“Coffee, anyone?” she asked brightly. “Or cocoa?”
“I’ll have a beer,” Boxer said.
Beth snickered.
“Cocoa all around, then. I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll give you a hand.” Stu stomped out of the room and was waiting for Liss in the kitchen when she got there.
“All right, Stu. What’s got you on the warpath?” Liss had mugs ready on a tray, a packet of pre-measured hot chocolate mix in each one. All she had to do was add water from the kettle steaming on the stove.
“What’s that Snipes boy doing here?”
“Beth brought him.”
“I’m pretty sure he tried to shoplift a ski mask out of my store the other day.”
“Pretty sure?”
“I’m keeping my eye on him.”
“You do that, but until you actually catch him walking off with something, you give him the benefit of the doubt. Presumed innocent until proven guilty, right?”
“I don’t need proof to know a bad apple when I see one,” Stu grumbled under his breath. “Figures he’d be a Snipes.”
“Keep your voice down and your opinions to yourself, Stu!” Liss jerked her head toward the doors that opened into the front of the house. One led to the hall and the other to the dining room. Both were open.
“You know what they’re like,” Stu muttered.
Liss uncovered a plate of assorted cookies, added it to the tray, and started pouring hot water into the mugs. “I don’t know any of the Snipes family well. Rodney and Norman were a couple of years behind me in school. Hilary is two or three years older than I am.”
“He must be Hilary’s kid. Heard she had a boy. She’s Cracker’s half sister. Quite a bit younger than him, but she’s aunt to Rodney and Norman all the same. Works as a checker at the grocery store.” Stu made a rude noise. “It’s anybody’s guess who the kid’s father is.”
“That’s enough, Stu.”
Liss kept her voice low, but let her anger show. Boxer was not responsible for anything members of his family had done and he certainly couldn’t be blamed for the circumstances of his birth. Besides, there were times when it was a mark of intelligence on the part of an expectant mother to decide that single parenthood was a better choice than marriage to an unsuitable or unstable sperm donor.
Stu looked as if he had more to say, but a noise from the direction of the pantry distracted him. Glenora stood on her hind legs on the kitchen side of the door, batting at the wooden panels with her front paws.
Liss returned the kettle to the stove and handed Stu a spoon. “Would you stir these, please?”
She opened the pantry door just far enough to shove the black cat through. Lumpkin made a gallant attempt at escape, but Liss was too quick for him. She did not intend to put up with any more cat vs. dog confrontations.
When Stu finished the task she’d given him, Liss picked up the tray and handed it to him. Firmness might not work all that well with cats, but sometimes it did with people. She could only hope. “Carry this into the dining room for me, will you, Stu? Just set it on the table and we’ll call the meeting to order.”
“I should never have let you badger me into joining this committee,” he grumbled, but he did as he was told.
Liss rolled her eyes and followed him out of the kitchen.
A few minutes later, everyone was seated at Liss’s dining room table and she’d handed around mugs of cocoa, cookies, pads, and pencils.
“What’s this for?” Gloria stared at the legal pad in front of her as if she’d never seen lined yellow paper before.
“That’s so you can make lists of what has to be done. Lists are always useful.” When Gloria continued to look doubtful, Liss turned to the first item on her list, the agenda for the meeting. “Has everyone had a chance to look around our haunted house?” She glanced at Boxer.
“Seen it,” he mumbled around a mouthful of chocolate-chip cookie.
“Good. Well, then—suggestions? Anyone?”
“How scary do you want to get?” Gloria asked. “A friend of mine was telling me about a play she saw once. One character swept aside a curtain, and there were the heads of the other character’s children. Freaked her right out. The heads were wax, or maybe plaster, but they looked real. Their eyes were open and kind of bulging out and there was lots of fake blood.”
Beth stuck her finger in her mouth and made gagging noises. Adam giggled.
“Have you got a better idea?” Liss asked her young neighbor.
“How about zombies?”
“Oh, nicely gross.” Gloria’s grin signaled approval. She nibbled delicately at a molasses cookie.
“Do you mean people dressed up as zombies?” Stu asked. “Or manikins?”
For a moment, Beth looked stumped. “Manikins, I guess. But they won’t be as scary.”
“We don’t have a big budget,” Liss reminded her. “We can’t afford to hire actors. And to make someone look like a zombie, you’d need a lot of make up. Same goes for vampires.”
Beth made a face. “Vampires are so yesterday!”
Liss just shook her head. Vampires, she could understand . . . sort of. At least there was a long literary tradition of romantic vampire heroes. But zombies? She didn’t see anything remotely appealing about animated dead people who were slowly rotting away. After a moment’s thought, she decided that she didn’t want an explanation.
“I realize that the old trick of putting a sheet on a pulley and calling it a ghost is way too tame,” she said, moving on, “but we need to keep the blood and gore to a minimum. After all, Moosetookalook’s All Hallows Festival is supposed to be family-friendly.”
“Can we have spooky sound effects?” Adam asked.
“Definitely. I still have theatrical contacts from my days on the road. I can arrange something without too much trouble.” Liss had toured for eight years with a Scottish dance company, until a career-ending knee injury had sent her back to her old home town to heal and regroup.
Stu asked about lighting effects, which led to a discussion about borrowing a generator to supply power to the mansion.
“Candles are way spookier than electric lights,” Beth insisted.
“Yes, but open flames are a safety issue.” Stu showed more patience than Liss expected of him, although she noticed that he spoke exclusively to Beth and ignored Boxer. “With a generator, you’ll have plenty of light while you’re setting things up and you can run special lighting effects, too.”
“What if we create a poisoning scene in the dining room?” Liss suggested after they’d discussed what to do in the conservatory, the parlor, and the library, and voted to use tour guides to take people around in small groups, rather than let them wander freely through the mansion. They’d also agreed to string a velvet rope across the bottom of the main staircase to discourage people from wandering upstairs on their own. “We can dress manikins in old-fashioned clothing and arrange them around that wonderful antique table. We’ll leave the cobwebs and the peeling wallpaper as they are and add platters of fake food. Envision the victims falling facedown onto their plates.”
“They all die?” Beth asked.
“That’s the way the cookie bounces,” Boxer said, chomping down on another one of the chocolate-chip variety.
“Balls bounce,” Stu muttered in an irritable voice. “Cookies crumble.”
Boxer smirked at him. “You sure about that?”
“Yes or no on the poisoning scene?” Liss interrupted.
Everyone voted in favor of the idea except Samantha. She sat with her eyes downcast, concentrating on her mug of cocoa. Her hair fell forward to conceal most of her face. Liss glanced at Boxer and thought she could guess why her niece had yet to contribute anything to the discussion. Liss could remember being just as painfully shy and tongue-tied when she was a young girl . . . and in the same room as a boy she had a crush on. Why Boxer Snipes should appeal to either Beth or Samantha eluded her, but puppy love was rarely logical.
>
“I think we should hang a body in the stairwell.” Gloria’s suggestion jerked Liss back to the matter under discussion—decorating the haunted house. “There’s just room enough for a rope where the banister curves around at the top.”
Liss had no difficulty visualizing the scene. “We could use another manikin for the victim. Or perhaps a dummy made of softer material. More like a scarecrow, so the body won’t look so stiff.” She’d recently read a mystery by a local author in which the villain left the body in the middle of a cornfield, in place of a scarecrow. Creepy!
“A stiff is supposed to be stiff,” Stu said, sotto voce. More loudly, he asked, “Are you sure you don’t want blood? What if we cut the body open so the guts hang out?”
“Oh, yes!” Gloria exclaimed. “And we could put up a little sign to tell people that he’d been hanged, drawn, and quartered.”
“Um, I don’t think they did the last part of that while the body was still on the gallows.”
“My friend says—”
“The same one who saw that macabre play?” Liss asked.
Gloria nodded.
“Maybe she’d like to join the committee,” Stu suggested. “She could take my place.”
Liss sent a withering look in his direction. “Would she be interested?” Liss asked Gloria. “Not that we can manage without Stu, but there’s plenty to do and another pair of hands would be welcome.”
A delicate flush stained Gloria’s cheeks as she backpedaled. “Oh, she can’t. That is, she’d be uncomfortable . . . oh, dear. The truth is, she’s not really a friend. She’s my great-aunt, Flo Greeley. She’s been my house guest for the last week, but she’s recovering from plastic surgery after an accident and she’s very sensitive about her appearance. She wouldn’t be at all comfortable meeting strangers. Not at all. Why, I can barely get her to go out into my back yard for a breath of fresh air.”
“I understand completely,” Liss assured her. “Forget I mentioned it. So, does anyone have any other suggestions to do with the haunted house or shall we move on to the next Halloween activity?”
“How about coffins in the basement?” Stu asked. “Seems like a natural, with or without vampires.”
“The cellar is off limits,” Liss said. “The stairs are narrow and steep and the floor is dirt. For safety reasons, we should keep the cellar door locked during the guided tours.”
Next on Liss’s agenda was a discussion of games for the community costume party.
“Did you know that Halloween is believed to have originated in Scotland?” she asked, smiling a little in anticipation of being kidded about finding a connection to her Scottish heritage. “That’s where the name All Hallows came from. That being the case, I thought we could include a few traditional Scottish activities, like bobbing for apples. That’s called ‘apple dookin’ by the Scots. Another Scottish Halloween game is ‘treacle scones.’ ”
“Okay.” Stu sounded resigned. “I’ll bite. What do you do with the scones?”
Liss laughed. “In fact, biting is what you try to do. You cover the scones in treacle, tie each one to the end of a piece of twine, and suspend them overhead. Blindfolded contestants, their hands held behind their backs, attempt to catch hold of a scone with their teeth. The first person to succeed, wins.”
Beth giggled.
“What are scones?” Boxer asked.
“The better question is what’s treacle?” Stu muttered.
“Scones are . . . biscuits. Treacle is what the British call molasses. We could use anything that’s sticky—honey, or maybe maple syrup. The idea is that contestants end up with messy faces and everyone laughs a lot.”
Gloria grimaced in distaste. “Messy? I call it disgusting. And think of the germs! The last thing we want is to have festival-goers come down with the flu a week after our fundraiser.”
This from the woman who wanted to eviscerate a dummy! With regret, Liss crossed treacle scones off her list of suggestions.
“You forgot the trick-or-treating,” Adam piped up.
“Never! Let’s talk about that next.”
By the time the committee members went their separate ways, they’d set a tentative schedule for Moosetookalook’s All Hallows Festival. The thirty-first of October conveniently fell on a Saturday, so the festivities could start early in the day. A corn maze would be open from mid-morning until late afternoon, when tours of the haunted house would start. Meanwhile, a costume parade and contest would take place in the town square. Prizes would also be awarded in various categories for carved pumpkins. Next would come the lighting of the community bonfire. After that, young revelers would go trick-or-treating. They’d reassemble an hour later for a Halloween party. Simultaneously, their parents and other adults would attend their own costume party.
“The meeting went better than I expected,” Liss told Dan that evening after supper.
They were in the living room, surrounded by cardboard boxes and bubble wrap. Now that her new library/office was finished, Liss was eager to move in. She chattered cheerfully as they wrapped her bits and bobs, recounting the committee’s discussion of blood and gore and ghosts. When everything was packed, they carried the boxes up to the attic.
Liss lost count of how many trips they made, but by the time the living room was empty of cartons, she’d run out of steam. She readily fell in with Dan’s suggestion that she call it a day, especially when she recognized the look in his eyes.
They were, after all, still newlyweds.
Chapter Three
Liss’s boxes were still unpacked the following afternoon when she put the BACK IN 15 MINUTES sign on the door of Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium and trotted across the town square to the public library.
“I’m looking for information on the Chadwick family,” she told the librarian, Dolores Mayfield. “Is there anything in the local history section about them or their house?” Liss was curious as to whether there was a Scottish ancestor in their family tree, but more interested in learning something of the history of the mansion. Who knew? She might even unearth a nice juicy murder somewhere in its past—something to inspire the creation of a resident ghost.
“I suppose I could let you browse through my clippings.” Dolores sounded reluctant, but Liss didn’t doubt for a moment that she intended to make them available. Dolores liked to be coaxed.
“I didn’t know you kept files of clippings.”
“I’ve done it for years. Since before there was an Internet.” Dolores gave a small, self-deprecating chuckle as she left her desk and crossed the library to a large vertical file cabinet, rolling up the sleeves of her turtleneck pullover as she went. “Worth their weight in gold sometimes. You never know what information someone will come looking for.”
Dolores, as Liss knew to her sorrow, was Moosetookalook’s resident snoop. She didn’t just collect clippings for the benefit of some future researcher. She clipped items from the newspapers because she liked to know everything about everybody and gossip about them behind their backs.
A bulging file folder labeled CHADWICK emerged from the A-H drawer. Dolores handed it over and stooped to open I-Z. A moment later, she produced a second, equally thick folder. The label on this one read O’HARE, EMMETT (BLACKIE).
“I didn’t know Emmett was Blackie O’Hare’s real name,” Liss said.
“Live and learn. You can look through these files here in the library or check them out for two weeks, same as a book.”
A quick glance at the contents of the Chadwick folder told Liss there was way too much material to absorb during a fifteen-minute coffee break. The first three items alone warranted careful reading. They were the obituaries of Alison Chadwick O’Hare, Euphemia Grant Chadwick, and Edgar Chadwick. “I’ll just take the Chadwick one for now, Dolores. Thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” She returned Blackie’s file to its proper place. “I hear you’re looking for a replacement.”
“Excuse me?”
“Stu Burroughs. I hear he’s quitt
ing your Halloween committee.” Back at the check out desk, Dolores stamped a slip of paper with the due date and tucked it into the Chadwick folder. Her gray eyes were avid behind small, rimless spectacles.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it.” Liss tugged on the file folder, but Dolores still had hold of it.
The last thing she wanted was for Dolores to volunteer to take Stu’s place. If he really did resign, she’d ask Sherri to step in. Or Angie Hogencamp, Beth’s mother. Even Boxer’s mother, Hilary Snipes, would be a better choice than Dolores Mayfield.
“You ought to recruit the gentleman who just moved into Doug Preston’s old place,” Dolores said, releasing her grip. “He’d be perfect.”
Liss told herself to head for the door and not allow herself to be lured in by Dolores’s smug expression, but curiosity won out over self-preservation. “How so?”
“Well, I should think that would be obvious. The man is living in a former mortuary.”
“A funeral parlor wouldn’t be my first choice for a home,” Liss conceded. “Sleeping in a house with an embalming room in the basement would give me nightmares. But maybe this newcomer is made of sterner stuff.”
Dolores leaned across the wide, highly polished surface of her desk until her face was only inches away from Liss’s. She lowered her voice, even though there was no one else in the library to hear them. “I bet he got a real good deal on the price.”
No wager, Liss thought, clutching the file folder to her chest and heading for the exit. With Doug out of the picture, Lorelei Preston had packed up all her possessions and her teenaged son, and moved to Portland. She’d have sold out for a song, just to sever her last tie to Moosetookalook.
Liss almost made good her escape, but she couldn’t move fast enough to outrun Dolores’s voice.
“I think he must be a writer.”
Vampires, Bones and Treacle Scones Page 3
