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could have been here to share in it.”
    “Yes, I’m sure you do,” I said. I tasted the brandy, then put the glass down. The natural heat felt good going down, but I was tired and knew the drink would make me more so.
    “We were like brothers,” Marshall said, waving the waiter away, “much more than business partners. I just can’t accept that he’s no longer here. When I first learned he’d died in that explosion and fire in his lab, I—”
    A loud wail cut through the air. All conversation stopped, and the small cluster of guests looked up.
    “I thought I told you to turn off the sound,” Marshall growled at a nearby moose.
    “I did,” the masculine voice responded.
    The wail erupted again, raising the fine hairs on my arms. We jumped up as a group and rushed onto the patio, where we peered out over the dark property in the direction from which the sound seemed to have come. We heard it again, louder this time, now closer to a scream, coming from the cemetery, or beyond.
    “Good Lord,” Paul said.
    “I’d better see what’s happening,” Mort said, instantly shifting into his law enforcement mode.
    He took off at a run, the rest of us following. We raced to the cemetery, the damp earth pulling at our shoes. Dodging tombstones and grave markers—nothing there—we continued running downhill toward the Rose Cottage. The screams had stopped by now, but we followed the sound of sobbing. As we approached, two figures could be seen standing together near the bare branches of rose bushes that climbed the brick wall. The two people were in costume, their bodies so close together their moose heads touched.
    “Stand back!” Mort ordered, bringing us to a halt. We weren’t so far away that we couldn’t see what had caught his attention. There, in a pool of moonlight, lay a motionless form. A stain, the same rich hue as the roses that bloomed on this brick wall every spring, had turned white hair to crimson. Those incredibly blue eyes were open and dull.
    It was Matilda Swift.

Chapter Six
    Sheriff Mort Metzger, dressed in his Davy Crockett costume, stretched his arms out wide and stopped the forward motion of the small crowd. “Come on, folks, give us a little room, huh. Dr. Hazlitt, would you . . . ?”
    Seth walked to the recumbent figure and slowly, with obvious arthritic stiffness, lowered himself to one knee so he could place his fingertips against Matilda’s neck.
    “Is she dead?” Mort asked, pulling his badge from a back pocket and pinning it above the suede fringe on his shirt.
    “Ayuh. Looks like it,” Seth replied, his fingers now on the chin of the corpse, gently moving it back and forth to check, I knew, whether rigor mortis had begun to set in. Witnessing this macabre tableau, besides Seth, Mort and me, were a movie star, a pair of pirates, two swans, a bear, a cheerleader and a half dozen moose. Had it not been so real and tragic, it might have been a surrealistic scene from a Fellini movie.
    “Who could have done such a thing?” Paul Marshall’s voice boomed as he pushed his way to the front of the group and tugged off his costume head.
    Mort turned from the corpse and faced us. “First thing, everybody get rid a’ those damn moose heads so I can see who I’m talking to.”
    One by one, the guests pulled off their furry heads until their identities were exposed.
    “Who discovered the body?” Mort asked, turning to the couple who’d been there when we arrived at the scene. “Who screamed?”
    “I did,” replied Erica Marshall, dropping her animal head to the ground.
    “Erica!” Warren Wilson’s face was red as he flung his moose head to the side and glared across the body at her. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
    “What were you doing down here?” her father asked in a tone that demanded an answer.
    “I was . . . I was taking a walk, getting some air,” she said.
    Marshall turned to the moose standing next to her. “You,” he growled, “do as the sheriff