to pin down than one might think, especially in a place like Sinful where hardly anyone seemed normal.
“Well, the first place that needs to up their game is the funeral home Gil was stolen from,” I said. “Do you have any idea where his body was?”
“No,” Ida Belle said. “But it shouldn’t take much to find out. I can tell you, though, neither of the ones closest to Sinful have security systems. At least not that I’m aware of. Stealing coffins isn’t much of a thing.”
“Much?” I frowned.
“Well, there was an old fisherman who got hacked over the cost to bury his wife,” Gertie said. “He stole a coffin and the body and had a pretty good hole dug in his backyard when Sheriff Lee got there.”
“I have no words,” I said.
“I’ll make some calls,” Ida Belle said. “It won’t take long to find out. Are you going to call the Heberts to get the police report on the carjacking?”
“Yeah, I guess I will,” I said. “Although I doubt it’s going to tell us much short of the exact location and a range of time.”
“Probably not,” Ida Belle agreed. “But you tend to see things that the cops don’t. It wouldn’t hurt to check out where it happened.”
“Definitely,” I agreed.
“We’re up!” Gertie said.
We handed over our tickets and headed into the maze. They’d done a great job, although I sort of missed the guillotine display. It had been replaced with an Anaconda theme, which was done well but wasn’t as scary as the way it was before. But then, no one could lose a head, so there was that. The mummy display was the same but the mummy itself wasn’t nearly as good as Gertie’s. She took one look and shook her head.
“That’s what we get for allowing people who aren’t committed to play these roles,” she said as we exited down the hay bale path. “Playing the mummy correctly requires sacrifice, discomfort, and the ability to hold your bathroom needs for hours on end.”
I grinned. “Some people just don’t have the dedication.”
“Got that right,” she agreed.
We were approaching the last scene—the chain saw killer—when crap hit the fan. Or the hay bales.
I could hear the chain saw revving but knew it was perfectly safe because the blade had been removed. Quite frankly, everyone in Sinful knew that, but people loved to be scared so they screamed and ran and generally had a great time with it.
Except Celia.
Why Celia felt the need to go into the maze after what had happened last year, I have no idea. But then, Celia regularly showed up in places she had no business being. I heard a scream and was pretty sure I recognized it and looked over at Ida Belle and Gertie. It wasn’t the scream of someone having a good time. It was a real scream.
And it was coming straight for us.
Celia burst around the corner, her mouth wide open and the scream still echoing. It took me a second to recognize her, because she’d ditched the Rose Kennedy costume and was dressed as a pioneer girl—dress, apron, bonnet, and carrying a lantern.
And a skunk was chasing her.
Chapter Seven
I pivoted and bolted back down the path toward the mummy display. I could hear Ida Belle and Gertie running behind me and Celia’s mouth, locked in a permanent scream. When I got to the mummy scene, I jumped on top of the coffin and launched onto the top of the hay bales. Ida Belle followed suit and then Gertie gave it a whirl.
Kinda.
She made a sort of hopscotch jump onto the top of the coffin and yelled “Parkour!” but didn’t have the velocity to make the next jump onto the bales. She crashed into the side of the bales, then bounced backward into the coffin. The coffin wobbled for a second, then tipped over, spilling the mummy out into Celia’s path. Celia’s feet connected with the mummy and she went flying face-first into a hay bale wall, where her lantern broke.
Her lantern with a real fire!
The hay bale went up in flames as the confused skunk ran into the middle of the scene and decided everything looked like a threat. He turned around in circles, letting out a toxic stream as he went. Gertie leaped up, jumped over the coffin, then dropped and rolled inside, closing the lid behind her. The poor mummy couldn’t even stand, he was so wrapped up, and finally resorted to rolling facedown, probably to protect his eyes from