by Leigh Perry
“That’s a relief,” she said, then quickly added, “Not that it’s good. I know I shouldn’t care that it was somebody I didn’t know but—”
“We get it,” I said, and hugged her again. “I don’t see Si— I don’t see Scooby-Doo.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Madison said. “He was with my group, but he slipped away when the lockdown was called.”
“He couldn’t have left the haunt,” Deborah said. “Security said some people got through, but not a Scooby-Doo.”
Madison said, “Then I guess he’s still in there. What do we do if they find him?”
“Maybe they won’t connect him with us,” I said.
Madison gave me a look. “Mom, what are you wearing? Or should I say Velma?”
“Oh, coccyx, I forgot!” It wouldn’t take a deductive genius to pair up my costume with Sid’s.
“Besides which,” Deborah reminded me, “my ticket takers saw you together. Didn’t you notice them taking pictures? They thought you were cute.”
“Next time, no matching costumes.”
“If there is a next time,” Deborah said ominously.
That pretty much killed conversation for a while, so we sat down to wait. Maybe fifteen minutes later, a man in a McQuaid sweatshirt and jeans came in, looking frazzled. He started for the clump of cops, but when Deborah called out, “Hey, Oscar,” he swerved in our direction.
“You picked a swell night to take off,” she said to him.
“I know. I should have known better on the first night of the Howl, but I wasn’t expecting things to go crazy until closer to Halloween.”
“Oscar, you’ve met my niece, Madison. This is my sister, Georgia.”
“Oscar O’Leary,” he said, shaking my hand. “You teach English, right?”
“Does it show?”
He grinned. “I don’t know all the faculty, but having three professors with the same last name stands out.”
“Oscar is McQuaid’s chief of security,” Deborah explained. “He’s been helping me set up safety protocols at the haunt, not that they worked any too well tonight.”
“Hey, we were planning for drunks and accidents, not murders.” He patted her arm, and she actually let him. Madison and I exchanged quizzical glances. Oscar had sandy blond hair and dark brown eyes, and while I wouldn’t call him handsome, he was definitely in the “nice-looking” category. I’d probably seen him around campus, but fortunately, hadn’t had to deal with security in a while.
Deborah said, “So what’s going on up at the haunt? Have they identified the girl yet?”
“Yeah, they found a purse dropped behind the curtains, and the picture on the driver’s license matches the victim. Sergeant Raymond is calling her family. Man, that’s not a job I’d want.”
I took Madison’s hand in mine and squeezed it. I didn’t even want to think about getting a phone call like that.
“Anyway, Raymond is going to come take charge here when he’s done, but in the meantime, I’m going to see about getting you people some drinks, maybe something to eat.” He patted Deborah’s arm again before walking on.
“He seems nice,” I ventured.
“He knows his job,” she said, which was high praise.
He certainly knew how to get things moving. Within minutes, the dining room personnel had rustled up coffee, soda, and cookies for everybody. I wondered which one of the dean’s affairs would be short on refreshments as a result. Since I was never invited to such things, I took extra cookies.
Finally Louis showed up, and accompanying him were a trio of young women. All three looked as if they were a year or two older than Madison, with blond hair, and had such reddened eyes that I could tell they’d been crying. I assumed that they were friends of the murder victim, and I wished I could offer them a hug or some comfort. Madison looked at them as if she were thinking.
“Do you know them?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. They look kind of familiar.”
Louis took a position near the front of the room, “May I have your attention please?” He waited for people to quiet down. “I want to thank you for your patience. I know this isn’t the way you intended to spend your Friday night, but as you’ve probably heard, a young woman was killed at McQuaid Hall. We’ve identified her as Kendall Fitzroy. She lived here in Pennycross and attended Brandeis in Waltham.”
There were gasps and murmurs from some of the scare actors, which I interpreted as recognition.
Louis went on. “We’re going to speak with each of you to find out if you saw anything that can help us determine what happened. So if you can be patient just a little while longer, we’ll get the process started.”
As the cops organized themselves, one of the uniformed officers came over and said, “Miss Thackery?”
“Which one?” Deborah asked.
He looked confused, but said, “Sergeant Raymond said it’s okay to let people make phone calls.”
“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 wor
king 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.”