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car.”
    “Stay there, I’m on the way. And do not touch anything.”
    “I know! I’m not a rookie anymore, you know—”
    Eddie hung up before I had a chance to ask about his previous encounters with Miss Todd. I closed the phone, shoved it into my shoulder bag, and thought again about that freezing curtain of air in Miss Todd’s living room.
    “There was definitely a cold spot in there,” I told Jack. “In Miss Todd’s house, I mean.”
    Yeah? And?
    “And nothing. That’s just what the phenomenon is called. I mean, according to those occult books in my store.”
    It’s a creaky old house. Could be all you felt was a draft.
    “You sure are changing your tune from a minute ago, when you ordered me to scram. Weren’t you picking up anything? You know, like a psychic vibration of a fellow spirit?”
    I wanted you out of there for your own good. It’s not too long a crap shoot that the murderer’s still in that house.
    “Well, listen, okay. Unexplained cold spots are found in haunted places. You’re a cold spot, for goodness’ sake.”
    Now ain’t that a rotten apple to throw.
    Jack’s irritation was easy to hear, and he got a whole lot colder. “You know, you have an awful lot of attitude for a ghost.”
    Wailing sirens cut off any reply from Jack. A few moments later, a Quindicott police cruiser was bouncing up the mansion’s cobblestone drive, trailed by the volunteer fire department’s ambulance. Jack noticed the ambulance the same moment I did.
    Your second meat wagon of the day.
    “Second?”
    What, you already forgot about that hearse train you caboosed onto?
    “Oh, yes.” I closed my eyes, remembering the electrocuted electrician, and took a breath. Death, death, and more death, I thought, then exhaled. “I’m really glad Eddie’s here.”
    But when the cruiser stopped behind my compact, it was Chief Wade Ciders’s bulky body that emerged from the passenger seat. His even bigger nephew, Deputy Bull McCoy, climbed out the driver’s side.
    “Where’s Eddie Franzetti?!” I blurted out, rather undiplomatically.
    Ciders’s black boots clomped across the cobblestones until his giant shadow fell over me. He wasn’t fat so much as large, with a broad nose, a jowly face, and a barrel chest that strained the shirt of his blue uniform.
    The chief had been on the QPD going on thirty years now. He’d been happily married to the same bride for even longer. He had grown children and small grandchildren. But the pettiness of small-town law enforcement had taken its toll on the man (or at least that was my theory).
    Decades of dealing with routine drunk and disorderlies, traffic accidents, and teen vandalism would have been enough to dull the edge of any gung-ho rookie. But Ciders’s job as chief of police included years of butting heads with loud-mouthed City Hall bureaucrats, every one of whom had an opinion on how he should enforce the town’s ordinances. By now, I could almost understand Ciders’s knee-jerk reaction to any crime scene, serious or trivial: For him, it seemed to come down to how much time the confounded case was going to take away from his fishing trips and card games.
    “I thought Eddie was coming,” I said in a less hysterical tone.
    Adjusting his ten-gallon chief’s hat (the rest of the force had the regular flat-topped kind), Ciders regarded me. “I sent my deputy chief to fetch the medicl ’xaminah . Not that the management of my police pahsonnel is any of yowah business, Mrs. McClu - wah .”
    I winced. Here we go . . .
    Stiffen your spine, baby. This scowling speed-trap jockey has less than half your brains. And don’t get me started on his idiot nephew. That’s who the big jerk is, right? Standing there with that not-too-bright look on his face.
    “Yeah, Jack,” I silently told him. Bull McCoy was essentially Chief Ciders’s 2.0: a much bigger, much younger, much dumber version of the original model.
    Ciders moved closer, until we were literally standing toe to