Spooky Scarecrow Read online

  She nodded. “Cookie didn’t like his secrets. She went over to the cart and started looking around. She only pretended it was because of the cart’s location.”

  “Was his assistant around then?” I asked. The shy young man would have been upset by Cookie’s bullish nature. I had a feeling that if he’d been there, he would have come quickly to stop her snooping.

  “Clover didn’t have an assistant then,” said Pep. “I’m pretty sure he got one just to help him watch out for Cookie. There’s no way he’d want to pay someone that much money otherwise.”

  I thought about the ratty tent. “I’m not sure the assistant is getting paid much.”

  Pep didn’t have a chance to respond, because just then we heard my brother’s voice yelling from outside, “Gate opening.”

  I said goodbye to my cousin and rushed to handle tickets. For the next two hours, that’s all I did. A crowd of customers had built up, waiting for the haunted house to open, a steady stream of more visitors kept arriving all the time. I was so busy that at first I didn’t notice the two men standing in the ticket line, partly because they were in Lizzie’s line and not mine. She was much better at customer service than I was, I have to give her that. She could plaster a smile on her face and speak in a singsong voice. I didn’t have the patience.

  It wasn’t until the men were almost at the front of the line that I saw them, the same two strange-looking men we had seen at the market that morning. The instant I noticed them I bristled.

  “Anything you need help with? Your mom sent me to ask you,” said a voice on my shoulder.

  I turned to see Marsha, all decked out as a witch. Her ensemble was maroon, flowing, and over-the-top. There was gold lettering on every article of clothing. The words “spell” and “poof” appeared a number of times. Her shoes were entirely covered in glitter.

  I smiled at her. “You look splendid. Did you find that stuff in the costume room?”

  She threw back her head and laughed. “No, certainly not. I brought it all with me.”

  “Has Meg seen you? She’ll be jealous,” I told her.

  “She sure has. She has already commented. Speaking of seeing special people . . . I hear you have a very important renter?” she said.

  I frowned. I had no idea who she was talking about. At my blank look she laughed again. “I hear His Majesty of Magic lives on the estate now.”

  I blushed. “Oh, him. Right. Yes, he does live here. He’s been working out of the Maine office in his investigations since the murder of the Skeleton Trio here at Haunted Bluff.”

  “He came, and he never left,” said Marsha with a wink.

  I looked down and told my heart to stop fluttering.

  “I would have thought Maine was too much of a backwater for such an important investigator to be based here,” she observed.

  When I didn’t respond, she shrugged, but there was really nothing for me to say. I wasn’t in charge of where investigators were sent. But her words did trigger a slight pang of fear. What if Grant were sent away? I told myself that was silly. When he was needed at another location, he traveled there. It appeared to work just fine.

  “I have to get inside,” said Marsha. “Your mom will be wondering where I am. Holler if you need anything.”

  All the people in line stared at her open-mouthed as she twirled away. To them she was as convincing as if she were a real witch.

  Little did they know.

  Only after she had gone did I think to check on the two strange men. I glanced at Lizzie and then down the row of people. There was no sign of them anywhere.

  Chapter Five

  The next morning, something compelled me to look outside as soon as I climbed out of bed. I went over to the one attic window and immediately noticed that the air seeping in around the cracks was not as cold as it had been the day before. But the mist swirling around the mansion was so thick that I could barely see through it. The slight smell of salt hung in the air.

  We lived next to the ocean, and the mist usually blew away quickly if it was there at all. To have it linger like this was strange.

  I inhaled deeply and released a long breath. After my late night I definitely hadn’t gotten enough sleep.

  “What are you doing?” Rose asked. She hadn’t gotten up with me, and now she was glaring at me from the warmth of the bed.

  “It’s another busy day,” I told her.

  I sighed and massaged my temples. The haunted house had stayed open later than we had meant it to. There had been one problem after another as we tried to close, and now I was exhausted.

  “How angry is your mom at Cookie?” Rose asked.

  “I think she accepts that Cookie is going to do whatever she wants. You can’t be angry at something for its nature, is probably how my mom views Cookie at this point,” I sighed.

  Cookie had become imperious and started ordering people around.

  “I should get to breakfast,” I said, heading downstairs.

  My mind was still on the haunted house, and I didn’t have time to think about much else, for example, my own investigations. I had heard of a couple of murders in nearby towns, but the fact was that I had no time to investigate them. With Grant out of town, some of his deputies had taken on the cases. I had to be satisfied with that.

  I was almost jealous. I would have liked to take the opportunity while Grant wasn’t around to investigate on my own. But with the haunted house in full swing, it just wasn’t possible.

  “Good morning,” said Corey when I ran into him in the foyer. He was already dressed, looking tired but ready to go. He had gotten to sleep earlier than the rest of us, even though he’d had another party on the estate. Mom didn’t know about those parties, which was best for all of us.

  “What are you doing today?” he asked.

  “Just trying to clean up from last night. We were open later than we meant to be,” I said.

  Corey was nice, but quiet. He liked to conduct experiments in his free time. “How is that going?” he asked. “I’m glad your mother put you in charge of it. I think it suits you.”

  For a long time I had harbored a desire to be a haunt hunter, like Kip and the rest of them. When it became clear that my mother was never going to allow it, I thought I’d never get to do what I wanted. But Corey was right. I was enjoying my work with Down Below. It suited me.

  “I kind of like it,” I said. “The Fudge is hard to deal with, but everyone knows that, so I guess no one blames me for the difficulties. I always feel like he’s about to sell the rights to my name or something.”

  “Don’t be silly. He’s probably already done that,” said Corey with a grin. Then we went our separate ways.

  Nobody was in the kitchen, so I headed for the dining room, where I found Meg with her head bent over some designs and a steaming mug of tea close at hand. Cookie was there too, but they were sitting far apart, as if each of them wished the other wasn’t in the room.

  My grandmother looked up hopefully when she heard someone come in. When she saw who it was, her face only brightened. That wasn’t a good sign. You never wanted to be the one Cookie was excited to see.

  “Jane, darling granddaughter. So lovely to see you,” said my grandmother.

  I thought about turning around and leaving, but I’d never get away with it. “Good morning. Sleep well?” I asked.

  “You know perfectly well I don’t sleep. I was talking to the ghosts most of the evening. Very happy with how the haunted house is going. They’re even thinking about joining some of the skeletons in the Cleaver Kitchen,” she said.

  Meg glanced up at that, but she didn’t say anything

  “Sounds like fun,” I said.

  “Should be,” said my grandmother. “Pull up a chair.”

  I sat down and started eating my cereal, hoping I could eat it fast enough to get out of there before my grandmother said anything even more inflammatory. Meg continued to look at her drawings, while Cookie stared at me.

  Finally I
couldn’t take it anymore. Cookie’s small eyes and large nose were pointed too insistently in my direction for me to ignore. “What is it?” I demanded.

  “What are you possibly talking about?” she asked.

  I glared at her. “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Why are you staring at me?” I asked.

  “I was just wondering if you wanted to come into town with me today. The decorations are up everywhere. I thought we could go look at them, see where the decorations and the scarecrows are around town,” she said.

  “We were just in town yesterday,” I said.

  “I know that. It isn’t that far away,” said Cookie.

  “Sure. I wouldn’t mind going to see the scarecrows one more time. They might look a bit silly next to all the holiday stuff,” I said.

  “Great,” said Cookie.

  Cookie looked very happy, which only intensified my feeling that I had walked into a trap. I just wasn’t sure what the trap was, or how I was supposed to get out of it. I glanced at my aunt, but she still wasn’t looking up. I resigned myself to my fate, finished my cereal, and excused myself. Now that Cookie had gotten what she wanted out of me, she didn’t even acknowledge my departure.

  I headed for the ice cream parlor, Lark’s domain. Lark probably wasn’t up yet, but I needed somewhere quiet to keep reading my supernatural dating conventions book.

  On my way there I ran into Pep, her arms filled with packages. I took a couple off her hands. “Need help?” I offered.

  “Yes, now that you mention it. Can you follow me to the gift shop?”

  I followed her. Even Pep looked tired, and she was always turned out impeccably. “How did you sleep?”

  “Not very well,” I admitted.

  Once we had set the packages down, Pep turned back to me. “I would have thought that if we didn’t have a mystery to solve it would be boring around here. It’s just the opposite. There’s too much to do.”

  I laughed and nodded. “Yeah, I wasn’t expecting to be bored this month, mystery or no. Still, I do wish there was a mystery I could investigate,” I said.

  “You want to take advantage of the fact that Grant isn’t here, don’t you?” she asked. She knew me well.

  “I still have to talk to Mom about dating him. I don’t think she’s going to be happy,” I said.

  “I think she might surprise you. She really likes Grant. To be honest, he’s a catch, and that will carry some weight. You couldn’t really do much better,” she pointed out.

  I picked away at the pieces of tape on a package. “I suppose. Hey, did you see those two guys here last night? The ones we saw at the farmers market earlier in the day?”

  She frowned. “No, I didn’t see anyone like that. Then again, I was super busy with the gift shop. I don’t think they came into the shop, though. You said they were at the market too?”

  “Yeah, those two guys who were standing by themselves,” I said.

  Pep clearly was thinking about other things, and she insisted she didn’t remember anything of the kind. I helped her with the boxes and then headed back into the foyer, hoping that by now that Lark might be awake. She was, in fact, just coming from the dining room.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Morning,” I said. “Did you see Cookie?”

  My cousin rolled her eyes. “I sure did. She’s in fine form today. I’m not sure I can deal with it.”

  Now that I looked closely at Lark, I could see that she was pale and sweating. “Is it something serious? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s something very serious. I can only imagine how you’re going to feel about it. In fact, it’s terrifying,” she said.

  I held my breath, ready for anything. Maybe she had stolen one of Clover’s explosives.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  “She wants to go to the Shimmer Dollar Decorations store and buy more decorations,” said Lark.

  I gasped. “What about everything back in the carriage house?”

  “Exactly,” said Lark.

  Just then my mom came into the foyer, so preoccupied that she got halfway past us before she noticed that we were there. Then she stopped dead. “What are you discussing?”

  “Nothing,” I said. There was no way I was going to tell her what Grandma wanted to do. She’d have a fit.

  “If you’re being evasive because you’ve heard that your grandmother wants to go shopping, I think you should go with her. I think all three of you should go with her. Then there will be less room in the car for her to bring stuff home,” said my mom, shaking her head. “Really, you’d think we had enough decorations.”

  “You’re more conniving than I ever realized,” whispered Lark in awe.

  “And don’t you forget it,” said Mom with a twinkle in her eye.

  I glared after her as she made a quick exit. I couldn’t believe she was joking about something so serious. If we went to the store, Cookie was going to buy the whole place. “This is going to be a long morning,” I muttered.

  I glanced out the foyer window hoping to calm down, only to see that the lawn was still a mess from the night before. The only thing that looked normal was Cookie’s cauldron.

  Making the vista even more cluttered and confusing, Clover’s tents stood silently near his cart. They seemed to bode no good, though I couldn’t figure out why. I could also see the decorations in the distance. The row of nutcrackers was beautiful, and Cookie had put up strings of fairy lights around the grounds. She hated calling them fairy lights, because of course she thought fairies were lesser supernaturals. But Mom insisted.

  Interspersed amongst the holiday decorations were the scarecrows that Ben still needed to pick up. Creepy and imposing amidst all the cheer, one of them looked a little larger than it had the day before, and suddenly I couldn’t wait until they were gone. I shook my head and told myself that the impression was nothing more sinister than a distortion caused by the mist.

  Surely?

  I tried to put the mess, and the vague apprehensiveness, out of my mind. At some point the guys would come out and clean, but with so much other work to be done, cleaning the lawn wasn’t a top priority. Even with the help of the skeletons it was going to take a hard push to get the place tidy again.

  Erika had made a deal with my mom about how much the skeletons were going to work during the busy months. Erika was the leader of the skeletons and worked with my mom a lot on issues related to how the haunted house operated and what was expected of the skeletons. Bottom line: they would work a lot, but in return, the barn loft over Corey’s science room would be given over to the skeletons permanently.

  Shortly after my mom disappeared from the foyer, Cookie found us and said she was ready to go and wanted to leave for the shop as quickly as possible. “I don’t want all the good decorations to be gone,” she said.

  “Right. Exactly. That would be terrible,” said Lark.

  When the four of us had made our way to the car, Cookie tried to get into the driver’s seat. The rest of us refused to allow that.

  “Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I can’t see properly,” she insisted.

  “Sure. But the fact that you can’t see properly means that you can’t see properly,” Lark explained.

  “If you won’t let me drive, I’m not going to let you drive either,” Cookie grumbled as I tried in my turn to get into the driver’s seat, and in fact succeeded. “This is the morning when the chief of police likes to go fishing. It means you can speed to the joke shop,” said Cookie.

  “I’m not going to speed,” I told her.

  “You are so boring,” she said.

  Even driving slowly it didn’t take us long to get to the small mall on the outskirts of town. The place was more rundown than it had been as recently as last year, with half of the stores always empty.

  The old car had barely rolled to a halt before Cookie had opened the front passenger door and stepped out. I stopped with a lurch and glared at my grandmother’s retre
ating back. “Not only am I supposed to take you shopping, but I’d like to keep you alive, as well,” I grumbled. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make that so difficult.”

  My grandmother barely looked back at me as she reached for the door of the store. I followed less eagerly, glancing at the sky as I went. It definitely looked like rain later. Lark and Pep followed the two of us with even less enthusiasm than I felt.

  The joke shop was next to a cheap chain clothing store that I hadn’t visited in a long time. Meg still liked to go there and buy clothes from time to time, but the place wasn’t really to my taste.

  A neon Grim Reaper greeted us at the entrance to the shop, a forest garland wound around his neck. The figure hadn’t been replaced in years, and some of the paint was starting to wear off. The store looked closed, but I knew from experience and many years of having my hopes dashed that despite appearances, it would be open. We had tried to convince Cookie not to go last year when it had looked closed, but she had insisted that it was open, and she had been right.

  We made our way into the dark, dank shop and found the space just as I remembered it. How old Hildegard managed to keep it ever-unchanging while still operating a business I had no idea.

  Instead of the bell tinkling as we walked in, a crow screamed.

  Pep turned around to glare at the door. “I hate that. I have always hated that. I will continue to hate that until the day I die.”

  “That’s a long time to be intolerant,” said my grandmother without even looking back; she was too busy taking everything in. Along the walls were racks upon racks of decorations. From rows of fake gravestones to plastic bats flying through the air with fake blood on their fake wings, there was everything you could possibly imagine to look at. There was an entire section for ghosts. Light-up ghosts, ghosts with flashlights behind them that blinked ghoulishly, different white sheets with different ghost facial expressions—there really was everything. There were fake turkeys and trees, bats lights, and countless creepy ornaments.

  Cookie was truly at home.

  Chapter Six

  Hildegard was a witch herself. Because she wanted her store to be as authentic as possible, she had interviewed ghosts before purchasing any actual stock for the store. She had certainly achieved her goal, and much more.