"Who isn't?" Maxie said.

"What do you think I should do?" I asked Tony.

"I don't see how there's a choice," he answered. "You've got to take the whole wall down and put up drywall. Maybe in the whole hallway, and possibly into the living room, depending on how it goes."

For a second, I forgot about the deceased people in the room, and thought only about my house. "Oh, Tony," I moaned. "I love the plaster walls. They give the place character. I can't make that room look like every other one built in the last fifty years."

Tony shook his head. "I don't see an alternative. But let me ask around. Maybe someone knows someone."

Maxie licked her lips and moved closer to Tony. She reached a hand in his direction again.

"Tony." My mind cleared-I had to get him out of here. "I'm not so sure I should be driving yet. Can you pick Melissa up and bring her home?"

"You drove over here this morning." Now Tony was going to argue with me.

"And I probably shouldn't have. I'm just a little tired now. Please?"

Paul nodded silently, as if Tony would have heard him even if he'd screamed at the top of his lungs.

"Sure," Tony said. "But I'm calling Jeannie and telling her to check up on you, too."

"Yes," I said, staring in Maxie's direction. "That'd be nice. Tell your wife to call me."

Maxie yawned.

"I will," Tony answered, matching my tone. Then he left, shaking his head, probably wondering if it was safe to go off and abandon someone as crazy as me in an empty room.

Empty.

As soon as I heard his truck pull out of the driveway, I turned to Paul. "Okay," I said. "Explain yourself. Why did I just hustle my friend out of here so we could talk? What do we have to talk about?"

"We need you to help us," Paul said, much in the same tone he'd said it before. Like it was a foregone conclusion, and anyone who questioned his word must be demented.

"What do you mean?" I asked. I should have known better than to ask, but my head was still a little fuzzy.

"We need you to find out who killed us," Paul answered.

Seven.

"Let me get this straight," I said. I sat back down in the lawn chair, having cleaned off the dried compound from days before, and remembering fondly the jeans I'd worn that day, now forever at the bottom of a contractor's trash bag. "You almost crush my skull with a fifty-pound bucket of compound, and then you think I should help you find out who killed you?" The fifty-pound thing was an estimate, but I thought I'd made my point.

"Geez," Maxie said, rolling her eyes. "Are you going to hold that against me forever? I said I was sorry!"

"Actually, no, you didn't."

She sneered, probably involuntarily. I got the feeling Maxie sneered a lot, and it had become second nature.

"It's tremendously important," Paul said. "And it seems you're the only one who can help."

"Help you do what? Why don't you know who killed you? Weren't you there when they did it?" I closed my eyes. Another headache was coming my way. And I was pretty sure it wasn't related to the concussion.

Paul smiled in an ingratiating way. "It's really very simple. Sit down."

"I am sitting."

"Right," he began. "Here's what happened, as far as Maxie and I can tell. Maxie here was the most recent owner of this house before you bought it," he said.

I stared at her. "You're the one who painted the walls the color of blood?"

I thought-but couldn't be sure-that I heard Maxie mutter, "It's my house," under her breath. If she had breath.

"But as soon as she closed on the property and moved in, strange things started happening," Paul continued, either unaware of Maxie's comment or ignoring it.

"Strange things?" I asked. "Like plaster walls that I can't replace coming down all by themselves?" I glared at Maxie for a moment, but she didn't flinch. And it was my best glare, too. My glare couldn't beat her sneer.

"No," Paul jumped in. "She started receiving strange e-mails, phone calls, and . . ."

"You don't tell it right," Maxie interrupted him. Paul spread his hands, giving her the floor. "So, some creep starts sending me messages about how I had to leave the house or I was gonna die." She snorted. "Guess he was right."

I turned to Paul. "How did you get involved?" I asked him.

"I am . . . I was a private investigator," he said. "Maxie contacted me when the threats started getting serious."

"I wasn't scared," Maxie interjected. "I was pissed off."

"Of course," I told her. "Who wouldn't be?"

Paul jumped back in. "Less than two days after I started investigating, we both ended up . . . like this."

"Yeah, good thing the retainer check never cleared," Maxie said. "Some private dick you turned out to be."

"It wasn't . . ." But Paul couldn't finish the sentence. He didn't know if it was his fault or not. I could see it clearly in his eyes. What bothered me was that I could see the window behind him just as clearly.

I didn't have time to answer because just then my phone vibrated (another unfortunately accurate metaphor for my romantic life). I looked down and saw Jeannie's number. "I have to take this," I said.

Paul frowned. "Don't you realize how . . ."

"If I don't answer, she'll send the rescue squad. Besides, you're not alive and I am, so I outrank you." I opened the phone. "I'm fine, Jeannie," I said.

"That's not what Tony told me," she answered. "He just called me from the truck. He says you were too tired to drive Melissa home, and you're talking like a crazy person."

"And how is that different than usual?" I asked.

"Normally, you're not that tired."

"Normally, I'm not just out of the hospital with a head injury," I reminded her.

Jeannie sighed. "Exactly. What am I going to do with you?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "But let me get going, because I'm two days behind on my repairs." Not to mention a lot of dried compound on the floor in the kitchen that wasn't going to clean itself up. We said our good-byes, and I moved toward the kitchen.

"If we can avoid any more interruptions . . ." Paul started.

Oh yeah, ghosts in the room! "What do you want now?" I asked. "Can't you see I have a crisis on my hands?" And on my kitchen floor, now that I remembered that.

"You have a crisis?" Paul demanded. "We're trapped in this house for the rest of eternity, and you have a crisis?"

I ignored him (partly because I didn't want to think about them being trapped in my house for eternity), and walked into the kitchen to survey the hardened white mess on the floor. I could break it up with a hammer, but that would mean sanding and refinishing the whole floor afterward. Another day and a half of work. "What do you mean, *trapped in this house'?" I asked. "Can't you leave the house? Go roam the countryside?" I looked at Maxie. "Haunt a punk-rock biker bar?"

Maxie picked up the mallet again and took a step toward me, but Paul stopped her. "Humph," she said, and scowled off into the living room. I made sure she didn't have the mallet with her this time.

"We can't seem to leave the grounds," Paul went on as if nothing had happened. "Every time we try to get past the sidewalk in front or the fence in back, we just can't move."

"Is this one of those things where you have some unfinished business here on Earth and have to get through it before you can enter the afterlife?" I asked.

Paul shrugged. "I have no idea," he said. "Remember? No handbook."

There was no sense in denial anymore-they were here, and they very much appeared to be ghosts. "Okay," I sighed. "Tell me what happened and what you want me to do."

"All right, then." Paul seemed pleased at my apparent cooperation. "The night . . . the night Maxie and I . . ."

"Died," Maxie shouted from the next room. She sounded disturbingly happy, and I chose not to dwell on why.

"That night," Paul continued, trying to pretend he hadn't hesitated, "Maxie and I went to a meeting of the Harbor Haven planning board. Actually, Maxie went to the meeting, and I went as her bodyguard."

"Another bang-up job," came the comment from the living room. Paul ignored that, too.

So did I. "Who needs a bodyguard to go to a planning board meeting?" I asked.

He took a deep breath-which was interesting, since I doubted he needed the air anymore-and re-boarded his train of thought. "There was a proposal to condemn this property and sell it to a developer. The only place you can be assured of making money on real estate is near the shore. Maxie was there to defend her claim on the house."

"They can do that? Just take the house out from under the owner?" How come I hadn't heard about any of this when I was buying the place? I'd have to get on the phone to Terry Wright the minute I was finished hearing the sad story of these two freeloading displaced spirits.

"Yes," Paul answered. "Assuming it gets approved by the various levels of the municipal government. But Maxie spoke up at the meeting, and the plan was rejected that night."

"I don't understand what that has to do with your . . . circumstances," I told him.

Paul frowned. "Neither do I," he said. "All I can tell you is that after we went out for a celebratory dinner, we came back to the house, and I was just about to leave for the night when we both collapsed."

"Collapsed from what?" I heard an ominous scraping noise coming from the living room. But I wasn't willing to deal with it at that moment.

"I don't know," he answered. "Something hit us very suddenly, because one minute we were fine, and the next, we were . . . like this. Here. And we couldn't leave, so there was no one here but us for days."

"So, what did you die of?" The heck with Miss Manners. You could tiptoe around the word only so long. They were going to be dead a long time; Paul might as well start getting used to it. Maxie seemed to have moved on emotionally, assuming she had emotions.

"I have no idea," Paul told me. "Our physical bodies weren't here when we became conscious. Well, aware."

"Well, you might have died of natural causes, then," I said. "Food poisoning. Some kind of fever. Swine flu."

From the living room came a flat, moist sort of sound. I guess Maxie didn't agree with my reasoning.

"We were definitely murdered," Paul said, his tone leaving no room for argument. "After the threats, and immediately after that meeting, it doesn't make sense otherwise. But since I can't get past the front walk, I need you to find out who did it and why. Alison, please. You can't imagine what this means. It's the last wish of a man who's already dead. You're special-you can see and hear us. You're the only one who can help."

There had to be a way to avoid a reply to that. "Where are you from?" I asked instead, stalling. "I can't place your accent."

"London, originally," Paul said. Damn! I'd thought Canada. "But my family moved to Toronto when I was six." Aha!

In the driveway, I heard the sound of tires on gravel. Perfect! "Tony is back with my daughter," I said, not to anyone in particular. "We can't talk in front of her."

I turned to walk to the back door. Paul moved toward me and reached for my arm. "Alison, stop," he said.

His hand passed right through my forearm. It wasn't an altogether unpleasant sensation; I would have expected it to feel cold, but instead it was a little like a warm breeze. I looked up into his eyes.

"Please," Paul said. His eyes were desperate.

Melissa opened the door and stuck her head in. "Tony says let's go out to the diner," she said. "He's buying." And then she turned and walked back out to Tony's truck. She knew I wouldn't turn down that deal.

"Please," Paul repeated.

The answer was a no-brainer. "No," I said, and went to walk out the front door.

On the way out, I saw that Maxie had picked up a box cutter and carved "WITCH" into the wall next to the hole she'd created with the mallet.

"Alison!" Paul called after me.

I got out as fast as I could.

Eight.

That first night back in the house was difficult, although I didn't see the ghosts when Melissa and I returned from the diner. I still wasn't 100 percent convinced I wasn't suffering the effects of a severe blow to the head. In fact, I wanted to believe I had injured myself severely enough to see things that weren't there. But the headache was gone, the bump had pretty much subsided, and when I'd called Dr. Walker's office to follow up, he'd actually gotten on the phone, asked me about symptoms, and told me I sounded completely recovered.

Okay, so I still hadn't told him about the hallucinations. The man was so busy; why trouble him?

Sleeping wasn't easy, particularly when I could've sworn that just as I closed my eyes, I saw Paul's head peeking in at me-through the bedroom ceiling. I resolved not to open my eyes again until morning, and fell asleep not long (maybe just an hour) after.

Melissa was grumpy and uncommunicative the next morning, which was not terribly unusual-she's not a morning person and she hates Mondays. I didn't even ask her whether she wanted me to cook breakfast; I knew she'd just glare at me and eat one of the small, single-portion cups of cereal I'd bought to use until I could get the kitchen into some kind of shape. After a wordless breakfast, she went upstairs, dressed, and came down to get a ride to school. I reminded myself for the umpteenth time to attend a board of education meeting and demand a school bus route.