Dungeons & Detectives Page 9

  “Sorry!” Frank shouted to the galactically hairy wizard as he tried to reel Lucky in.

  The headstrong bloodhound just sniffed at the air and yanked even harder in a new direction. The leash slipped from Frank’s hand and Lucky went running through the crowd and disappeared down a long corridor on the far side of the main hall, his tail high in the air and his nose low to the ground.

  “Lucky, come back!” Frank pleaded as he took off after his disobedient spectral hound.

  I shook my head and sighed. Frank had been hijacked by his costume. I figured I’d let my bro deal with his Lucky problem by himself while I continued to scope out the costumed guests to see if I could identify more of our persons of interest. Inkpen was lurking in a corner, munching on his Halloween loot, but Nancy Drew had slipped out of sight, and we still hadn’t caught sight of Don, Xephyr, or Murph.

  I was just starting to scan the crowd again when I caught someone lurking at the edge of the corridor, peering after Frank. From behind, the person’s costume just looked like a black cloak, but when he turned around to see if anyone was watching him, I saw a living painting staring across the room. A living, screaming painting. I’m not exactly an art historian, but this painting was pretty famous, and I knew from art class at school that it was The Scream by an old-time expressionist painter named Edvard Munch. Funny name, but it wasn’t a funny painting. It was pretty terrifying, really. The mask captured the abstract face with its wide eyes, little holes for a nose, and screaming O for a mouth pretty well. The lurker’s costume even had a set of fake hands grabbing the sides of its mask like the subject in the real painting.

  I quickly turned away and pretended to be talking to the confused Statue of Liberty next to me so McScreamy wouldn’t know I’d spotted him. It was hard to tell what his expression was under the mask, but I had a hunch Mr. Munch was suspicious, whatever it was. I kept watch out of the corner of my eye until he ducked down the hall after Frank. I pulled out my phone to send Frank a warning about his masked follower, but there didn’t seem to be any cell service in the castle. My brother had a tail, which meant there was only one thing for me to do: tail Frank’s tail while Frank tailed his dog’s tail.

  The hallway curved to the right, and I waited until McScreamy had turned the corner, then headed down the hall after him. I reached the bend just in time to watch him run through an arched doorway. What I found when I got there was a bright yellow strip of caution tape crisscrossing a large, slightly cracked wooden door. I threw caution to the winds, pushed the door open, and stepped under the tape.

  Chilly air nipped my cheeks as I did. McScreamy seemed to have vanished into the dark. Lucky and Frank hadn’t, though. I was standing atop a steep stone staircase. As I started down it, I could see that it led to a huge outdoor courtyard, presumably connecting the eastern half of the castle—where the party and Angus’s tower were located—to the eerily quiet, totally unlit western half. In the dark distance below I could see Lucky’s glow-in-the-dark plastic cone bobbing through the night, with Frank’s key-chain flashlight bouncing along in pursuit. Who knew Lucky’s spectral cone of shame would also come in handy as a runaway-canine locator!

  As reliably bad as Lucky’s luck seemed to be, it wasn’t surprising to see the glowing green cone moving farther away from the party toward the really dangerous-looking side of the castle. It irked me that Frank’s tail had disappeared from sight. If he hadn’t spotted me already, he easily could once I followed Frank. Leaving my bro alone in a part of the castle we hadn’t explored with McScreamy after him wasn’t an option, though, so I continued descending the stairs in pursuit anyway.

  There was enough moonlight illuminating the steps for me to see my way to the bottom, but then it vanished behind the clouds and I had to turn on my flashlight as well. So much for stealth.

  “I’m right behind you, Sherlock!” I called out so he’d know it was me as I ran toward the large stone arch on the other end of the courtyard, leading back inside the castle’s lower level. I caught up with Frank before he caught up with Lucky.

  “You didn’t see a screaming painting run by, did you?” I asked as he shone his light down a wide, dusty hallway filled with creepy, dancing shadows.

  He gave me a confused look and pointed his light at a crooked portrait of a medieval maiden. “A glow-in-the-dark dog, yes, but the paintings here look like they haven’t moved in a while.”

  “You picked up an artistically costumed tail when you went after Lucky, but I lost him in the stairwell back at the other end of the castle,” I explained.

  “Huh, I guess we both got the slip, then,” he said, then cupped his hands to his mouth. “Lucky!”

  “This place is even bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside, and that’s saying something. Where are we anyway?” I asked, sweeping my cell phone’s flashlight over the jumbled assortment of boxes, furniture, and ancient antiques piled against the walls. From the looks of it, some of the castle’s previous stewards had been hoarders.

  Frank shook his head. “More or less west of the party, I think, on the opposite side of the castle from Angus’s tower, as far as I can tell. Wherever we are, it doesn’t look like anyone’s used this wing in a long time. We better find Lucky and get back. I didn’t realize babysitting a bloodhound would make effective detecting so difficult.”

  As if on cue, Lucky let out one of his spectacularly spooky howls.

  “It’s a good thing I know that’s Lucky, otherwise I might think this castle was haunted,” I said, following Frank in the howl’s direction. “With a voice like that, no wonder Doyle cast a hound as a murderous ghost dog.”

  We followed Lucky’s bark down another set of stairs to an underground hallway, where we found him pawing at a closed door.

  “Come on, boy, back to the party,” Frank said, grabbing hold of his leash.

  Lucky ignored him and kept on scratching at the door. Frank gave him a gentle tug, but Lucky refused to budge and added a plaintive howl for good measure.

  “Robert was right about you being stubborn,” Frank told Lucky.

  “Maybe he knows a shortcut,” I offered.

  The second I turned the door’s creaky knob, Lucky bolted inside. Our flashlights illuminated an open chamber leading to two more passageways, one on either side. There was more junk piled against the walls, with a rusty suit of armor guarding the mouth of each passage. Lucky’s tail went up, his plastic-cone-encapsulated nose went down, and he headed straight for one of the suits of armor, dragging Frank behind him.

  Lucky leaped up on his hind legs like he had when he first met me and put his paws on the empty knight’s armored chest. Only unlike me, the knight didn’t fall over; it collapsed in a pile of pieces.

  I’d been wrong about the suit of armor being empty. Gazing up at us through the decapitated helmet’s open visor were the gaping, empty eye sockets of a human skull.

  15 A NOSE FOR TROUBLE

  FRANK

  I ONLY SAW THE OPEN VISOR for a second before Lucky knocked the knight’s helm out of the way as he pawed through the pile of armor, but there was no mistaking what was underneath. A skull, and it wasn’t the only human remain hidden in the suit of armor either. Bones skittered across the floor, tumbling out of the dismantled armor Lucky was doggedly pushing aside with his nose.

  My first thought: this was just another one of Robert’s Halloween gags. But then I remembered that we were deep under the castle, way past the caution tape, in a wing that looked like it had been forgotten for decades. How many decades? I didn’t know, but whoever’s skeleton this was, it wasn’t ancient. The tattered remains of blue jeans and a dress shirt clung to some of the bones. I wasn’t an expert on eighteenth-century fashion, but I knew they sure didn’t have blue jeans.

  “This one isn’t a piñata, is it?” Joe asked, looking a little ashen.

  “It’s like Lucky knew it was here,” I said, trying to process my shock over the dog’s discovery. “He followed his nose down here from al
l the way across the castle.”

  “Isn’t that what bloodhounds are known for? Their sense of smell?” asked Joe.

  “They’re famous for it, but they don’t just follow random scents. When the police use them to chase a suspect or”—I gulped—“to find cadavers, they have to be given an article of clothing or something with the scent on it first so they know what to track. This skeleton looks like it’s been in the suit of armor undisturbed for years. How would he have picked up its scent and why now?”

  “Um, I don’t think it’s the skeleton he was sniffing for,” Joe said as Lucky emerged from the pile of armor and bones with an expectant look on his face… and a skeletal hand still clutching some torn comic book pages in his mouth.

  Lucky dropped the hand at my feet and started bouncing around and whining excitedly.

  “It can’t be…,” I muttered, looking down at the crumpled, badly stained pages of Sabers & Serpents #1 grasped between the bony fingers.

  “The missing pages!” Joe exclaimed. “He could have picked up their scent from the stolen comic!”

  Lucky started barking loudly as if to confirm it.

  “Shush, calm down, boy,” I said, thinking about the mystery guest Joe had spotted tailing me. Lucky stopped barking and started whining and dancing around in place instead.

  I looked from the stain-obscured but no less distinctive artwork of Filmore Johnson to the torn piece of oversize, pointy shirt collar still clinging to the skeleton’s collarbone. I could tell from photos and movies I’d seen that collars like that hadn’t been in fashion since the 1970s—when Filmore Johnson went missing, never to be seen or heard from again.

  “I think Lucky’s nose may have just helped us solve more than one mystery—” I didn’t get to complete the thought.

  There was a gasp followed by a clatter as the living embodiment of Edvard Munch’s The Scream stumbled from the shadows.

  “You found it!” the Scream cried.

  It didn’t take me long to place the walking painting’s voice.

  “Murph?!”

  16 TREASURE ISLAND

  JOE

  THE SCREAM’S VOICE INSTANTLY SOUNDED familiar, but Frank identified it first.

  “You’re the screaming lurker, Murph?” I asked, unable to hide my disappointment. Murph going AWOL suddenly made a lot more sense, and there’s nothing worse than being betrayed by a friend.

  “Um, no?” he ask-answered with his mouth hanging wide open. Okay, he was wearing a mask with a screaming face that always had its mouth wide open, so the expression didn’t exactly tell me anything.

  “Off with the mask, dude,” I ordered him.

  Sure enough, Murph emerged from behind the mask. Frank and I were both staring daggers at him.

  “Um, why are you guys looking at me like that?” he asked meekly.

  “Like what?” Frank asked. “You mean like the prime suspect in multiple crimes?”

  “I didn’t commit any crimes, honest!” he yelped right away, but then he seemed to take a second to think about it. “Well, I mean, not any major ones.”

  Lucky was running around us in circles, barking up a storm.

  “Quiet, Lucky,” Frank commanded.

  “So you deny stealing Robert’s copy of S and S #1 from Comic Kingdom and then trying to play us for suckers so we’d lead you to the missing pages once you found out your pilfered plunder was incomplete?” I asked, running down the most serious of the crimes that came to mind.

  “You guys really think I would do that?” I couldn’t tell if the hurt in his voice was real or if he was laying it on for effect.

  “I didn’t think you’d sneak around behind our backs and try to follow us either,” Frank retorted.

  “And you’re the most intense comic book collector we know, with a pretty obvious obsession with S and S,” I added. “That’s what we call motive.”

  “I’d never steal a collectible! It’s against my code,” he declared proudly. “I bought or traded for every single thing in my collection fair and square. I didn’t want to steal the comic for myself, I just wanted to find out what was inside it. That missing page is one of the collecting world’s biggest mysteries, and I wanted to be the collector who solved it!”

  Lucky, who had been dancing around and whining by Frank’s side, got impatient and started running around and barking at him again.

  “Quiet, Lucky,” Frank commanded, but it didn’t work this time. He just started barking at me instead.

  “Not now, Luck, we’re trying to conduct an interrogation,” I told him. He didn’t listen.

  He tried Murph instead, barking his deep bark and looking up at our suspect with big, sad puppy-dog eyes.

  “Sorry, big guy, I’m allergic,” Murph said, sniffling and rubbing his nose for good measure.

  Lucky gave Frank one last try, barking loudly and ramming my brother with his cone, nearly knocking him over.

  “Ouch! What’s gotten into you?” Frank protested.

  Lucky gave one more anxious little bloodhound dance, then ran off out the door back toward the courtyard.

  “Lucky, come back!” Frank shouted uselessly.

  “We’ll find him later. He knows this place better than we do anyway,” I said. I shot Murph a glare. “Right now we’ve got a more important party guest to babysit. And he still hasn’t told us anything to prove he wasn’t involved in the theft.”

  “But I’m the one who wanted to help you guys find it!” he insisted.

  “True, but you wouldn’t be the first crook to try to deflect suspicion by offering to help an investigation,” Frank pointed out.

  “I didn’t need to steal the comic to find out what was in it, and whoever did ruined my plan!” he said, pouting.

  “Which was?” Frank prodded.

  “I feel terrible for lying to you guys,” he said quietly without meeting our eyes—or answering the question.

  “You should feel terrible,” I said. “Now stop stalling and start spilling.”

  “I kind of impersonated the guy from Butterby Auctioneers who promised to pay Robert all that money if he agreed to sell it,” Murph admitted.

  “You’re the phony Wendell Leadbetter?!” Frank asked.

  “All I wanted to do was trick Robert into showing us the inside of the comic so I could see if I was right about it being a treasure map,” Murph said. “I knew he wouldn’t do it without real incentive, so I came up with one he couldn’t say no to.”

  “But then someone stole it first, and you pulled the plug on the operation,” I surmised. It would explain why the phony Leadbetter had disappeared after the theft.

  “I knew you guys would probably be looking into it,” he said. “Fooling Robert is one thing, but I’ve seen you crack enough cases to know I couldn’t get the ruse past you. So I shut down the bogus number and e-mail I’d given Robert.”

  “What had you planned to do if the comic hadn’t been stolen? Robert would have noticed when you were the one who showed up at the party to authenticate it,” said Frank.

  “I was going to have an older collector friend pretend to be Leadbetter and flash a fake check,” Murph explained guiltily. “They looked enough alike from his picture online that I didn’t think Robert would know any better, and we’d be able to put him in a costume anyway, since Robert wanted Leadbetter to do the appraisal at the party. I wasn’t going to have him take the comic, though. After Robert showed everyone the inside of the comic, he was just going to kind of go to the bathroom and never come back.”

  He the saw the disappointment in our eyes and looked away in embarrassment. “I didn’t think it would do any harm, not really.”

  “Defrauding Robert isn’t doing any harm?” Frank asked incredulously.

  “I mean, if he was telling the truth about the comic being complete, then all it would do was confirm how valuable it was,” Murph rationalized. “And if he was lying, I figured he kind of deserved it for leading all of us on. I swear I was never going to steal it, thou
gh.”

  Incriminating yourself in a different crime from the one you’re suspected of is one way to prove your innocence, I guess. I believed him, though. Murph had shown really (really really) bad judgment, but I didn’t think he was a thief, and he didn’t have anything to gain from lying about trying to scam Robert. This case was full of deception and a bunch of unsolved mysteries: what happened to Filmore, who scammed Robert, who stole the comic, what was on the missing page, and who sabotaged our tires, to name a few. At least the auction scam was another mystery solved. I also had a hunch it ruled Murph out as our tire saboteur.

  “My plan pretty much went out the window once the comic was stolen. But with you guys on the case, I knew you were my best chance to find out what was on that page,” Murph said, confirming my theory—he really did want us to solve that part of the case, which meant he didn’t have any motivation to threaten us off the investigation. “I figured I was out of the loop when you guys wouldn’t tell me what you’d found out. Seemed like following you was my best bet.” His eyes landed on the skeletal hand with the wad of torn comic pages and practically started to sparkle. “And I was right!”

  Murph lunged for the hand, the allure of comic collecting’s holy grail clouding his judgment to the facts that (a) he was still in big trouble, (b) holding a dead person’s hand is downright creepy, and (c)…

  “Don’t contaminate the crime scene!” Frank yelled.

  But it was too late. The hand came apart, bones dropping to the floor as Murph grabbed the pages and began to carefully separate them.

  “The map!” he cried, holding out the crumpled page from the center of the wad.

  I noticed the stains right away. The paper was covered with faded reddish-brown blotches. It wasn’t the type of thing the average Joe might recognize, but a detective Joe sure would. So would a detective Frank.

  “Bloodstains,” we both said at the same time.