The Skeleton Haunts a House (14 page)

M
y plan for the rest of the day was simple. I'd teach until three thirty, then spend an hour at my mother's office, fortunately unoccupied for the day, to grade papers or meet with any students who came by. After that I'd head home in a leisurely fashion to pick up Madison and Sid to bring them back to McQuaid for the meeting at McHades Hall. Given the amount of food I'd had for lunch, I wasn't worried about eating, but if I did get hungry I'd have plenty of time for a snack.

Unfortunately, my plan didn't allow for a student who came running up after I'd already locked Mom's office and was on my way out. It was vitally important that we talk right away so he could explain why I shouldn't lower his grade even though his weekly essay was going to be late. It took fifteen minutes to convince him that I disagreed. Then when I got to my car, I remembered I needed to stop at the gas station, where there was a line.

With all that, it was already five thirty-five when I burst in the back door, calling out, “Sid, Madison, are you ready?”

Then I stopped. Roxanne and my mother were at the dining room table, again surrounded by papers and books.

“Excuse me. I didn't realize we had company.”

“We're doing what we can while we wait for the police to do the right thing about Linda.” Mom's voice was strained, and I could see the entreaty in her eyes, but all I could do was give a little shrug since I'd neither found the real killer nor broken Linda out of jail.

Madison came downstairs, carrying her old backpack. “I'm ready. Here's your bag.”

I automatically reached out for it, but was about to ask why when I noticed it had a skull-sized lump in it. “Okay then. We better get going.”

“What about Sid?” Roxanne said, though up until that moment she'd seemed so intent on a printout that I'd have thought Sid could have walked into the room in all his bony glory and performed a solo from
Swan Lake
without her noticing.

“Excuse me?”

“You were calling for somebody named Sid.”

“Oh, it's a nickname. For the dog. And I was kidding because I'm not taking the dog.” I was ready to kick myself as soon as I said it, but Roxanne just nodded as if it made perfect sense for me to give a dog a nickname, and went back to her printout.

Mom said, “Will you be back for dinner?”

“We'll grab something on the way home.” It wasn't an unreasonable question, but I wasn't used to having to run my schedule past anybody else other than Madison. I knew I should probably have a talk with Mom about boundaries, but I'd rather have had a root canal without anesthesia.

The police guard and crime-scene tape were gone from McQuaid Hall, but the door was locked and we had to wait for Deborah to let us in.

“We're meeting in the greenroom,” she said.

Madison and I started up the stairs, but Deborah said, “You sure you're all right to come inside, Georgia?”

“I've been in here before.”

“Yeah, but it's nighttime.” Then she smirked.

I held up three fingers. “Dancing in public. The feel of rubber bands. Inflatable arm-flailing tube men. Let she who has no phobias cast the first fear.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Fine. Go on up.”

From inside the backpack, I heard Sid whisper, “I didn't know about the tube men thing.”

“Shhh.”

The greenroom was already well filled, and at about ten after six, Deborah came up and the crowd quieted.

She said, “First off, I want to thank you for coming. What happened last week was bad, and I wouldn't have blamed you if you'd quit the haunt.”

Somebody said, “The show must go on!” and there were general sounds of approval.

“That's the way I see it, too,” Deborah said. “As you've probably heard, the police have a suspect in custody that they're satisfied is the right one. So we're reopening tomorrow night.”

There was a cheer.

“But!” Deborah interjected. “I'm not assuming anything about our safety from here on out. First off, I've already begun installing security cameras, which I will be monitoring personally.” She looked around sternly. “Camera footage will be for security only. We will not be putting embarrassing videos of our customers up on YouTube. Is that clear?”

Heads nodded vigorously.

“I'm also going to station more room monitors, in more places. That's going to mean longer shifts.”

She paused to allow for the inevitable groans.

“It also means more pay. The McQuaid Scholars Committee has agreed to double your hourly rate, and it'll come out of their budget, so we'll still make the same amount of money for funding scholarships.”

The reaction switched back to cheers, though I suspect it was for the extra pay and not the size of the scholarship fund. As for me, I was applauding Deborah for getting the McQuaid Quintet to pony up the bucks. Knowing that they were worried about the missing heir must have given her the edge, even if she couldn't allude to it directly.

After that, she broke the meeting into groups to deal with details like scheduling, costume repairs, and shuffling the scare actors to make up for the cast members who'd been frightened off by the murder.

That's when I felt a nudge from the backpack, telling me that Sid wanted to consult. So I went to the bathroom, made sure nobody else was in any of the stalls, then unzipped the backpack to pull out his skull.

“Phew!” he gasped. “I wasn't sure I was going to make it! What rotted in there?”

I took a whiff, and remembered why the backpack had been retired. “Madison left a carton of milk in there over a long weekend, and it spilled. And spoiled. We thought it would air out eventually.”

“And you used me to test the theory?”

“How often do I have to remind you that you don't breathe?”

“It's the principle of the thing. So where are we?”

“The ladies' room.”

“I can't be in the ladies' room!”

“Well I'm not going into the men's room, and you don't use any bathroom, so what difference does it make?”

“It's the principle of the thing,” he said again. “You're disrespecting my manhood.”

I thought about pointing out that he was lacking that
portion of anatomy that bestowed “manhood,” but decided it would be too cheap a shot. “I figured you were enlightened enough not be bothered by what is, in fact, a gender-neutral bathroom.”

He radiated suspicion, but nodded. Well, without a neck it wasn't really a nod, but he did kind of bob his skull.

“Now what did you want?”

“I think we should tour the building.”

“You went through the haunt the night of the murder.”

“Those were just the public spaces. I want to see the rest, including the scene of the murder.”

“I saw enough of that already.”

“I know it's upsetting, Georgia, but—”

“No, you're right. We should look around now that we've got a chance. I don't know that we'll see anything the cops didn't—”

“Ahem!”

“Sorry, sorry.” I would have apologized further, but the bathroom door started to open and I shoved Sid back into the backpack just as one of the scare actors came in.

“I thought I heard voices,” she said, looking around.

“I was on the phone,” I lied. Then I washed my hands and went back into the main room.

Deborah was talking to the costume crew, so I found Madison and said, “Since your aunt is going to be busy for a while, I thought you could show
us
around.”

She looked at the backpack and nodded. “Got it. What do you want to see first?”

“How about the control room or whatever you call it.”

“We call it the control room.” She led the way down to the first floor and into the curtained enclosure Deborah and I had gone through in such a rush on the night of the murder. “That's the—”

“I can't see anything,” Sid said from the backpack.

“Sorry.” I unzipped it and held it in front of me, so he was hidden but could still look out. “How's that?”

“That'll do. Now start over.”

“Sound board, light board, and since I haven't seen those screens before, they must go with the new security cameras.”

“It's a shame they weren't there before, or that the room monitors didn't see anything,” Sid said.

“Come on, dude, you were there. You know how dark it is, and confusing.”

“No, no, I get it. I just wish we had more to go on.”

Madison looked only partly mollified. “What next?”

I said, “Sid? This was your idea.”

“Can you walk us through the haunt as if we were customers? I want Georgia to get a feel for the flow, and I've got some questions about the setup.”

“Do you want me to see if I can turn on the special lighting and effects?”

“Thank you, no,” I said firmly.

“Okay, then.” We went back to the entrance hall. “Here's where the tour starts. Each group is met by a guide who shows them through the house.”

“That's what you do, right?” I said.

She nodded. “The group is supposed to stay together for the whole tour, but it doesn't always work out that way. People get scared and run ahead, or sometimes they freeze in place. Plus we're trying to keep people moving, so we can't always keep track of every single person.”

“Madison,” I said, “nobody blames the tour guides for Kendall getting killed.”

“Are you sure? The cops kept harping on it, especially with the guide who had that group.”

“Which one was that?” Sid asked.

“Liam. He does an Igor riff.”

“Write that down, Georgia. I didn't bring a pad. Or my hands.”

“I think we can remember. Go on, Madison.”

“Anyway, each guide has a spiel. Like ‘Welcome to McHades University, where all your worst college nightmares come true.' Blah blah blah.”

“The blah-blah-blah part is particularly frightening,” I said.

“Mom, it's kind of hard to get into character under the circumstances.”

“Fair enough.”

She cleared her throat, then spoke in a much lower, more ominous tone. “I'll be your resident advisor, though my first advice is that you transfer out now, while you still can. Because once you enroll, you can't ever leave again.” She laughed evilly. “No? Then don't blame me if you don't make the grade.”

Madison led us up one flight of stairs, then turned to the left. The wide hall was lined with black curtains that were covered with spooky messages painted in Day-Glo colors:
Go Back
,
Help Us!
, and my personal favorite,
Too Ghoul for School
. “Time for your first class: chemistry,” Madison intoned as she gestured for me to step into the first room.

In her regular voice she said, “This is the lab, obviously. Normally the stuff would all be bubbling, and we'd have dry ice making steam.” There was a long lab table covered with various pieces of glassware with poison markings. A mannequin with a look of horror had his hand in a beaker labeled
Acid
, only the hand was a skeleton hand. “The scare actor in here has her back to people as they come in, and she pretends to swallow some stuff in a beaker. Then she grabs her throat, screams and groans, and turns around so people can see that she's changed into a werewolf. She jumps at them, and I rush people out and say, ‘Quickly, before Mrs. Howl-ley gives you homework!'”

“Nothing scarier than homework,” I said.

“Where does the room monitor stay?” Sid asked.

“In that closet. We took the door down and put in a scrim so she can see the whole room, but you can't see her at all.”

We went back into the hall and on to the next room. “Next up, history. What education could be complete without learning about the black plague, Countess Bathory, and Jack the Ripper?”

This room was broken into three tableaux. The first was a pile of faux corpses with faux rats with faux red eyes.

Madison said, “We light up the rats' eyes, and the joke is that Purell hasn't been invented yet. We've got one radio control rat, and the room monitor stays in that corner, all in black, making it jump at people. Some people have a real issue with rats.”

“Who wouldn't have an issue with rats?” I said.

The next tableau was a curvaceous female mannequin in a bath tub with a red-stained, naked body and a satisfied smile on her face. A trio of mannequins in peasant dresses was sprawled across the floor, each painted to look as if her throat had been cut. “We fill the tub with fake blood every night, and those are the virgins Countess Bathory supposedly drained to stay young. If the group is old enough, I'll say it's harder and harder to find enough virgins every year. We have a scare actor in that same outfit acting like her blood is draining into the tub saying stuff like, ‘Help me! Save me!'”

“How can somebody talk when her throat is cut?” I asked.

“It depends on if it was the trachea, the esophagus, or an artery that was cut,” Sid said cheerfully.

“Sorry I asked.” I didn't want to know how he knew.

Next up was a dead woman mannequin in vaguely Victorian garb, with bits and pieces of her insides on the outside.

“That's gross,” I said.

“Kind of the point,” Madison reminded me. “I tell people that Professor Ripper really gets into his subject, and hates
it when people cut class. We have a guy in a black frock coat who pretends to be a dummy until they get close enough, then he turns around and comes at the people with a knife.”

“A fake knife, right?”

“Totally fake.”

“Good.”

We went to the next room. “This is the school cafeteria—it's your basic cannibal theme. There's a scare actor for the cook with a cleaver—a fake cleaver—and kids pretending to be students pretending to eat body parts.”