“Dear Diary, I’m calling him Mr. X because if that Fat Pig sees this, we’ll get in trouble. Mr. X is an older man. So much more mature than those high school boys. A REAL Man. He says I’m his Special Lady. I can’t wait to see him Saturday. I’ll have lots to tell you when I get back!” Hearts, hearts, hearts.
“He climbed the trellis last night. He said it was time to make me HIS WOMAN. He touched my dirty word with his dirty word and then he dirty word dirty word dirty word,” Eunice read.
“Give me that!” Berks snatched the diary from Eunice’s hands and began to read.
In October, things had changed. A few pages were ripped to shreds, evidently by Donna digging in with her pen.
“Dear Diary: It’s REALLY REALLY true. How could he do this to me? He said we’d leave together and move away and he’d get a job in another school.”
“Another school? He was old enough to work in her school?” Eunice gasped.
“A teacher? That’s gross!” I shuddered.
“Creep.” Berks flipped the page.
“Cindy Pertaki. Why her? She’s a total slut. She thinks she’s hot stuff with that Camaro. How could he do that? Why!!!!! If he won’t leave her, I will tell. EVERYONE. Because he promised we’d be together. Forever.”
“That’s the last entry,” Berks said, leafing forward through some blank pages just to make sure.
I grabbed the yearbook and pawed through it until I found a picture of Cindy Pertaki. A blonde with soft eyes and a lot of cleavage stared soulfully at us.
“That’s the sophomore section,” Berks said. “Mr. X was a cradle robber.”
“The last entry was two days before Halloween,” I noted. “And Disco Donna died on Halloween.”
Eunice stared. “So that means—”
Berks looked at us. “What? What does it mean?”
“Mr. X had to hide his games with his students. When Donna threatened to tell on him—”
“He had to shut her up,” Eunice finished my sentence.
Berks whispered, “Mr. X killed Disco Donna.”
We were quiet for awhile. Eunice twirled her hair. Berks bit her fingernails. I flipped through the yearbook to the teachers’ pages.
Row upon row of serious-looking men and women stared out, black and white pictures of respectable, middle-aged educators. Berks stabbed a photo of a blond man with aviator glasses. “There. The gym teacher. They’re always so full of themselves.”
We contemplated the gym teacher, Cale Smith.
“He’s not my type,” Eunice declared.
“Mine either.” Berks turned the book, squinted. “He looks a little like our Principal Smith, doesn’t he? If Principal Smith were a lot more handsome and had hair? I wonder if that’s him.”
“Doesn’t matter about our types, it had to be Disco Donna’s type.” I flipped back to the student section.
Berks gasped. “Wait! That’s, that’s—” she jabbed the page. “My uncle Paul. Paul Sugarman.”
A skinny boy with long black hair, braces, and a mangy moustache grinned from the page. Everyone knew Berks’s uncle. He was on the town police force. Now he weighed twice as much and had half as much hair as the boy in the picture. Thankfully, he no longer had a moustache.
“Your uncle was Paulie Sugarboy?” I started giggling. Berks blushed.
“Well, this probably means that your uncle is a psycho killer, Berks,” Eunice said. “Even though he seems pretty nice now. Maybe it was a crime of jealous passion.”
Berks shot Eunice a killer look.
“Wait, wait,” I said. “You’re forgetting. Disco Donna practically points the finger at Mr. X. Seems like she and Paulie, er, Uncle Paul, whatever, were just a passing thing. It was probably a teacher.”
It was hard to see what any teenage girl would see in these guys, since the clothes and glasses and hairstyles were so unflattering. We flipped through, muttering “How about him?” but didn’t get killer vibes from anyone other than the chemistry teacher, who looked like he’d spent way too much time with the formaldehyde.
“We should call the police. We have new information that could crack the case,” Eunice said.
“Correction. We stole information that could crack the case,” Berks said.
“We didn’t know it was Donna’s. Oh wait, we did,” I said.
We paced, bit our nails, twirled our hair, and avoided each other’s eyes.
“Wait a minute.” I flipped through the diary. “She keeps mentioning this guy Peter who keeps her secrets safe. Maybe he knew.”
“What if Peter was the killer?” Eunice’s eyes glowed. “Peter gets to hear from this hot girl about other men, but secretly he’s in love with her? It might drive him wild with jealousy.”
“That’s a good theory. I saw a movie like that on Lifetime,” Berks said.
“But the timing,” I said. “This Peter has heard about all these other guys and never did anything except keep listening.… Doesn’t seem likely.”
“He might have cracked,” Eunice said.
We nodded. People cracked. That happened on Lifetime all the time, too.
“Listen.” Berks stood up. “We’ve got to do the right thing. Let’s take the stuff down to the police station in the morning. My uncle’s there. We’ll talk to him. And we won’t get in trouble because he does everything my mother tells him, and she won’t want me to get in trouble.”
“We do have that Halloween party to get to. I don’t want to waste my costume,” Eunice said.
Berks and I shrugged into our hippie clothes. A Halloween party with a bunch of other kids our age suddenly seemed pretty tame.
“I’ve got a better idea.” I pulled on a sweatshirt. “Let’s drive by Disco Donna’s house.”
I have no idea why it seemed like a good idea to go to Disco Donna’s house or what we’d do when we got there, but five minutes later Eunice parked her mom’s van in a pool of hazy gray light from the streetlight directly in front of the old Demonte house. Two large Dumpsters filled with rubble sat in a yard overgrown with weeds. Someone had left a lawn mower and a pile of equipment by the front door. There were only a few houses on this side of the park, and the laughter of trick-or-treaters on the main road was swallowed by the shadows lurking beyond the streetlight. We all had flashlights we’d found in the van, thanks to Eunice’s mother, a Girl Scout leader.
“I am so not okay with this,” Eunice said.
“Come on, I just want to take a look,” I whispered as I drew closer to the house.
“Cluck, cluck.” Berks laughed and pulled Eunice through a pile of dead leaves.
Vines twisted up a trellis to the Demontes’ second floor. I aimed the flashlight at the trellis, spotlighting blackened petals and curved thorns. “The vines are roses! The killer probably got a rose from the trellis when he killed her!”
“I am waaay creeped out.” Eunice shivered.
“Now that we’re here, I want to see her room. Who’s coming in?” In the light from my flashlight, Berks’s eyes glowed.
“No freaking way.” Eunice folded her arms.
“Don’t worry, Eunice.” I started walking around the house. “You can be the lookout. Down here. Alone. As in all by yourself. With the ghosts.”
Eunice punched my shoulder but followed close behind as we crept into the backyard. We tried the door; it was locked, but being tall has its advantages. We pushed a trash can under a window. I climbed up on it and managed to slide a window open. I swung into the dark house and then opened the kitchen door for my friends. Inside, we bunched together and made our way down the hallway. Pale gray fingers of streetlight clawed at the dirty windows.
We OMG’d up the stairs.
Everything creaked. We peered into gutted rooms. The emptiness magnified our every gasping breath. As we passed a derelict bathroom, Eunice moaned, “I’ll never get into Harvard with a rap sheet.”
Berks hugged her. “No way my uncle will let this get out. Even if we get arrested, no worries, Eunice. T
rust me.”
I stopped at a door at the end of the hall. “I bet this was her room. It’s on the side with the trellis.”
“A psycho could climb up the rose trellis again. And kill an innocent high-school girl. What are we doing here again?” Eunice’s voice wavered.
“We’ll look fast.” I turned the knob and the door creaked open.
“Two minutes,” Eunice said. “I mean it.”
Three beams of light crisscrossed silently in the empty room. I don’t know what I expected—to see her room as it was? I had imagined a ruffled bed and painted furniture, kind of hippy colors, posters on the wall.
“Berks, what was that poster she had? The blond rock guy?”
“Frampton Comes Alive?” Berks whispered. Her fingers clamped so tight on my arm they were cutting off my circulation.
“Frampton Comes Alive? You mean Peter Frampton? My dad listens to that,” Eunice said.
Berks’s fingers tightened. “Maybe Peter…”
“Peter was the poster!” I said. “But how would a poster keep her secrets?”
“If this were my room, I’d put the bed here.” Berks waved her hand like a spokesmodel on a game show. “There are all these eaves and windows, so the only wall for a bed is here.” She turned. “And if I had a poster of a hot guy I wanted to see all the time, I’d put it…there.” She waved to the wall with a built-in bookcase.
“It would have fit there,” I said. We hurried to the empty bookcase and stared at the three-foot gap between the two middle shelves.
“Uh, what are we looking at?” Eunice’s voice was getting shrill. “Bookshelves. Nothing to see here, people. Let’s go!”
“Wait!” I started knocking on the back of the shelves. “On TV there’s always a hiding place behind the wall.”
Berks crouched down, aiming her light so I could see. The back of the bottom shelf made a different, hollow sound. “No way!” Berks said.
Eunice knelt too, her eyes wide, aiming her flashlight at the bottom shelf. Eunice pulled a Swiss Army knife from her key chain. “Finally something I can use this for.” She knelt down and angled the knife into a seam at the back of the shelf. “It’s coming away. It’s just cardboard painted like the wood!”
The flashlight beams wavered as we jockeyed to see better. I pulled away crumbling cardboard. There was a narrow, hollowed-out space behind it. In it sat a small white cardboard gift box.
Berks reached into the bookcase. “Don’t touch it,” I whispered. “I’ll get gloves—”
“What was that?” Eunice said in the loudest stage whisper I’d ever heard.
I’d heard it, too. A thump downstairs. Berks jumped to her feet.
“The lights,” I said.
We switched off the flashlights. The thumping continued. I stood slowly. I could barely breathe. I could just see Berks’s wide eyes in the pale light coming from the window. I could hear Eunice moaning. She reverted to Korean, which she did only when she was completely unhinged or in gym class. There was more thumping, and then a pungent smell, and then a whoosh and a reddish glow from the hall. Eunice and Berks jumped and shouted, “Fire!”
I ran to the door and saw a red glow and a cloud of white smoke surging toward us. I slammed the bedroom door shut and ran to the window. “If a psycho killer can climb the trellis in, we can climb out.”
“You first!” Berks shrieked as I struggled to raise the sash.
The window groaned open. I swung one leg over the sill and aimed my flashlight beam onto the trellis. “Okay,” I said. “Doable.” Eunice and Berks held my arms while I hung from the sill, until my feet found the trellis. It creaked. I prayed it would hold me.
Smoke gathered behind Eunice and Berks.
I was carefully climbing down the trellis when I heard sirens shrieking. I twisted my head. A police car swung into the Demontes’ driveway, followed by a fire engine. Firefighters leapt from the truck. A radio squawked, and one of the firefighters pointed to the side of the house. I hurried to the ground, then waved my flashlight and shouted. The firefighters reached the base of the trellis as Eunice neared the bottom. Berks quickly followed, touching the ground just as a police officer jogged up.
Berks shone her flashlight on her own face. “Hey, Uncle Paul, it’s me, Berks.”
Uncle Paul rubbed his face. His shoulders slumped. “I know,” he muttered. He pulled us aside as firefighters placed ladders and started hoses. “Your mother tracked you on your cell phone. When she saw you weren’t at the Halloween party, she called me.”
Berks swore. “I am so dead.”
A few minutes later we were hustled into the back of an ambulance, its back door left open, while the cops and Uncle Paul decided what to do with us. The firefighters quickly contained the fire. Nobody would tell us what was happening, but we caught words like “accelerant” and “dumbass prank.”
“I guess I can kiss off Harvard.” Eunice’s eyes searched mine. “They can’t pin this on us. Right?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “We didn’t do it.” I meant the fire. We had definitely broken into the house.
“Oh, my God.” Berks pointed. “It just got worse. Look who just showed up. Principal Smith! He’s over there talking with the cops.”
We could see Principal Smith standing under the street lamp. He had smoke smudges on his shirt and bald head. A firefighter leaned into the ambulance and told us we were lucky. Principal Smith had been driving by and saw the fire. He’d gone into the house to make sure no one was trapped inside. Passing trick-or-treaters called the fire department.
Eunice moaned.
“We’re doomed,” Berks said. “And the worst part is, we’ll never know what Disco Donna hid in the bookcase.”
“Oh, yes we will.” I pulled the cardboard box, now slightly crushed, from beneath my tie-dye T-shirt.
“Screw forensics,” Eunice said. “Let’s open that box.”
Berks pulled the door to the ambulance shut. My hand shook as I lifted the lid of the box.
Inside was one dried rose, brownish gray and moldy. A cassette tape. And a shiny old Polaroid photograph. “Oh, my God,” Berks exclaimed. “It’s a naked guy! It’s, it’s…”
“Looks like he’s asleep,” Eunice whispered.
As I set down the lid of the box, I noticed something written on its underside.
The door jerked open. Uncle Paul looked in. “Well, what do you ladies have to say for yourselves?”
I turned the lid of the box so Berks and Eunice could see it.
Berks smiled. “Uncle Paul, you’d better get ready to make an arrest. We know who killed Disco Donna.”
Uncle Paul didn’t look too pleased, but he climbed in, closed the door, and listened. We told him what we had done, from the moment we found the hall pass. He kept rubbing his hand over his face, especially when we told him about entering the house, but then we showed him the box. With the rose. And the cassette. And the photo. And the lid of the box, where Donna had practiced her signature. Or what she thought would be her new signature.
Mrs. Cale Smith.
* * * *
Two nights later, Berks called to tell me the details of what Mrs. Maven had already reported at Cookie’s. Brave Principal Smith, who had tried to rescue a bunch of honor-society arsonists, had been arrested.
The man in the photo, the man heard during a “romantic exchange” on the tape, was our principal. He’d been a gym teacher at Roseport High all those years ago. He’d left town shortly after Disco Donna’s murder, but had returned to take a promotion to principal, thinking that no one would remember his brief time as a gym teacher at the same school nearly forty years before.
He’d been in Cookie’s when Mrs. Maven made her broadcast about the hall pass. Creepiest of all, he confessed that he had followed us after seeing the “vision” of Donna in Retro Rags—my friend Berks, of course, wearing Donna’s old dress. When he saw us going into the Demonte house and feared we might have found some evidence, he decided to burn the
place—and us—down.
Needless to say, we all got grounded, except for our appearances on Crime Solvers and the Today Show.
We still tease Berks about the vision thing.
Eunice wouldn’t speak to me for days, until Berks convinced her that our adventure would make a killer college-application essay.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shari Randall still hasn’t decided if she’s a reader with a writing problem or a writer with a reading problem. She is a children’s librarian and literacy advocate. If she is not traveling to some place warm, or haunting vintage clothing stores and antiques shops, she’s probably dancing. She blogs at Writers Who Kill (www.writerswhokill.blogspot.com).
MONSTER PARTY, by Meg Opperman
During our annual Fourth of July barbeque, I steeled myself for the inevitable. It was getting so I dreaded the holidays, and that says something, because I am a holiday junkie. Any excuse to celebrate—Groundhog Day, Arbor Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day—you name it, I’ll celebrate it.
As the day progressed, I surrounded myself with other party-goers, keeping a safe distance from Joseph Cozzaluccio’s roaming hands. No doubt he’d manage to get a pinch or pat in at some point, anyway. Coach Joe is an octopus in a track suit. He’s also the closest thing my husband, Rick, has to a father.
“He’s harmless,” Rick has said many times. Or, “Jeanie, he just lost Nina. Can’t you show a little compassion?” So he continues to bring Coach Joe over every—and I mean every—holiday. Joe arrives with a six-pack of beer, lots of hugs and kisses for the kids, and a big appetite.
At Christmas it was “Jeanie, we’re under the mistletoe,” as he held a wilted sprig over my head. On Valentine’s Day, it was a pat on the bottom and a “Who needs a box of chocolates?” Saint Patrick’s Day brought a pinch on the cheek and “Oops. My eyesight must be shot, I didn’t see you were wearing green.” At Easter, the accidental brush-up as we passed in the hallway. Accidentally, five times. And after every grope he’d wink and add, “I just miss you so, Jeanie.”
Homicidal Holidays Page 9
