Autumn is my favorite season, and I know it's silly and no I'm not into the occult but I absolutely love Halloween. Kids in costumes, jack-o-lanterns, cool evenings and crisp leaves and a moonlit night... and chocolate! What's not to love?
Which is why, when I was supposed to be writing book 2 in my Matinee Classics Cozy Mystery Series, I held the presses and slipped in a Halloween story.
In The Body and Mr. Chicken, Stevie and best friend Melanie are assigned to do a community service project cleaning off and documenting graves at the aging Sweet Penny Cemetery. It's an enormous cemetery, with iron gates and odd little hills and tree roots knocking crumbling tombstones wonky. And crows, and creepy crawlies. Not their activity of choice, especially when their work is interrupted by Stevie stumbling on another body.
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And just to wet your whistle, here's an excerpt from The Body and Mr. Chicken:
We had passed
through enough fog to see that we had reached the cemetery gates.
As if things
weren’t eerie enough, we discovered that we were not the only ones there. A
group of people stood near the cemetery gate, watching as we approached. Goose bumps
rose under my sweater sleeves.
Not the friendliest-looking
folks. We stopped a few yards away from them—a distance that I judged we could still
make a quick getaway from, especially if we dropped our tools in their path to slow
them down. They didn’t look like great jumpers, at least not the ones in front.
“Good morning,” I
said, smiling. Smiling was my favorite disarming tool. It usually broke through
uncomfortable barriers. It didn’t this time.
“Gate’s locked,” a
middle-aged man spoke up. He held a large potted plant. A couple of others in
the group had plants as well, and a few shovel handles poked up in their midst.
A faded cemetery sign
hanging on the gate posted visiting hours.
“Locked?” I
repeated. “It should have been open by now.”
“No kidding,” a
woman next to the man said. She didn’t look like smiling was her
favorite.
Mel nudged me and
leaned close as she spoke. “If it’s not open, maybe we can leave.”
“Judith definitely
said we were to be here today,” I whispered to Mel, though I looked around.
Without someone to let us in, maybe we could get out of this assignment,
at least temporarily. “Let’s give it ten minutes—”
“Five,” Mel said
with feeling.
“—five minutes, and
if no one comes—”
Before I could
finish the thought, a grating noise scraped through the air, loud enough to
wake the dead. And don’t think I didn’t look through the bars to check if it had
woken any dead, as adrenaline shot to each and every one of my nerve endings. We
all stepped back, Melanie and I and the plant-bearing mourners. Somehow, as if
by invisible hands, the massive iron gate creaked open a foot.
Melanie said
something that would have made my mother scowl—may she rest in peace—and
internally I gave an amen.
I hadn’t realized
I’d lifted my shovel in self-defense until I noticed Melanie had her pickaxe up
too.
“Do we run?” I
asked, not sure what spooky cemetery protocol called for. The other folks seemed
unsure as well.
Just as I was
ready to turn tail, a sparsely haired head appeared in the gate opening. My
stomach sank. The head was grey, skeletal, and probably freshly risen from the
tomb, if my overactive imagination was right.
But the head,
which I could now see was attached to a sinewy neck and work shirt matching the
grey color of the man’s skin, and hair, and eyes—so unnerving—spoke to us. In
the menacing kind of voice you’d reserve for Scooby-Doo monsters, the grey man demanded,
“What do you want?”
As the mourners
had arrived first, we waited for them to state their case. Plus, I couldn’t
speak for Melanie, but I was wishing hard that I’d used the bathroom one more
time before coming.
“We’re just here
to tend our family graves,” the same woman said.
“Like I told you last
time, you have to wait for visiting hours!” The grey man’s voice rose with each
word. The group grumbled, but the head at the gate swiveled our way. I hadn’t
realized how menacing a monochrome face could be. “What do you want?”
I found my voice,
though my bravado seemed to have run off somewhere. I could only speak in
questions. “Judith Christiansen sent us? We were assigned to come as part of the
town historical documentation project? But if it isn’t a good time—”
I let my words die
when a bony hand loomed into sight, motioning us to come forward. I swallowed a
whimper.
“I don’t want to,”
Melanie whispered. She’d moved close enough to me that our arms pressed
together. Or maybe it was me that had moved.
“Let’s just get
this over with,” I told her, though my jelly legs wanted to go the other way.
“Otherwise Judith will just send us back again.”
“Or shame us in
front of the chamber of commerce,” Melanie said, which I knew was scarier to
her than a foggy cemetery and its creepy caretaker. “Again.”
Taking baby steps
and carrying all the equipment on the very precise list Judith had given us, we
made our way to the gate. I took one last look at the mourners, who seemed as
jealous of us as we probably looked of them.
Every ounce of
self-preservation in my body told me not to go through the gate, and it wasn’t
hard to picture myself clinging to the black bars like a child to a parent. But
we were grown-ups. We had a job to do, an assignment to fulfill, and I wasn’t
one to cop out on a responsibility.
Even one in an
ancient, spooky graveyard in October.
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