"Would it be all right if I came to the house tonight?" he asked. "I can help hand out Halloween candy or something."

I tried to think of excuses. If Ned was the killer, it would probably be a bad idea to invite him over. On the other hand, Tony and Jeannie would already be there, as would my less-alive tenants.

"I don't know," I said.

"Alison. Please."

Maybe he wasn't a homicidal maniac. I nodded my agreement.

"Great." Ned's smile, truly a work of art, made suspecting him very difficult. "I'll bring something for dessert." Uh-oh.

But the real shock of the morning came on the ride home when my cell phone rang, the call coming from a number I did not recognize. Worried that it might be the killer, I pulled over. Wouldn't want to cause an accident. I'm a responsible driver.

"Hello? Is this Alison Kerby?" a woman's voice asked. She didn't sound very threatening.

"That depends," I answered.

"This is Bianca Valessy. I'm Adam Morris's assistant?"

She'd gotten my note! "Yes, Bianca," I said.

"I read your note. Can you meet me?"

That posed a difficult question. If Adam Morris was the person threatening me, he might try to lure me to a particular spot where he could do me harm. Or Bianca herself could be the killer, innocuous though her voice sounded. "Where?" I asked.

"Someplace we can't be seen," Bianca said. That didn't sound at all positive. "I could get in a lot of trouble." Sure you could, honey. How stupid do you think I am? "Anyplace you can think of?" she asked.

"How about my house?" I asked.

Forty-four.

If there's one thing you want when you're meeting with a person who could be dangerous-or representing someone dangerous-it's witnesses. Luckily, my place was packed with them.

I'd been planning this since I'd written the note to Bianca on my way to Adam Morris's office the day before. I had finally recognized her as the blonde woman who'd met Kerin Murphy at Oceanside Park and taken the appointment book. I had figured (with some help from Paul) that Bianca was probably just a messenger, not the recipient of the book, and might be persuaded to talk if my knowledge about her was revealed. So I did just that, on the back of a receipt from HouseCenter. I assumed she'd be smart enough to look up my cell phone number (I couldn't be bold enough to write it down, given that Adam Morris was in the next room) through the records on my house.

When I hadn't heard from Bianca immediately, I'd been a little concerned that she'd shown Morris the note, but luckily, it appeared she'd spent just as sleepless a night as I had, before deciding to make the call. I was ready.

I phoned Jeannie after I got off with Bianca, and alerted her to the meeting. She and Tony were in the kitchen when I got there. They said Mom had called from her house, where she'd gone to shower and change, and would be back soon. They hadn't told her about Bianca's visit.

"Where do you want us to hide?" Jeannie asked before I'd even made it all the way inside. "We can ambush her anytime you want."

"I don't want you to hide at all," I said. "I want you visible, to help intimidate her."

"This should help," Tony said, and opened his jacket to show me he had a gun tucked into his belt.

"Okay, that's scary," I said.

"Gotta be prepared," Tony said.

"Don't even think of using that unless she pulls out a nuclear bomb," I told him. "I don't want bullet holes in my walls."

Jeannie shook her head.

Maxie swooshed through the ceiling as we walked into the living room. "Look out!" she yelled, and darted in and out of walls, still looking for the deed.

"You didn't tell them?" I asked Jeannie, pointing around the room.

"Tell who?" She could see Maxie lift a hammer and fly it across the room, and she'd still deny anything unusual had happened. As long as Maxie didn't hand the hammer to Tony-something Tony had discovered the night before, trying once again to square out the hole in my wall. Jeannie had given him a look that could have caused frostbite. And then insisted he had made the hammer levitate.

"Forget it," I said.

I asked Maxie for Paul's whereabouts as she made a quick circle of the living room. Jeannie walked to the kitchen, acknowledging nothing.

"Basement. He's trying the crawlspace again."

"Would you zip down there and ask him to come up?" I requested. "I need both of you."

"Oh yes, ma'am!" She groaned like the annoyed teenager my daughter would be in four years and disappeared into the floorboards.

Jeannie returned to arrange lawn chairs in the front room, and Tony checked his gun for at least the third time to make sure it was loaded.

Paul rose up through the floor and accidentally through Tony, who shuddered and looked around, no doubt worried that Maxie was striking again. I shook my head to reassure him.

"What's going on?" Paul said, professional demeanor at the forefront.

There was a loud knock on the door (despite the fact that the doorbell was perfectly functional). "This is," I told Paul, and hurried to let Bianca inside.

"This is what?" Jeannie asked.

Tony and Jeannie rushed toward the door as she came in, and Bianca's eyes widened. She looked terrified.

"I can't talk with all these people here," she said as Paul floated near and Maxie rose up from the basement.

You have no idea, I thought.

"They're my friends," I told her. "You can trust them. Please, have a seat."

That proposed something of a dilemma, as I had only the old, dusty lawn chairs to offer. I actually took a towel from the downstairs bathroom and spread it over a chair for Bianca, who was eyeing the house warily.

"I hear there are ghosts here," she said.

"Oh, that's just people talking around town," I said. "It's just silly stories."

"No kidding," Jeannie said out of the corner of her mouth.

I pressed on. "Now, you said you had something important to tell me?" I asked Bianca.

"I read your note saying I should tell you if I knew something about this house," she said. "I've seen you in Adam's office. You're not afraid of him."

Well, I was afraid of somebody, but I couldn't be sure it was Adam Morris. "That's right," I told her.

"Well, I do know something. I know a lot."

I waited, but she seemed to need some prodding to go on. Luckily, Jeannie was in the room. "So tell us," she said, a little heatedly.

"See, here's the thing," Bianca said. "Adam wants this house way more than he's letting on. He came into town all set to take this whole section and make a real big project out of it, you know, beachfront property, lots of condos and big houses to sell to rich people. He's been working on it for years. And all the other owners of all the other houses sold out to him right away, because he was offering good prices in a bad real estate market."

"But the Prestons sold to Maxie before he knew it, and then Kitty Malone wouldn't sell, right?"

"Well, not the Prestons-that was just bad luck," Bianca answered. "Adam's agent in the area, Ms. Wright? He didn't contact her until a month after they sold the house to Ms. Malone. Adam dropped the ball on that. But when that owner died, and her estate still wouldn't sell, he got mad. He stopped seeing Ms. Wright, just cut her off entirely."

"Adam Morris was seeing Terry Wright?" It was news to me.

"Oh yeah. Among . . . others," she answered. "He's lucky his wife is back in Nebraska."

"His wife?" Tony said. "The guy's married in Nebraska, and he's having multiple affairs here in New Jersey?" He blinked a couple of times. Jeannie poked him on the arm, thinking he was expressing admiration for Adam Morris's accomplishments. "What?" he asked her.

"Yeah." Bianca was warming to the attention she was getting. "He was with Ms. Wright for a while, then the mayor for a while . . ."

"The mayor? Bridget Bostero? Harbor Haven's mayor?" Jeannie wasn't aghast-she was thrilled with the treasure trove of gossip she was receiving.

"Yeah," Bianca repeated. It appeared to be her favorite word. "He was going to finance her campaign for state assembly, but he got mad when she couldn't deliver the planning board vote, and that was it. She gets no money and no Adam."

My head was spinning. I actually felt like lying down (a concussion never really leaves you), but instead, I sat on the stairs. "Let me see if I've got this," I said. "Adam Morris was having an affair with Terry Wright. But he broke that off because he thought she failed him by not getting this house for his project. So he started seeing the mayor, thinking she could get him the house by influencing the planning board, and enticed her with an offer to put up money for a state assembly campaign."

"I'm not sure he was only seeing one of them at a time," Bianca corrected me. "And they weren't the only ones. Like the lady who got his appointment book."

"Excuse me?" Jeannie looked like she was five and it was Christmas morning. "Adam Morris was having an affair with Kerin Murphy?"

"Is that her name?" Bianca asked.

"Oh, this is too good!" Jeannie gushed. I was trying to wrap my mind around it.

Adam Morris had tried to use his charm on me and, frankly, I'd found him very easy to resist, so it was hard to imagine that he was such catnip to so many women. But this wasn't getting me any less killed, so I plowed on. "Okay, so all this was fine until Maxie convinced the board to vote against him. Then he withdrew the money and broke it off with Bridget."

"Yeah." Again. "Except he was getting back together with Ms. Wright before she died."

"He was?"

"Yeah. He kept calling her and sending her flowers."

"Ask her how he reacted when she died," Paul suggested, so I repeated the question.

"It was weird. He didn't really seem to care that much." There was a long silence. I know what I was thinking.

"Why are you telling me all this, Bianca?" I asked.

She looked from face to face in the room (and missed a couple she didn't know were there). "I think you need to be careful. He still wants your house, and he knows you won't sell it to him. He's tried to get this house before. He got really mad when it didn't work."

"Don't I know it," Maxie said. Paul never took his eyes off Bianca.

"I just . . . I don't know for sure, but I saw what happened the last time he got this mad, and I thought it would be wrong not to warn you."

"What happened the last time?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. But those two people died here." Bianca shuddered a little, and Maxie wasn't touching her. I checked.

"Do you think Adam Morris killed the people who died here in this house?" I asked. Paul and Maxie were similarly tensed up and leaning forward, and if they'd had breath, they'd have been holding it.

"I don't know for sure," Bianca said. "But I know he was awful mad."

That wasn't enough. Detective McElone would tell me it wasn't enough. I'd go to her, but she'd tell me it wasn't enough.

"Why did you decide to tell me this?" I asked Bianca again.

Her eyes got watery, and she covered a tear with the back of her hand. "He told me I was the only one," she said.

Forty-five.

"It's not enough," Detective Anita McElone said.

I leaned back and put my feet up on her desk, which I'm sure did not please the detective. Jeannie and I had gone directly to police headquarters when Bianca, having recovered from her misty moment of regret, reorganized herself and headed to work so as not to draw any suspicion.

"I thought you'd say that," I allowed, "but it should be enough at least to question Adam Morris. That, coupled with what we talked about the last time I was here?"

"The guy killed probably three people," Jeannie said, not having to worry too much about the niceties (what the hell, she didn't live in Harbor Haven). "You're a cop, right? So what's the problem?"

McElone had initially insisted that Jeannie stay out in the waiting room, but Jeannie had inched her way in a little at a time and was now standing next to the chair in which I was sitting. McElone hadn't looked happy about it, but she hadn't said anything. Until now.

"Didn't I ask you to wait outside?" she asked Jeannie.

"Yeah, but I decided the answer was no."

I decided to put us back on topic. I held up a finger. "One," I told the detective. "Adam Morris was having an affair with Terry Wright when she was selling my house to Maxie Malone. Two"-second finger. Hey, this was fun!-"Adam Morris was having an affair with Mayor Bostero as well as with Kerin Murphy, and offering to finance Bridget's campaign, while she was trying to push a condemnation order through the planning board. Three"-next finger-"Morris dumped each woman when she was no longer of any use to him, but, four"-finger again-"he was starting to see Terry again-just before she was killed. Five"-thumb-"he knew the kind of poison used on Terry, even though you hadn't made that information public. Six-"

Before I could put up another finger, McElone held up one of her own. "So far, what you've given me wouldn't even stand up on an episode of Perry Mason from nineteen fifty-nine. All the information you say you have comes from a so-called anonymous witness, and is all hearsay, anyway." It was true; Bianca had insisted that I not tell McElone her name. "Two, you don't know that any of it is true. Three, even if all that stuff about him sleeping with all those women is true-and I have no reason to think it is-it doesn't make him a killer, just an adulterer. Four, there's nothing tying Morris to the killings of Harrison or Malone. Five, get your feet off my desk."