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

the situation, we didn’t have a cell phone or any money in our pockets to use a pay phone to call Casey and ask him.
    I
did
know where Casey lived, though, and although that used to be a ways out of town with his dad, it’s now in town with his mother and sister.
    A bad situation on all counts except one: We could walk there, no problem.
    And I guess because I was so intent on getting to Casey’s quick, I didn’t even think that we were going to walk past the graveyard, but suddenly there we were.
    “Want to take a shortcut?” Holly joked.
    I smirked at her. “Very funny.”
    I didn’t really want to go past it, but unless we were going to backtrack, there was no avoiding it. “They say people always return to the scene of the crime, you know.”
    “Are you talking about us?”
    I laugh. “Well, here we are!”
    And the truth is, I did feel kinda guilty. About more than sneaking into the graveyard or bending some dilapidated car’s windshield wiper.
    It was those skulls.
    I didn’t even
have
them, but I was still dying to get rid of them.
    Then Holly says, “Looks like someone’s getting buried today,” and nods across the street.
    Through the gate where we’d scrambled over the Deli Mobile, we can see a pickup truck parked near a big green canopy and a couple of people putting out chairs.
    Holly shivers a little. “The whole thing is awful, don’t you think?”
    “Getting buried?”
    She nods. “I’m with Marissa—I get claustrophobic just thinking about it.”
    “They used to install little bells, did you know that? So if you were buried alive, you could pull on a cord and ring a bell. Or a flag would go up. Something like that.”
    Holly shivers again, and this time it’s a big one. “Can you imagine?”
    Then I see that the people in the graveyard are picking something off the ground.
    Planks.
    Long wooden planks.
    I find myself crossing the street to get a closer look.
    “What are you doing?” Holly asks, chasing after me.
    It comes out all breathy when I say, “Those must be the boards we ran over last night.”
    “You think?” We watch the men move the planks a fewfeet to each side, leaving an opening in the earth. “So we ran over …”
    She looks at me all bug-eyed, so I finish for her. “An open grave.”
    We let this sink in a minute, and finally Holly says, “What if those boards hadn’t been there?”
    “We’d have fallen in and killed ourselves?”
    “Wow,” she says, staring into the graveyard.
    I force a laugh. “Either that or
Marissa
would have killed us!”
    We watch as the workers put a couple of cross braces widthwise over the grave, then cover the hole with a big piece of AstroTurf.
    “Why the fake grass?” Holly asks.
    “Maybe so people don’t have to see inside the hole during the service?”
    “Yeah, I guess the less you have to think about it, the better.”
    “No kidding.” I grab her. “Let’s get out of here.”
    So we hurry away from the graveyard toward the sanity of regular neighborhoods.
    Which just goes to show you how relative things can be.
    After all, we were heading for the Acostas’ house.
    Home of Heather the Horrible.
    Now, there was no way I was going to ring the Acostas’ doorbell. Aside from not wanting to wake the Wicked Monster, I didn’t want to wake her mother.
    Candi Acosta is just like Heather, only scarier. Imagine being in a horror movie, fighting off a giant hairy arachnidmutant with all your might, not sure you’ll ever be able to land your harpoon in a place that’ll keep it from killing you. It’s closing in on you with its rancid breath and fangs dripping with blood … and then in walks another hairy arachnid mutant that’s ten times bigger than the first one.
    That’s pretty much what it feels like when Candi Acosta comes to her daughter’s defense. And since chances were two out of three that a hairy arachnid mutant would answer the door, I was not
about
to knock or ring the bell.
    What I did have going