The bar is right near the entrance to the kitchen. The wine comes from the bar to your table, and then the glasses are sitting right in front of the two of you the whole time."

Paul nodded in agreement. "So the poison had to be put in the glasses either at the bar, or on the way from the bar to the table."

"Did you see anyone in that area?" I asked him.

Paul twisted up his mouth again. "I didn't pay close attention to the wine. I wasn't expecting to be poisoned."

I would have patted him on the shoulder, if it had actually been there. "It wasn't your fault. So few of us expect that. Believe me, I'll be watching everything I eat and drink for, essentially, the rest of my life. But if you didn't notice, who might have? Who was your server that night, do you remember?"

Paul's face relaxed; he was happy to have the right answer to a question. "Yes, I remember because he had such an interesting name. Rudolfo."

"I think I'm going back to Cafe Linguine to talk to Ralphie," I said.

Paul frowned again. "Who's Ralphie?"

I didn't get the chance to answer because my cell phone started creating havoc in my pocket. I dug it out and opened it, noting only that the incoming call screen read, "Out of Area."

"You've found it, haven't you?" a voice said. It was muffled. Either the person on the other end was whispering or holding a cloth over the mouthpiece or both.

"What? Who is this?" I put the cell phone on speaker, and Paul bent over my shoulder to hear. There was the usual feeling of a warm breeze when he leaned a little too close.

"You know who it is," the voice answered. "You have it, and you're going to hand it over."

"I don't have it," I said. "I have no idea where-"

The voice didn't have any inflection, and wouldn't rise enough to be identifiable. Not to mention, it cut me off. This was one rude murderer. "You have until midnight tomorrow to deliver it."

"Deliver what where?" I asked at Paul's instruction. "And when you say, *midnight,' do you mean twelve a.m. early Friday or late Thursday?" That last question was all on my own.

"You'll be given instructions at the proper time," the voice said. I still couldn't tell if it was male or female. And the line went dead.

"Well," Paul said, "that wasn't much help at all. Now. Who's Ralphie?"

I called Detective McElone, and she said she'd try to track my cell phone records to see if she could trace the call I'd just received. But she wasn't promising anything, and reminded me that I was still technically a suspect in Terry Wright's murder. The woman had a reassuring manner, to be sure.

Once I'd dropped Melissa at school, I drove to Phyllis's office. She reassured me that the cops didn't have any hard evidence on me, but had little to add. We moved on to other topics, and discussed frequency of advertising once the guesthouse opened (assuming I lived to see it) and I told her I thought the house renovations would be mostly completed by the weekend, although we still wouldn't have any furniture until at least a week later.

At lunchtime, I walked over to Cafe Linguine and asked for Rudolfo.

"I didn't see anything," Ralphie protested when I started asking him questions about Paul and Maxie on the night they were killed. His skinny little body was all atremble, and his face, just now recovering from the acne that no doubt plagued his high school years, was pinched. "I swear, I didn't see anything. Can I go back to work now?"

"You're sure you remember the night I'm talking about?" I asked him. I felt bad for the kid; I'd taken him out of his lunch shift (which, to be fair, wasn't exactly bustling) and wasn't even ordering a cup of coffee. But the answers to these questions might save my life, so I saw a certain urgency in them.

"I remember. The cops asked me about it then, and they asked me about again last week," the waiter said. "A bunch of people came in after some board meeting or something. The mayor was here. She and her group were all over there . . ." He pointed at the corner away from the bar, not so close to the exposed ovens and grills that it would be uncomfortably hot. "At a big table. They were all laughing and drinking wine."

"But they'd just had a tremendous argument at the meeting," I protested, trying to prove to Ralphie that he was wrong, and surely someone must have been in a separate corner, sulking, licking his or her wounds.

The kid shook his head. "They don't care," he said. "I've seen it a hundred times after meetings. No matter what, they all hang out here afterward and drink and laugh with each other. I guess none of it's personal."

Well, there went the theory that Paul and Maxie had been killed over a political grudge.

The fact was, it was looking more and more likely that my two houseguests had been murdered over the Washington deed, if only because the other motives weren't bearing any fruit in the investigation.

"Who else was here?" I asked Ralphie. If he mentioned a brooding history teacher with a dimple in his chin, I was officially going to spend the rest of the day in a bad mood. On the other hand, if Kerin Murphy was on Ralphie's list, I'd probably buy extra Halloween candy for the celebration of her arrest. You have to have priorities.

"There were lots of people here," he said, lips twisted downward. "I can't remember everybody."

"Do you remember who was hanging out near the bar?" The poison had probably been administered between the bar and the table.

"Just Lisa Pawley." He grinned.

"Who's Lisa Pawley?"