Sure enough, Maxine pulled Alison’s laptop computer out from under her coat. “All right, what am I supposed to be looking up?” she asked.

That was the very moment when all the lights in the house went out. The howling of the wind outside seemed much louder now.

“Okay,” Alison said after a moment, “things just got a little bit more difficult.”

Chapter 4

Mr. McNamara, Alison’s lone guest for the week, arrived back from dinner in town not long after. Although Alison usually doesn’t serve food to the guests, she told me she’d invited him to eat with us because of the upcoming storm, but Mr. McNamara had declined, saying he liked the wind. And the rain, when he’d left, hadn’t started in earnest yet.

I hadn’t yet met Mr. McNamara (who insisted on being called “Mac”), so I was a little surprised to see a man in his late sixties (a few years older than I am) wearing worn jeans, a long-sleeved tie-dyed shirt and an American flag headband that kept his shoulder-length straight gray hair out of his eyes. Very Willie Nelson. Alison handed him a towel to dry his hair and face, introduced us and assured her guest that she’d taken every precaution to ensure the safety of the house and everyone in it. Also, she’d put a battery-powered heater in Mac’s bedroom. I was proud to see she was such a caring and intelligent innkeeper. The only other such unit was in Melissa’s attic bedroom.

Mac seemed completely unconcerned about his safety. He just smiled, dabbed at his eyes a bit while his clothes dripped on the kitchen floor, shrugged, said, “It’s all cool, man,” then asked if there was a policy against smoking in the house. Alison told him there was after glancing at Melissa, but again her guest seemed unperturbed. “Okeydokey,” he said. “Thought I might go back to my room and dig the storm from inside for a while. Okay if I play the harmonica?” Alison assured him that would be fine and asked him to come out and play for all of us, but he insisted he wasn’t skilled enough to play for an audience.

There were three flashlights in use at the moment, one for Alison, one for Melissa and one for me. The rest of the house was illuminated by candlelight. I offered my flashlight to Mac but he declined, saying the candles gave off a much more mellow light (it’s possible he used the word “groovy”), and then quietly walked toward his room, guided by a beam from Alison’s flashlight. She had left two candles in his room.

“What is his deal?” Maxine wondered aloud as soft harmonica music began. “Has he been in storage the past forty-five years?”

“Maxie,” Alison warned.

“What? I kind of like him.”

“Let’s get back to the subject,” Paul reminded her. “Our case.”

Clearly, with the power off, we had been forced to reconsider our plans. Alison could not, as she’d planned, give each of the ghosts a flashlight for looking inside walls and other spaces where the rest of us couldn’t go; we needed the flashlights just to get around. And there would be no Internet access until there was power, so Maxine was unable to do any research.

Even cell phone use had to be limited to absolute necessity, Alison pointed out, because we had no idea when our phones could be charged again.

“We can charge them in the car,” Melissa pointed out. “We still have chargers out there.”

Alison nodded. She always treats Melissa like an intelligent, responsible person and doesn’t talk down to her the way some people do to their children. “That’s true, but we’d be using up gas, and we don’t know if the gas stations’ power is out, too,” she explained. “Why don’t you go get the little radio so we can find out a little of what’s going on?”

Melissa ran toward the stairs with her flashlight and up toward her room, where she had a little battery-operated transistor radio that looks like a race car. “We can get the news, at least, as long as that’s working. You should have gone home when you had the chance,” Alison told me.

“I would have gone home if I’d wanted to,” I told her. “But I didn’t want to.”

“You are incorrigible,” my daughter scolded. “You can’t be corriged.”

The harmonica music had faded away by the time Maxine, almost completely invisible in the dim light of the candles, swooped down from the ceiling. “I was up on the roof,” she said. “There’s, like, all kinds of wind going on out there. I saw a whole tree fall over three houses down. It missed the house, but that blue Oldsmobile down the street has made its last run to the grocery store.”

“We won’t be able to search for the bracelet until sunlight.” Paul’s voice came from over me and to the right somewhere. I couldn’t see him at all.

“The bracelet is the least of our worries right now,” Alison said. “I hope the house is still all in one piece by morning.” Her I could see, and she looked extremely worried.

Her expression changed completely when Melissa’s footsteps could be heard on the stairs approaching us; she smiled bravely and looked up for her daughter. “Got the radio?” she asked.

“Yeah, but it’s not working. I don’t know the last time we changed the batteries.” Melissa’s voice wavered a little. The reality of the situation—being cut off, in the dark and in the middle of a massively powerful storm—was beginning to set in.

“Don’t worry, baby,” Alison assured her. “I have a lot of batteries in the fridge. I’ll tell you what—you and Grandma change out the batteries in the radio, and I’m going to go start a fire in the fireplace so we can have some light and a little heat for a while; how’s that?”

Alison didn’t wait for an answer but headed for the den, where the fireplace was. I took Melissa by the hand and brought her to the refrigerator. But I caught her hand when she reached for the handle.

“Remember, honey,” I said. “There’s no power coming to the fridge now. So we’re going to open it only when we really have to, and we’re going to be really fast about getting what we need. If the power stays off for a while, we might have to cook everything in there, but if it comes back on soon, we’ll be keeping everything inside cold. Okay?”

Melissa got a look on her face that made her so closely resemble Alison in the dim light I almost did a double take. “There’s not that much in there to cook, Grandma,” she said. “A couple of eggs, a tube of cinnamon rolls and I think some apples, maybe.” There were also the remnants of the dinner I’d cooked tonight, and some extra supplies I’d brought with me. Melissa didn’t know that yet.

“And some batteries,” I reminded her. “Ready?”

Melissa nodded, so I opened the refrigerator door and pointed the flashlight inside. She stuck her hand in like a dart and came out with a package of C batteries. I closed the door as soon as her hand cleared it. “Good job!” I said.

We had just replaced the batteries in the radio when Alison walked back into the kitchen. “That’s great!” she said when she heard the static. “Can you find the news station?”

It took a little doing, but we tuned in an all-news station from New York. The news was not at all encouraging. “Hurricane Sandy is wreaking havoc all through the area. Power is out for tens of thousands of homes on Long Island, and we’re starting to hear reports of water in lower Manhattan,” the newscaster intoned. New Yorkers. It’s all about them.

“This could be a while,” Alison said, looking at Paul.

“Indeed. I think Maxie and I should alternate keeping a watch on the outside, make sure no serious damage is done to the house if we can.”

Alison grinned what she’d call her dopey grin, her eyes filling just a little. “Thanks to both of you,” she said.

“What do you mean, ‘both of you’?” Maxine asked. “I didn’t agree to that plan.” But she rose through the ceiling to take the first shift on the roof, which is one of her favorite spots anyway.