"Oh, yes. Harry is Esther's dead husband. He appeared to me at the seance tonight." Hannah nodded her head very matter-of-factly.

I leaned my head on the back of the couch. This was probably not going to be a comfortable conversation, given this man's obvious issues with the supernatural.

"Harry told me that the missing bracelet originally belonged to his previous girlfriend, Hester Diamond. His spirit must have thought Hester was at the seance, not Esther. Must have just misheard me or something. Whatever, he told me that when Hester returned the bracelet, he saved it and gave it later to his Esther. Yikes. What a mess, right?" She twirled her blonde dread and gave us both a sad smile.

"Let me get this straight," Miles said. His brow was furrowed, and I squinted to picture him as an older man with wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. "You're telling me that you conjured up the spirit of Mrs. Sena's dead husband, who confessed to having given the same bracelet to two different women."

"Yup," I said.

"And Hannah, you actually heard the voice of this dead man?"

"I'm a witch. And a medium, Officer Denton," Hannah said. "It's what I do."

"Right." He scratched a few words into his notebook.

"But wait," I said. "There's more! Hannah, tell us about the other things you saw. You never got a chance to tell me about the other folks you heard from. The troll. The old lady."

"The troll?" Miles Denton had gone from mildly confused about the whole seance thing to looking like he might want to bolt from my apartment.

"Oh, yikes, yes. While you and Esther were leaving my shop, Maddie, I was still in that weird state of mind? You know how I get when I've been visiting with spirits?"

"Yeah, go on," I said.

"Well, this troll with the blue hair and those crazy googly eyes appears to me and says one word."
Both Miles and I leaned forward, and Hannah mirrored us. She leaned in toward us and bit her lip. I worried for a moment if she'd forgotten the damn word.

"What?" she asked.

"What, what?" I said. "What's the word? The troll's one word? Jeez!"

"Bingo!" exclaimed Hannah.

"Bingo?" Miles fell back into his chair. "What in the world?"

"Why would there be a troll appearing to you after hearing from Harry Sena, and why would it only have one word to say to you, and why would it be 'Bingo', for gods' sakes?" I had my eyes closed while I talked, trying to focus on these new revelations.

"Because," said Sedona, "people take trolls to bingo games for good luck, silly."

No mistaking her for Hannah's voice this time, because Sedona had curled up on the coffee table that sat between all of us. "You closed the kitchen door, Madeline. Makes it difficult for a cat to get out. Sorry not sorry." She stood up, rocked back and forth a couple of times, judging for distance, then leaped to the arm of the sofa, turned toward Miles Denton, and lifted a front paw. "Hi there, handsome."

Ooh, I could only imagine the headache building up inside his head at this point.

"Um." He couldn't break eye contact with my cat.

"That's right," she said in her smooth lower register. "The witch's cat talks. And yes, I did wave at you from the rooftop earlier."

Well, so much for soft-peddling the fact that I was involved in more-than-your-everyday witchcraft. And so much for the hope of ever feeding that infinitesimal ember that I'd sensed from the moment I laid eyes on this man. I guess it's best to always be truthful, especially when it comes down to being true to yourself, but damn, I kind of wanted to let our immediate chemistry lay the foundation of some sort of relationship here before I brought out every last broomstick from the closet, you know?

"Officer Miles Denton, meet Sedona, my cat and my familiar. Sedona, thank you for your troll insight." I sighed. "Can I get you that beer now, Officer?" I stood up and started toward the kitchen. "Because I'm ready for one, that's for sure."

His mouth did that fish-out-of-water move. Open, close, open. I sighed again and went to grab two beers.

"There's more," Sedona said when I returned. Miles looked at his phone, cocked his head, and finally accepted the beer.

"Ah, well, of course there is," I muttered.

"Well, I've been trying to tell you all night, but you've been busy chasing your own tail, Maddie." Her tail twitched. "It's about that Mrs. Peterson woman who lives down the street. Old lady, she's been in the shop a couple of times. Bent almost in two because of the hump on her back. Looks like a shelf bracket? You know who I'm talking about?"

"Peterson?!" Miles Denton practically shouted.

"Peterson?" I asked at exactly the same moment. We looked at each other and I almost said, "Jinx!" but I didn't want him any more spooked than he already was.

"Why does that name mean anything to you?" I asked him.

"Never mind," he answered. "It's confidential. It's business. It's..."

"Wait," I interrupted. "The only Peterson I know is the woman who was at the station at the same time as me, yesterday morning. The one who was complaining about the construction guys and the landlord. Maybe you hadn't come out to the front desk yet." I closed my eyes to look back at my memories.

"Was she all stooped over?" Hannah asked.

"Yes, she was. She's been in the shop several times. I kind of sort of recognized her." I visualized Mrs. Peterson again. "And hey! She wrote her address down for Chief Whatshisname, MilkCarton, and the piece of paper she wrote it on got accidentally swept into my carpetbag!" I was getting really excited now. This couldn't all just be coincidence.

"And what's more," said Hannah, who was waving her hand in the air like a fourth-grader who knew the answer in class, "is that she, Mrs. Peterson, must be the old lady who appeared to me right before the lucky bingo troll as the seance was wearing away!"

We all stopped, stunned.

"Excuse me?" Sedona was down on the floor at this point, stretching. Her front claws were extended into my area rug and she was pulling her body away from them.

She yawned. "I know this seems crazy, but perhaps we could take turns. Talking, I mean. Far be it from me, a talking cat, to try to steal the show, but hey, all you have," she looked at me, "is a piece of paper with an address. And you," she looked at Hannah, "all you have is a wisp of a dream state. And you, tall, dark, and purrrfect," she turned delicately to face Miles, "have nothing to offer, since you're busy keeping secrets."

It was an awkward moment, but I love awkward moments. They tend to be the spice in those slide show memories.

"Okay, shoot," Miles said. He took a deep pull from his beer and picked up his notebook again.

"You see, Officer, being a cat offers a unique opportunity to me. I get to listen to all kinds of conversations and slip inside all kinds of windows and sometimes doors," Sedona gave me a sideways smirk, "that would be closed to me if I were human. When I was so rudely locked up here earlier this evening, I needed to take the ledges and landings approach to get up to the rooftop, which means my first stop was the window on second. It's the only window you can count on to be open all the time, although sometimes that lady on four, what's her name, Marian something? No, Martha? Anyway, sometimes she leaves the fourth-floor window open, but there's just no guarantee--"

"Sedona! Get to the point!" I had the strangest feeling that she was trying to draw this out just to get back at us for all the times I'd let her down.

"Ah. Well, I saw Mrs. Peterson. Running from Esther Sena's apartment. Well, if you could call that little scuttle a run. She had a frightening look on her face. She left the door ajar, so I went in, thinking maybe some of those boxes on her counter may be open. Her door was still open, after all, and how do I know when my next bite will be these days?"

I rolled my eyes and my head fell back on the couch.

"Hmm," said Miles. So Mrs. Peterson was visiting Mrs. Sena tonight." He scribbled a few words down.

"But that's just the first chapter of that story," said Sedona. "Later, when I was so rudely locked up on the roof," and here she sent a glare my way, "I had to stop on that floor again to get my bearings after all those greasy fire escapes from six to five, then those skinny ledges between four and three?"

"Sedona!" I just about shouted.

"Yes," she said very softly. "I stopped once again at Ms. Esther's place, call it a cat's curiosity, hmm? Never know what you've left behind. And the door, well, it was still open."

I was ready to explode. "Just get to it, if there even is a point, Sedona! Ms. Esther was there, wasn't she? She should have been sleeping by then. What time do you think this was?" I picked up my phone and studied it, playing with time inside my head.

"Oh, she was in there all right," Sedona answered. "But she wasn't sleeping."

"What do you mean?" Miles asked.

"I mean," said Sedona, and she licked her left paw, leaving a deliberately dramatic silence, "that Esther Sena is dead."