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Todd experienced that terrified her so much . . .”
    I hate to bring up bad memories, baby. But being homicided myself, I can tell you the business isn’t a barrel of laughs.
    “Right, Jack. Sorry.”
    For what? You didn’t plug me.”
    That was when it happened. As my fingers closed around the cell phone in my bag, a chill enveloped me. It was a sudden, disturbing sensation, and I knew one thing instantly: This was not my ghost. No way. No how.
    Jack Shepard’s spirit, or aura, or whatever you wanted to call his existence, fluctuated around me like a kind of energy field. His typical “presence,” for lack of a better word, felt something like a pleasant spring breeze on a warm summer day. It was always moving, swirling, or pulsing like a beating heart. Jack felt like a field of living energy.
    Sure, he occasionally blasted me with an arctic chill, but it was always accompanied by an almost unconscious understanding of his mood. The cold I was experiencing now felt totally dead, without sensation or communication, like the lifeless chill of a coroner’s morgue slab.
    Whatever this was, it was disturbing. As soon as I felt the anomaly, I cried out. My breath formed a little steamy cloud, as if a New England winter had just descended inside the Second Empire’s front parlor. I quickly moved backward, toward the room’s exit; and within a few yards, the stifling heat of the June afternoon immediately returned. Tentatively, I moved forward again and stretched out my hand. Again I felt the cold air, as if I’d breached an invisible curtain.
    “Oh, my God, Jack. I don’t know what or who this is—”
    Get out of here! NOW!
    Jack didn’t have to tell me twice.
    More than a little unnerved by the bizarre phenomenon—not to mention poor Miss Todd’s corpse—I waited until I was outside before I made the call. But I didn’t dial 911, or put a call through directly to Chief Ciders office. Instead I called my friend Eddie Franzetti, Deputy Chief of the QPD.
    Since I’d moved back to my hometown, Chief Ciders and I had clashed numerous times. At first, I thought the chief was nothing more than a tool of the small-minded town council, a body ruled by the manicured fist of Marjorie Binder-Smith, who had no love for me, my aunt, or our bookshop. But I’d since revised that opinion. Ciders’s more recent animosity, I decided, was simply the result of my tendency to show up his police force.
    Fortunately, Eddie Franzetti was different. Married with children, Eddie had escaped working in the family’s pizza restaurant by joining Quindicott’s finest instead. After a rocky start on the force, Eddie had helped me close a case or two. Consequently, when the Staties made him an offer, Ciders was forced to recognize his value and promote him to second-in-command.
    Eddie was more than just deputy chief, however, he was also my late older brother’s best friend. I was happy to call him my friend, too; and that was why, whenever I needed a cop, I called Eddie.
    He answered on my second ring. “Pen! I know what you’re calling about. I’ve been meaning to get to the store and pick up those Narnia books you’re holding for my kids. I just haven’t had the time—”
    “This isn’t about my business, Eddie. It’s about yours,” I interrupted. “There’s trouble at Miss Timothea Todd’s house. The address is 169 Larchmont—”
    “I know where Miss Todd lives,” he said, a note of irritation in his voice. “What’s the problem this time?”
    This time? Jack echoed in my head.
    “She’s dead,” I told Eddie, ignoring Jack.
    “Aww, no,” Eddie said. “When?”
    “When? I don’t know. I just found her—”
    At least thirty minutes, but no more than three hours. That’s my estimation by the look of the remains. Tell him.
    I did. “But, like I said, Eddie,” I added, “I just found her. Listen . . . I think she was murdered.”
    “Are you there now?”
    “Yes . . . I’m outside her house, in front of my