Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls (11 page)

“Yeah—it was awesome.”

He raises an eyebrow at me. “Does your grandmother know you went all the way over there?”

“It’s not
that
far.”

He hands me the paper, and I see a big picture of the haunted house, with a fat streak of lightning Photoshopped in behind it, trying to make it look super scary. The headlines over it read:

I start to read the article—
October ended the way it began—with a mysterious disappearance
—then skim through
the first few paragraphs before looking up. “But none of this stuff happened at the haunted house!” I point to the Photoshopped picture. “The guy who owns it used to be a set builder in Hollywood, and he goes through all the trouble of turning his regular house into a haunted house because he thinks Halloween is
fun.
” I hand the paper back to Hudson. “It’s like they’re trying to
create
fear with this.”

Hudson thinks a minute, then nods. “You have a point. But it doesn’t negate the fact that last night there were two stabbings, a beating, and yet another man’s gone missing.”

Holly holds her hand out for the paper. “What do you mean, ‘yet another’ man?”

“This is the third disappearance in a month,” Hudson says, handing the paper over as he goes inside to answer his ringing phone. “No trace of any of them.”

“The
third
?” Something about this gives me a weird kind of draining feeling. Like all the blood in my body is running for cover. “Holy smokes.”

I must’ve looked as pale as I felt, because Holly stops reading and nudges my arm. “What’s the matter?”

“Yesterday was the
third
disappearance.”

She shakes me a little. “Yeah? And … ?”

“So before yesterday there were
two
people missing?”

She just stares at me.

“You know … 
two
?”

She’s still not getting it.

“Two people, two bodies, two
heads
?”

She gasps. “You’re not thinking …?”

I nod and for some reason I can barely breathe. “That’s
exactly
what I’m thinking.”

Hudson’s phone call had been from Grams, who’d gotten a call from Meg, who was wondering what had happened to Holly and me.

Specifically Holly, who was supposed to help out in the shop.

“What time is it?” Holly asked after Hudson relayed the news.

“Half past nine.”

Holly jumped up. “How’d that happen?” Then she beat it down the porch steps, calling, “Come over later! I want to know what happens.”

I wave and call back, “Okay!”

The minute she’s gone, Hudson eyes me and says, “What happens with what?”

I look at him, wondering where I’m going to start with this, only he’s not sitting down, getting comfy, kicking his boots up—he’s just standing there.

Now, this whole skull thing is not something I can explain with him
standing
. It’s just not. But even when I say, “Well, it’s kind of a long story,” he doesn’t sit down.
So I finally ask, “Uh … what time do you have to pick up Grams for church?”

He scratches one of his bushy white eyebrows. “I should be leaving now.”

“Oh. Well, never mind, then.”

“Why don’t you come along?”

“I can’t. Billy and Casey are meeting me here.” I look down the street. “They should be here any minute.”

He takes a deep breath. “Well, I can’t be late.” He gives me a kind of sheepish smile. “It’s taken me a long time to get out of the doghouse.”

I laugh because it’s so true. Grams would never admit it, but she was pretty sweet on Hudson, and then he went and got love-punched by a phony
artiste
and messed the whole thing up. “Arrroooo!” I tell him, then shoo him along. “Go!”

“You sure?”

I say, “Of course!” because I’m thinking that talking to Hudson won’t change anything—that I really just have to talk Billy into turning the skulls over to Officer Borsch.

A few minutes later Hudson’s purring down the road in his 1960 sienna rose Cadillac—a car only Hudson Graham could pull off. And then I just sit there.

And sit there.

And
sit
there.

Well, I fidget and pace and look up and down the sidewalk a
gazillion
times, but in between all of that I just sit there.

And then finally Billy and Casey come loping up the walkway.

I jump up and start to say, What took so long? but then I see that Billy’s arm is all bloody. So instead I say, “What
happened
?” and
then
I notice that he doesn’t have the skulls so I say, “Oh, no! How’d they find you?” but
then
it hits me that the Vampire and Shovel Man must have somehow followed Holly and me to the Acostas’ so I say, “Oh,
maaaaan
, I’m so sorry. I had no idea they were tailing us!”

Billy and Casey look at each other, then back at me like, Whoa … 
what
? And finally Casey says, “They?”

That throws me a little. “Shovel Man and the Vampire?”

Billy says, “It wasn’t the Vampire or Shovel Man.”

“Then who?”

Casey snorts. “Try El Zarape.”

I look at Billy. “
El Zarape
did that to you?”

“Yeah.” Billy scowls. “If he’d have come up and asked, I would’ve just handed Grim and Reapy over. But no, he had to go and pull a switchblade.”

My eyes bug out at him. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, and you know what? That guy’s older than I thought. He’s like twenty-five or thirty or something.”

“Are you sure it was him?”

“Yes!”

“Was he wearing a zarape?”

He gives me a puzzled look. “Are you wearing zombie stuff?”

“Oh. Good point.”

“And I told him, ‘Here, have them!’ but he was, like,
possessed.
”

“I’m telling you,” Casey says, “he didn’t understand you.”

“He didn’t speak English?” I ask.

Billy gives us an exasperated look. “He didn’t speak at
all
. He just flicked that knife around! So I chucked the knuckleheads at him and dived in some bushes.”

Casey gives a twinkly little smirk. “Rosebushes.”

Billy checks out his bloodied arm. “I should have gone up against the knife.”

I sit down on the porch and hold my head, because I’m having a little trouble fitting all this in with the Vampire and Shovel Man. I mean, why were they
all
after those skulls? Were they working together?

But … why would Shovel Man be chasing El Zarape through the graveyard late at night if they were working together?

Did they have a falling-out?

Did El Zarape steal the skulls from
them
?

Were
they
the ones making people disappear?

Finally I look up at Billy and Casey and say, “There was a reason I thought it was the Vampire and Shovel Man.”

“Yeah?” Casey asks. “What.”

So I tell them about Holly and me being spotted at the Pup Parlor and how we ditched Shovel Man through the Heavenly only to about clobber Meg with a toilet plunger. And then I explain how we figured out that they were after the skulls, and that Billy was probably in danger. And when I get to the part about going over to the haunted house to
check out the skulls over there, Casey asks, “So how’d they compare?”

“The best-that-money-can-buy fake skulls are lighter and plastickier, and they have
seams
on the inside.” I look at Billy. “Grim and Reaper were the real deal. Those were actual human skulls.”

Billy eyes Casey. “Dude, I told you.”

Casey’s eyebrows go flying. “You told me? I told
you.
”

I give them both a squint. “What are you talking about? Last night you both said they were just awesome fakes.”

Billy heads over to the spigot by the porch and says, “Yeah, but that was before last night.”

“Last night? What happened last night?”

He turns the water on and starts washing off his arm. “Casey’s house was
possessed.
”

I roll my eyes. “Uh … Heather’s living there?”

Casey snickers, but Billy’s serious as he rubs off the blood. “There were
sounds …,
” he says all mysteriously. And since he’s not, you know, elaborating, I ask, “What kind of sounds?”

“Scratching. And screeching. And rubbing.”

“Rubbing?”

He shuts off the water and squeegees his arm with his hand. “Like shuffling footsteps. And the scratching was like someone trying to claw out of a room. Or a
coffin.
”

Now, it’s not like I don’t remember the way the air felt when the skulls were out at Hudson’s, but shuffling footsteps? Clawing out of a coffin? I can’t help it—I laugh. “Oh, please. It was just Heather messing with you.”

“You’re wrong, Sammy-keyesta!” he says, and his eyes are enormous.

I turn to Casey, but he just gives me a little shrug like, You shoulda been there.

So after staring back and forth at them for a minute I finally grab the newspaper off the table on Hudson’s porch and hand it over.

Casey shakes his head when he sees the picture. “That is so fake.”

“What’s
real
is the fact that another person in Santa Martina has disappeared. Just
poof
, nobody knows where he is. That makes a total of three people who have disappeared this month. Well,
last
month.
Three
. As in, there were
two
people missing, and now there’s one more.”

I wait for them to react to the stunning significance of this, but they don’t say anything.

So I try again. “As in,
two
probably dead people plus one more.”

Casey eyes me like he can’t quite believe what I’m suggesting. “As in, two bodies with two
skulls
?” he asks.

“Exactly.”

They both stare at me a minute and then Billy laughs and says, “You think
I’m
nuts, Sammy-keyesta? A body doesn’t rot and leave a clean-as-a-whistle skull in less than a month! It takes years!”

“So maybe they burned the bodies! Maybe they dissolved them in acid! Maybe they threw them in the river and let a bunch of barracudas loose!”

Billy squints at me. “Barracudas?” And Casey says, “What river?”

“That’s not the point! The point is, there are two people missing and nobody knows where their
skulls
are!”

“Or the rest of them,” Casey points out.

“I know,” I grumble. “But for some reason, Shovel Man, the Vampire, and El Zarape are all after those skulls! And why? You don’t just go carrying people’s heads around! Not unless you’re a sicko murderer!”

So, okay. I know I’m being a little over the top, but for some reason I can’t let this idea go. I mean, it just seems too coincidental. Two bodies missing, two skulls found—there had to be a connection. But I take a deep breath and say, “Look, the reason Holly and I came over so early was to warn you about Shovel Man and the Vampire being after the skulls and to tell you we thought the skulls were real. I’m sorry I woke up Heather, and I’m sorry you got ambushed by El Zarape. And maybe those skulls don’t have anything to do with the missing people, but what if they do? I really think we should tell the police everything we know.”

They both just look at me, and I can tell that (a) they don’t think the skulls and the missing people have anything to do with each other, and (b) they’re not too keen on telling all of this to the police.

“Please? Just go over to the police station with me?”

Billy scratches the back of his neck. “Is it even open on Saturdays?”

“Sure. And with everything that happened last night, Officer Borsch’ll be around somewhere.” I shake my head. “I hope so, ’cause I really can’t see explaining this to anyone else.”

Casey and Billy look at each other and shrug, and Casey says, “Probably a good idea.”

The Santa Martina police station is smack-dab in the middle of downtown. It’s across the street from the mall, next door to the fire station, around the corner from the library, and really near St. Mary’s Church and the Salvation Army.

It’s also not far from Hudson’s, so before long we were pounding up the station steps, and once we were inside I went straight to the counter where a receptionist I’d never seen before smiled and asked, “May I help you?”

“Uh, yeah,” I told her. “We’d like to talk to Officer Borsch. Is he here?”

“Just a moment,” she says.

Now, I don’t know how many moments it takes to make ten minutes, but it’s got to be in the billions. And with every moment I waited, I felt more and more antsy.

Probably because I could tell that Casey and Billy did not want to be there.

“Sorry!” I kept mouthing over to them.

“It’s okay,” Casey kept mouthing back, but I could tell—they wanted to leave.

Finally the receptionist tells me, “Sergeant Borsch isn’t presently at the station but should be arriving momentarily.”

Well, since
momentarily
has
moment
in it, I figured that meant it could take half an hour. Maybe more. So I ask, “When he gets here, could you
please
let him know that Sammy’s waiting for him out front?”