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Uncle Alec held up his hand in a tentative gesture, and promptly a sausage was coming his way. It landed on his head with a dull splat, and sizzled for a moment on his bald pate before landing on his empty plate.

“Oops,” said his brother-in-law. “I really thought I nailed it this time.”

“You did,” the Chief said acerbically as he gently touched the sore spot.

“Okay, I’ll come back,” said Brutus. “How about you, tootsie roll? Do you want to come home with me?”

Harriet rolled her eyes.“I thought you’d never ask! I like Rufus, I really do, but have you noticed that dogs… smell? No, really, they do. And then there’s the fleas, of course.”

“What fleas?” asked Marge. “Rufus doesn’t have fleas.”

Harriet cast a suspicious look in my direction.“He doesn’t?”

“Of course not. Marcie and Ted take pride in the fact that Rufus is the best-groomed dog on the block.”

“Is that so?” said Harriet, and narrowed her eyes at me.

I pretended not to notice, and instead gratefully accepted the piece of sausage Odelia placed in front of me.

“So tell us, Max,” said Odelia. “How did you figure out that Ellie was the culprit?”

“Well, I suddenly remembered that a girl wrote to you last year, announcing she was Carl Strauss’s illegitimate daughter, and suggesting an interview. You even told me the Gazette wasn’t Hampton Cove’s National Enquirer and how you decided not to respond.”

“You remembered that, huh?” she said, looking a little shamefaced.

“I did—only I’d forgotten the correspondent’s name, of course, but then when you mentioned that all of your emails from last year had been deleted, the story suddenly popped into my head again. And so I just wondered: what are the chances?”

“Lucky for me I keep a duplicate mailbox on my laptop,” said Odelia. “And lo and behold: Ellie’s email was right there, in the contingent she’d tried to delete.”

“And so when you told us that Carl had died, I asked you to hold off on announcing his death. At least long enough until we could set a trap for Ellie—which she neatly walked into when you sent an invitation to ‘Zoe’ knowing only the killer would react.”

“Such a shame,” said Dooley. “She seemed like such a nice girl.”

“I think the fire she set at her school should have told us something about what kind of person she is. She has a vengeful streak that in this particular case turned homicidal.”

“I still can’t believe she tried to frame me,” said Odelia.

“So Charlene,” said Gran, dragging up a chair and moving closer to our Mayor. “About that building permit.”

“Oh, no!” said Uncle Alec, looking up from the dissection of his sausage.

“I’m not talking to you,” said Gran. “Charlene, honey, I understand that we can’t build high—for whatever esthetical and practical reasons—but how about we build low?”

“What do you mean?” asked the Mayor suspiciously.

“How about we build a couple of stories underground? And then we rent them out?”

“Ma!” Marge cried. “Will you please stop already? We just don’t want tenants.”

“You don’t want money, that’s what you’re saying. You hate money.”

“We don’t want apartments. We just want a nice single-family home, just the way it always was, and we don’t want to deal with tenants. Is that so hard to understand?”

“Okay, so you don’t like money. Why didn’t you say so from the start?”

“We did say so from the start.”

“Look, if you really want tenants, Vesta,” said Scarlett, “I have an old garage that I don’t use, since I don’t have a car anymore. If you want you can turn it into a studio.”

“No, thank you,” said Gran with a look of distaste. “Who wants to deal with having to rent the place out? Making sure the whole thing is up to code, collecting rent… Ugh.”

“I thought you did?”

“I don’t—I was doing this for my family! So they could deal with that stuff. Not me.”

Suddenly two familiar people popped through the hedge. They were Ted and Marcie Trapper.“Oh, there’s our sweethearts,” said Marcie. “I thought they’d gone missing. Brutus and Harriet, you’re in the wrong backyard again, sweeties.”

“I’ve got a ball here with your name on it, Brutus,” Ted added, holding up a red ball.

“Put away your damn ball, Ted,” said Gran. “My cats are exactly where they’re supposed to be: home.”

“But I thought they wanted to come and live with us from now on,” said Marcie, looking confused.

“Well, they changed their minds. Now get lost.”

Ted was still fiddling with his ball, and looked like a lost puppy.“But…”

“Go on—shoo!”

“Ma! Be nice to our neighbors,” said Marge. Then she got up and went over to have a chat with Ted and Marcie, and explain to them that circumstances had changed and that the Pooles would be keeping Brutus and Harriet after all. She was also kind enough to invite the Trappers to stay and have a bite to eat, which they gratefully accepted.

“So you did it again, did you, Max?” said Harriet.

“Amazing,” said Brutus, “to think that you did it without us.”

“Well, it was hard, I don’t mind telling you,” I said. “But we managed—barely.”