I took my feet off her desk.

"Okay," I said. "So I don't have any physical evidence. But you have to admit, the fact that Morris was involved with all these women and that he was so desperate to get my house would at least give him a motive. Isn't that enough to investigate?"

"We are investigating," McElone said. "We've been investigating since these incidents happened. I questioned Mr. Morris myself."

"And?" I asked.

"When did you become a police consultant?" the detective asked in return. "I have no reason to tell you anything, but how about this: Adam Morris says that he left the restaurant at least a half hour before Mr. Harrison and Ms. Malone finished their dinner the night of the meeting. Most of the restaurant staff corroborates that account. And the ME says that's the wrong time frame for him to have poisoned their drinks."

I gave her my best oh please face. "He couldn't be lying, or have gotten someone else, like the bartender or the waiter, to do it?" I hated to cast suspicion on Ralphie, especially since I had no reason to think he had anything to do with the poisonings, but McElone was cornering me.

"We questioned the entire staff," she said. "If there's anything suspicious, we already know about it. And no one has been ruled out as a suspect."

"Not even me?" I asked.

"You?" Jeannie asked. "How can you be suspected of threatening yourself? I thought we'd gotten past this library card thing."

"We have," McElone said wearily. "Ms. Kerby is no longer a suspect in Ms. Wright's death." She looked at me. "You didn't have a motive. And we checked your cell phone records. The call you got came from a disposable cell phone, and even if we could triangulate its location, I guarantee the person who used it has discarded it and gotten another by now."

"So, how should I proceed now?" I asked.

"Until I tell you otherwise, assume you're still in danger," McElone said. "But I'm betting I'll tell you very soon to stop worrying." She smiled warmly.

"See? And I thought you didn't like me."

"I don't," she said. "But if you're not in danger, you won't be bothering me anymore."

We turned to leave. "To protect and serve," Jeannie scoffed as we walked out.

My cell phone buzzed on the way out, indicating a text message. I opened it, and the message read, "I WANT THE DEED. 2NIGHT."

I didn't even bother to go back and show it to McElone. She'd say it wasn't enough.

Forty-six.

"What's our plan of action?" I asked Paul.

"We have no choice," Paul replied. "No matter who the killer is, we have nothing to bargain with if we don't find that deed."

"But we've looked everywhere," I told him. "There's no place left to explore."

Paul composed himself, and I got the impression I wasn't going to like what he had to say next. I was right. "The Prestons and Mayor Bostero were really fascinated by the hole in that wall." He pointed, as if I didn't know where the hole that had been haunting (so to speak) my thoughts was located.

"Don't even think it," I said.

"Alison, there's a very strong possibility that the document that can save your life is hidden somewhere behind one of those plaster walls, and the only way we can find out is to let in enough light for Maxie or me to look inside."

I shook my head. "That's a hole in every wall in this house, none of which I'll know how to repair."

"They'd be small holes," Paul tried.

"We wouldn't have time to be neat. We'd have to ruin every wall until we found it."

"Weigh that against waking up tomorrow morning," he said.

"I'm not afraid of . . . whoever it is," I lied. "They can't poison me if I know it's coming. I won't eat anything for the rest of the day. I'll only eat food I cook myself from now on. I'll save money. I can't destroy the house-it's the only way I can make a living, Paul."

He did whatever ghosts do that looks like sighing. "Alison, you can't live scared forever. I firmly believe that the only way to stop this is to find that deed, and the only way to do that is to break holes in each wall in this house until we find it."

"I'd rather die," I said. And at that moment, I meant it. "I will not take down months' worth of work just because something might be behind one of the walls. When you guys develop X-ray vision and can tell me exactly where the deed is, I'll think about it."

The argument went on for hours: I finished the urethane job, putting up and taking down barriers to keep (live) people from stepping on the floor until it dried. Jeannie made two more curtains for my bedroom, Wendy's mom gave Melissa a ride home from school, Tony called to say he'd be back after his drywall job was completed, and Maxie was holed up with the laptop doing "research," but neither Paul nor I had moved from our original positions: Paul thought taking down all the plaster walls, which could never be adequately replaced, would save my life, and I thought the possibility was just a little too iffy to warrant the damage.

Oh, and Mom called to say she'd call later.

Melissa was upstairs getting into her Mr. Spock outfit, and we expected the horde of trick-or-treaters, discreetly followed by a few mothers (including Kerin Murphy, much to my chagrin), to arrive at our house for pickup in ten minutes. I called up the stairs.

"Liss! Come on down! I want to get pictures before you leave!"

"Just a second!" the tiny voice came back. "I'm finishing up."

The typical wave of four- and five-year-olds had already been coming by trick-or-treating from pretty much the minute school let out, each one followed so closely by a parent it was hard to tell who was getting the candy. But that died down fairly quickly, and we were awaiting the second wave, which would include Melissa and her posse, shortly. The teenagers would come after nine, and I'd stiff them. Teenagers trick-or-treating. Really.

Paul, wearing black jeans and a tight black t-shirt, looked like he should be attending an extremely casual funeral or a reunion of New Yorkers from the Clinton era. But his face was serious. "Alison . . . ," he started.

I cut him off. "No more. We're done." Once again, I called upstairs. "Melissa! They'll be here any minute, and I'm going to get pictures whether it mortifies you or not!"

"One second!" More insistent.

Paul bit his upper lip and tried a different tactic. "All right, then. If we're not going to look behind the walls, where else haven't we tried yet? This is a big house; there has to be some area we haven't searched thoroughly."

"I can't think of anyplace," I answered. "There's no furniture in the house; each room is empty. I've been behind the tiles in the bathrooms, checked the mortar and every brick of the fireplaces, and pulled up each and every rug. There isn't an inch of this house with which I have not become intimate."

"There's something we're missing."

"Of course there is, or we would have found it by now. Melissa!" I ran up the stairs to move my daughter along. "You have to come down now!"

And I found her in her bedroom, standing in her blue Star Trek shirt with the insignia on the left side. Her hair had been piled up under a store-bought wig that gave her black bangs and a bowl cut with sideburns. She had on the Silly Putty ears, which for the moment actually looked pretty natural (but almost certainly would not by the fourth house).

Also, her eyebrows were half-shaved, and Maxie was kneeling next to her, applying mascara to extend them up in a diagonal line on each side.

Melissa gasped. I gasped. Maxie looked up and didn't so much as blink.

"We're not done yet," she said.

"I . . . you . . . didn't I . . . ?" I was at my most articulate.

"Looks pretty good, huh?" Maxie said.

Melissa, considerably more savvy to my expressions and the fact that I'd specifically forbidden this activity, didn't look nearly as confident. "Mom," she said. "Don't freak out."

"Don't freak out?" I echoed. "I told you without any question that you could not do this, and here you are with . . . with her, doing exactly what I said you couldn't!"

"Oh, chill," Maxie said. "They'll grow back."

I advanced on her, and she tried to wield a Gillette Venus safety razor as a weapon. "I don't want you near my daughter ever again, do you understand?" I bellowed.

"Never!"

And I turned on my heel and left the room. Behind me, I heard sobs, but I couldn't say for sure which one of them was crying.

When push came to shove, I didn't have the guts to ground Melissa on Halloween, especially since I arrived downstairs to find at least eight of her friends, in costumes ranging from Captain Kirk to Lieutenant Uhura to Princess Jasmine (Marlee Murphy didn't get the memo), and four mothers, including Kerin Murphy, standing in my empty living room, eyes round and wide. At first, I thought they were admiring the restored beauty of the old place.

No such luck.

"Ready for the SafeOWeen?" Kerin asked, no doubt dredging up skills from a cheerleading past. The kids looked glum.

"Is your house really haunted?" Wendy, Melissa's best friend, asked. She hadn't even asked where Melissa was, and here she was inquiring after the deceased. "Can we see the ghosts?"

"Yeah!" A little girl named Sandy (I remembered her because she had been trading Melissa Twinkies for apples until I got wind of it) asked. "Where are the ghosts?"

"Do they wear sheets?" another one asked. The poor kid.

Melissa appeared at the top of the stairs. Her face registered angry, nervous and a little scared, mostly, I thought, at what vengeance I might take for her disobeying me so blatantly.

"I'm sorry, girls, there really aren't any ghosts here," I told the gathered assemblage, and in that first second, I must report that the mothers were the ones who looked the most disappointed, Kerin perhaps most of all-if I had a haunted house, she could probably put it around that I was a witch. "I know stories have been going around, but they're just stories. Like Aladdin and Princess Jasmine." I gestured to Marlee in the Jasmine costume.

"Princess Jasmine is real!" she insisted, and crossed her arms with great conviction.

"You're right, my mistake," I agreed. "But the ghost stories are just . . ."

And that was when Maxie appeared out of the floor, reached for "Captain Kirk's" communicator (made out of a painted-over McDonald's apple pie box) and made it "fly" across the room. She looked at me, sneered, and stuck out her tongue.

The little girl in the Kirk outfit yelled, "Hey-!" But then she stopped and realized what had happened, and her mouth dropped open.

"A ghost," said the Uhura girl.

"No, no," I told them. "This is just a big, drafty house, and sometimes the wind . . ."

"All the windows and doors are closed," Kerin said. Her smile was just a little evil. "There's no draft in here." I decided there and then to destroy her.

But Maxie wasn't finished getting her revenge. She pushed the hanging overhead light in the living room and made it sway. Then she made the communicator hover in front of Captain Kirk until the little girl understood she could take it back. And Maxie topped it off by picking up Melissa and carrying her down the stairs, then placing her gently on the floor. Melissa looked up and nodded at her.

"Thanks, Maxie," she said.

Maxie looked in my direction. "No problem, Melissa," she said. "I'll always be your friend."

"You can see them!" Wendy said to Liss. "You know their names!"

"I told you," Melissa said, very matter-of-factly.

Kerin stared at me. "There really is no explanation, is there?" she said in a cold, calculated tone.

I can't justify it. Maybe the pressures of the past few weeks just exploded out of me all at once. Maybe it was the imminent threat that I'd be deprived of my life in six hours or less. Maybe it was the scared expression on the faces of those mothers and the delighted ones on the faces of their children.

"Sure there is," I said loudly. "Yes, there really are ghosts in this house. Melissa and I can see them. We can talk to them. Why can't you?"

"Oh, there are not," one of the other moms protested. "You're just playing a Halloween trick on us."

"No, I'm not," I said. Suddenly, I felt like there was nothing left to lose-let the guesthouse idea go down the tubes. Let the rest of the town think I was insane or a "Wiccan Gone Wild." Let the fourth grade think my daughter was weird. "They're real ghosts. Real dead people, still existing in this house, and they can never leave. Go ahead, tell your friends! Tell your neighbors! The place is haunted, I tell you, haunted!"

Paul, attracted by the noise, floated into the front hallway and looked at the amassed children and parents, aghast. "What are you doing, Alison?" he asked.

"I'm telling the truth!" I shouted, and then I pointed at the mothers, who stood stock-still and widened their eyes to the size of Oreo cookies. "They all need to know, in case their kids want to play here! There are ghosts here, and they're not the least bit dangerous!"

Maxie picked up the little girl dressed as Lieutenant Sulu and swirled her around the room, something the girl (I think her name was Soyong) could not possibly have enjoyed more. She squealed with delight and clapped her hands when put back down.

Her mother, thankfully, was not present, but Kerin grabbed "Sulu" by the shoulders protectively, once she was back on solid ground.

"Any questions?" I asked.

The girls applauded mightily, and I noticed Melissa among the most arduous clappers. One of the mothers backed out the door.

As the kids each grabbed a mini Crunch bar and the remaining mom stood absolutely motionless, I pulled Kerin to one side. "I know you're sleeping with Adam Morris," I said. Mentally, I thanked Bianca for my newfound power: Kerin's eyes widened and her jaw dropped. "If you don't want that information in the hands of someone who'll use it"-why use Jeannie's name?-"you'll skip SafeOWeen and watch my daughter like a hawk door-to-door all evening, is that clear? Don't say anything, just walk away."

Kerin just walked away. Quivering.

Chattering with excitement, the girls headed out to an evening of sugar-fueled avarice. The mothers huddled together on the way out, and I knew that there was no chance I'd ever be elected PTSO president in my lifetime. If I had one.

I knelt down by Melissa before she turned. "You look wonderful, sweetie," I told her, and she gave me a hug. I made sure she took her cell phone with her, and told her to call in at half-hour intervals. I also reminded her of the eight-thirty curfew, and told her that under the circumstances, it was even more unbreakable than it would have been otherwise.

Melissa didn't argue. She was gone far too soon for my liking.

After all, it might have been a last hug.

Forty-seven.