Melissa looked like she was going to argue, but I jumped in: “She’s right, Melissa. You don’t know how bad things are outside. If it’s too bad, Mom’s not going to stay out there, either.” And I made a point of looking at Alison with a serious expression on my face when I said it.
We all walked over to the front door to look outside. Our first post-storm look at the street was harrowing: There were dozens of branches, some very large, blocking the street. One had come down directly on top of a 1988 Chevy Monte Carlo that someone down the street had left parked in his driveway. A power line was definitely down. Alison’s across-the-street neighbor Mrs. Arbogast had lost a whole section of her picket fence. There was a telephone pole four houses down leaning at a precarious angle.
But the rain had mostly stopped, and while the wind was still blowing hard, it was nowhere near the strength it had been the night before. Alison got to work on the front windows, and the light that came in as each board came down was a relief, beginning what we knew would be a slow return to normalcy.
Paul hovered outside on the porch as Alison worked, and Melissa and I watched through the front window.
“We should have a plan for when Sergeant Elliot gets here,” Paul said, pacing with his feet buried in the front porch.
“Why are you so nervous?” Alison asked him. “We’ll get out the nice tablecloth and he won’t notice we’re serving leftovers.”
“Very funny,” Paul answered. “But this case has become very puzzling, and I’d like to have a strategy for our meeting with our client when he arrives.”
“We ask him where the heck he’s been, why he was so hot to get his hands on that bracelet and then disappeared, and whether he knows the deceased woman who was flying through my guest bedroom last night,” Alison suggested, pulling down another board. The wind grabbed the board as she brought it down and pulled it all the way to the other end of the porch. “Maybe I’ll just do every other board so we can have light, but leave some up,” Alison muttered to herself.
Melissa called through the closed window, “I don’t understand. We know the bracelet is on Mac’s arm. Why can’t we just ask him for it?”
“That’s an excellent point,” I told her.
Paul puffed out his lips and rubbed his hands together. “The real question is why Mac has the bracelet with Sergeant Elliot’s name, and why Sergeant Elliot asked us for it.”
“That’s two questions,” Alison pointed out.
Paul ignored her. “The point is, Sergeant Elliot must have known Mac has the bracelet. He asked us to find something that could only have gotten to this house with the man who wears it. Why doesn’t Sergeant Elliot just reach over and take the bracelet off Mac’s arm if he really feels that he needs it?”
“He doesn’t want Mac to know there’s a ghost following him?” Melissa suggested.
“Why not? Once he has the bracelet and moves on, it won’t matter.”
“I get that,” Alison said in answering Paul, “but clearly Sergeant Elliot needed help, or he wouldn’t have asked for it. What I’m really wondering about is whether the female ghost in Mac’s room last night was there for herself or because the sergeant wanted her to be there.” She pulled down the middle board on the last window and asked Melissa and me, “Is it lighter in there?”
“Much,” I told her. “How bad is the wind?” It’s not that I couldn’t see it, but it’s not the same thing as being outside.
Alison hung the hammer in her belt and walked inside, where she could speak in a more normal tone. “Not that bad,” she said. “I think the worst of it is over. We’ll see how long it takes for the power to come back on.”
We looked back out onto the porch to find Paul, but he was gone.
“I guess he went to ask about the lady ghost,” Melissa said.
“Ghostmail,” Alison said. I think she was still trying the word out.
Maxine returned first. She did not descend from the ceiling, as I had expected, but instead came into the kitchen from the beach side, in the back. “It’s wild out there,” she reported before anyone could ask.
Alison, noting that the water in the basement was “just a puddle, really,” had brought the portable generator upstairs and set it up just outside the kitchen window, running an extension cord to power the refrigerator for a little while.
“Did you see anyone who needs help?” Alison asked her.
“No one’s out there,” Maxine answered. “But I got a little farther in a police car up and down Route 35. Part of the boardwalk in Seaside Heights is gone. The roller coaster is in the ocean. There are houses that are completely off their foundations; some of them all the way in the road. Trees are down all over the place. Nothing’s open. It’s going to take a while to come back from this one.”
“The roller coaster?” Melissa looked upset, so I gave her a hug.
“They’ll rebuild, baby,” Alison told her.
“How’d you get back?” I asked Maxine.
Maxine smiled. “There was a really cute group of National Guardsmen coming up from the south, so I hitched a ride,” she said. “What’s going on here?”
I recounted for her how Paul was presumably trying to locate the poor lost female soul Maxine had glimpsed, and that we were expecting Sergeant Elliot to appear at any minute. Maxine looked over at the generator.
“Will that thing run my laptop?” she asked Alison.
“You mean my laptop, and yes, it would. Why?”
“I can do a little research on Robert Elliot if I’m connected.”
Alison considered, but shook her head. “Not without Wi-Fi,” she said. “We’d have to run the modem and the network as well as the laptop, and I can’t keep all four of those things going at once.”
“Four?” Maxine asked.
“The refrigerator. I want to run it now so I might be able to use some stuff later when it’s dark.”
Maxine made a face but said nothing. She might be impatient, but she’s not unreasonable.
Paul rose up from the basement. “I’m drawing a blank,” he said. “Nothing from Sergeant Elliot, and nothing about the woman Maxie saw. Has Mac come back in?”
“Not yet,” Alison told him. “He really hasn’t been anywhere but his room much at all since he came two days ago. Except for this morning when we heard the branch fall, I’ve barely spoken to him.”
“He is an odd duck,” Paul said. “But I did get one piece of information I think might be useful.”
“And what would that be?” Sergeant Robert Elliot’s voice came from the darker corner of the room, near the door to the den, and again I was taken with how wispy his presence could be.
“Sergeant,” Paul said. He gestured toward Alison and Melissa. “These are my associates, Alison and Melissa Kerby.” Melissa smiled proudly at the distinction; she loves being treated like a valued member of the team, and Paul always makes a point of doing so.
Robert nodded in their direction, then reiterated his question. “You said you had a useful piece of information. Have you got my bracelet?”
“We’re not sure,” Paul said. “We have seen a POW bracelet with your name on it, but it was not in this house until a few days ago. It came in on someone’s wrist.”
“Really?” I thought Robert looked considerably less surprised than he sounded, but the light from the candles in the room wasn’t great for reading a transparent ghost’s expression. “Whose wrist is it on?”