Stephanie pushed through the kitchen door, went straight to the sink, and soaked a dish towel. She plopped the towel over her head, not caring that the water was running off and dripping onto the floor.

“I’m getting a migraine. I’ve never had a migraine in my life, but I’m getting one now.” She whipped the towel away and stood up straighter. “There. That feels better,” she said, turning to Lucy.

“All these people want dinner. That means we have to have two seatings. Ivan can preside over the first seating while Melody and I serve. Then I’ll take charge of the second seating while you and Melody serve.” Stephanie looked at everyone in the kitchen. “How does that sound?”

Lucy raised an eyebrow. “You think these people need a master of ceremonies?”

“No. I think they need keepers. Animal trainers. You think Sears sells cattle prods?”

Stephanie leaned against the counter. There has to be a better way of getting furniture money, she thought. Controlling this crowd of ghost chasers made police work seem tame. And Ivan was mad at her. She couldn’t blame him. She’d stripped Haben of its dignity.

She took a basket of toasted bread rounds and slid them into the microwave for ten seconds. When the house quieted down later, she’d have a chance to think. Right now all she wanted to do was get everyone fed as efficiently as possible. She removed the bread and grabbed a crock of butter from the refrigerator. “Melody, everyone starts out with a cup of chowder.”

Melody took the can of spray starch from the pantry shelf and freshened up her hair. Then she gave Lucy a thumbs-up and took a tray of chowder cups out to the dining room.

“You want some chowder?” she asked the man on Ivan’s left. Without waiting for a reply, she slammed a cup down in front of him. “Watch out for the fish eyes. I read someplace that fish eyes are poisonous. They make your tongue swell up so big it doesn’t fit in your mouth, and it turns black, then you choke to death. You ever see anyone choke to death?”

The man shook his head.

“It’s not pretty,” Melody said. “It’s slow. Real slow. Your eyes bug out of your head, your face gets purple, and your testicles swell up as big as watermelons, and when you finally die, you make a mess in your pants.”

“I read that article,” a woman at the other end of the table said. “It was in the May issue of Reader’s Digest, wasn’t it?”

The woman next to her shook her head. “I read Reader’s Digest from cover to cover, and I know for a fact that there was no such article. It was in one of those health magazines they have in doctors’ offices. I remember seeing it while I was waiting to get my blood pressure checked. I remember because the man in the photograph didn’t have any eyes. They’d fallen clear out of his head.”

Melody looked at Ivan and whispered from the side of her mouth, “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being upstaged.”

She distributed two more cups of chowder and stopped beside a fat man with a florid face. “Sometimes the poison liquid leaks out of the eyeballs and contaminates the whole pot of chowder,” she said. “But that only happens when you overcook the eyeballs, and we were careful not to do that.”

She looked at Stephanie, who was standing frozen with a basket of bread in her hand. “Lucy didn’t overcook the chowder again, did she?”

Stephanie only stared at her in astonishment. During the past couple of weeks she’d thought of Melody as a rebellious teenager, but she suddenly had a flash of insight, seeing her as an entirely different person. She suspected Melody wasn’t flaky at all. And she had serious doubts about her being a teenager. Melody was a performer; Stephanie was sure of it. And she had a wicked sense of humor.

Stephanie bit back a smile and wondered how she could have missed something that was now so obvious. She felt as if she were looking in that rearview mirror again, seeing an outlandish parody of herself as a cop being a teenager. She couldn’t even begin to guess what Melody was up to. Instinct told her it wasn’t anything bad. Self-preservation kept her from believing it one hundred percent.

“I’m sure the chowder’s fine,” Stephanie said. She leaned over Ivan’s shoulder, and whispered in his ear, “Better not eat it, just in case. I’d hate to see you try to fit a pair of watermelons in those tight jeans.”

“I understand you’re the young lady who talks to Tess,” one of the women said to Melody.

“Yup.”

“What sort of things does she say to you?”

Melody shrugged. “We talk about Eminem a lot. She’s heavy into Eminem.”

The woman looked confused. “You talk about M & Ms?”

“No. The rapper Eminem. Jeez.” Melody began collecting soup cups. “Mr. Jackson, you didn’t eat a drop of your chowder. How are you going to grow up big and strong that way? Oh, Mr. Billings, you didn’t eat yours either.”

“I’m saving myself for the main course,” Mr. Billings said. “What are we having tonight?”

Melody’s mouth curved ever so slightly. “Ham.”

Chapter 9

Stephanie left the cranberry glass hurricane lamp burning in the downstairs hall and crept up the stairs. She’d shut the widow’s walk down at ten and advised everyone to go to bed and wait for ghosts. Then she’d said a silent apology to Tess and warned her to stay away from the master bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Billings were in the master bedroom, and they were enough to frighten the ectoplasm out of anyone, dead or alive. She went to her room and quickly changed into jeans, a black turtleneck, and a heavy black sweatshirt. Then she quietly went downstairs and out the back door.

She took a deep breath, letting the sharp night air fill her lungs while her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She waved acknowledgment when Ivan signaled from behind the concealing lower branches of a giant spruce. He’d chosen good cover, she thought, moving to join him. She wouldn’t have seen him if he hadn’t flashed the light at her. She drew closer, and the jaded cop part of her went momentarily speechless at the picniclike atmosphere Ivan had created. He’d spread a blanket on twenty years’ accumulation of pine needles and brought a second blanket, a searchlight, binoculars, and a thermos of coffee. “Looks as if you’re planning on spending the night,” she said.

“This is my first stakeout. I wanted to be prepared.” And he wanted to make her comfortable. He wanted to keep her warm and safe and entertained. He would have rented a Winnebago if he thought he could have gotten away with it. Or better yet, he would have hired a detective and let him sit out here, freezing his buns, while Stephanie was inside, soaking in a hot bubble bath. And after the bubble bath…

Stephanie shifted uncomfortably. She’d never had a stakeout partner look at her quite the way Ivan was looking at her. It wasn’t difficult to guess what was on his mind, and it was almost impossible not to respond. She knew if she gave him the slightest encouragement, they’d be in the house, under the covers, and the mystery would remain unsolved.

Maybe it would be worth it. It wasn’t much of a mystery, anyway. It wasn’t as if there were drugs involved. And in actuality, no one had gotten hurt. There was just a dead guy who turned up every now and then, and he’d been dead a long time. He could hang around a little longer while they took a night off to make love.

She took a moment to think about it seriously and decided there weren’t many things more important than making love to Ivan. She finally understood the enormous importance of the bedroom. It was a place where love was exchanged and strengthened, and the more time she spent with Ivan, the less she understood promiscuity and infidelity. There was a bond growing between them. A collection of shared intimacies, adventures, problems, and dreams. Private whisperings held them together as surely as steel bands, and she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to sever those ties.

Priorities, she thought. It was important to get her priorities straight. Ivan and Haben were at the top of the list, but it was a toss-up for the number one slot. Her emotional choice was definitely Ivan, but her more practical intellect insisted on Haben. She owned Haben. She was responsible for it, and it would guarantee her security in her old age. Someone was threatening her success as an innkeeper, and she had to find out who and why.

Ivan had watched the transformation take place inside her by studying her face. For a minute there, he’d almost had her. Then a variety of emotions had tramped across, ending in steely-eyed resignation, and he knew they’d be playing cop for a while longer. “Determined to get to the root of it?”

Stephanie looked grim, not completely happy with her choice. “Yeah. I hope this works. I’d dearly love to know who broke my toilet.”

Ivan pulled her onto the blanket. “I think you have a toilet fixation. You’re almost as bad as Melody and pork chops. Besides, how do you know the flying dead man has anything to do with your bathroom?”

“Woman’s intuition.” Stephanie sprawled on her stomach and felt Ivan move next to her, cuddling into her side, throwing his leg over hers. “Ivan Rasmussen, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Sharing body heat.”

“As long as you don’t share too much. I wouldn’t want to be so distracted that I missed the corpse dangler.”

“Spoilsport.” His hand inched under her sweatshirt. Stephanie murmured an unintelligible warning, and Ivan responded with a gentle squeeze. “Just warming my hand.”

Yeah, right. Stephanie didn’t think his hand felt cold at all. It felt nice and warm. And it was performing skillful manipulations that were encouraging more of the doodah humming.

“You know what you need? You need some hot coffee. Hot coffee will warm you up,” she said, pushing at Ivan, trying to wriggle out from under him.