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

next-day burial. Maybe he’s really just a normal guy with a rundown car and unfortunate teeth.
    But as I’m looking around for the Vampire, I keep getting distracted by the whole
parlor
part of the place. Seriously, there’s a main room with a fireplace that’s all decked out like an old Victorian living room. It has little flowered couches and oval-framed pictures on the wall and an Oriental rug under a sideboard with a silver tea service and a plate of crunchy-looking cookies. And really, it looks more like a fancy tea parlor than anything to do with death.
    I try to mosey through the people like I belong, which isn’t easy because I sure don’t feel like I belong. The jeans I’m wearing are bad enough, but my shoes? I feel like I’mwearing muddy army boots to a prom. And even though the adults don’t seem to notice me, there are a few other kids, and they do. Especially this one girl with a perfect little blond bob. She’s about ten and she’s wearing a blue velvet dress over black tights, and her shoes are definitely shiny.
    I try to ignore her as I move around, casually looking inside a room that has a little conference table, and another room that’s obviously an office, and then a kind of oversized closet that has display cases of urns and a wall filled with coffin samples. They’re each about six inches deep and a foot across, and there are dozens of them mounted in a giant grid on the wall. It’s like coffin corners as
art
.
    There are more rooms farther back, and I’m thinking about taking a quick little tour through them, but no one else is even as far back as the coffin room. Plus when I look over my shoulder, there’s that girl again, glaring at me.
    So I move back into the “parlor” room, and I try smiling at Little Miss Nosy Bob, but she just keeps on glaring. It crosses my mind that maybe I should snag a cookie and deliver it to her, but she’s definitely not the kind of girl who’d take cookies from a stranger. So instead, I start to mosey on back to the chapel side of things. But the Oversized Eggplant is coming toward me, and when I look over my shoulder, I see that Little Miss Nosy Bob has gotten her mother’s attention and is pointing right at me.
    So to ditch all of them I take a quick right turn through two open French doors into another room.
    Trouble is, the room happens to have a big, open rosewoodcoffin perched on a thick, wide pedestal, and standing looking in the coffin are Billy and Casey.
    “What are you
doing
?” I whisper as I hurry up to them. “You’re supposed to stay separated!”
    “And who, pray tell, are you?” Billy asks, looking at me like he’s never seen me before.
    “Knock it off!” Then I ask, “Did you see him?”
    “Who?” Billy asks.
    “The Vampire!”
    “No … but it looks like he’s been here,” Billy says, wiggling his eyebrows at the coffin.
    So okay. I can’t help it. I look. And there, laid out in a dark blue suit, is … some old dead guy.
    I shiver, because, well, even though I don’t know him, and even though he
is
old, he’s also
dead
.
    Plus, he looks pasty.
    Sort of … 
waxed
.
    “Did they put makeup on him?” I ask, leaning in a little.
    “Too much rouge, if you ask me,” Billy says.
    “I think we should get out of here,” Casey says, looking over his shoulder. “I don’t know where the Vampire is, but I did find out he’s not the funeral director.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because I heard someone in the chapel ask who the funeral director was and the person they pointed to was a normal-looking guy in a suit.”
    And that’s when I see Little Miss Nosy Bob standing in the middle of the double French doors, tugging on hermother with one hand and pointing at me with the other. I let out an “Uh-oh,” and Casey asks, “You know her?”
    “Nope.”
    He looks her over. “I’m guessing her name’s Trouble.”
    Luckily Trouble’s mother is talking to the Oversized Eggplant and not focusing on her