The Skeleton Haunts a House Read Free Page B

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 dark 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
no
s.
    â€œWho 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?”
    â€œThere’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
    W e 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.
    â€œWe got a report of a woman being hurt,” he said.
    â€œShe’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 setin. “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