“In here,” Derek said, gesturing to the doorway to the living room. I took a breath and plunged through.

Venetia was lying on her stomach in the middle of the floor, and there wasn’t as much blood as I’d feared. Her gray hair was matted, and a smallish puddle had soaked into the rose-colored carpet by her head, but that was all. And she looked pretty peaceful, all in all. Her eyes were closed, and her teeth weren’t bared or anything weird. She looked like she was sleeping, except for the fact that she was clearly not present anymore. Her soul, for lack of a word less fraught with controversy, had left her body.

Until we bought the house next door to Venetia ’s, I’d always thought ghosts were a bunch of hooey. People died and were buried, and that was that. But now, with unexplained footsteps walking down the hallway next door, I wasn’t quite so sure. Maybe the soul really does survive the death of the body and goes somewhere else. Or stays where it is, hanging out, as the case may be. In certain circumstances, anyway; maybe when death comes unexpectedly. Maybe Venetia ’s soul was still hanging around, too. I looked around nervously, but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“Avery was here yesterday,” Derek explained to Wayne and Brandon, who were busy looking around. “I thought maybe she’d notice if anything was missing or looked wrong. Avery?”

He turned to me. I shook my head. “It looks just like it did yesterday. Except that she’s changed her clothes since I saw her. Yesterday afternoon she was wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt. This looks like pajamas.”

Venetia ’s compact body was encased in a plain, white T-shirt and a pair of flannel lounge pants in shades of blue, green, and red plaid.

“ Maine tartan,” Derek said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s the official Maine tartan. Designed in the 1960s by a guy named Sol Gillis. The light blue is for the sky, the dark blue for the water, the green for the pine forests, and the red for the bloodline, or the people, of Maine.”

“Huh,” I said.

“I thought you’d want to know,” Derek answered with a shrug.

“Well, whatever it is, she wasn’t wearing it when I saw her. She must have put it on later. So she must have been killed late at night, after she got ready for bed.”

“That’s what we’re thinking,” Wayne nodded. “Her bed’s been turned down, but not slept in, and there’s a book on the sofa and a mug of cold tea on the table.”

“I notice you didn’t disagree with the idea that she was killed.”

He shook his head. “Not much doubt about that. She’s in the middle of the floor, there’s nothing she could have hit her head on accidentally, and she couldn’t have reached back and knocked herself out, either. Especially not with this big thing.” He toed one of the pieces of the large fake magnolia arrangement.

“I guess not,” I agreed. So someone must have gotten in somehow after all the hoopla died down last night, and had conked Venetia on the head. But why?

I looked around. “It doesn’t look like anything’s missing. All the collectibles are still here,” and Venetia had had enough Gone with the Wind paraphernalia to make a fortune on eBay, “and so are the TV and the silverware on the table and the antiques, what few she owned. Most of this is reproduction furniture.”

“You’d know,” Derek said, making a sly reference to the fact that my ex-boyfriend and former boss, Philippe, had been a furniture maker.

“Unless we find a hidden safe somewhere,” Wayne said, “and it’s been cleaned out, it doesn’t appear as if robbery was the motive.”

I had to agree. “Do you think it has something to do with what happened in our house? Finding the bones?”

Wayne looked like he might have hesitated for just a second. “Likely there’s a connection, yeah. Somewhere. When two unusual things happen back-to-back like this, usually they’re connected somehow. When you saw her yesterday afternoon, how did she seem?”

I shrugged. “Just like always. Tart. Full of questions about what was going on next door. We talked a little about the people she’d seen around the house, because I was trying to figure out whether Venetia might know who the skeleton was, or who might have put her there. Without realizing she knew it, of course.” I went through the list of individuals Venetia had mentioned, who had been seen in or around the house over the past few years. “That reminds me,” I added, digging in my pocket for the earring, “I found this in the kitchen next door a couple of days ago. We thought it might have belonged to one of the Murphy women, but Mr. Nickerson, at Nickerson’s Antiques downtown, says it’s not old enough. And Shannon McGillicutty has a similar pair, which she says Josh gave her for Christmas a few years ago.”

Wayne nodded to Brandon, who pulled a little Ziploc bag out of his pocket. I dropped the sparkly drop into it, and he sealed it and, after a moment’s hesitation and a glance at his boss, put it down on the gleaming surface of the coffee table. I opened my mouth to ask if he recognized it, but before I had the chance, Wayne continued.

“It was in the kitchen?”

I nodded. “In the dust where the fridge used to be. See, Derek ditched the old fridge and stove the day we started work because…” I stopped, feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“Because of what?” Wayne prodded. I swallowed.

“Because there was a spill of something down the side of the stove. From the corner. We thought it was tomato sauce or ketchup…” I trailed off, fully aware of how lame the excuse sounded. We’d talked about tomato sauce and ketchup, yes, but what had caused us to hustle the appliances out of the house in a hurry, was the thought that the spill was blood. I’d assumed the blood to be from one of the Murphys, but now…

“Where are the appliances now?” Wayne asked. Derek gestured with his thumb.

“The dump. They were more than twenty years old, so I doubted even the reuse center would want them. I loaded them in the truck and drove them out to the landfill. Didn’t want them sitting around, even in the Dumpster.” He grimaced.

Wayne nodded to Brandon, who left, without a word being exchanged.

“They were red,” Derek called after him. He added, for our benefit, “No sense in him wasting time looking at every white and almond and stainless steel stove he sees.”

“Maybe we should go with him,” I suggested. “We’re cluttering up Wayne ’s crime scene as it is. Is Brandon finished next door, so we can go back to work, or does he still have things to do?”

“There are no more bodies in the crawlspace,” Wayne answered, walking with us toward the back door of Venetia ’s house, “and none on the rest of the property, either. Just the one we’ve already got out. With this new victim, and figuring out who the old one was, and processing the stove and fridge when we find them, not to mention the work you two have already done tearing everything useful outta there, I’m gonna say that Brandon’s probably finished. But it might be a good idea to wait until tomorrow anyway, just to get rid of the crowds and the reporters before you go back in.”

I nodded. Made sense.

“If you’d wanna ride with him out to the dump to see if maybe you can expedite things, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“I’ll do that,” Derek said. “Maybe he can drop me off at Cortino’s on the way back into town.” He jogged after Brandon, who was in the process of getting into his cruiser.

Daphne the state trooper was packing things up, too, letting Hans into his special compartment in the K-9 vehicle. I guessed their job here was done. Wayne excused himself to go talk to her, and I stood on the lawn for a second, at loose ends, before I trudged back to the neighbors. Word would be out in a few minutes anyway, and they’d already started speculating-wildly-so maybe it would be better just to tell them the truth instead of allowing them to perpetuate the myth that Venetia had murdered untold numbers of people and hidden them in her house.