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his canine bones that all was not as it should be in this house? That someone who had shuffled off his mortal coil still somehow resided here? At that moment, while she was still partially draped over Hobo’s back, the house lit up like an elaborate birthday cake. Every light inside went on simultaneously, as if someone had hit a master switch. Or a certain ghost was trying to make a point. Hobo yelped and danced backward several feet, dislodging Rory in the process. She picked herself up and snagged a handful of his fur before he could flee any farther. On any other night she might have enjoyed the light show, but given the current circumstances a less dramatic homecoming would have suited her just fine.
    It took all of her strength to drag the trembling Hobo indoors, and once there he stuck to her side as if he’d been sewn on to it, his tail tucked securely between his legs. Zeke was standing near the staircase, arms folded, glowering at them.
    “I thought you were taking the dog back where it belonged.”
    “So did I,” Rory said, “but as you might have learned some years back, and in this very house, things don’t always work out the way you’d like them to.” With Hobo matching her step for step, she gave Zeke a wide berth, dropped her jacket and keys on the bench beside the stairs and headed for the kitchen. She unhooked Hobo’s leash and filled a bowl with water for him. He wasn’t interested. His food was still in the car, but she doubted that he was any more hungry than he was thirsty. He was locked into full survival mode, which for the moment seemed to mean cowering under her protection. There was a pretty good chance that the marshal was his first ghost. She could empathize completely.
    Zeke appeared beside the center island, causing Hobo to give a high-pitched yelp of surprise and ratchet his shaking up to something measurable on the Richter scale.
    “I assume there’s more to the story,” Zeke said, his tone reminding Rory of an unpleasant trip to the principal’s office in junior high. “Seein’ as how you were gone for hours.”
    “Only if you consider murder worth mentioning,” she said tightly. “And I’d drop the attitude if I were you.” She pulled a half-full bottle of pinot noir out of the refrigerator and poured herself a glass. She needed a drink even if Hobo didn’t.
    She could tell by the way Zeke’s eyebrows had inched upward that she’d piqued his curiosity. But his jaw was still set hard. He wasn’t going to be bought out of his anger all that easily.
    Fine with her. If he was determined to be in a black mood, she had no obligation to coax him out of it. She took her glass to the table and sank into one of the chairs, her back to him. Now that she had a lap, Hobo wanted to be in it. She tried a variety of commands to dissuade him, before succeeding with “off.” Even then it took a firm voice and a lot of pushing to keep him on the floor. Denied that comfort, he burrowed his way under her legs like a self-guided hassock.
    Zeke was silent. Either he was still standing where she’d left him or he’d gone back to whatever dimension he inhabited when he wasn’t co-opting her life. She didn’t even bother turning around to check. She was finally starting to relax from the tensions of the last few hours, a sweet lassitude hitching a ride on the wine that was spilling through her body. She could almost have convinced herself that she lived in an ordinary house where the paranormal was trapped safely within the pages of books by Dean Koontz and Stephen King.
    A moment later Zeke popped into the seat across the table from her, shattering the lovely fantasy and causing Hobo to renew his campaign to launch himself into her lap. It took her another five minutes to calm the dog from panicked to merely frightened again.
    She thought of asking the marshal to confine his movements to the more traditional kind for poor Hobo’s sake, but he was probably trying to prove that he