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  I deflated a little. “True enough.” I scanned the room and crossed to the armoire. It towered over me, easily eight feet tall. I tugged on one of the metal pulls and the door swung toward me, emitting a faint scent of camphor. A few wire hangers rattled on the metal pole that stretched across half the opening. Drawers marched down the left side of the cabinet and I opened them idly. Liner paper with a faint gold stripe and a few rodent pellets were all I found until I got to the last drawer. It didn’t open as easily as the others and I gave it a sharp jerk, nearly falling on my fanny when it slid toward me to reveal white fabric crammed into the drawer.

  Spaatz and I exchanged a glance and I scooped my arms under the material and pulled it out in a crumpled ball. I found an end and flapped it, unfolding a white sheet. I arched my brows and poked a finger through one of two perfectly round holes, golf ball sized, in the middle of the cloth.

  “The Ghost of Christmas Past, I presume?” Spaatz said dryly.

  “Boo.”

  We stared at the sheet draped over my arms for a moment.

  “It must be Lonnie’s costume,” Spaatz said, rubbing a corner of the cloth between his thumb and two fingers.

  I was shaking my head before he finished. “Uh-uh. Lonnie was still wearing his ghostie disguise when he went through the window. He got rid of it out there somewhere.” I tilted my head toward the gardens and the cemetery beyond.

  “So who left that in there?”

  I bit my lower lip. “I don’t know, but it seems to me that more than one of your students wanted to make sure you would find ‘spirits’ on your ghost-debunking field trip.”

  A troubled look settled on Spaatz’s face. “This might explain why Braden came upstairs.”

  I nodded. “If someone was playing ghost on the landing, with or without special effects like Lonnie’s, Braden might have come up to investigate. Trouble is, even though this explains why he came upstairs, it doesn’t explain how or why he fell.”

  Spaatz widened his ice-blue eyes. A faint, half-moon scar curved from the outside corner of his right eye. “It must have been an accident, like the police said. He ran up to catch the ghost, caught his shoe on a tread, and fell.”

  “So why didn’t the ghost get help, instead of stuffing his costume in this armoire and disappearing?” I asked quietly.

  “Scared?”

  “Maybe.” The situation made me uneasy. I hadn’t liked it when there was no obvious reason for Braden to have come upstairs. I liked it less now that we knew someone else had been up here, someone who hadn’t bothered to get help for a critically injured teen.

  Spaatz and I descended the stairs and walked to the now-deserted parking lot.

  “What should we do with that?” he asked, nodding at the sheet I still carried.

  I chewed the inside of my cheek, undecided. “I guess we should take it to the police,” I said finally, “and tell them what we figured out about someone playing ghost on the landing.” I dumped the sheet into the trunk.

  “It probably won’t change their minds about it being an accident,” Spaatz warned, pushing the trunk lid down so it closed with a clang.

  “I know.” I sighed. “But we can’t just leave it here. I’ll take it by the station first thing in the morning. Then it will be the police’s problem.”

  Chapter Seven

  DUSK HAD FALLEN BY THE TIME I PULLED UP TO THE curb in front of my apartment, the remodeled carriage house offset from my landlady’s Victorian home. Clumps of trick-or-treaters carrying flashlights and pumpkin-shaped plastic containers for collecting candy ran excitedly down the sidewalks. Parents trailed behind, assuring the safety of the tiniest princesses and ninja warriors. A huge jack-o’-lantern with a goofy grin on its face glowed from the bottom step of Mrs. Jones’s veranda.

  “Yoo-hoo! Grace!” Mrs. Jones called. She waved a broom to attract my attention and I saw she was dressed as a witch, complete with pointy hat on her head. “Come help me hand out candy.”

  I obediently climbed the steps to the veranda and helped myself to a Snickers bar from the basket at her feet. “Had many customers yet?” I asked.

  She nodded happily. “Oh, my, yes. Quite a few. I do so enjoy Halloween!”

  In her mid-eighties, Genevieve Jones was still a go-getter, taking Meals on Wheels to shut-ins, practicing tai chi in the park, and generally meddling in the lives of her numerous nieces and nephews and their children. Tall and skinny and with a frill of white hair standing up from her head, she reminded me of a crowned crane.

  “Such a shame about the McCullers boy,” she said.

  I wasn’t surprised that she’d heard; Mrs. Jones’s network of family and friends kept her posted on all the good gossip.

  “He wasn’t really possessed by a spirit, was he?” she asked, leaning forward.

  I sighed. Mrs. Jones might get all the good gossip, but the rumor mill had usually distorted it beyond recognition by the time she repeated it. “Of course not. He tripped and fell on the stairs at Rothmere,” I said.

  “Twick or tweat,” a tiny bumblebee with blond curls said, holding out a pillow case. Two other youngsters stood behind her, a skeleton and a diva with a feather boa, oversized sunglasses, and chunky jewelry.

  “Aren’t you all so sweet?” Mrs. Jones said as I plunked a couple of pieces of candy into the bee’s bag.

  “Are you really a witch?” the skeleton asked apprehensively, his words muffled by his mask.

  “Just like you’re really a skeleton,” Mrs. Jones replied with a twinkle.

  The boy thought about it for a moment and then gave a satisfied nod before scampering after the bee and the diva.

  “They moved him out of ICU this afternoon.” I picked up our conversation.

  “I had a friend whose son was in a coma for twenty-four years,” Mrs. Jones said sadly. “Such a tragedy.”

  “And then he came out of it?”

  She shook her head as a posse of teens—way too old to be trick-or-treating—came up the walk. “Then he died.”

  “Hand over a treat or I’ll make you walk the plank,” a female pirate said. She had a red bandanna tied around her head and a lot of leg showed under her skimpy skirt with its ragged hem.

  A costume was no excuse for her rude tone. I skipped over the chocolate bars and gave her a packet of candy corn. She backed down the stairs and a Frankenstein’s monster, complete with green face and penciled-on stitches, replaced her. He looked a bit familiar . . . Recognition dawned in his eyes at the same time I realized who he was. I half stood, spilling some candy onto the veranda. “Lonnie!”

  He turned, like he might run off, but then I could see him decide to brazen it out. “The name’s Frank. Frank N. Stein,” he said as his buddies scooped up the spilled candy and put it in their bags.

  Mrs. Jones said, “Aren’t you a bit old for trick-or-treating, young man?”

  “I’m a kid at heart,” he said, getting a laugh out of her. “I still believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy . . . and ghosts.” He shot a sidelong glance at me on the last word.

  “Where’d you disappear to last night? The police are looking for you.” Should I call the police, try to detain him? I gave the thought up almost immediately. No way could I keep the six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound Lonnie here if he didn’t want to stay.

  “Let ’em look.” Lonnie gave me a slow, lazy smile, green makeup caking in his smile creases.

  “Ooooh, the po-po,” the pirate girl said with a mock shudder.

  “C’mon, Lon,” said a short Obama. Tyler Orey. “Let’s split, dude. The party starts in an hour.”

  “Happy Halloween,” Lonnie told me and Mrs. Jones. He poked a green finger at me. “You. Don’t go messing with stuff that ain’t any of your business. You hear what I’m saying?” He sauntered back down the stairs and followed his friends across the street.

  I stared after him in disbelief. Had he just threatened me?

  “There goes a bunch of kids who’re going to get in
to mischief before the night is over,” Mrs. Jones said, shaking her head so the witch hat tilted rakishly over one eyebrow. “Just you mark my words. They’ll be TPing houses or knocking over mailboxes or worse.”

  I dialed the police number on my cell phone and asked for Officer Parker. Not that I wanted to talk to Hank, but he and his partner were working the case.

  “There’s no point in calling the police on them yet, dear,” Mrs. Jones said. “I don’t think the police will take action until those kids do something. And maybe not even then,” she ended.

  “Hi, darlin’,” Hank said loudly into my right ear. “Did you want to pick up where we left off last night?”

  The smirk in his voice slimed my ear. I sighed and moved the phone an inch from my head. I quickly told him about Franken-Lonnie.

  “Now, Grace,” he said, a tsk-tsk note in his voice, “you shouldn’t be trying to do our job for us.”

  I’d heard that before, from Special Agent Dillon, and it stung. “I’m not—”

  “We interviewed Alonso Farber this morning at his home in that trailer park south of the old cemetery. He ’fessed up to setting off the fireworks without a permit and we ticketed him. Case closed.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s good,” I said, feeling a bit foolish. I remembered the sheet. Before Hank could hang up or, worse, ask me out, I told him about Spaatz and me finding the sheet. “I can bring it by in the morning,” I said.

  “You know I always enjoy seeing you,” he said, “but we don’t need that sheet. That boy’s fall was an accident, pure and simple.”

  I hung up with a growl.

  “You sound quite ferocious, dear. What is it?” Mrs. Jones asked.

  “Nothing,” I gritted between my teeth.

  More trick-or-treaters arrived, and I had calmed down by the time they left with their bags a bit fuller of teeth-rotting booty. I handed out candy for another fifteen minutes, chatting with Mrs. Jones between waves of Hannah Montanas, stormtroopers, witches, ghosts, and Disney princesses. She was happily quizzing an aluminum-foil robot when I said good night and strolled toward my apartment. I hadn’t reached the door when a horn honked. I turned to see my friend Vonda Jamison’s old station wagon with its Magnolia House logo on the side panel. A vampire waved from behind the steering wheel.

  “Vonda?” I approached the car and peered in through the passenger window. “What did you do to your hair?”

  My best friend had had me dye her hair red a few weeks back after a spat with her ex-husband, Ricky, who was also her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Now, Vonda’s short hair was jet-black and spiked around her gamine face. Her heavily made-up eyes twinkled.

  “It’s not permanent. I’m making a grocery run . . . we’ve run out of candy for the trick-or-treaters. Wanna come with?” She lisped the words around a pair of plastic fangs.

  Why not? I hadn’t talked to Vonda all weekend. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said, sliding onto the station wagon’s bench seat and buckling up.

  “I know. It’s just been crazy at the B and B this week. Which is a good thing, I guess. But I was missing my best bud.” She patted my hand. She and Ricky owned a twelve-bedroom B&B, Magnolia House, and lived on opposite sides of it so they could run the business and share custody of their son, RJ.

  “You and Ricky . . . ?”

  “We’re good.” She turned her head to grin at me.

  “Good.” I was relieved. Vonda and Ricky belonged together, but they both had tempers and their arguments were the stuff of legend in St. Elizabeth. As Vonda slid the car into a slot at the Winn-Dixie, I told her about my weekend. “I should’ve kept a closer eye on the kids.”

  She didn’t argue like I hoped she would. Giving me an incredulous look, she liberated a shopping cart from the train of them near the store’s entrance. “You chaperoned a ghost hunt? And Rachel’s boyfriend fell down the stairs?”

  I walked fast to keep up with her as she charged toward the candy aisle, not distracted by the lopsided pyramid of pumpkins at fifty percent off. Several shoppers, their carts piled high with bottled water and canned goods, strolled the aisles. One man gave Vonda, sexy in her clinging black vampire dress with the plunging neckline, the once-over. She bared her fangs at him and he jumped back into a cereal display, knocking boxes to the floor.

  “Or was pushed. Either way, it shouldn’t have happened,” I said, flinging a bag of Snickers into the cart.

  Vonda pulled them out and restored them to the shelf. “No chocolate. Only icky stuff. Otherwise, I’ll eat all the leftovers for breakfast and blow up like a blimp.”

  Vonda was a petite slip of a thing, no wider than an angelfish, who’d never been two ounces overweight, and right now her focus on the candy was beginning to irritate me. I flung a couple of bags of caramels into the cart. Vonda added some gum and candies the size of ping-pong balls that advertised themselves as “so hot they’ll burn through the roof of your mouth into your brain.” Irresistible.

  “So, do you think it was?” I prodded.

  “Was what?” Vonda wheeled the cart toward a cashier.

  “My fault.”

  “No, especially not if he was pushed. Do you think he was?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Rachel said he was depressed.”

  “Suicide attempt?” Thunk, thunk. Bags of candy landed on the conveyor belt. The bored-looking cashier scanned them without comment.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know how anyone with an IQ over forty could think that a fall down a couple flights of stairs would be guaranteed fatal.”

  “A gesture? A call for help?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. “Possible.” I looped my fingers through the bag’s handles and walked with Vonda back to the parking lot. A man and a woman stood arguing by the open tailgate of a Chevy Tahoe. The man looked vaguely familiar . . . It took me a moment to realize he was the man who’d shown up at Rothmere looking for Mark Crenshaw. His dad? The couple wasn’t shouting, but their faces were mere inches apartment and I could tell from the rigid way they held themselves that they were quarreling.

  “. . . last time,” the woman, dark-haired and petite, said in a louder voice.

  As I watched, Crenshaw flung up a hand and stalked toward the grocery store. The woman hesitated only a second before jumping into the driver’s seat, gunning the engine, and pulling out recklessly, clipping a shopping cart with the rear bumper as she peeled out of the lot. Tottering over the asphalt, the cart crunched into a motorcycle. Crenshaw spun when he heard the SUV take off, chased it for a couple of futile steps, then kicked at a discarded soda can, using his whole leg like a World Cup midfielder aiming for a goal half a field away. It sprayed caramel-colored liquid onto his slacks before rolling off the curb and under a sedan parked in a handicapped slot. I watched to see if Crenshaw would retrieve the can, but he headed back toward the store, pulling a cell phone from his pocket as he walked. Glancing at Vonda, I saw she’d missed the whole byplay, busy putting the groceries into the backseat of the station wagon.

  It didn’t seem worth mentioning, so we chatted about hurricane preparations as she drove back to my apartment. We arrived safely, not even clipping any of the trick-or-treaters dashing heedlessly across the road in search of enough candy to keep them on a sugar high until February.

  “Sorry this had to be drive-by catch-up,” Vonda said as I opened the door. “Let’s do lunch later in the week. Keep me posted about Braden.”

  “You bet.” I slammed the door shut and patted it twice. “Thanks for dropping by.”

  She grinned her silly vampire grin and pulled away.

  I went in and watched a bit of the Julia Roberts DVD but couldn’t get into it. Noise from the Halloweeners had tapered off, and when I peeked through the blinds, I didn’t see any costumed figures making the rounds. A dim glow to my left told me Mrs. Jones’s jack-o’-lantern was still on duty. I went to bed feeling unsettled and a bit weepy, and I knew the morning’s conversation with Mar
ty was driving my mood. It wasn’t like Marty and I had been dating for eons; we’d known each other only since May, and our relationship had always been a long-distance one, with him in Atlanta and me here. And I’d known from the start that his work was paramount to him. Still, I’d gotten used to thinking of him as my boyfriend, and he was the first man I’d slept with since Hank and I divorced and . . . Oh, hell! I punched my pillow.

  I must’ve drifted into an uneasy sleep because a loud bang wrenched me upright some time later. I looked around, disoriented, and heard another bang—coming from the direction of Mrs. Jones’s house— followed by a cut-off shout and the squeal of tires. My bedside clock read 12:30 as I unwrapped myself from the sheet. The wooden floor was cold against my bare feet as I raced toward my door. Pulling it open, I peered toward Mrs. Jones’s house. A line of vertical light slit the darkness on her veranda—her door was open. Uneasy, I headed across the yard separating my apartment from her house. Acorns and twigs cut into my feet and I hoped I didn’t stumble into a fire ant hill in the dark.

  “Mrs. Jones?” I called as I got closer.

  Nothing.

  I put my foot onto the bottom step and felt something sticky. Oh, my God! Blood? I scrambled up the steps to push the door wider but stopped when I saw a crumpled form lying across the threshold.

  Mrs. Jones.

  Chapter Eight

  THE OLD WOMAN LAY HALF IN, HALF OUT OF THE door, a thin form in a floral flannel robe. I knelt beside her and groped for her wrist. A pulse hammered under my fingers. Thank God. I kicked backward at the door with one foot to open it wider and get more light. I didn’t see any blood. The sticky stuff on my foot seemed to be pumpkin, and now that I looked around, I saw chunks of pumpkin scattered across the veranda and steps. I didn’t have time to figure out what had happened; I was afraid Mrs. Jones had had a heart attack. I rose and was about to enter the house to call 911 when a hand closed around my ankle. I jumped.

  “Grace?”

  Mrs. Jones sounded confused and querulous. I knelt again so she could see my face.