The Skeleton Haunts a House (3 page)

“Thank you,” I said.

The zombie cheerleader must have heard, because she came over and said, “So I can use your phone now?”

“Sure.” I pulled it out of my purse and handed it to her.

“Some of the others want to use it, too, if that's okay.”

“Of course. Just don't get any fake blood on it.”

“And make sure it comes back to her!” Deborah added.

The girl nodded, and took off with it. I didn't expect to see it for a while as she and other cast members took turns reassuring their families. I was just glad I had mine with me, other than my parents, who were out of the country on sabbatical, and, of course, Sid. I'd thought about calling his phone, but if he was hiding, I didn't want the ringing to give him away. Even the noise of receiving a text might be enough to alert anybody nearby.

In a matter of minutes, several tables were set up with teams of cops with notepads to take down statements and contact information. I'm no expert, but it seemed to me that the police did a reasonably efficient job of dealing with people in order of possible involvement.

First off, they spoke with Kendall's three friends, which was painful to watch because they were all crying so hard. I was relieved when the police finished with them, and Oscar and a Pennycross officer escorted them out. I hoped somebody would be driving them home.

Next, with Deborah's help, they sorted out the customers
who'd been caught in the first few rooms of the tour, meaning pretty much everybody on the second floor. Presumably they couldn't have killed Kendall because they'd been nowhere near her. After a few quick questions, the police sent them on their way.

The bottom floor consisted of three different rooms and an outside courtyard—Madison called them scare scenes—and the body had been found in the second scene of those four. Some customers had still been in the first and third scenes when Deborah called the lockdown, and a few more had been stopped in the courtyard just past the exit. The police questioned those people with considerably more thoroughness, and even pulled a few aside to search them.

As far as I could tell, none of them owned up to knowing the victim or, needless to say, killing her. The woman who'd found the body was in that group, and shrilly repeated that she'd never even heard of Kendall Fitzroy before finding her body, and I noticed that Louis made sure she had somebody to take her home, which I thought was nice. Or maybe she was a suspect and he was keeping an eye on her.

It was then that my phone finally returned, thanks to a girl who was all too convincingly made up as having had half of her face flayed. “Here's your phone, Dr. Thackery.”

“Thanks,” I said, and looked hard at the relatively undecorated half of her face. “Freshman comp last spring?”

She smiled, which made the effect even creepier. “That's right. I'm Linda Zaharee.”

“And your final essay was about working in a haunted house.” I don't remember all my ex-students, let alone their papers, but Linda had been attentive and enthusiastic with a fabulous head of red hair, and her haunted house essay had stood out in a sea of bland personal experience papers about overcoming handicaps, being bullied, and fighting racial prejudice.

“Yeah, I'm an old hand at haunting, though I've never seen anything like this before.”

“Are you holding up all right?”

“Yeah, it's just that . . . Well, I knew Kendall. Not well, but we were at Pennycross High at the same time.”

“So you two graduated what, a year and a half ago?” I said, trying to decide if Madison could have known the dead girl.

She nodded. “I hadn't seen her since graduation, which makes this so strange.”

“Yeah,” I said, and patted her shoulder, which seemed about the right level of contact between a one-semester professor and a former student, and she seemed to appreciate the gesture.

“Thanks for letting us borrow your phone, but I'm afraid we used up the battery.”

“Don't worry about it.”

It was just as well, I decided when she went back to her friends. If I'd still had power, it would have been awfully tempting to risk texting Sid, even though I knew it was a bad idea. But since I couldn't, I got another cookie.

I know it sounds nuts, because one would think being around an active murder investigation would be exciting in a morbid way or at least interesting, but it was mostly just boring. Madison went to check on her friends and Deborah was reduced to grunts and glares. With my phone dead, I had no games to play, social media to catch up on, or electronic books to read. That left the other people in the room as the only distraction from imagining what would happen if Sid were found.

Earlier Deborah had speculated that the killer had left the building before the body was found, and she was probably right, but I couldn't help looking at the other people waiting to give their statements, wondering whether any of them had blood on their hands, figuratively if not literally.
Unfortunately, nobody was stalking around looking like a serial killer or twirling a mustache like a more classical villain. It was just a bunch of people, many in costume, and some showing the signs of too much partying.

One guy did catch my eye. Not that he was acting particularly suspicious, but he seemed to be by himself, and not many people went into a haunted house alone. Other than Sid, of course, who was a special case in every way. Besides, this guy looked familiar, though I couldn't place where I'd seen him. He had reddish-brown hair and a small cleft in his chin, and his eyes were an unusually deep blue. He looked at me a couple of times, too, with that same air of almost recognition.

Eventually the police finished with the customers, and it was down to the haunt crew and me. Though I suspect I could have pointed out that I wasn't involved, I didn't mind staying with Deborah and Madison. Plus I wanted to keep an ear out for any news of Sid.

Louis stood in front of the room again. “Before we talk to the rest of you individually, I want to speak to you as a group about what happened.” He consulted a note pad. “Kendall Fitzroy entered McHades Hall accompanied by three friends: Alexis Primo, Nadine Seger, and Vanessa Yount. Their tour guide was a young man, walking hunched over and wearing a hood.”

“That was me,” said a scare actor in the outfit described. “I'm doing Igor.”

Louis wrote that down. “Do you remember seeing those young women?”

“Yeah, definitely. They were, you know . . .”

Louis waited for him to get it out.

“Well, I don't want to say anything rude with that girl dead, but all of them were pretty hot.” One of the other actors punched him, and he said, “What? I like blondes.”

Louis just nodded. “How many others were in that group of customers?”

“Maybe seven or eight.”

“Counting the four girls, it was twelve,” Deborah said. “We limit our groups to a dozen, and with so many people waiting in line, we didn't let any groups go in unless they were full up.”

Louis made another note and asked Igor, “Did you notice anything unusual about the group?”

“Not really. There was a family with a couple of younger kids, maybe ten or eleven, so I was mostly keeping an eye on them to make sure the kids didn't get freaked out. We've got signals to tell the other actors to tone things down if a kid is about to lose it.”

“Did you have to signal anybody?”

“Nah, those kids loved it. They'd scream, then laugh, and scream and laugh again. They were having a great time.”

“And the victim and her friends?”

“They stayed to the rear of the group, and they were screaming at all the right places, but it wasn't panicked screaming.”

“Did you know Ms. Fitzroy before tonight?”

He shook his head.

“Then how did you know her name?”

“I didn't.”

“Somebody did. According to Alexis Primo, actors were calling out ‘Kendall' in what she describes as a creepy, threatening manner.”

Deborah said, “It's a classic haunt gag, Louis. If an actor knows a customer's name, we'll use it. It makes the experience more intense.”

“So somebody at the haunt did know her?” he persisted.

“Not necessarily. One of her friends might have said her name where it could be heard, and someone picked up on it.
Then we spread the word to the rest of the cast.” She looked over at the crew. “Who started the name gag with Kendall?”

“I think it was me,” a timid voice said, and a werewolf in a lab coat stepped forward. “One of the blondes came into my scene, looked around, then went back to the door and said, ‘Don't worry, Kendall, no zombies.' So when I did my transformation, I said, ‘Kendall, drink this for extra credit.' Once they left, I told the room monitor that we had a name.”

“Who was the monitor?” Louis asked.

“Me,” said a boy dressed in black. “I used the walkie-talkie to let people know, in case they wanted to pick it up. Like Ms. Thackery says, it's something we do to make the experience more personal, you know.”

“Good enough,” Louis said, though I thought he looked disappointed that he hadn't happened upon a real clue. “After the group made it through the rooms on the second floor, they went downstairs. I understand the stairs are better lit than the rest of the house.”

“No scares on the stairs,” several actors said in unison, then broke into nervous laughter.

Deborah silenced them with a look. “It's a safety precaution. It's not strong light, because that would mess up everybody's night vision, but it's bright enough for people to get down the stairs, and there's nothing to scare them or make them fall.”

“Good planning,” Louis said. “As I understand it, the ground floor starts with a detention hall room, then there's a hall that goes into the zombie party room where Kendall's body was found. Did you notice anything unusual then?”

Igor said, “I was sticking with the kids when I gave my intro for the scare because the zombie party is one of our more intense scenes. Then the zombies came in and started chasing. At first the kids were all right, but one of the zombies got right
up in their faces, and I could see they were getting upset. So I grabbed their hands and pulled them out of there. We waited in the hall for the rest of the group to come through.”

“How long were you waiting?”

“Five minutes. Maybe a little less, maybe a little more.”

“And you didn't notice you were missing somebody after that room?”

“It's a dark hall, and not very long, so it was crowded. I saw blondes toward the back of the group but I didn't realize that it was only three of them. Then I gave my spiel and took the group on to the next room. I kept hold of the kids, because I was worried the chainsaw would bother them. There's something about a chainsaw.”

The scare actors nodded at that bit of haunt wisdom.

Louis said, “Vanessa Yount said she and Kendall were holding hands as they went into the party room because Kendall had a phobia about zombies, but a zombie ran at them and they got separated. Vanessa thought Kendall had gone on ahead, and that she'd catch up with her in the next room. Since she and the other two women didn't see her there or in the courtyard, they waited for her in the quad. When Kendall never emerged, they tried her cell phone, but got no answer. Finally they decided that she'd gone home without them, either because she was embarrassed about being frightened or angry because she thought she'd been ditched. Also, Nadine Seger said Kendall had mentioned wanting to call her boyfriend.

“At any rate, they went to the midway, not realizing that Kendall had never left McHades until we found her cell phone and retrieved their messages.”

He looked at his pad again. “Can anybody explain why there might be a baseball bat in the building?”

“You found my bat!” said a zombie in a baseball costume.
“I mean, it's not mine, but I use it for the haunt. I swing it around and bang it on the floor—it makes a great noise.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Aluminum, red tape on the handle. Just a regular bat.”

“When was the last time you saw it?”

“It was in the greenroom. I left it there Thursday night after our final run-through. It didn't fit in my locker, so I leaned it up against the wall. Only it wasn't there tonight.”

Louis wrote all this down.

“You're not saying . . . ?” The baseball player suddenly realized why the bat was important. “I mean, I didn't hit her. Ms. Thackery, tell him I lost the bat.”

“Justin reported it missing first thing this evening,” Deborah said. “No big deal—props get misplaced all the time.”

“We thought the ghost took it,” said a tall, thin boy in bloody academic regalia.

“Ghost?” Louis said.

Deborah sighed. “Every haunt has ‘real ghost' rumors. You work in the dark with fake spooks all night, in an old creaky building, and your imagination starts to run away with you. I told you that, Austin.”

“Then where did Min-woo's hat go? And Charity's gloves?”

“Why would a ghost need a hat and gloves? This many people, this many props and costumes, I'm surprised more stuff doesn't go missing.”

“Somebody lost a pair of gloves?” Louis said with sudden interest.

“Yeah, our werewolf chemist Charity usually wears a pair of yellow rubber gloves, and those were misplaced, too.”

Louis said nothing, but took a note. “What about the bat?”

“We hunted around, but when we couldn't find it, Justin went without it. And just so you know, he's one of our most experienced scare actors and would never hit a customer.”

“Nobody said he did,” Louis said. “I'm just trying to find out where the bat came from.”

I said, “I suppose this is a dumb question, but wouldn't the killer have blood spatter on him or her?” Remembering what many of the scare actors were covered in, I added, “Real blood, I mean.”