A Catered Halloween (2 page)

Bernie did.

Libby took a deep breath and told herself not to say anything now. She would talk to Bernie later. She forced a smile. “Let’s go,” she told Mark.

He rubbed his hands together. “Good. I’m going to scare you to death.”

“I can hardly wait,” Libby muttered as they went inside.

L
ibby looked around the hallway they’d just stepped into. It had been totally transformed since she’d been there two weeks ago. The walls were now painted a dull gray and festooned with cobwebs.

Meat hooks hanging from the ceiling rattled menacingly. The floor looked old and dusty, except for the splatters of what, Libby decided, was supposed to be blood. The overhead fluorescent lights flickered on and off, painting shadows on the walls and floor. Libby sniffed. The place even smelled musty. The only things that looked modern were the
EXIT
signs over two doors down the hall.

Mark jerked his head in their direction. “The fire marshall insisted on those. I tried to talk him out of it—I think it spoils the mood—but it was a no go.”

“I would think so,” Libby said as she took a couple of steps forward.

No doubt about it. Mark was definitely getting on her nerves. She stopped for a moment in front of a sign on one of the walls, which said,
THIS WAY TO THE EXE
CUTION.
A black arrow pointed to the door on Libby’s right. Then she moved over to the square wooden table pushed against the wall. On it sat a cash box, a bunch of forms, and a black cup filled with pens.

“The releases I was telling you about,” Mark said, pointing to the pile of paper.

Bernie nodded. A notice on the table stated that the price of admission was thirty dollars.

“A little high, isn’t it?” Libby commented.

Mark shrugged. “High tech always is.”

Libby was about to tell him that was why she liked low tech better, but before she could, Bernie was pointing down the hall.

“I’m a little confused. The kitchen is the last door on the left, isn’t it?” asked Bernie.

Mark nodded. “Correct. The corridor we’re using for the Haunted House loops around and ends up in the kitchen and the dining room. This is the back part of the mansion. The oldest part. The part where they say Esmeralda is buried.”

“Who says?” Libby asked. She wished she could have found her chocolate. That way she wouldn’t be so grumpy.

Mark waved his hands in the air. “People say.”

“Well, then I guess that’s okay. I mean, if dogs said it, then it wouldn’t be so good,” replied Libby.

Mark shot Libby a puzzled look. Obviously, he hadn’t gotten what she was saying. He took a step away from her as he glanced around. Even better. He probably thought she was nutty.

“God, you wouldn’t believe how many rooms this place has,” Mark said. “And they all connect with one another in weird ways. Tracing the wiring was a nightmare, and I thought the guy that put in the fiber optics was going to quit on me. Let me tell you, we had a hell of a time getting this place up to code.”

“That I believe,” Bernie said.

Mark nodded toward the door that was marked
ENTRANCE
. Below it was written,
ONCE YOU COME IN HERE, THERE’S NO TURNING BACK
.

“Shall we?” he asked.

“You know,” Libby said, thinking of everything they had to do, “we really
are
running out of time. Why don’t you and Bernie go ahead, and I’ll start in the kitchen.”

“Nonsense,” Mark replied. “This will only take a few minutes. No more than five, I promise. We’ll just do a quick walk-through.”

Libby was about to say they didn’t have five minutes when she caught Bernie glaring at her. Even though her sister hadn’t said anything, Libby knew what she wanted to say: something along the lines that Mark was new in town, that he was wealthy, and that he could throw lots of business their way. Which he wouldn’t do if Libby pissed him off. So Libby just nodded her head and followed Mark through the door.

When she stepped through to the other side, Libby felt a puff of ice-cold air play up and down her spine. She jumped in spite of herself. Mark laughed.

“That’s the oldest trick in the book,” he said. “I connected a motion detector to a compressed-air tank.”

Libby looked around. The room was totally dark for a second; then a strobe light began flashing. She could hear a faint moan rising and falling. Then she heard another sound. It sounded like a chain saw. It
was
a chain saw. The chain saw got louder. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a woman over in the corner. Her arms were tied to a chain that was suspended from the ceiling. The woman started screaming. A man with a chain saw appeared from the far corner of the room. The woman’s screams got louder as the man got closer.

Libby wanted to look away, but she couldn’t as the man came nearer. She could feel her heart racing as the man lifted the saw. The flashes of light from the strobe bounced off the blade, making it dance in the light.
This is all a trick
, Libby told herself.
It’s an optical illusion
. But somehow it didn’t help.

There was a bloodcurdling shriek as the man raised the chain saw and brought it down on the woman’s shoulder. Rivulets of something warm and wet ran down the left side of Libby’s face. She couldn’t help herself. She screamed.

“It’s water,” Mark said. “Warm water. It was my idea. Everything is computer controlled. We also have a state-of-the-art sound system with volume controls and directional speakers.”

Libby jumped. She’d been so focused on the scene in the room that she’d forgotten that Mark was there.

“God, that looked real,” Bernie said. She gave a nervous giggle.

“Holograms,” Mark said. “We can adjust the images if we want. We can adjust the screams and the sound of the chain saw. I think the blood splatter is a nice touch, don’t you? It gets everyone involved.”

“Involved?” Libby could hear her voice rising. She took a deep breath and told herself to calm down, because what she wanted to do was throttle him. She took a second breath and a third before she regained control.

Bernie gestured around her. “This must have taken months to figure out.”

“Not really,” said Mark. “I hired a company, FX Productions, that specializes in this sort of thing. It took them a day and a half to set the show up.” Mark shrugged. “I’m not good with technical stuff,” he confessed.

“Just making money,” Bernie observed.

Mark’s grin flashed on and off. “Well, I’ve found
that if you can do that, everything else falls into place. And this is only the beginning of the tour. Wait till you see what else FX has come up with.”

“I’d rather not,” Libby told him.

Mark reached over and took Libby’s hands in his. “But you have to.”

“She doesn’t like gory stuff,” her sister explained.

Mark patted Libby’s hands and then let go. “The rest of it is just scary. Promise.”

Libby was about to say that she didn’t think that was much better when Bernie interrupted.

“Is the whole thing movie themed?” Bernie asked.

Mark shook his head. “Not at all. We have vampires; we have ghosts; we have a little bit of everything.”

Libby realized she was still breathing hard. What ever happened to the days when going through a haunted house meant being blindfolded and having your hands forced into a bowl of oatmeal and spaghetti and being told that was someone’s guts?

“After you,” Libby said to Mark. She just wanted to get this over with.

He laughed. “My pleasure.”

“Enjoying yourself?” Bernie asked him.

“I have to confess that I am. I feel like I’m watching my baby take his first steps,” said Mark.

And with that, they opened a door and stepped out into a hallway. Smog rolled around their feet and drifted upwards.
A fog machine
, Libby thought. She jumped as a bony hand dropped down in front of her.

“That’s Bob,” Mark said.

Now that Libby looked closer, she could see the outlines of someone’s arm.

“He’s one of our actors,” added Mark.

“Actors. That’s a laugh,” came a disembodied voice out of the ceiling.

“Bob Small?” Bernie asked.

“How’d you guess?” came the voice from the ceiling.

“Your voice,” said Bernie.

“When did you—” Libby began to say, but Bernie kicked her.

Bob finished the sentence for her. “Get out of jail?”

Libby rubbed her shin. “Yes.”

“About two weeks ago,” replied Bob.

“Comfortable up there?” Mark asked.

Bob snorted. “Yeah. If you like being in a coffin.”

Mark patted his hand. “Don’t worry. We’ll have someone come and relieve you in two hours.”

“Two hours?” Bob squeaked. “What happens if I have to take a leak?”

“We already discussed that. You hold it,” Mark told him as he guided Libby and Bernie toward the center of the room. When he got there, he stopped. “I like to give people a second chance,” he practically whispered.

“Very noble,” Libby observed.

Mark shot his cuffs. “No. It’s just what I call enlightened self-interest. You give a guy like that a second chance and he’s yours for life. See, we have Bob to set the mood, and then you come over here and see this.” He pointed to a big black coffin that was seemingly rising out of the floor.

There was a creak as the coffin’s door began to open. A squeal of laughter came from a skeleton as it sat up. He had an eye patch over his left socket and a long mane of white hair that came to his shoulders. He stared straight at them and shook a bony finger.

“Soon you’ll look just like me,” the skeleton cackled. “Just like me. Eat, drink, and be merry. We don’t have six-packs in the graveyard.” Then he lay back
down as the coffin door started closing. A minute or two later, the coffin was gone.

“It comes up through the floor,” Mark explained. “People crossing a point on the floor trip a sensor that raises the coffin.”

“Sensor?” Libby asked.

“Yeah. It works on the same principle as a doorbell,” Mark replied.

“Like the one we have in the store, which alerts us when customers come in,” Bernie added.

“I know,” Libby said.

“Well, I was just explaining it in case you didn’t,” Bernie mumbled.

“But I do,” insisted Libby.

Mark cleared his throat. “This is really a throwaway. Something to get you calmed down after the chain-saw scene and before the next thing.” He paused for effect. “Because the next thing, as my father used to say, is going to knock your socks off.” Mark walked to the door marked
EXIT
, opened it, and said, “Ladies, welcome to the Pit and the Pendulum. I have to say, I think that Poe would have approved, were he alive today.”

Libby took a look around. The walls were mirrored, and in the center of the room was a raised platform. Four steps led up to it. On that platform was a long table, draped in a red cloth. Up above the table, a sharp-looking, curved blade swung back and forth, going lower with each swipe.

“You have to get closer to get the full effect,” Mark said as he gave Libby a little nudge. She took a few steps. There was a headless body lying on the table.

“See,” Mark said. “You stand in the center and you see your head being chopped off.”

“Lovely,” Libby said. She gritted her teeth and took another step. Never let it be said that she wasn’t a good
sport. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the woman’s head sitting on the first step from the top. It stared up at her. It looked incredibly lifelike. It also looked familiar. Very familiar.

“Shouldn’t the head be sitting in a pool of blood?” Bernie asked.

Mark didn’t answer her. “Wait,” he said instead, and he put out his hand.

Libby stopped.

“Give me a moment,” Mark said.

Libby noticed he was frowning. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

Mark didn’t reply. His attention was focused on the head.

“Well, is there?” Bernie asked while she watched Mark take another step forward. She had a bad feeling in her gut. “Is that a hologram?” she asked. “Because it looks pretty solid if it is.”

Libby watched as Mark stretched out one of his feet and gave the head a tentative tap with the toe of his shoe. It began rolling down the steps…bump, bump, bump…and then it kept going until it stopped at Libby’s feet.

This is not a hologram,
Libby thought.
Holograms do not make noises like that.

And then she had another thought.

The head was not made of wax. It wasn’t made of plaster. It was flesh and blood.

Libby didn’t know how she knew. She just did.

And then she knew how she knew.

Libby stared at the face staring up at her. She’d recognize those eyebrows anywhere. “It’s Amethyst Applegate,” she cried.

Which was when Libby started screaming.

S
ean Simmons took a bite of his pumpkin bar. “Not bad,” he remarked. “Not bad at all.”

As he brushed a small piece of the pumpkin bar off his lap, he thought that in the normal course of things, his daughter Libby would have taken those words as fighting words. Tonight she hadn’t even blinked. In fact, she hadn’t said much since she and her sister had come running in, yelling about what had happened down at the Peabody School.

Not that he was surprised. Some places just had bad karma. Of course, he hadn’t said that to Bernie and Libby when they’d told him about this job, because he didn’t like to talk about certain things. Now he was thinking that maybe he should have. Then he pushed that thought away. Better to concentrate on the known and leave the rest to all the weirdos out there.

“You’ve added a touch more cinnamon, haven’t you?” he said.

Libby’s eyes widened fractionally. “How can you ask
me something like that at a time like this?” she demanded.

“I thought you liked talking about food,” Sean commented as he turned his wheelchair slightly so he could look out. The wind had picked up and was blowing the leaves on the street into the air. He could hear the creak of the store sign as it swayed back and forth. It looked as if a cold front was coming through.

“I do, but I don’t want to talk about food now,” Libby said.

Sean turned to face her. “Well, what do you want me to talk about?” he asked.

Not that he didn’t know. Bernie would say he was being disingenuous, but he’d found in his years as chief of police of Longley that it was better to let the witnesses, especially if they were in a state of shock, introduce the story themselves.

“We want to hear what you have to say about what happened at the Peabody School, of course,” Bernie said.

“But I wasn’t there,” Sean reminded her.

Libby leaned forward and pointed at her sister. “And we wouldn’t have been, either, if it weren’t for her.”

Bernie snorted. “Like I knew what was going to happen?”

“If we had been setting up like we were supposed to, we wouldn’t have been there. We would have been in the kitchen,” Libby snapped.

“We were cultivating a potential customer, which, in my humble opinion, was worth the ten minutes we were going to spend having Mark show us around,” Bernie countered. “Besides, it was interesting to see how the place was rigged up.”

“Not to me,” said Libby as she put her hand on her forehead. “I’m going to have nightmares for years.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Bernie snapped.

“It’s true. I am,” Libby wailed.

Bernie groaned. “Which you’re going to blame on me, just like you do everything else.”

“That is so unfair,” Libby retorted.

“Girls,” Sean said before Bernie could reply.

Both of them turned to him.

“Enough,” said Sean.

“But,” Libby began.

Sean held up his hand. “I mean it. This bickering—”

“We’re not bickering,” Bernie objected.

“Fine,” Sean said. “Whatever you want to call what you’re doing doesn’t do no one—”

“Anyone…,” Bernie corrected.

Sean glared at Bernie. She’d been like this ever since she’d learned to talk. “Any good. So do you have to give the retainer back? Is the Haunted House closed down for the duration?”

Libby and Bernie both shook their heads.

“It’s opening tomorrow afternoon,” Bernie volunteered.

Sean snorted. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. That’s what Mark told us.”

“This has to be the fastest processing of a crime scene in the history of the town. But then what do I know? I’m an old man,” said Sean. He tapped his fingers on the side of his chair. At least in his day, they would have kept the crime scene closed off for a couple of days. He’d learned to his cost that if you rushed, you always missed something.

Bernie took another sip of her Scotch and put her glass down. “Well, it is a big fund-raiser for the volunteer fire department.”

“And money always wins,” Sean said after he’d taken another bite of his pumpkin bar. “You better bake
some more of these. You know what people are like. The more gruesome the crime, the more people want to see where it took place and the hungrier they are after they’ve seen it.”

“Yeah,” Bernie said. “When business is slow, we should just kill someone.”

Libby glared at her. “That’s disgusting.”

“But true,” Bernie countered. “Every time we’re involved in a case, the shop is packed.”

“I wonder why?” said Libby.

“People are nosy,” Sean said. “Look what happens when there’s an accident. Everyone always slows down.”

Bernie frowned as she thought. Finally, she said, “Or maybe it’s because we miss that kind of stuff on some primordial level. You know, in the old days, they used to have public hangings and torture. Now there’s nothing like that. Maybe that’s why haunted houses and horror movies are so popular. People like to be scared and disgusted.”

“Not me,” Libby said firmly. “Not in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I don’t think I want to go back there.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Sean told her.

Bernie untwisted her legs and stood up. “Yes, we do. We have a contract.”

Sean took a final bite of his pumpkin bar. “I think a beheading might count as a cancellation clause, don’t you?” he asked after he swallowed. He’d love a cigarette now, but since the girls didn’t know he’d gone back to smoking, he couldn’t ask them to get him any.

Libby folded over the empty wrapper of the chocolate bar she’d been eating and creased the line with her thumb. Then she did the same thing again.

“I’m serious. Maybe I won’t go,” she announced.

“Why?” Bernie said. “What more can happen? Anyway, then we’d have to give back the money, which we can’t exactly afford to do.”

Sean watched his eldest daughter run her thumb across the edge of the wrapper again. She didn’t say anything.

“For real,” Bernie said to Libby. “What more can happen?”

“Someone could cut off our heads,” Libby replied.

Bernie rolled her eyes. “Please. You can’t be serious.”

“Of course, I am. Why wouldn’t I be?” said Libby.

Sean coughed. The girls turned back to him.

“You know,” he said. “Amethyst has…had…a lot of enemies. I don’t think this crime was committed by some nut looking to get his jollies off. I think it was committed by someone looking to kill Amethyst. So you two have nothing to worry about.”

“My sentiments exactly,” Bernie agreed.

Libby stood up. “But you don’t know that for a fact.”

“It’s true, but that’s what my gut tells me,” said Sean.

Libby plucked at the top button of the shirt she was wearing, then absentmindedly rearranged the magazines on the table over by the wall. “She wasn’t well liked, was she?”

Sean wiped his fingers on the napkin in front of him. “That’s one way of putting it. Look at what she did to Bob Small.”

Bernie put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you. We saw him today. He was working at the Haunted House, as a skeleton.”

Sean raised an eyebrow. “Now that’s interesting.”

Bernie sat back down and took a sip of her Scotch. “I bet the police are going to pick him up in a hurry. I’d be surprised if he’s there when we go back.”

Libby shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t see him
doing this. He’s just not the kind of guy who would chop someone’s head off.”

“In my experience, you get someone angry enough and you’d be amazed what they can do,” Sean said. “Remember Bernard? He weighed what? One hundred pounds, if that? He was so shy he could hardly look you in the face when he talked, and yet he managed to kill his two-hundred-and-fifty-pound girlfriend, drag her out of the house, and put her in the trunk of his car before he was caught, and that was only because he couldn’t get the lid all the way down, so he tied it shut. If he’d gone to Boy Scout camp and practiced his knots, he might never have been found out.”

Libby frowned. “Bob Small went to jail because he stole stuff.”

“No,” Sean said. “Bob Small went to jail because he gave Amethyst a top-of-the-line BMW off the lot of the dealer he was working for so she could get to work and back while she had her car fixed. But instead of doing that, she took off to Florida with a guy she picked up at a bar and totaled the Beamer. Bob lost his wife and his job and spent a year in prison because of her little shenanigans. If that’s not a motive, I don’t know what is.”

Libby was about to reply when the door buzzer rang downstairs.

“You think Bob is guilty?” Bernie asked her dad as Libby went to see who was at the door.

Sean shrugged. “Don’t know, but if I were the investigating officer, I’d like Bob for it. He had motive and opportunity. Of course, like I was saying, Amethyst had plenty of enemies in town. Considering all the things she pulled, it’s a wonder someone didn’t do something like this before.”

“She liked to make trouble just because she could,”
Bernie observed as she studied one of her nails. She really needed to get them done. And talk about getting things done. She was developing frown lines. Maybe it was time for a little Botox. Character lines were nice, but no need to go too far.

“Some people get a real kick out of that,” Sean said.

“In this case she got kicked back.”

Sean grunted. His attention was focused on the footsteps running up the stairs.

“Who the hell is that?” he asked as two men burst through the door. Libby was right behind them.

She gave her father an apologetic look. “They insisted on coming up.”

“It’s okay.” Sean could feel himself relaxing. He glanced up at the two men approaching him. “Well, well, Curtis and Konrad Kurtz,” Sean said. “I haven’t seen you boys in a while. Still got the same bad haircuts, I see.”

Both men stopped. They shuffled their feet. Konrad hugged the tape deck he was carrying closer to his chest.

“We don’t drink anymore,” Curtis volunteered. “That night was the last time.”

Sean laughed. “Yeah. That was quite a night. How many guys did you send to the ER to get stitched up?”

“Six,” Konrad said. “But like Curtis said, we don’t do that no more.”

Curtis raised his hand. “I swear. Except for Thursday night bowling, when we have one or two brews.”

“Sometimes three,” Konrad said. “But that’s the max. Honest.” He nodded toward his stomach with his chin. “We’re hardworking family men now.”

“That’s a good thing,” Sean said.

Both men nodded solemnly.

“We’re working for Mr. Kane,” said Curtis. “Main
tenance. Before that, we worked for the housing complex off Ridge Road.”

“That’s very nice,” Sean said. “So what brings you boys out this time of night?”

Curtis adjusted his suspenders. “It’s about what happened at the Haunted House.”

Sean waited. When nothing else was forthcoming, he told them to go on. There was more shuffling of feet; then Konrad spoke.

“See, we got this other hobby besides bowling and being volunteer firemen. Only it ain’t really a hobby. It’s more like an avocation. We go all over doing it. Some people think it’s silly, but it’s serious.”

Curtis pointed to himself and puffed his chest out. “We’re professional ghost hunters. We even went to school for it. We got certificates to prove it.”

“You went to school?” Bernie asked. “What school?”

“The Vincent Ludovic School for Paranormal Phenomena. You can look it up on the Web if you want to. We are trained professionals,” said Curtis.

“I’m relieved,” Bernie said. “I thought you might be fakes.”

Sean motioned for her to be quiet. “Go on,” he said.

Konrad shot Bernie a reproachful glance. “Well, we are the real thing. Being twins and all gives us a certain knack for it.”

“I didn’t know that twinness gave you a leg up in that department,” Bernie said.

“It’s true,” Konrad told her. “Boy Scout oath of honor. Me and Curtis been doin’ this for a while now. We done the Perkins Place and the graveyard over at Three Trees. We even done this house over in Parker, PA.”

“And how do you ghost hunt?” Sean asked.

Konrad motioned to his tape deck with a nod of his
head. “We get tape recordings. You can’t hear anything if you’re just standing there, but if you ask people questions, sometimes you can hear their answers when you play the tape back. It’s called EVP Electronic voice processing.”

“You mean electronic voice phenomena,” Bernie corrected.

“There was a program on TV about that,” Libby said.

“That’s where we got the idea from,” Konrad said. “And like I just said, it turns out we got a real talent for it.”

“I take it this has something to do with why you’re here?” Sean asked.

As Sean watched Curtis and Konrad nod, he noticed that they didn’t really look like twins at all. Curtis was blond and skinny, while Konrad was broad and dark. But they had the same mannerisms and dressed alike.

“Okay. I think it’s time you told me what this is about,” said Sean.

Konrad and Curtis looked at each other. After a few seconds, Konrad said, “Well, Mr. Kane hired us to be ghost hunters for this haunted house thing, and we jumped at the chance because there are actual ghosts in there, and lots of people have seen them. There’s Reverend Peabody; and his wife, Esmeralda; and Bessie Osgood, the kid that died, the one that was related to your wife.”

Libby turned to her dad. “You never told me she was related to Mom.”

“She was a distant cousin,” Sean said.

“Why didn’t you mention it?” Libby asked.

Sean shrugged. “There didn’t seem to be any need to.”

“Mom never mentioned it at all,” Bernie said.

“Well, she wasn’t one to mention painful subjects,” replied Sean.

“Painful?” Libby repeated.

“People said Bessie committed suicide,” said Sean.

“That’s not what Bessie says,” Konrad interrupted.

Sean raised an eyebrow. “And you know this how?” he asked.

“’Cause, she told us. She told us other things, too. We got it right down on this tape recorder,” said Konrad.

There sure was a lot of nuttiness out in the world, Sean decided as he looked at the two men standing before him. “Fine,” he said. “But how does that explain why you’re here?”