“What’s new with the nut out on the old quarry road?” Pete asked, drawing me back from my musings.

“Lucas Tremaine?” Decker said. “Our copy editor, Brenda Brody, has been attending his-what would you call them, services?”

“Con games,” Seth said, guffawing.

“She calls them seances,” Decker said. “You know Brenda lost her husband a year ago.”

“Ayuh,” said Seth. “He was my patient. Fell off a ladder putting on a new roof. Damn fool was too old to be roofing.”

“Brenda’s a believer. I told her she was throwing away money, giving it to Tremaine, but when someone is grieving the way she is, you grasp at straws. She swears Tremaine puts her in touch with Russell and that they have long conversations,” Decker said.

“The man is a charlatan,” Doug Treyz said.

“Unconscionable,” added Pete Walters.

“There’s got to be a law against what he’s doing,” Doug said.

“If there were, Mort Metzger would have invoked it long ago,” I said, indicating Cabot Cove’s sheriff, who was dancing with his wife in the room behind us.

“Look at that.”

We directed our eyes to where Tina Treyz pointed. Two partygoers in moose costumes could be seen walking through the cemetery, their antlered heads silhouettes in the light of the full moon.

“Sneaking off for a little moose smooching, I suspect,” Seth said of the couple, smiling.

The festivities ended at midnight, but our host, millionaire Paul Marshall, invited a small group of us to linger awhile, including Seth and me. We gathered in the living room and enjoyed leisurely conversation after the crush of the party.

“I never really got a chance to talk with my guests,” Marshall said to me. “There are so many things that pulled me away during the evening.”

“It was a wonderful Halloween party, Paul-as usual,” I said as a waiter appeared with a tray of brandy, which I declined. “Thank you for inviting us.”

“Thank you for coming. Wouldn’t be as much fun without you. By the way, Jessica, you look terrific as The Legend. Are you sure I didn’t just see you haunting the cemetery?”

“This is the night she’s supposed to appear,” Seth put in, “but I can vouch for Jessica’s presence all evening.”

“Tonight was fun but-I just wish Tony Scott could have been here to share in it,” Marshall said, soberly.

“Yes, I’m sure you do,” I said.

“We were like brothers,” Marshall continued, waving the waiter away, “much more than business partners. I just can’t accept that he’s no longer here. When I first learned he’d died in that explosion and fire in our lab, I-”

A loud wail pierced the night air and all conversation ceased.

“I thought I told you to turn off the sound effects,” Marshall growled at a nearby moose.

“I did,” a masculine voice responded.

The wail rose again, raising the hairs on my arms. We rushed onto the patio and peered out over the dark property in the direction from which the sound seemed to have come. We heard it again, louder this time, now a scream, from the cemetery, or beyond.

“Good Lord,” Marshall said.

“I’d better see what’s happening,” Mort Metzger said, shifting into his law-enforcement mode.

He took off at a run, with the rest of us following. We raced through the cemetery, dodging tombstones and grave markers, the damp earth pulling at our shoes. The screams had stopped by now, but we followed the sound of sobbing. As we approached the Rose Cottage, two figures could be seen standing together near the bare branches of bushes that climbed the brick wall. They were in costume, their bodies so close together their moose heads touched as they slowly backed away from the onrushing crowd.

“Stand back!” Mort ordered, bringing us to a halt. But we weren’t so far away that we couldn’t see what had caught his attention. There, in a pool of moonlight, lay a motionless form. A stain, the same claret red as the roses that bloomed on this brick wall every spring, had turned the white hair to crimson. Those incredibly blue eyes were open and dull.

It was Matilda Swift.