by Leigh Perry
Sid lowered his voice to what he thought was a conspiratorial whisper. “I don’t suppose you can sneak us past the line, can you?”
“You’re in a fur suit,” she said dryly. “Not exactly easy to sneak.”
“Aw, come on, Deborah—”
“But as it happens, Madison reserved will-call passes for you two so you can go in with the next party.” She handed an orange cardboard ticket to Sid, then tried to give me one.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll wait out here.”
“You don’t want to go in?” Sid said.
“Nope.”
“Not even to see Madison give her spiel?”
“She did it for me at the house.”
“You’re not still freaked out about—”
“No, I’m not,” I lied. “I just don’t like going in front of all these other people. You go ahead.”
“Are you sure?”
“The next party is leaving now,” Deborah said, though I’m not sure if she was taking pity on me or getting rid of Sid. Either way, he scurried off to join a group. A young Snow White immediately announced that Scooby would protect her from any monsters, and reached up to hold his hand.
“Isn’t that cute?” I said.
“It’s not going to be cute when she comes out of the haunt crying.” Deborah pointed at a sign on the ticket booth.
WARNING!
McHades Hall is too scary for the following:
People with weak hearts.
Those who faint easily.
Pregnant women.
Intoxicated visitors.
Children who frighten easily.
Enter at your own risk—no refunds!
“Yow. Maybe you guys should tone it down a little.”
“If we tone it down, people complain because they feel cheated. We’re not talking McKamey Manor or Blackout, but we are trying to scare people. That is the point, after all.”
“I guess.”
“Just because you don’t like haunted houses—”
“I know, I know. I’m a wimp.”
She shrugged. “You can see we’ve got plenty of customers without you.” If anything, the line had gotten longer since we’d been talking. “Come Halloween, people are going to be waiting for two hours to get in. I just hope my cast lasts. All that screaming and scaring is hard work.”
“I imagine so. So how long is Sid going to be in there?”
“It takes about half an hour to go through.”
“Then I think I’ll go get a hot dog.”
“Bring back hot dogs and fries for me and my ticket sellers, and I’ll pay for yours.”
“Deal!”
I ran into my friend Charles along the way, and stopped to chat for a bit. Then with the line at the concession stand for hot dogs and the difficulty of carrying my load through the ever-increasing crowd, I was gone considerably longer than half an hour. When I finally got back, I handed Deborah the sack of food, reached in to grab a hot dog and a mustard packet for myself, and asked, “Isn’t Scooby out yet?”
“Out and back in again. He was making a hairy nuisance—”
“Good one!”
“What?” She made a face. “God, you’re as bad as he is. He was making a nuisance of himself while waiting for you, so I gave him another ticket.”
“Jinkies. I guess he enjoyed it.”
“Something weird about a . . .” She looked around and apparently decided too many people were in earshot. “About a guy like Scooby liking a haunted house, don’t you think?”
“He loves Halloween. You know, he volunteered to work here for you.”
“Madison told me. Thanks, but no thanks. We only hire fake spooks.”
“Suit yourself.” It was probably just as well. The other cast members might have noticed there was something odd about my pal.
I’d just finished my second hot dog when the first screams came. Well, to be fair, people had been screaming the whole time, attesting to the success of the scare actors’ efforts, but these came via Deborah’s walkie-talkie.
“What’s going on in there?” she demanded of whoever was on the other end.
The response was loud enough that I could hear it plainly. “There’s a dead body in here!”
2
“Say again?” Deborah’s tone was determinedly matter-of-fact, but I could see how tightly she was gripping the walkie-talkie.
“There’s a dead woman in the party room. A real one!”
“Who is it?” Deborah barked, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. My daughter, Madison, Deborah’s niece, was in there. Sid was, too, but the voice had said “she.”
“I don’t know. There’s blood and . . . It’s real blood!”
“Don’t go anywhere, and don’t touch anything! I’m coming!” She keyed a different switch. “Security. Lock the haunt down—nobody in or out. Do it now!” Another switch. “Bring up all house lights and shut off sound effects. Room monitors, hold all groups in place and stay where you are! Tell your actors to drop character.”
Then she pointed at her ticket agents. “You, call 911. Tell them to send cops and an ambulance. You, call campus security. I’m going in.”
She headed for the front door, and I was right on her heels.
“Where’s Madison?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.” Back on the walkie-talkie, she said, “Room monitors sound off.” Deborah must have prepared them for an emergency because they started giving their names and statuses, including which scare actors were with them. Their voices were probably higher-pitched than usual, but they were holding it together.
Deborah led us in the front of the building, where a group of confused customers surrounded a young girl in a bride of Frankenstein costume. “Stay here!” Deborah ordered as we zoomed past, ignoring their questions.
There was a wide stairway in front of us, and though the glow-in-the-dark arrows painted on the floor pointed up, Deborah went past them to part a set of black curtains. The enclosure behind held control boards manned by college-aged kids in jeans and orange McHades Hall Crew T-shirts.
“What’s going on?” one wanted to know.
“I’m going to find out. Stay here, stay safe.”
We went through another set of curtains at the back, and I found myself in a narrow corridor made up of plywood walls. Deborah went forward and slid open a door. Just as we went in, I heard a room monitor on the walkie-talkie say, “Avery. I’ve got Madison and her group with me.” I took a breath, wondering how long it had been since I’d done so.
The large room we’d entered was set up like a party, if you liked creepy parties. There was a banner hung on the wall that said Delta Epsilon Alpha Delta Rush in red, dripping paint. Along one side was a long table filled with nasty-looking refreshments like eyeballs in Jell-O, finger sandwiches with human fingers shoved into them, and a head with brains hanging out. A bar had poison bottles, bloody Bloody Mary glasses, worms in the martinis, and maggots in the beer. All fake, of course, but as gross as it was in normal light, I could only imagine how it would have looked if the scene had been set for customers.
In one corner of the room, half a dozen people in zombie costumes were huddled together. When they saw Deborah, they pointed to the opposite corner, where a woman was crumpled on the floor, lying on one side with one arm flung forward and wide-open eyes staring at nothing. And as the guy on the walkie-talkie had said, there was blood.
When I got nearer, I realized that she looked closer to girl than woman. I couldn’t bring myself to look too long at her face, but her hands looked young. Her long blond hair didn’t hide the fact that she’d been beaten hard enough that her skull was no longer shaped right and one arm was bent at the wrong place. She wasn’t in costume, unless it was some character who wore blue jeans, white sneakers, and a d
ark blue hoodie.
Deborah knelt beside her and touched her arm. Then she checked for a pulse, something I hadn’t realized she knew how to do. After a moment, she shook her head, took a deep breath, and stood. “Okay, the police are going to be here soon. Does anybody know who this is?”
There was a round of nos.
“Who found her?” Before anybody could answer, she said, “Never mind, we’ll wait for the cops.” She got back on her walkie-talkie to tell security to bring the police to the zombie party when they arrived. “Otherwise,” she said, “nobody comes in, nobody goes out.”
I whispered, “What about Sid?”
“There’s nothing I can do about him, Georgia. We’ve got to preserve the crime scene.”
She was right, I knew she was right, but the thought of what was going to happen when the police made my skeletal friend take off his costume scared me more than anything in the haunt could have.
3
We didn’t have to wait long. It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes when a guy in a bright orange McHades Hall Security T-shirt came in, followed by a pair of Pennycross patrolmen and a man in jeans and a button-down shirt.
When Deborah saw the fellow in jeans, she nodded a curt greeting. It was Louis Raymond, a member of the Pennycross Police Department. At one point, I’d been sure Louis was interested in dating her, but when Madison had been kidnapped some months earlier, he hadn’t taken Deborah’s instructions on how to respond, and she hadn’t been pleased.
“We got a report of a woman being hurt,” he said.
“She’s over there. Dead.”
He repeated Deborah’s actions, then asked, “What happened?”
A college-aged guy spoke first. At least I thought he was college-aged. It was hard to tell under his makeup, which made him look as if his throat had been slit and putrefaction had set in. “We don’t know! We were in the middle of attacking the group— I mean, not really attacking, but doing our scene, so we were chasing people all around. One woman went into that corner, tripped or something, and started yelling that it was a real body. We just laughed—you know, still in character—and she ran out screaming. But once she was gone I started thinking that there aren’t any bodies in this scene, just us zombies. So I went to see what she was talking about and I found—” He swallowed. “I found her. I thought somebody had just moved a prop in here, but when I touched her, I could tell she was real. That’s when we called Ms. Thackery.”
“Do you know how long she’d been there?” Louis said.
The zombies conferred, but it turned out that they weren’t sure. “That corner is really dark when the room is set, so we didn’t notice her until that other woman tripped over her.”
“I did a walk-through before opening tonight,” Deborah put in, “and I’m sure she wasn’t here then.”
“How long have you been open?” Louis asked.
“Since five. So two and a half hours.”
“She’s not one of your people, is she?”
Deborah shook her head. “All of our people are accounted for.”
“Then what about the group she came through the house with? Wouldn’t they have noticed her disappearing?”
“Not necessarily,” said a girl zombie with a fake eye hanging down one cheek. “A lot of parties get split up in the haunt, especially in this scene. They get so scared that guys forget their girlfriends and parents abandon their kids. It happens all the time.”
I wasn’t sure if I should be impressed or appalled by the effectiveness of their efforts.
“Have you checked security footage?” Louis asked.
“We don’t have any cameras,” Deborah said, and I could tell she was gritting her teeth.
He looked as if he was about to ask why when more responders started coming in: EMTs with a stretcher, additional uniformed officers, people in plainclothes with badges on their belts, and several campus security guards.
Louis waved one of the officers over. “Officer Burcell is going to take you out of the way and stay with you, okay?”
“What about the rest of the people in the haunt?” Deborah asked. “I’ve got cast and crew members, and I don’t know how many customers are still in the building.”
“We’ll get to them as soon as we can,” Louis said, “but it’s going to take some time. Just hang tight.”
Deborah got on her walkie-talkie and told her people that the police were on the scene, and that they should all stay exactly where they were until the police told them differently. There was some back and forth with the security crew outside the exit because apparently some people had escaped despite their best efforts to keep them contained, and some of the ones left were making noises about leaving. Louis sent a couple of officers out to deal with the situation. Then Officer Burcell herded Deborah, the zombies, and me to the end of the room as far as possible from the dead girl. Being at a distance was fine with me—farther away would have been better.
Deborah was glaring at Louis as he went to work, but I knew she wasn’t really mad at him. She just gets argumentative when she’s worried, and she was currently pretty worried. She was in charge of McHades, after all. Had she and I had a different kind of relationship, I’d have mirrored the scare actors we were standing with and offered her a hug or a hand to hold. But it was us, so I said, “You okay?”
She grunted in an affirmative way.
The niceties attended to, I said, “I guess Officer Raymond was off duty when the call came in since he’s not wearing a uniform.”
“He rotated to Investigations, so he gets to wear plainclothes. Promoted to sergeant, too. Or so I hear.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“What? We do still bowl on the same team. I have to talk to him sometimes.”
In a better situation, I’d have probed more about just how much she had to talk to him, but it wasn’t the time or place for sibling teasing. I think my unconscious was trying desperately to give me something to think about other than the dead body just a few feet away. At least the gathering responders meant I couldn’t actually see her anymore. When I tried to think of something else, I started worrying about Sid instead. I wanted to borrow Deborah’s walkie-talkie to call Madison and see if she knew where he was, but was afraid to draw any attention to him.
After some discussion between the various responders, Louis came over. “We’re going to evacuate all of you people, plus the rest of the staff and customers so we can move the investigation along. McQuaid security has opened up a room in Stuart Hall, which I understand is close by, and we’re going to walk you over there and ask everybody some questions.”
“You want me to let my people know?” Deborah asked.
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
She nodded and used the walkie-talkie to spread the word. There was some grumbling, not so much from the cast as from customers who wanted to know what was going on, but Deborah just said, “Don’t fuss at me. The cops want us elsewhere so we’re going elsewhere.”
“Thanks,” Louis said when she was done.
“I don’t blame them for wanting to leave,” she retorted. “None of the customers upstairs or in the room before this one would have had a chance to kill that girl. It’s the people who’ve already left you should be holding.”
He held his temper admirably, and only said, “It shouldn’t take long to sort out the people who don’t know anything, and we’ll be trying to track down the people who left.” Then he waved over another uniformed cop and a pair of McQuaid security guards and said, “These people will walk you over.”
“Can we get our stuff out of the greenroom?” a zombie cheerleader asked.
“Not now,” Louis said. “We’re going to need to leave everything in situ until the forensics people get here.”
“But I need to call my mom and let her know I’m okay,” she said.
&nbs
p; “You can use my phone,” I said. “I didn’t come in until after the body was found, so I don’t need to leave my bag, right, Louis?”
“No, you’re good, but as for calling . . . Look, I don’t want to alarm the town with a bunch of rumors. So I’m going to ask you people not to make any phone calls, or e-mail anybody, or tweet for the time being. Once we identify the victim and get in touch with her next of kin, we’ll give the okay.”
The zombies and I nodded, and Deborah said, “Don’t worry. They can wait.”
Our escorts started leading the way out, two in front and two behind. I guess they didn’t want anybody sneaking off. We went back the way Deborah and I had come, through the building to the main entrance, collecting staff and customers as we went. I spotted Madison, still in her vampire outfit, but didn’t see Sid’s Scooby-Doo head anywhere. I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.
Once we were outside, the cops cleared a path through the curious crowd and took us to Stuart Hall, the sedate, ivy-covered building which held the plush dining room usually only used for university functions and suck-up-to-alumni dinners. The zombies and other made-up cast members looked particularly incongruous amongst the oak tables and solemn paintings of former deans and distinguished professors. A trio of maintenance people was busily setting up metal folding chairs all through the room, no doubt wanting to keep the fake blood and gore off of the upholstery.
People quickly divided up. Customers went to one side, grumbling and looking suspiciously at the scare actors. The actors were on the other side, comforting one another and chattering in a mix of excitement and upset. Deborah and I were left in the middle.
Madison found us quickly, and came over for hugs—in public—which showed how upset she was.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Did somebody really die?”
“I’m afraid so. And it looks like murder.”
“Oh my gosh. Was it one of us?”
Deborah said, “Nope, a customer. I didn’t recognize her.”