Chapter 03

While Daphne and I were getting settled into our room, her phone rang. She put it on speaker and Fred's voice popped out. "Girls, when can you be ready to go into the ghost town and take a look around?"

"Five minutes?" Daphne replied. "We'll meet you all down in the lobby."

A few minutes later, we were all together in front of the hotel. "Maybe, we should split up." Shockingly, this was Shaggy.

I followed his gaze to the only open restaurant on the street. The sign above the door said:

Wahasapee Bar and Grill

All You Can Eat Potato Bar

I had seen Shaggy and Scooby eat often enough that I knew I didn't want to do it if I didn't have to. "I'll stick with Fred and Daphne."

As has been well documented, I am poor at reading non-verbal communication. But I can memorize certain facial expressions if I have known a person long enough. I had known Fred long enough to know his glare. It was directed at me.

I looked to Daphne and she was smiling. Since she was always basically in character, she was unreadable to me. I couldn't guess whether the smile was happy that I was coming along, laughing at Fred for his obvious discomfort, or just another part of the enigmatic character she always played.

But I didn't want to watch Shaggy and Scooby eat and I didn't want to walk through a strange place alone at night. So, Fred could deal. I did stay behind them about ten feet so they could flirt or schmoozle or do whatever they did when the rest of us weren't around. Fred tried to take her hand and she casually used it to point at something—removing it immediately from his grasp. He didn't try again.

It was hard to differentiate between where the fake decrepitude of the ghost-town-themed architecture ended and the actual decrepitude of an old tourist trap which was going to seed began.

The fake cemetery was definitely on the hokey side and looked like it had been bought from the bargain section of an off-season Halloween costume store. As we passed the undertaker's shop, one of the shutters came loose and swung from a single hinge. I was startled until I noticed that it swung three times and then there was a slight buzzing sound as it returned to its original position. I pressed down on the wooden slat in the boardwalk and the shutter repeated the mechanical motion.

Investigating this put me about forty feet behind Fred and Daphne so I scurried to catch up. Being diminutive, I'm not fond of the word 'scurry'. But, you've seen me run, and if the Mary Jane shoes fit…

As we walked along, I noticed shadows paralleling us on the other side of the street. I tried to convince myself that they were just some other tourists caught with nothing to do but walk around a dark ghost town in the late evening. Or, more likely, kids or fellow teens who were escaping from their parents' watchful eyes if only for a few minutes.

But then the shadows turned and started walking directly toward us.

"Guys!" I spoke to Fred and Daphne in as muffled a whisper as would carry the ten feet between us. "Someone's coming!"

Fred and Daphne whirled in time to see Shaggy and Scooby appear in the faint moonlight.

"Hi guys. Like, we thought that was you."

"Reah, rhat's rut ree thought."

Fred, who had not been kidnapped recently, recovered from the start more quickly than I. "Hi guys. I thought you were going to be at that restaurant for a while."

"So did we. And things were going pretty well until we got into a disagreement with the manager about the precise definition of all-you-can-eat."

"Rif roo are going to put it on the rign, then it should ree rue. It ras ralse radvertising."

"Its not our fault they didn't have enough potatoes. So, here we are." His voice dropped. "Like, have you seen any ghosts or spooky stuff?"

"Rye rate rooky stuff."

"No, we've just been walking along. Pretty quiet."

Daphne pointed up at the building in front of which we were standing. "Why don't we check this out." The sign said 'Saloon'.

There were no lights on inside as I pushed through the squeeky swinging doors. "This looks like a legitimate old saloon."

Shaggy came in right behind me. "You aren't kidding when you say 'old'. Make sure that you don't disturb any of the spiderwebs."

"Why not?"

"I think they're the only things holding this place together."

Scooby giggled at Shaggy's joke. Somebody had to, I guess.

We all jumped when the room suddenly filled with music.

"Zoinks! A ghost!"

I knew that I could rule out that possibility, so, as my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, I made my way over to the source of the music. "It's a player piano. It must be triggered by a motion sensor or a pressure plate like the shutter at the undertaker shop." I looked up to see Shaggy and Scooby cowering at the top of a set of curtains. "Now, come down out of those draperies!"

Like Wile E. Coyote realizing he was running on thin air, Scooby seemed to suddenly realize his paws were not made for gripping curtains. He tumbled on top of Shaggy and they both came down with Shaggy flat on his back and Scooby landing safely on his friend's stomach.

After the initial OOMPH, Shaggy got his breath. "Why couldn't you have been a poodle… a toy poodle."

"Rere would be ress of ree to love."

While I poked around some more, Shaggy and Scooby dusted each other off. Without announcement, Fred had apparently decided that the group would split up since he and Daphne were nowhere to be seen. The saloon was a bust.

Fred and Daphne were waiting for us in front of the next building over.

Fred acted as if he had not deliberately jilted us. "Did you find any clues?"

I could play along. "Not a one."

"Neither did I." As if he had been searching for anything other than Daphne. "Let's take a look inside this old hotel."

Shaggy tended to get headaches when he was coming down off a high. "Maybe our mysterious miner rented a room for the night." I'm not sure how the tech guys at the network were able to make that sound less sarcastic in the final edit.

Now that Scooby Doo has been declared an American citizen with all of the rights of a human, it's a little embarrassing to see how we shoved him into that old hotel first in case it was dangerous. I guess this would be bad even if he was just a normal dog but it seems worse with him being a citizen.

Shaggy followed Scooby up some stairs while the rest of us looked around in the lobby. Like in the saloon, the cobwebs seemed natural rather than artificial and we could see very few footprints on the dust-covered floor. This tourist trap was clearly not trapping many tourists.

Within a few seconds, the not abnormal sound of Shaggy yelling "He's got me!" was followed by the equally expected sound of Scooby yelling in general.

The brief silence that followed was a little more out of the ordinary. Completely unexpected was for Shaggy and Scooby to enter through the front door from the outside. And Shaggy was shirtless.

Shaggy seemed pretty nonchalant about the whole thing. "My shirt got caught on a tree branch. Me and Scoob need to head back up and get it."

Even in the low lighting, I was able to make out the scars on his back from the bicycle accident when he was a kid. Were there new ones?

While they were upstairs searching, Fred, Daphne, and I worked our way over the lobby. There were no keys or envelopes in the slots behind the front counter. The drawers on the employee side of the counter were filled with visitor tallies which apparently had been kept on a shift-by-shift basis until about a year before. There was nothing newer than that.

Fred was pushing his fingers into the cushions of the nasty old settee. I was just watching him and thinking that I hoped he had hand sanitizer with him when, yet again, we heard Scooby cry out from above followed by Shaggy's voice "Zoinks! The Miner's chasing Scooby!"

Shaggy came barreling down the stairs first, followed by Scooby who was entangled in a blanket of some kind which had, in turn, caught on a…

I said it in the show and the phrase has not aged well. But it was what it was. Scooby's blanket was dragging along a wooden cigar-store-indian. I can't think of any part of that phrase that isn't offensive by today's standards. Honestly, it was offensive eleven years ago when I said it and it brought in a lot of less-than-stellar comments on the YouTube channel. And it was still offensive a year-and-a-half later when it was first broadcast on the network but someone else was handling the fallout from that since the network censors had chosen to leave it in.

I guess it's better late than never. Sorry. I should have used another way to describe it. In my defense, I still can't think of one.

We dodged out of the way of the hurtling dog and the very dangerous wooden statue and all ended up sprawled around on the floor. The one thing missing was the miner.

Daphne glared at Shaggy and Scooby as she dusted herself off. Her dress probably cost as much as my parents' car. "You said something about the miner?"

"Rits ras right rehind ree! Rye was running for rye rife!"

Daphne looked to Shaggy. "Did you see it?"

"No. But I have rules and one of those rules is that, when someone is running away from something, don't ask questions. Just run."

One thing I had noticed was that the type of wooden statue in question was usually solid wood and very heavy. Scooby had dragged this one with ease. I tapped on it and the sound came back hollow. The others gathered around as I made a close inspection. There was a clear seam around the neck and I tried to twist it.

Fred stepped in. "Here. Let me help."

As annoying as this was, he had a clear advantage in upper body strength. Within a few seconds, the head popped off like a cork from a bottle revealing that the chest cavity of the statue was hollow. And inside was an envelope that didn't look very old.