Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls

  And then at lunch I forgot about Heather because Marissa and Billy walked up holding hands.

  “All right,” I said, grabbing Marissa and yanking her to the side.

  “What?”

  “Since when did you start liking Billy?”

  “I’ve always liked Billy!”

  “No! I mean, liking-liking. When did you start liking Billy? When you found out he liked you? That’s no reason to like someone!”

  “I do like Billy. This has been, like, the funnest two days of my life!”

  “But is this a rebound thing? Because if it is, you have to be careful. Billy’s all funny on the outside, but inside he’s a marshmallow.”

  “Would you stop worrying?” She frowns at me. “You’d think you’d be excited for me. You’d think you’d be happy I was over Danny. You’d think you’d be saying, Yay Marissa!”

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “Sorry. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  So we left it at that and she went back to Billy and that’s pretty much all I saw of her for the rest of the day.

  Now, all day I’d been trying to keep Dusty Mike out of my mind, but he’d been there, sort of haunting me. And by the time school let out, I’d decided I needed to check some things before I met Casey at the graveyard. So when the dismissal bell rang, I didn’t even wait for Marissa to tell me she was going to hang out with Billy. I just grabbed my skateboard and flew over to Nightingale as fast as I could.

  The first thing I did was open Dusty Mike’s mailbox.

  There were now five pieces of mail in it—the three from yesterday plus an electric bill and a subscription postcard for Horticulture magazine.

  I put it all back in the box, closed the door, and went to his converted garage.

  The curtains were drawn, I couldn’t hear any noise coming from inside, and when nobody answered the door, I checked the knob.

  It was locked.

  So I went up to the front door of the main house and rang the bell, and when a woman with a sleeping baby on her shoulder answered and whispered, “Yes?” I whispered back, “I’m wondering if you know where your neighbor is. The one who lives in the converted garage?”

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah.”

  She shakes her head. “He’s pretty quiet. We don’t say much but hi to each other.”

  “So you don’t know if he has relatives or friends or … people he visits out of town?”

  She shakes her head. “He works at the cemetery. That’s about all I know.”

  I thank her and turn to go, but she asks, “Why all the questions? Is something wrong?”

  “I’m not sure,” I tell her, but in my gut I am sure—something bad’s happened to Dusty Mike. So I get out of there, cross the street, squeeze myself and my stuff through the cemetery gate, and hurry over to the place Holly and I had been the night before.

  Sure enough, Dusty Mike’s hoe is still lying there.

  Same place, same angle, same everything.

  So I go back to the gate, squeeze out of the graveyard, then haul down Stowell on my skateboard until I get to a gas station where I know there’s a pay phone. I pop in some leftover change from my laundry room scavenging and call Officer Borsch’s cell phone. And when he answers, “Borsch here,” I say, “Hey, it’s me. Sorry to call again, but to make a long story short—which I know you like me to do—I think something bad’s happened to Dusty Mike.”

  “Who?”

  “Michael Poe.”

  A slow, heavy sigh comes over the line. Like he’s just too tired to deal with me or my overactive imagination.

  “Officer Borsch, look. I know that Gordon guy thinks he’s a loon, and maybe he is, but Dusty Mike hasn’t picked up his mail in two days, he doesn’t answer his door, his neighbor hasn’t seen him, and his hoe has been lying on the same grave in the exact same way for two days.”

  “His hoe has.”

  The way he says hoe is so huffy and slow that my mind flashes to an image of him in a Santa hat with so little jolly left in his big ol’ belly that he can’t even finish a ho-ho-ho.

  “Yes! It’s just lying there! In the graveyard! For days! Which I know sounds stupid, but I’ve never seen him without it!”

  He heaves another sigh. “And how often have you seen him, Sammy?”

  In my head I count quick and get all the way up to maybe six. In almost a year. “Lots!” I tell him, but he’s right—it’s not like I’ve seen him that often.

  Or know anything about him.

  “Officer Borsch, listen to me. Something’s wrong. I can just tell.”

  “Sammy, this sort of thing happens all the time. People report someone missing and it turns out they’re at a friend’s house. Or they went away for the weekend. Or they’re taking a nap. No one’s reported him missing and—”

  “I’m reporting him missing!”

  He sighs again. “No family member has reported him missing. No co-worker.”

  “He was fired!”

  “Nobody who knows him.”

  “Well, what if he doesn’t have family? What if I’m the only person who cares?”

  There’s a moment of silence and then, “Why do you care, Sammy? From what I’ve heard, Michael Poe is a pretty strange character.”

  “Why do I care?” Something in my head snaps. “The same reason you should care! He looked after Elyssa last year when nobody knew she was running away from home to visit her dad’s grave! And since her dad was a cop and you saw him get killed—”

  “Okay, okay!” he says, shutting me up. Then he grumbles, “It would have helped a lot more if he’d called the department and told us a young girl kept appearing at the graveyard without supervision.”

  “But that’s not how he is. He’s just kind of in the shadows, watching out for people.”

  “So I’ve heard,” he growls. “A real stalker type.”

  “How can you say that! You don’t know anything about him!”

  “I’ve been told plenty by the office manager and the cemetery workers.”

  I take a deep breath. “Officer Borsch, he may be strange, but he’s nice and he cares, and it’s really starting to bug me that nobody seems to care about him.”

  He’s quiet a minute, then says, “Look, I can’t do anything official for forty-eight hours.”

  “What about unofficially?”

  “Sammy, do you have any idea what I’m going through here? I am buried in investigations.”

  “What if Dusty Mike’s the fourth person to go missing?”

  “It isn’t even in the same ballpark!” he snaps.

  “You don’t have to get mad.”

  “Sorry,” he grunts.

  We’re quiet a minute before I say, “I take it those other cases aren’t going well?”

  “We’re getting nowhere fast,” he growls. “They all just vanished. No trace. No ransom. No body …”

  “Sounds like Dusty Mike to me. No trace, no ransom, no body …”

  “Oh, Sammy, please,” he says like he’s rubbing out a migraine. “Just because you don’t know where he is doesn’t mean he’s missing.”

  “I’m telling you, Officer Borsch, something’s not right.”

  “And I’m telling you, Sammy, he’s not missing until someone who knows him reports that he’s been missing for forty-eight hours.”

  “What if no one ever reports him missing and he never comes back? Does that mean he’s not missing?”

  He hesitates, then growls, “Look, Sammy, I’ve got real work to do,” and hangs up without even saying goodbye.

  I stand there for a minute staring at the phone, then I slam it on the cradle and ride toward the cemetery to meet Casey.

  Now, from where I am, using the main cemetery entrance is way quicker than going back to the sneak-through gate. Easier, too. And since there’s an actual road, I just cruise up the driveway on my skateboard, go through the open gates, and keep on riding.

  The road leads right to the cemetery office
, so at first I feel a little like someone’s going to come out and bust me for riding a skateboard through the cemetery. But I tell myself they drive cars through, so what’s a skateboard going to hurt?

  And maybe I should also have been worrying about someone seeing me and thinking I was one of the Tombstone Tippers, but I’m by myself, not with a bunch of other kids, and besides, I’m not really thinking about tombstones or Halloween.

  I’m thinking about Dusty Mike.

  And just as I’m getting ready to turn with the road as it goes to the left, I get a brilliant idea. I check my watch, and since I’m still running a little ahead of when Casey would be able to get to Sassypants Station, I hop off my skateboard and carry it up to the cemetery office.

  The sign on the door says OPEN, so I turn the knob and go inside.…

  And right away I wish I hadn’t.

  Hudson says that if you act like you’ve done something wrong, people will assume that you have. So when I walk through the cemetery office door and find myself face to face with the ruby-haired woman we’d seen on Halloween, I try real hard to act like I’ve never seen her before in my life.

  Even though her van had practically run us over.

  Even though she’d watched us slide down the Vampire’s car.

  Even though we’d seen her calling the cops on us.

  I remind myself that I’d been dressed as a zombie on Halloween and that there’s no way she’ll recognize me. Still, the office is small and cluttered and she’s staring at me, so right away I feel claustrophobic and panicky.

  “May I help you?”

  She has a beautiful smile—sparkly and warm—and I suddenly feel worse about any trouble I caused. Especially since it’s obvious that she’s in the eye of a big junk storm. There are files and papers and boxes and catalogs and boots and jackets and a leaning tower of ancient computer parts and printers and just junk all around her, but her desk is really tidy. It’s got only a big desk calendar over it, a phone to her left, and a pencil jar and a small vase of flowers to her right.

  I blink at her and out of my mouth comes a real intelligent, “Uh …”

  What was I going to ask?

  She laughs. “Or maybe you took a wrong turn?”

  There are lots of chairs crammed into this office. Two in front of the desk, two off to the side, and one near another door that’s straight across from the door I’d come through.

  Oh. And then there’s the one she’s sitting in.

  So I guess my brain figures it’s okay to let my shaky knees take a little break, ’cause before I even know what I’m doing, I’m sinking onto the edge of a chair in front of her desk, holding my skateboard across my lap. “Uh, no. I, um … I’m actually wondering if you have files on people who work … or worked here.”

  Her smile fades a little. “Files on … Why would you be interested in that?”

  “Because … um …” And then my mouth just starts motoring. “You know how at schools they make you fill out an emergency contact form where you have to put down who to call in case something happens? Like, if I fall and break an arm, they know who my doctor is and who to track down and say, Hey, this idiot daughter of yours was riding her skateboard down a ramp and fell and broke her arm. You know … that kind of thing?”

  She grins at me. “Sure.”

  “So is there something like that at places where people work?”

  Just then the door on the other side of the office opens and Teddy Bear walks in saying, “Hey, Courtney—” and then he sees me. “Oh, hi. You her sitter for tonight?”

  I shake my head and look at Ruby Red, who laughs and says to him, “Give me five, would you?”

  And that’s when the weirdest thing happens.

  I hear that pack of dogs again.

  Grrrrr-ruff-ruff-ruff, grrrrr-ruff-ruff-ruff.

  Only this time the dogs go from being somewhere out there in the distance to being loud.

  And tinny.

  Before I can finish blinking, ol’ Teddy Bear’s swept his cell phone out of his pocket and is going out the back door saying, “What’s up?”

  Half of my brain feels stun-gunned, and the other half is zapping around trying to wake up the first half. But it’s like there’s a force field between the two halves and nothing’s getting through.

  “So yes, we have personnel records,” Ruby Red is saying, “but it’s against the law for me to share them with you.”

  “Huh? Oh.”

  “Who were you wanting to know about?”

  Half of my brain’s screaming, Get up! Leave! but apparently my mouth’s wired to the other half, because it says, “Michael Poe.” Then real fast, I add, “I know he’s a little strange and all that, but he’s been really nice to a friend of mine and we’re worried about him because he hasn’t been home in two days.”

  She stares at me a minute, then says, “I wouldn’t worry about Mike Poe. I’d worry more about your friend.”

  “My friend? Why?”

  She cocks her head a little. “I wouldn’t let my kid anywhere near him.”

  I just sit there, perched on the edge of the chair, and finally the lightning-storm half of my brain starts to break through to the stunned half. “So I should ask the police to look into his … what did you call them? Personnel records?”

  “The police?”

  “Well, you’d show it to them, right? So they could try and track him down?”

  She stares at me a minute, then says, “Well sure. But I just can’t imagine a young girl like you would have any concern over a strange man like Michael Poe.”

  I stand up and tell her, “I just want to know he’s all right.”

  “Well, here,” she says, twisting around in her chair and opening a filing cabinet. “Let me make sure we even have contact records on him. He was hired so long ago … I don’t know what the policy was back then.”

  So I wait while she paws through files, and that’s when I notice that her calendar has BURIAL written in red in certain boxes, with a time and a name underneath.

  Something about that gives me the shivers. Her calendar goes from July to December—half a year laid out in front of her. And in the blink of an eye you can see what sort of month Death had.

  He was really busy in September.

  There are, like, eight BURIALS.

  Not so busy in October—there were only two.

  But already November had two written on it, and it wasn’t even a week old.

  “Here we go.” She pulls a file halfway out, then thumbs through it and shakes her head. “All we’ve got is a mailing address and his phone number.” She gives me a sorry-honey look and says, “And I don’t think anyone here’s going to be able to tell you much, either. He’s a loner, and, sweetheart, honestly, you should stay away from him.”

  “So no one here’s seen him the last two days?”

  She shakes her head. “He was let go, you know.” I nod, so she adds, “There was a reason for that.”

  I tell her thanks and start to leave, but stop. “Maybe you could call his number? As a favor?”

  She hesitates, then shrugs and says, “Sure, I can do that.” And after checking the file again she picks up the phone on her desk and punches in the number. And I’m watching her wait as the line rings, expecting her to tell me there’s no answer, when suddenly her face clicks into action and she says, “Michael? … Yes, this is Courtney, I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s a girl here who’s concerned because she hasn’t seen you in a couple of days.… Uh-huh … Uh-huh … I’m not sure, let me ask.” She covers the mouthpiece and asks me, “What’s your name?”

  “Sammy.”

  “Sammy?”

  I nod. “And my friend’s name is Elyssa. He calls her Lyssie.”

  “It’s Sammy and Lyssie,” she says into the phone.

  I put out my hand and whisper, “Can I talk to him?”

  “Sammy wants to talk to you, is that okay?” But as she listens her eyes get bigger and bigger, and the
n she says, “I’ll relay that,” and drops the phone on the base like it’s contaminated.

  “What did he say?”

  “To put it in polite terms, he wants all of us to leave him alone.” She shakes her head. “It’s sweet of you to be concerned, but honestly, he’s not someone you should be associating with.” She looks up at me. “And obviously he’s fine.”

  I take a deep breath and say, “Well, thanks,” then head out the door.

  Now, I was feeling kind of stupid. Stupid and a little bit mad. I mean, why had I wasted so much time thinking about Dusty Mike? Why had I been so worried? I really didn’t know him, and it was pretty clear from what he’d told Courtney that he didn’t care if Elyssa and I were worried about him.

  Since I was now late meeting Casey, I decided to make a beeline into the old section by taking a shortcut across the pavement that went around the office. I’d never paid any attention to the office area part of the cemetery before, but now I saw that it was way bigger than just the office—it was a whole little complex. Next to the office was an open storage unit that had canopies and AstroTurf and casket gurneys inside it. And behind that was a wide paved area and two big garages. The garage doors were all open, and I could see a riding mower, a flat trailer, and some sort of oversized Tonka truck thing with a boom and a winch coming out of it.

  So that was all a little surprising, but what made me do a double take was something completely unexpected. There, in the big breezeway area between the office building and the garages, parked in the middle of two pickup trucks, a silver van, and a golf cart, was the Deli-Mustard Car.

  I look around quick for the Vampire, and I can feel my heart speed up and my hands start to get clammy. He had seen me—at least the back of me—without my zombie disguise when we’d escaped the funeral parlor. And since I’m wearing the same shoes and jeans and sweatshirt I’d had on then, the last thing I want is to come face to face with him.

  Since the nearest place to really get out of view is behind the Sunset Crypt, I cut up to it as fast as I can, then catch my breath and make sure nobody’s watching.