Alison looked at me. “Check your cell phone,” she said. “It’s weird that I haven’t heard from Jeannie or Tony.” Jeannie and her husband, Tony, were Alison’s closest friends. And she was right; it was unusual for them not to have called to see how she and Melissa were weathering the wind and rain, and to let us know how they and their infant son were handling the storm at their home in Lavallette.

But one look at each of our phones showed that they were both without service. “The tower must be out,” Alison said.

“There isn’t anything we can do right now,” I replied. “Come on, let’s go into the den and enjoy the fire.” We walked into the den, the largest room in the house, with its very tall and lovely wood-burning fireplace. With the windows boarded, it seemed darker than it would have otherwise, even though night had clearly fallen by now. Alison had put just two logs on the fire, though, and I saw that the pile of wood next to it was pretty paltry. She caught me giving the woodpile a doubtful look and said, “I have some more in the shed.”

“But nobody’s going outside tonight,” Melissa reminded her.

Alison hugged her daughter. “That’s right, baby. This should do us, though, and when you go to bed, we’ll take one or two of the guest blankets to keep you extra warm. Even with the ones I gave Mac, there are still plenty for us.”

“Alison,” Paul interrupted, “since we have the time, perhaps we can focus on the search we’ve undertaken on behalf of Robert Elliot.”

Alison closed her eyes for a moment in a gesture of frustration, I think. “We’re in the middle of a hurricane and we can’t really start searching until it’s light in here,” she reminded him. “What is there to talk about?”

But Paul seemed prepared for that question. “The real reason he wants to find that bracelet,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Melissa asked. “Don’t you think he wants it because his name is on it?”

“It’s possible he’s telling the truth,” Paul said, pacing in midair as he did when he was thinking through a problem. “But from what you’ve told me, Loretta, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of these bracelets distributed. Would he need to collect every single one in order to evolve to the next level?”

Melissa looked into the fire; it was always fascinating to watch the flames, but I think she was considering. “Maybe his . . . What’s the word, when it’s the thing that’s how you look at stuff?”

“Perspective,” Alison offered.

“Yeah, perspective. Maybe his perspective is different after all these years. Maybe it changed when he died. Did yours change, Paul?” Melissa can be very direct. Paul doesn’t like to be reminded that he’s no longer alive, but this time it didn’t seem to bother him because it was in service of his case.

“Yes, in some ways,” he answered, stroking his beard. “There are some things I don’t care very much about anymore, like the clothes I’m wearing or who’s elected to office. I do still keep track of the football scores.” When Paul says “football,” he means “soccer.” He was born in England and grew up in Canada. “But that’s more a way of passing the time now.”

“Did you care less about the people you knew?” Alison asked. I knew that when she first “discovered” Paul and Maxine, she’d asked if there was anyone he wanted her to contact, and Paul had declined. But later, he had asked her to find a woman he’d been especially fond of when he was alive, just to see if she was all right. That ended up being quite a story.

“I don’t think so,” Paul said after a moment. “The ones I cared about were still on my mind, although it’s possible I’ve forgotten some and don’t know it. But Robert Elliot has been a ghost for more than forty years. How is this relevant to his wanting to find the POW bracelet?”

“It raises questions,” Alison asked. “Why did Robert wait all these years to look for this one bracelet? Why is this the one that makes all the difference?”

Paul nodded, digesting the question. As he thought, probably without noticing, he lowered throught the air to floor level. “You’re doing better and better as an investigator, Alison,” he said, as if the rest of us didn’t know that already. “I wouldn’t have thought to ask that.”

“I don’t understand,” Melissa said, getting closer to the fire. “Sergeant Elliot asked us to find the bracelet. Does it matter why he wants it?”

Paul’s eyes, difficult to see in this light, seemed squinted. He paced more quickly, an action made all the more strange by the fact that he was up to his ankles in floor. “Not necessarily,” he said. “But Robert has all the same abilities as Maxie and me. He could have searched this house from top to bottom anytime he wanted to in the past forty years. Why haven’t we seen him before? Why didn’t he find the bracelet himself?”

“What reason would he have to lie to us?” I asked.

“A good question indeed,” Paul said.

We had no time to ponder it because there was a loud crash from somewhere inside the house. Alison leapt up at the first sound. “Was that a window?” she asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. She ran toward the main entrance room, the area where the sound seemed to have come from.

Melissa and I followed immediately, but as it turned out Paul beat us all to the front room. “I think it came from there,” he said, pointing toward the largest guest bedroom Alison has in the house, the one with its own private bath just off the stairwell up to the second floor.

“That’s Mac’s room,” Alison said. “Paul . . .” But Paul was already heading toward the door.

He was stopped there by Maxine, who must have heard the noise from outside and come directly down through the room. She emerged through the door to Mac’s room holding up her hands. “He’s okay,” she said. “He fell out of bed.”

“Oh my!” I said. “But he’s all right?”

Maxine assured us Mac was unharmed. Alison knocked on his door anyway, since he couldn’t have been aware anyone had checked on him. Mac called out that he was all right, but that it would be best if Alison didn’t come in, since he was, as he put it, “dressed for bed.”

“You don’t want to know,” Maxine said. “And he’s right: Don’t go in.”

“All right, Mac,” Alison said through the door. “Call me if you need me.”

As we headed back into the den and toward the fire (the only warm spot we could reach right now), Paul, who seemed suspicious of the incident, asked Maxine for a full report.

“He was lying next to the bed,” she said as we reached the fire. The ghosts, of course, didn’t care about temperature, but Alison, Melissa and I huddled by the fire and threw blankets around ourselves. “Luckily, his sheet covered up most of his bottom half.”

“What position was he in?” Paul asked, his eyes narrowed. He expected a certain answer, I could tell, though I couldn’t imagine what.

“Uh, the candle was blown out, so I couldn’t see much, but it looked like he’d landed on his left side. He didn’t seem hurt.” Maxine had her eyes closed to think. I often wonder if the ghosts can see through their eyelids, which are somewhat transparent, but this didn’t seem the moment to ask.

“What else?” Paul asked.

Maxine opened her eyes. “His left arm was stretched out in front of him, but it was dark. I couldn’t see if he had something in his hand, or anything.”

Paul’s jaw moved back and forth. “Good. Nice work, Maxie.”

“Oh, but that’s not the weird part,” Maxine offered.

Alison, eyebrow cocked and lips twisted, said, “Okay, Maxie. What’s the weird part?”

“I saw someone like us—a woman—making her way out of the room and through the wall to the outside,” Maxine grinned. She loves knowing something others don’t.

Melissa’s eyes widened. “Another ghost?”