And that was just during the daylight hours. By dusk, the younger kids would be all over the place trick-or-treating. Older kids like Jen’s brother, Brandon, and his friends would be lying in wait in alleys and on rooftops to ambush one another with eggs and paint guns and water balloons in the annual battle of Easties vs. Townies. Come nightfall, it was the adults’ turn. Every bar in town—and I don’t know the actual total, but for a small town, trust me, we have a lot of bars—was hosting a costume contest. At ten o’clock, the adult costume parade would take place on the main street of East Pemkowet.

It was going to be mayhem.

Which is why on the second day of ominous supernatural silence, Cody and I called for a joint meeting with Chief Bryant and Amanda Brooks to ask them to cancel the festivities.

It didn’t go over well.

Amanda Brooks was apoplectic—another of Mr. Leary’s vocabulary words and a fitting one—and ranted for a solid ten minutes about tourism being the lifeblood of Pemkowet, and how we were the only small town in Michigan to have weathered the economic downturn with our property values intact, which generated revenues that allowed us to have an excellent school district that sent a high percentage of its students to college, which in turn made more people eager to move here and raise families, generating more revenues that paid for things like, for example, the Pemkowet Police Department.

All of which was true, but beside the point. “None of that will matter if it turns into a fiasco,” I murmured.

She turned her acid gaze on the chief. “Tell me you’re not considering this, Chief Bryant.”

The chief sighed as though the weight of the world was on his shoulders. “Do you have any proof?” he asked Cody and me.

We shook our heads.

He steepled his thick fingers. “These . . . ghosts. They haven’t actually harmed anyone, have they?”

“No, sir,” Cody said. “But—”

The chief cut him off. “In fact, has there been any indication that their presence in Pemkowet is malevolent?”

“No,” I said. “But the duppy—”

“I don’t want to hear about the goddamn duppy, Daisy!” He’d raised his voice. “That’s a situation you assured me you had under control. Well, you didn’t, and now we’ve got ghosts. I’m not happy about it, but if there’s an upside to this whole business, we need to take advantage of it.”

Amanda Brooks sniffed in pointed agreement. “And I don’t understand why you’ve been wasting your time pestering my family.”

“Because I think the duppy was responsible for whoever took the Tall Man’s body,” I said stubbornly. “And they’re both still out there.”

“That magic watch you gave me says otherwise,” Chief Bryant reminded me. “Whoever took the Tall Man was human.”