Free Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls by Wendelin Van Draanen

kept picturing myself as a skeleton on Holly’s floor.
    One with a stupid, laughing skull.
    “You awake?” Holly whispers.
    I open my eyes, and there she is, looking over the edge of the bed, her little poodle, Lucy, peeking out from under her arm. “Yeah. I can’t get back to sleep.”
    “What a night, huh?”
    “No kidding.”
    “You still worried about those guys finding us?”
    I sit up cross-legged. “You know, André’s right—even if they do see us, they won’t recognize us.”
    “What I don’t get,” she says, sitting up, “is what the big deal was.”
    Now, for as long as I’ve known Meg and Vera, they’ve only owned one dog, and that’s Lucy. Lucy rarely barks, she doesn’t fuss, and the instant Holly walked through the Pup Parlor door, Lucy decided Holly was
her
girl.
    Something that can make a big difference to someone who’s been living homeless.
    Anyhow, Lucy immediately curls up in Holly’s lap and cocks her head at me like, Why are you here?
    I give her a little scratch on the head and kind of start thinking out loud. “Everyone agrees that trespassing in thegraveyard is not that big of a deal. I mean, we didn’t hurt anything, right?”
    “Right.”
    “And denting the roof of a rust-bucket car or bending an ancient windshield wiper … ?”
    She strokes Lucy’s fur. “Not worth tracking someone down.”
    I nod.
“But …”
    “But what?” Holly asks, because she can see that the wheels in my head are gaining some traction.
    “But we weren’t the only ones chased through the graveyard last night.”
    “El Zarape?”
    “Right.”
    “Didn’t we decide that Shovel Man had chased him from the haunted house to get those skulls back?”
    I give her a little squint. “Did that ever make sense to you?”
    She shakes her head. “Not really.”
    “Plus if the Vampire and Shovel Man are both roaming through a graveyard at night and then cruising the streets of Santa Martina
together
, they must know each other. And at least one of them must have a key to the graveyard gate.”
    “Right.”
    “So I don’t think it has anything to do with recovering stolen property from the haunted house.”
    “Then what?”
    “Well, if we’ve ruled out trespassing, and we’ve ruled out damages to the Deli Mobile, then I think they’re after Billy.”
    “Billy? Why Billy?”
    “Because he’s got El Zarape’s sack of skulls.”
    “But why would they …” She stops petting Lucy and stares at me as it sinks in.
    “First Shovel Man’s chasing El Zarape. Why? We don’t know. Then the Vampire sees Billy with El Zarape’s sack—he must’ve seen it, right?”
    “Right.”
    “So he tells Shovel Man and now they’re looking for us.” I nod. “They
must
be after the sack.”
    Holly’s looking a little pasty. “But … why?”
    I eye her. “I think those skulls are real.”
    She scoops Lucy into a hug. “That would be very … disturbing. Why would someone be carrying around skulls?”
    We both sit quiet for a minute, and then I say, “Whatever the reason, we need to tell Billy and Casey. It’s way too early to call or go tapping on windows, so I’m thinking we should go back to the haunted house and check out the skulls they had there—just so we can compare them to the ones Billy’s got. I mean, everyone else thought they looked the same, and I don’t want this to be another case of my imagination running wild.”
    She laughs. “Right. Because we all know how dangerous
that
can be.”
    I laugh, too. “At least it’ll be a place to start.”
    “Okay, let’s do it.”
    So we make up some excuse about wanting to go for a walk, grab a couple of biscuits and bananas, and hurry downstairs before Meg or Vera starts asking questions. Andwe’re beelining for the front door when all of a sudden both of us stop, look at each other, and, without a word, turn around and go out the back door.
    I guess we were both still feeling a little shaky from our close encounter with the