“Except Sondra, and we can’t leave without her!” Ron said. “Have you seen her?”
“This afternoon, when I came by,” Mo said. “And then when I was in makeup.”
“That’s odd,” Phil muttered.
“What?” Grace demanded.
Phil pointed. One of the “cracked” coffins was leaning against a tomb. There still seemed to be someone in it.
“That’s Joshua Kirbin’s spot,” Phil said. “And I said good-night to Joshua already. He lit out of here in a hurry, trying to catch up with some friends working the hayride.”
Mo didn’t know how she knew. She just knew it was bad. Really bad.
They all turned to look in the direction Phil had pointed.
There was definitely a body in the coffin. It was loosely covered in what appeared to be a black shroud. The coffin was a prop, of course, built to appear like an old Victorian coffin but with a glass window at the head area. The bottom half of the lid was broken off; the head area with the window remained.
The four of them looked at one another.
Mo didn’t want to take a step toward the coffin. It was across a field of broken gravestones, scattered “bones” and thick webbing.
“We have to go and see,” she said flatly.
She started across the center of the graveyard. She could hear Grace behind her, pushing Phil. “Get up there! Help her.”
“I’m going, I’m going!” Phil said. “Why me? Why is the heterosexual male supposed to be the brave one all the time?”
“Oh, please, just get out of the way!” Ron told him.
Mo heard them, but she reached the coffin first.
She peered through the Victorian window....
And there was nothing.
For a moment she dared to breathe, dared to hope, that it was a prank—in extremely bad taste—being played on them.
But she reached out and opened the broken lid.
And she saw it.
The bloody stump of a neck.
She’d seen nothing through the window...
Because the corpse had no head.
*
When Aidan reached the Appleby house, Van Camp and police had already arrived.
“Crime scene units are on the way,” Van Camp told him. “The place is trashed. What someone was looking for, I have no idea.”
“The neighbors heard a commotion, but no one saw anything?” Aidan asked.
“Hey, you expected this to be easy?” Van Camp asked dryly.
“I wish to hell something would be easy,” Aidan said. “Who called it in?”
“The guy in the sweater over there, talking to the woman in the cat slippers with the trench coat over her pajamas. I’ve talked to them both. You go give it a try.” He glanced down at his notebook. “The guy is Marshall Long. The lady is Penelope Seaford. Like I said, he called it in. She came out once we got here. She lives right next door, and the house on the other side of Wendy’s is empty. Long, who lives across the street, met the cops out here. He didn’t see a car or anything, although he’s pretty sure he heard someone burn out of here while he was on the phone.”
Aidan walked over and introduced himself to the neighbors and fielded their questions. Marshall told him he was a teacher. Penelope Seaford, an attractive woman of about fifty, told him she worked for the chamber of commerce. She’d loved Wendy Appleby. “Wendy was a great neighbor. She caught my escape-cat for me several times,” Penelope said. “Everyone in the neighborhood was devastated to hear that she’d died.”
“And so horribly!” Marshall said, shaking his head. “A lovely woman.”
“Did she date much? Was she seeing anyone?” Aidan asked. The police had been through that round of questions already, Aidan knew, but he’d yet to talk to anyone other than Debbie who’d been close to her.
“Date? No. No boyfriend. She was devoted to her child,” Penelope said.
He asked them a few more questions, then went into the house.
The least affected area was J.J.’s room. Wendy Appleby’s bedroom, office and kitchen had been ripped to smithereens. The intruder’s first area of concentration had been the office, Aidan thought.
“There’s no computer,” he pointed out as Van Camp came into the room with Gina Mason, the head of the forensic unit, whom he’d met before.
“But there was evidently one here,” Grace said. “You can see the outline on the mat. Looks like it had a seventeen-inch screen.”
He nodded to Gina. “Thanks. I think I remember it being here when we came and searched the house once Debbie Howell gave us Wendy’s identity.”