"I hate this kind of place."

"Really?" Ned's eyebrows rose.

Nancy turned to him, quirking up her own eyebrow. "You're surprised?"

Ned shrugged. "I don't know," he replied, following her up the narrow, steep staircase. "It just... well, I always associated you with mysterious things."

Nancy chuckled. "There's nothing mysterious about this," she pointed out.

"Well, not now."

A haunted house in daylight was pretty sad, it turned out. All the props that scared visitors to death when used in the darkness, the prerecorded soundtrack of cackling, screeching, and creaking, the sticky synthetic spiderwebs, battery-powered glowing eyes flashing on and off... Ned shook his head as he ducked under a plastic scythe, then swerved to avoid a rubber bat. Thanks to safety requirements, nothing in here could truly be dangerous, and he knew that.

"It just makes me angry. I've seen this kind of garbage used to trick gullible people before."

Ned paused. "How many seances did you say you'd been to?"

Nancy sighed. "I've lost count," she replied, brushing a scarecrow's hand aside as they approached an intersection in the corridor. "Okay, toward the front from here..."

"And you don't believe in ghosts. Not even a little."

"Not even a little," she agreed. "I believe that some people are devious enough to impersonate ghosts. But so much can be done via the power of suggestion and sleight of hand."

"Phosphorescence."

"Fishing line." Nancy flashed a grin at him. "Thanks for coming along."

"Hey. What kind of boyfriend would I be, if I weren't here to protect you from..." He narrowed his eyes at the next figure they approached. "Gray-skinned geriatric Dracula." Complete with stage blood dabbed on the tips of his rubber fangs.

Nancy laughed. "We'll just have to walk briskly to escape him. It is daylight, after all."

The creaking farmhouse was crammed with all manner of ghouls and creatures. The owner hadn't decided on a common theme; it was just a buffet of the weird, with the hopes that if one room didn't scare a visitor, the next would. Mummies wrapped in stiff linen brushed shoulders with gory zombies and reanimated corpses still sporting stitching in patched-together rubber flesh. Witches peered from beneath long dirty wigs, their gnarled hands tipped in long curved fingernails, beckoning to cauldrons bubbling over, ready to be primed with dry ice for the evening's events. He saw grimy hockey masks, knife-tipped gloves, oversized spiders.

Nancy opened one room, then hastily shut the door.

Ned stifled a chuckle. If she really was frightened by whatever she had seen, he didn't want to mock her for it. "Need me to check it out?"

She shrugged. "I just hate that kind of thing," she muttered, avoiding his eyes.

Ned twisted the knob and slowly pushed the door open, in case doing so triggered some scene in the room, but nothing moved. He saw a mannequin, face obscured by a mass of long, stringy dark hair, bound to a bed. The bed itself had been placed on top of a chalk design, surrounded by flameless candles that weren't flickering now. Shelves lined one wall of the room, crowded with porcelain dolls, all of them facing away from Ned. The room smelled of old copper, stagnant water, earth.

Yikes, he thought as he closed the door. That was a little creepy.

Eventually they found what they were looking for: a figure that was incredibly lifelike, or deadlike, compared to the many, many cheap props cluttering the rest of the house. One of the visitors the night before had been too ashamed to approach the police after she had seen what she swore was an actual corpse in the house. "What better place to hide it?" Kaylie had commented, her voice rising, becoming a little shrill, almost hysterical.

"Hmm," Nancy commented, walking slowly around it, scanning it thoroughly. "Yeah, this is definitely state-of-the-art haunted house staging."

Ned scratched his jaw, gazing steadily at the faux corpse. "And a lot more expensive than, probably, the rest of this place put together."

Nancy nodded idly. She took the corpse's hand, then slumped a little at the confirmation. "It's not a body, but..."

"But it doesn't belong here."

Nancy looked over at Ned. "It's hidden in plain sight. The owner knows nothing about it..."

Ned picked up the hand Nancy had just released. The arm swung easily in the socket. "Is that-"

"Sure looks like it," Nancy said, leaning forward. The cuffs of the shirt were stained with what looked like dried blood, not the fake, staged stuff they had seen on several of the creatures.

She bit her lip. Then she reached up and touched the face.

The mannequin underneath had a blank oval, a suggestion of a face. The mask that had been placed over it was what was so realistic. "It's almost like a death mask," Nancy marveled, as she gently massaged it back in place. She glanced over at Ned.

"So what's your theory?"

"Something bad happened here, and whoever was involved decided to get rid of the evidence until they could do something more permanent," she replied, keeping her voice low. "It's not a ton of blood, but that doesn't mean it was a minor event."

They heard a thumping, shuffling sound and exchanged a glance, and then Nancy ran her hand over her hair. "Must be her."

Ned glanced around, but there was nowhere obvious to hide the mannequin, and it might be more effective to just confront the owner with the evidence anyway.

The owner of the house was old and walked with a stoop, dragging a cane. Her mouth seemed pinched in a perpetual sour-lemon pucker, and her voice carried the gravel of two-packs-a-day and cheap whiskey. She sniffed and headed toward them.

"Anything?"

Nancy nodded and gestured at the mannequin, keeping her gaze on the owner as long as she could. "Do you recognize this?"

Rose studied the figure for a moment and shook her head. "Zeke handles all this," she replied. "All the upstairs. Gets an idea in his head and goes for it. It's too hard for me to get up here and move stuff around."

"So could we take the shirt with us?"

Rose peered at the stains Ned pointed out, then shrugged. "Can't see why not," she replied. "I'm sure Zeke'll find something else to put on him before tonight. It's probably stage blood."

Once Rose had shuffled toward the staircase and thumped back down to the first floor, Ned crossed his arms. "If you wanted to discredit a potential witness," he began, then trailed off.

Nancy crossed her arms, too, frowning. "Kaylie was drunk," she replied. "She was a terrible witness to begin with."

"But I'd bet you anything Zeke overheard her commenting on whatever she saw."

"So he sets up a plausible explanation for it." Nancy paced a few steps, then back. "Everything up here is like a bargain basement Halloween sale, except..."

"For this masked mannequin."

"And that room."

Ned raised an eyebrow.

"The rest of this? Stagey, hokey, good for a laugh or a gullible friend. That room..."

"You think he set it up to discourage people from lingering?"

Nancy nodded slowly. "Can't hurt to check."

Ned noticed that she took a deep breath before opening the door, but he didn't say anything. He wanted to take her hand, but he held back; he didn't want to seem patronizing, and she was handling it.

Nancy walked straight to the bed and touched the figure there; it was plastic, and Ned didn't see anything outwardly amiss. Then Nancy stood in place and did a slow turn, taking in all angles of the room. Other than the dolls, there was a tattered black curtain, a few bare bulbs, and a likely closet door.

Ned headed that way while Nancy walked toward the shelves of creepy dolls. Hanging on the inside of the closet door, he found a tattered, dirty raincoat. A thick plastic tarp, folded into a neat square, was lying on the floor of the closet.

Nancy made a sound that was somewhere between choking and hoarse distress. Ned turned quickly to see her gazing at a doll she had turned to face her.

A diagonal slash of dark-red angled up the doll's dress to her shoulder.

"Yeah," Nancy said quietly. "Something happened in here."

The sun had set and the wind was cutting right through Ned's jacket as he walked Nancy out of the Emersonville police station, his arm around her shoulders.

Ned had mentioned the fresh graves outside the haunted house as an afterthought; he hadn't expected anything to come of it. Still, though. If a skeletal hand had been visible next October, would anyone have even questioned it?

Nancy shuddered, and Ned held her a little tighter.

"You know the worst thing? When it reopens tomorrow, she'll probably have so many people there wanting to tour that she'll have to turn some away."

"Yeah." Ned shook his head in disgust and sighed. "And I'm definitely never going in a haunted house again."

Nancy shrugged. "I don't know. Going in, knowing what it is... huddling together in the dark and knowing that you'll be right behind me to hold me tight..."

"Despite all the hokey stage crap."

"In spite of it, I guess."

"But I do like the excuse to hold you tight."

Nancy leaned her head against his shoulder. "Well, there is that monster-movie double feature downtown tomorrow. We can enjoy some papier-mache black-and-white monsters and throw popcorn at the screen when the damsel in distress faints in fear."

Ned kissed her temple, glad that she wasn't dwelling on the horror of the trip back to the haunted house, police officers roaring up the drive behind them, the inevitable garish headlines. The suspect was in custody. Tomorrow, everything would be a little better.

"And then we can go bobbing for apples at the Theta Pi party."

"We aren't hanging out at the Omega house?"

"I... just think you won't enjoy this year's theme."

"Ah." Nancy moved to look up into his face. "Probably not. I think I'd be happy to never set foot in a haunted house again, really."

"Definitely. Phosphorescent ghosts or not."

She snuggled against his side again. "And maybe if I collect enough peanut butter cups, I can bribe you for favors..."

Ned chuckled. "Count me in, babe. No matter what."