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?”

“I think you know exactly whose wrist it’s on, and I think you’ve known all along,” Paul said. “Because the woman you sent for it knew exactly whose wrist to tug on.”

There was something about that phrase—“wrist to tug on”—that triggered a connection in my mind. “Mac said his hand smelled like chicken—that ghost was using my cup of pan drippings to grease Mac’s wrist and get the bracelet off, wasn’t she?” I said to Sergeant Elliot.

The sergeant looked stunned. His mouth flapped open a few times, and then he vanished into thin air.

“That’s becoming a rude habit,” I said, even though he was already gone.

Alison squinted at Paul as if he were harder than usual to see. “What was that all about?” she asked. I wondered if she’d seen Sergeant Elliot at all, but she had been looking in his direction when he spoke.

Paul let out a nervous chuckle, which is sort of incongruous coming from a transparent man calf-deep in floor. “It was a gamble, and I don’t usually approve of gambles,” he said. “But I think that one paid off.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I think I might have just solved this case,” Paul said.

Chapter 8

“Okay,” Alison told Paul. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”

“I can’t yet,” Paul answered. “The sergeant will be back, and I think we can help him, but we need to do a few things first. Where is Mac?”

“In his room,” I said. “Why?”

“Soon, someone will need to ask him to come out here,” Paul said.

Melissa began clearing dishes from the island and putting them in the sink. “Don’t wash them yet, Liss,” Alison told her. “We’ll have to boil some water first. The radio said some of the water supply is not being filtered because of the storm. We don’t know if ours is affected yet.”

“Okay.” Melissa looked up at Paul while Alison moved to fill a large pasta pot (which I’m fairly sure she never uses) with water in order to boil it for use later.

“I can knock on Mac’s door,” I said, “but he might be asleep.”

“You’ll have to wake him up,” Paul said.

Alison’s eyebrows rose. “Why don’t you do it?”

“I would, believe me, but Mac doesn’t see ghosts.”

“He’d feel a bucket of cold water if we threw it on him,” Maxine suggested. Her solutions to problems are often effective, but not always subtle. She’s always trying.

“You said before the sergeant came that you’d found something useful,” I reminded Paul. “But you didn’t say what.”

“In a minute. Alison, do you think the refrigerator has been running long enough to give Maxie a chance with the Wi-Fi network?”

Alison considered, then nodded. “We can let it go for a while; it won’t hurt anything. But there is some water in the basement, even if it’s not much. I want to get the extension cord down to the sump pump and maybe pump out the water so we can be ready before it gets dark.”

Paul seemed to agree; he looked at Maxine, who was already heading for Melissa’s room in the attic. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. Alison picked up a candle and headed for the door to get the things she needed for an Internet connection. Paul, pacing as if there were a floor beneath his feet, appeared to be considering options. His eyes were almost gleaming, even as they were transparent. I’d rarely seen him look so happy.

I didn’t want to disturb his train of thought, and Melissa seemed fascinated with watching him think, so I said nothing. But the facts of the situation with Sergeant Elliot and the POW bracelet were perplexing me in a way that I think escaped the others in the house. None of them understood, because none of them (aside from Mac) were old enough to have been part of the era the bracelets were made and distributed.

You weren’t supposed to take off a POW bracelet until the soldier in question was accounted for. Many people removed theirs, sadly, when it was discovered that the person whose name they wore had been confirmed as killed in action. Not nearly as many others received good news about their POWs, but there were cases of men—they were almost all men—recovered either from a prison or simply as part of a sweep of the area. It was years after the war was over for the United States before the bracelets stopped being fairly common sights on wrists all over the country.