Homicidal Holidays

by Donna Andrews

  Somewhere in the distance you hear laughter—more than one person. This laughter, you know, is real. But you can’t gauge the direction or the distance. Not yet.

  Layers of darkness shroud the other side of the room, but you know the door of the closet and the door to the hallway stand closed. Easing back the edge of the covers, you reach up to turn on the lamp. Your cat wakes when the light floods the room. It blinks its eyes and stretches. You rise and, still gaining your balance, find your way across the carpet, picking up that baseball bat and pushing that white shirt down into a ball on the chair. Surely there’s nothing behind either door—you know this, the laughter wasn’t that close—but you go through the motions anyway. Which one to open first? You decide on the closet, raise the bat high, and with a deep breath, fling open the door.

  No one jumps out. Of course.

  And there’s no one hiding in the hallway either.

  And as you work your way through the house—checking behind the shower curtain and in the hot water heater closet, in the laundry room and the second bedroom—you began to ease your grip on the bat. The front door is still bolted shut, and the second latch remains in place. The door to the patio is locked, and when you glance through vertical blinds, you find the plastic chairs and table as empty as always in that same moonlight.

  And there, just beyond, you find the source of the laughter: the dregs of your neighbor’s Halloween party, the one he’d invited you to—a courtesy, you know (an invitation you’d just as courteously declined). A keg sits in the center of his deck, and he’s got his feet propped up on it, leaning back on his own plastic chair. Only two others with him, at least two that you can see—two men, one dressed as a pirate, the other a gangster. You see the latter’s tommy gun resting on the railing. Wind chimes clink and jingle, a murmur of conversation, more laughter—just a little too loud, after just a little too much to drink. You know how those parties go. Your neighbor himself is in some sort of skeleton costume, a black outfit with white bones, faintly glowing. The thin bones of his forearm rest motionless on the arm of his chair.

  And then you see that he’s seen you. That he’s looking your way.

  Quickly, you pull the blinds tight again, press your hands against them to keep them from swinging, look down at what you’re wearing—just that thin nightgown, barely hanging to your knees.

  The conversation out there, the laughter that you’d heard, stops.

  You wait. You don’t hear anything more from over there, nothing but those wind chimes, and that same rustle of leaves through the small yard that separates your house from his…because he’s just told them to keep it down, right?…because you’ve told him to keep it down before. More than once. The houses aren’t so far apart, and the noise carries, and you’ve tried to smile each time you’ve explained this to him and tried to accept his own smile as genuine, even though you’ve felt his impatience, those little hints of disdain. Entitlement, arrogance. Something cold in those eyes, too—something you saw the very first time you met him, when he asked if you were seeing anyone, asked why you weren’t, asked if there was any chance.… Something cold in those eyes when you’d politely declined his interest, something lifeless there.

  Those same eyes that just caught you looking at him through the blinds.

  You wait. You hear nothing.

  When you peek through the window again, the pirate and the gangster have disappeared. The skeleton sits alone, openly staring at your house now. As you watch, he tips back his beer, almost like he’s sending a toast your way.

  You shut the blinds quickly.

  You promise yourself not to dare another look.

  When you return to your room, you lay the bat beside you on the bed. It is exactly 2:01 when you pull the covers up to your chin, 2:04 when you look down to find your cat curling up once more into a ball at your feet, and by 2:15 you’ve successfully resisted the urge to call someone. And who would you call anyway? That brother of yours, long since deep in his Halloween drink and helpless himself? That ex-boyfriend, a mistake in the first place and one you don’t need to compound? Your father, asleep himself, and two states away?

  Overreaction.… Stupidity. Of course.

  And Halloween, you think again. The spirit of the season. Just something in the air.

  But you find yourself unable to sleep. The wind has picked up now, you can hear it in the swish and whisper of those leaves, and in those wind chimes, too, like change in a stranger’s pocket. The refrigerator has never seemed to hum so loudly, and the ice falling into its bin sounds like glass breaking somewhere close by. Something in the hallway creaks. You tell yourself it’s always made that sound.

  But the worst of it isn’t the noise at all. It’s the clock’s calm measure of minutes and the waiting silence of the phone.

  You watch them both without blinking, fearful despite yourself of what might happen just before the time comes and the phone rings.

  Because the phone number in the dream had, of course, been your own.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Art Taylor’s fiction has appeared in anthologies including Chesapeake Crimes: This Job Is Murder and The Crooked Road, Volume 3, and in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. “When Duty Calls,” his story for the previous Chesapeake Crimes anthology, won him a third Derringer Award and was a finalist for the Agatha and the Macavity. “The Care and Feeding of Houseplants” (EQMM) won the Agatha in 2014. An assistant professor at George Mason University, he reviews crime fiction for the Washington Post. www.arttaylorwriter.com.

  DISCO DONNA, by Shari Randall

  “Hippies?”

  “It’s a Halloween costume emergency,” I said.

  Mrs. Maven nodded and pushed her way through racks of vintage clothes. I figured if anyone could help Berks find a costume at the last minute, it would be Mrs. Maven.

  Eunice and I had our bell bottoms and flower power ready to go. Berks, however, complained that hip huggers hugged her big hips too hard. She had a point. She’s definitely curvy.

  “Not much in here,” Mrs. Maven said.

  She owns the storefront on Elm Street that houses both Roseport Retro Rags and Cookie’s Bakery. There isn’t much else in Roseport. It’s a bucolic village, or at least that’s what it says in the real-estate brochures. Cookie’s is the place where everyone meets, and Retro is where high-school kids shop for cool stuff. Since Mrs. Maven is the world’s biggest gossip, she keeps the door between the two shops open, so occasionally you’ll see teachers from the high school come in for coffee and pastry, which is awkward for kids like us if we’ve just skipped school. Aside from that, though, the combo is heaven. Pastry and vintage clothes: two of my favorite things.

  “Just got a box of new stuff in. Some of it looks hippyish to me.” She waved at a box on the counter. “Came from the people who bought that rundown Victorian on the edge of Hamilton Park. They’re living with friends while they gut it. They found some boxes in a crawl space.” She opened the cardboard box. “They took a box of books to the library book sale and brought the clothes here. Fortunately, the attic was dry. Doesn’t look like any mice got at it. Help yourselves.” She waved a vague peace sign and left us with the box.

  Berks and I dug in, giggling at the headbands, tie-dye shirts, and patchwork skirts, draping ourselves with macramé necklaces and beads, and posing in front of a cloudy floor-length mirror making peace signs. “Some of these clothes are a bit more seventies,” I said. I held up a pair of Frye boots and hot pants. “Not so much hippie. Kind of disco.”

  Berks tugged a polyester halter dress over her jeans and T-shirt, pulled up her curly black hair, and twirled. “Very Saturday Night Fever, don’t you think?”

  Berks danced over to Cookie’s door, waved to Mrs. Maven, then danced back. I shook my head. Berks had a very big comfort zone. I shrugged into another silky dress but it hung slack on me. Curvy I’m not.

  “That dress works for you, Berks,” I noted. “You’re about the size of whoever owned these c
lothes.”

  “Maybe you could wear this skirt.” Berks tossed a denim mini to me, then perched some pot-leaf sunglasses on my nose.

  I frowned. “Too short. My mom would never let me out of the house in this. Cool patch pockets, though.”

  I put my hand into one of the pockets and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. “Hey, what’s this?” I smoothed it out on my knee. “It’s a study hall pass from Roseport High! ‘Please excuse Donna Demonte from gym class.’”

  Berks’s face clouded. “Oh, my God. Donna Demonte.”

  “Who?” I tossed the skirt back in the box.

  “You don’t know Disco Donna?” Berks shrieked and clawed at her dress. “Eew! Disco Donna! I’m wearing a dead girl’s dress!” She stumbled backward into a mannequin, sending it tumbling to the floor.

  “Oh, my God! The Disco Donna!”

  The commotion drew Mrs. Maven. “Girls! What is it?”

  “Mrs. Maven, do you remember that high-school girl who was killed? Disco, er, Donna Demonte?” I handed her the hall pass.

  Mrs. Maven’s eyes widened as she studied the paper. “How could I forget? That poor girl was murdered.”

  Mrs. Maven and I helped Berks pick the mannequin up off the floor. We peeled the dress off Berks, while she continued to shudder and moan. Several customers from Cookie’s Bakery had poked their heads in to see what the commotion was about. In the crowd, I saw the very disapproving face of our high-school principal. Time to go!

  We thanked Mrs. Maven and hustled from the shop as quickly as possible, leaving Mrs. Maven to share this delicious nugget of news with the folks at Cookie’s.

  “I cannot believe I touched a dead girl’s stuff.” Berks passed me a mini bottle of hand sanitizer as we hustled to our volunteer gig at the Roseport Library. Her mom makes her take sanitizer everywhere. “You wore a dead girl’s glasses, too.”

  “Eeew,” I shrieked, then started giggling. Nerves, probably, but it was kind of exciting in a way. Some towns had haunted houses, or a ghostly black dog, or the Bunny Man who killed partying teens. We had Disco Donna, our unsolved crime, our urban legend.

  Donna had been queen bee of Roseport High back in the seventies. Head cheerleader, bad rep, too hot to care. The morning after Halloween, she was found laid out on her bed real peaceful, with a red rose in her clasped hands, bruises around her neck. People said a madman had escaped from the sanitarium in Springfield and climbed in her window and strangled her. Or it was the head football player or the president of the student council. Everyone had a theory. People whispered. They said her mom went mental when she found her and left her room unchanged like a shrine for years. If a girl told the story, they always mentioned the rose. If a boy told the story, they always said she was naked.

  Her killer was never found.

  “You know what?” Berks gave me the one-eyebrow-raised smirk that was a sure sign that she was about to make a bad decision. “That dress would make an awesome costume!” She spun on her heel. “I’m going to buy it. It fit me perfectly. I am going to be Disco Donna for Halloween tonight!”

  “That is a monumentally gross idea,” I said. “What if the dress is haunted?”

  Berks shrieked with laughter and told me she’d catch up with me later.

  I ran up the steps of the Roseport Library, a pretty stone building on the edge of Hamilton Park. The library was the other town hub, so I didn’t mind volunteering there. The librarians were nice, with one exception. Mrs. Davis Keen, The Dragon Queen. She could make a table of teen delinquents pack up and leave with just a single death-ray glance, so when she was there we were on our best behavior.

  I waved to Mrs. Day, the cool children’s librarian, and hurried into the staff-only area to get a book cart, praying that Mrs. Davis Keen wouldn’t notice that Berks was late. A half hour later, Berks dashed in, face flushed, holding her bag with The Dress. We hurried into the staff room. Tillie Thompson, a tiny older lady, was there sorting through some boxes. I stopped short.

  “Remember what Mrs. Maven said?” I whispered. “She said the people who brought in the clothes also dropped a box of books at the library.”

  “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Berks whispered hoarsely, grabbing my arm. “Dead girl’s books!”

  Mrs. Thompson reached into a canvas bin so deep that her toes barely touched the floor. “Need some help?” I asked.

  “You girls are the best.” Mrs. Thompson smiled. “We got a lot of boxes today. I’ve got to run, but if you can just get them on the table, I can sort through them tomorrow. Could you finish up for me?”

  Could we ever. As Mrs. Thompson twinkled out, we took the remaining three boxes of books from the bin.

  Keeping an eye peeled for the Dragon Queen, we rooted quickly through the boxes. One box held paperback romances. Cover after cover trimmed in pink, with shirtless men and half-naked women clinging to them. We rolled our eyes and moved on to the next box. Ludlum, Benchley, Jacqueline Suzanne. That left one box. It almost vibrated with—what? It was just an old cardboard box, but my hands shook as I pulled the flaps open, and I could tell Berks was holding her breath.

  High-school textbooks. Very old high-school textbooks. Earth Science. Algebra and You. “Oh, no!” I gasped. “Should we be wearing gloves?” We were huge fans of CSI.

  “Her killer probably didn’t handle her textbooks, unless he was a complete weirdo,” Berks said.

  I unfolded a poster of a skinny, bare-chested rock singer with amazing blond hair. Frampton Comes Alive.

  “Kind of hot,” Berks said. She put it back in the box. “Look! A Roseport yearbook.”

  We flipped it open and thumbed through the pages. “Oh, my God, look at those glasses! And those prom pictures. Ruffles!”

  The intercom squawked. “Mrs. Davis Keen? Back room phone.”

  “Quick!” Berks grabbed her shopping bag and thrust the yearbook inside. “Let’s put the other books back in the box and get this later.”

  My hands shook as I hurried to replace the textbooks in the box. In my haste, I knocked the huge algebra book off the table. It fell open. We gasped.

  The pages had been glued together, then hollowed out. Tucked in the hollow was a pink notebook.

  I pulled it out. On the cover, someone had written in purple looping handwriting: Diary. I felt like it was burning my hand as I pushed it into the shopping bag, too. Berks shoved the bag onto a shelf just as Mrs. Davis Keen entered the room.

  “Hi Mrs. Dra— er, Mrs. Davis Keen. We were just helping Mrs. Thompson with those donations,” I stammered.

  Mrs. Davis Keen swept her laser beams over us but evidently was too busy thinking about important library business to detect our nervous energy. “Thank you, girls. I’m sure she appreciates it.”

  She lifted the phone, listened for a few seconds, and said, “There are some new boxes here. I’ll check them now.”

  She powered over to the boxes we had rifled. “These came in today?”

  “Um, I think that’s what Mrs. Thompson said.” We edged toward the door.

  “Move along, girls. Get back to your shelving,” she murmured as her beautifully manicured hands lifted the flaps on one of the cartons.

  We pushed our book carts into the children’s room. “Why is she going through those boxes? She never looks at donations,” I whispered.

  When Mrs. Day, the children’s librarian, popped around the corner, I almost died.

  “She’s there because someone told her the books were donated by the people who bought the old Demonte house,” she said. “You know how people are. If anyone hears that we have books from Disco Donna’s house, they’ll cause a disturbance. And you know how Mrs. D-K feels about disturbances.”

  We finished our shift and hurried to the back room as casually as possible and grabbed Berks’s shopping bag. When we ran out, I was certain that the bag was glowing radioactively and we had “Stealing Disco Donna’s Diary” in a huge thought bubble over our heads.

  We hurried to my house. I t
exted our friend Eunice. She had to see the diary and yearbook A.S.A.P.

  Berks and I sat in my room staring at the plastic bag, which sat on the floor in the corner. It seemed to breathe. I did not want it on my bed. I was dying to look at it but knew that Eunice would kill if she learned Berks and I had gone ahead without her.

  I heard Eunice’s mom’s van wheeze to a stop in front of the house, and then the sound of footsteps as Eunice pounded up the stairs.

  “What’s this all about?” Eunice exclaimed. She was wearing a perfectly coordinated hippie outfit, including a purple pimp-like hat. “What’s this about Disco Donna?”

  “Shhhh!” I grabbed her arm and pointed at the bag.

  “Disco Donna’s shopping bag?” Eunice deadpanned.

  We dissolved into shrieks of laughter, but I shushed everyone again. “This is for real,” I said.

  “Really real,” Berks whispered.

  I filled Eunice in.

  Our eyes turned again to the bag. Berks grabbed it, and we flung ourselves on the floor.

  We went through the yearbook first, flipping to the D’s. “That’s her,” I whispered.

  Donna looked out at us with dark, almond-shaped eyes ringed with heavy eyeliner. She wore huge hoop earrings. A mane of dark curls. Her smile was flirtatious, almost a smirk.

  “She kind of looks like you, Berks,” Eunice whispered.

  Berks snorted. “Maybe she looks like me with way too much makeup and attitude. Supposedly she was pretty slutty, right? That’s not me.”

  Eunice flipped open the diary. “Look, she dots her I’s with bubbly hearts. My auntie says that means you’re weak minded.”

  “She doesn’t look weak to me,” I said.

  I could hear my mom answer the doorbell downstairs, but the voices of little kids yelling “trick or treat” faded into the background as Eunice read the diary entries. Donna noted big events, which sounded pretty wild. Fights with her mom, whom she called a “slut,” “fat pig,” and “jailer.” Donna never mentioned girl friends, but she had a lot of boyfriends. Occasionally she’d doodle hearts, flowers, and peace signs, and after most entries she’d write “Keep my secrets safe, Peter! SWAK.” Page after page describing make-outs with Jimmy, Paulie Sugarboy, Billy, Chris, Scott the Hickey King, and some nameless boy she did IT with in the janitor’s closet after a basketball game. We were riveted. September of her junior year, she started mentioning Mr. X.