Case File 13 #2 Read online

  Angelo nodded, pointing at the picture on Tiffany’s phone. “See how only part of the grave is open? They dig out the top half or so. Then one guy goes down in the hole, breaks open the coffin, and loops a rope around the chest of the corpse. The other guy pulls on the rope, and presto, one dead body.”

  Tiffany wrinkled her nose. “That’s nasty.”

  “It’s actually quite fascinating to study,” Angelo said. “The resurrectionists used wooden shovels because they were quieter than metal, and lanterns with only a small opening so villagers wouldn’t catch them taking the bodies.” He looked up from the phone and blinked as though realizing what he’d just said. But Dana was bobbing her head up and down.

  For the next ten minutes the two of them went on and on about mortsafes and methods of stealing bodies Nick had never imagined. It was almost like they were speaking a different language.

  Angie took the phone and flipped through the rest of the pictures. “So here’s what I don’t get. If people don’t buy bodies anymore, why did someone go to all the trouble of stealing these?”

  Nick had been wondering the exact same thing. But he wasn’t about to let Angie know it. Instead he gave a big yawn as if he were bored by the whole conversation, while still listening carefully.

  “Body snatching isn’t near as uncommon as you might think,” Dana said. “There are all kinds of reasons for taking corpses.”

  Angelo turned to a page in his notebook. “Abraham Lincoln’s body was dug up and reburied ten times.”

  “And don’t forget Alexander the Great,” Dana said.

  Angelo’s face took on a look of concentration. “St. Nicholas.”

  Dana looked every bit as determined not to be outdone. “Einstein’s brain.”

  During the last minutes of the game, Dana and Angelo continued to compare stories of missing or stolen dead people. It was like a gruesome debate—the two of them trying to prove who knew the most. As far as Nick was concerned it didn’t mean much one way or the other. They’d already determined the bodies in the local cemetery weren’t from anyone famous. And if they weren’t stolen for money, why were they taken? The possibilities were interesting, to say the least.

  When the game finally ended in a humiliating 77-to-10 loss, the whistle blew and the Pleasant Hill band launched into a listless rendition of the school song. The Rams’ coach jogged slowly out to the middle of the field, slouched over as if he carried a heavy weight on his back. His team had been destroyed by a school he probably thought was going to be a piece of cake.

  The Sumina coach, who also walked out to the middle of the field and shook hands, was tall, with bony arms and stilt-thin legs. He appeared to be like a hundred years old. Thick-rimmed glasses and wild gray hair made him look more like a history professor than a football coach. His long, pale face was sort of creepy.

  “What are you doing?” Tiffany shrieked.

  Nick spun around, his mind imagining dead bodies or worse. Instead, he found Tiffany staring horrified at Carter, who was standing several rows back, wolfing down a piece of pizza. “You want some?” he asked, holding out a greasy slice.

  Tiffany put a hand over her mouth as though she were about to throw up.

  “Where did you get that?” Nick asked. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to know.

  “It’s like a buffet up here.” Carter held up a pizza box with several cold pieces inside and a half empty carton of popcorn. “Who’d have thought people would leave all this food uneaten? Guess the game must have ruined their appetites.” He climbed over a couple of benches. “Look, Milk Duds!”

  Angie frowned. “Your friend is disgusting.”

  Nick couldn’t really disagree.

  “You know,” Angelo said. “If we could actually figure out who the body snatchers are, the publicity would almost guarantee that our movie would win the contest.”

  “Totally,” Nick said. “You, me, and Carter will figure out who’s stealing bodies while Angie and her friends . . . play house. Or whatever it is girls do.”

  “Fat chance,” Angie snarled. “You wouldn’t even know about the bodies if we hadn’t told you. You’ll still be tying your shoelaces when we work it all out. That is if you can ever pull your friend away from his scavenging. I think he just scraped up a piece of cheese someone stepped on.”

  Angelo and Dana glanced at each other while Nick steamed. What was the deal with his friends? One seemed to want to hang out with girls while the other wanted to search for half-eaten hot dogs. He couldn’t decide which was more disgusting.

  “Who’s that?” Tiffany asked.

  Nick followed her pointing finger to see a strange figure walking across the empty field. The man—or was it a woman?—looked like no one Nick had ever seen before. Cloaked in a long black overcoat and sunglasses, he seemed to be searching for something on the field. Every so often, he stopped to pick something up or look closely at the grass.

  “Equipment manager?” Angie suggested. “Maybe he’s looking for a mouthpiece.”

  “I’ve never seen a manager who looked like that,” Dana said. The figure stopped, knelt on the ground, and appeared to smell the grass. Nick couldn’t imagine any reason for doing that.

  “He’s even freakier than Carter,” Angela said.

  The man looked directly up at the kids, who were the only ones still up in the bleachers. He seemed to realize they were watching him and scrambled to his feet. As he raced off the field, something dropped out from under his coat to the grass. The man apparently didn’t notice. He ran to the tunnel with awkward crablike steps and disappeared into the darkness that led to the locker rooms.

  “What did he drop?” Angelo asked, squinting.

  Dana cupped her hands to her eyes. “It doesn’t look like a piece of equipment.”

  Nick looked from Angelo, who was squeezing his monster notebook, to Carter, who was wiping a mustard stain from his chin. Whatever the guy had dropped, he wanted to reach it before the girls could. “Come on!” he shouted, breaking into a run.

  Nick raced down the bleachers, hurdling benches and jumping steps in an effort to beat the girls to the field.

  “Get back here!” Angie shouted from close behind him. “We saw it first.”

  He had no idea what the guy had dropped. For all Nick knew it was a sweaty hip pad. But he was still stinging from Angie finding out about the missing corpses before he did, and he wasn’t about to get beat by a girl.

  At the bottom of the steps, a metal railing separated the bleachers from a short drop to the grass. Still running, Nick grabbed the bar and hurdled over. Before he could clear the rail completely, a hand closed around his ankle. Off balance, he fell to the ground.

  A second later Angie landed on his stomach, knocking all the air out of his chest with a woof. “Cheater,” she growled, crawling across the grass. Still trying to catch his breath, Nick wrapped both arms around her leg and held on as she tried to get to her feet.

  “Not . . . yours,” he gasped.

  A tall shape leaped gracefully over both of them, and Nick had a moment of hope that Angelo was going to get there first before seeing Dana lope across the football field like a wide receiver racing for a pass. A moment later Angelo ran past far less gracefully, the pages of his notebook flapping as he huffed and puffed.

  Nick disentangled himself from Angie just as Carter and Tiffany jogged by. Carter shoved what looked like a giant pretzel into his mouth. Tiffany held down her fluttering scarf with one hand and clutched her sunglasses with the other.

  Feeling like someone had hit him in the gut with a bowling ball, Nick got to his feet and shuffled across the football field to the circle of kids. Angie didn’t look much better, limping beside him.

  “What is it?” Nick called hoarsely.

  Angelo looked back, his face pale. “Well . . .”

  “Whatever it is, it’s ours,” Angie said, pushing her way past the other kids.

  Carter stepped backward, letting the last of his pretzel drop
to the grass. “You can have it.”

  As the circle of kids parted, Nick caught a glimpse of what they’d all been staring at. Nestled in the bright green grass, almost exactly balanced across the fifty yard line, was what looked for all the world like a severed human forearm.

  Angie’s sneakers skidded as she came to a quick halt. “That’s not real, is it?”

  Angelo licked his lips, his glasses fogging in the cold night air as he breathed heavily. “Based on the . . .” He couldn’t seem to finish his thought.

  Nick couldn’t believe they were falling for it. It was totally fake. “Get real. It’s just a prop—like they use in the movies. Probably some player from Sumina Prep playing a trick on us.” Fake-looking or not, it was cool. He could just imagine putting it in his trick-or-treat bag the next Halloween and freaking out all the health nuts who tried to give him apples.

  Before anyone else could make a move, he reached down and grabbed the arm by the wrist. It felt warm. He was trying to understand how that could be, when the stadium lights went out with a loud clang.

  In the sudden darkness, something banged against Nick’s leg and he stumbled to the side. Someone screamed. Angie? Tiffany? Carter?

  The arm seemed to twitch in his grip and fingers closed around his wrist, nails digging into his skin. With a howl, Nick flung the arm away. Someone rammed into his side and he flew through the darkness, getting a mouthful of mud and grass as he hit the turf.

  Somebody grunted and another scream tore through the night.

  “Let go of me,” shouted a voice that he was pretty sure belonged to Angelo.

  All around Nick, people were running and yelling. A foot kicked him in the head and green and red lights spun before his eyes like an out-of-control Christmas tree.

  “Take that!” yelled a voice that could only be Angie, and something gave an animal-like squeal that made Nick’s arms break out in goose bumps. A terrible smell filled the air and his eyes started to water.

  All at once, a bright light lit up the field. Lying on the ground, Nick could see the other kids spread out around him. Angelo was standing a few feet away, clutching his monster notebook protectively to his chest. Off to his left, Dana was standing in a karate pose, legs spread, one in front of the other, one hand in front of her, the other above her head like a blade waiting to drop. Angie was on the other side of them holding a small white canister.

  A tangled shape was several yards away, nearly outside of the light’s range. It took Nick a moment to realize it was Carter and Tiffany, clinging desperately to each other.

  “What in the name of Jiminy Cricket is going on here?” a nasal voice called. Holding a flashlight in one hand, a man in a green jumpsuit stepped toward the kids. As the man swiveled the beam toward his face, Nick could see two lines of snot running from his nose. His eyes were pools of red.

  “Get back or I’ll give you a faceful of pepper spray,” Angie said, pointing her canister in his direction.

  The man swiped his arm across his eyes, and Angelo said, “Pretty sure you already did.”

  Tiffany and Carter, realizing who they were holding, quickly dropped their arms and stepped away from one another—Carter with an embarrassed chuckle, Tiffany with a snort of pure disgust.

  Nick’s first thought was that the man with the flashlight was the same person they’d seen hurrying around the field. A second look and he realized that couldn’t be. This man had short gray hair and was dressed in what looked like a gardener’s outfit with the name Cebrowski stitched over the pocket. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and gave the kids a bleary-eyed glare.

  “You knobbly-kneed carpet crawlers ain’t supposed to be down here.” He pointed his light at Angie. “Put that poison down before I call the police.”

  “It’s not poison. It’s pepper spray,” Angie said. “And I’m not putting it anywhere until you tell me why you attacked us.”

  Despite his complete loathing for her, Nick had to admit Angie had guts, standing up to an adult that way.

  Mr. Cebrowski seemed taken aback by Angie’s accusation. He lowered his light and wiped his streaming eyes again. “What the flying fish are you talking about? I was only shutting down the field, just like always, when I heard screaming. I came running over to see what was wrong when somebody gave me a snootful of that firewater.”

  “I think he might be telling the truth,” Dana said, lowering her hands. “Whoever hit me was stronger than him.”

  Nick nodded. He couldn’t imagine the man in front of him hitting him hard enough to send him flying the way he had.

  Carter and Tiffany were uncharacteristically quiet, edging away from each other and refusing to make eye contact. But Angie wasn’t backing down just yet. “I suppose you don’t know anything about that arm?”

  “Arm, you say?” the man asked, looking dubiously at his own two.

  “A severed arm. It was on the field until Nick picked it up,” Angelo said. He and the other kids looked toward Nick.

  In all the excitement Nick had completely forgotten about the arm. He’d thrown it somewhere. But when he looked around, the arm was nowhere to be seen.

  Saturday morning, the boys jumped onto the internet first thing to see if there was any news from either the football game or the cemetery. Other than a sports story about the lopsided score and a short article about what the paper was calling graveyard vandalism, there was nothing new.

  “The police are probably trying to downplay the body snatching so people don’t freak out,” Angelo said.

  “You three are up early,” Mom said, coming back from her morning workout with a big box of cinnamon rolls. As Mom handed out rolls and poured milk, the boys quickly closed the browser and took their food to the table.

  Nick took a drink of milk and considered what had happened the night before. The more he thought about the arm, the more he realized it had to have been some kind of trick. Who would carry body parts around a football field?

  Carter downed his roll in three big bites. “Are you gonna finish that?” he asked Nick.

  “Yes.” Nick shoved the rest of his food in his mouth before Carter could get any more ideas, and Angelo quickly did the same.

  Carter grimaced. “I think I liked it better when you were a zombie.”

  One of the side effects of Nick’s previous experience becoming a temporary member of the undead had been a loss of appetite for most foods. Now that he was back to normal, his appetite had returned.

  “How was the game?” Mom asked.

  “Awesome,” Carter said, eyeing her roll. “Can you believe there are people who leave half-eaten food right on the bleachers where anyone can come along and take it? Seriously. Perfectly. Good. Pizza!”

  Mom gave a stricken look to Nick, who shook his head. “Don’t ask.”

  Dad walked into the room struggling to program his smart phone. “Wasn’t it Benjamin Franklin who said, ‘A pizza found is a pizza earned’?”

  Mom looked from Dad to Carter and pushed her plate away. “I think I just lost my appetite.” Carter’s eyes went wide and she shoved the cinnamon roll across the table. “Go ahead.”

  Carter gobbled the roll so quickly it looked like an optical illusion.

  Angelo frowned at Carter. “You could say thanks.”

  “At least someone here has manners,” Mom said.

  Carter put a hand over his heart. “I’d be more formal if I didn’t know you consider me a part of the family.”

  “He’s got you there.” Dad gave up on his phone and set it on the counter.

  “Thanks for the food, Mrs. B,” Carter said as the three boys headed for the door.

  “Just promise me you won’t eat anything you find on the sidewalk,” Mom said.

  Carter gave her a strange look. “That would be gross.”

  “To the cemetery?” Angelo asked, as soon as they were outside the house. “Even if we don’t find any clues, we could still shoot more of the movie there. Maybe somebody steals Fitzpatrick’s body
after the funeral.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, pulling his backpack over one shoulder. “But first I have to make a stop at Cole’s Deli.”

  Angelo raised an eyebrow.

  “Talk about me being a pig.” Carter pushed up the end of his nose.

  “I’m pretty sure the food isn’t for Nick,” Angelo said as the three boys climbed onto their bikes. “Do you think the deli will be open this time of the morning?”

  “Hope so,” Nick said. “I think they serve breakfast sandwiches.”

  It turned out that Cole’s Deli was open. But Frank, the owner, was more than a little surprised when Nick asked for a hot pastrami sandwich with extra pickles. “Kid, you’re gonna have heartburn all day. Take it from Frankie.”

  Nick just smiled and put the sandwich in his pack along with what he’d already put there, wondering what Mr. Cole would say if he knew the real reason for the sandwich.

  As they pedaled toward the cemetery, Angelo rode his bike alongside Nick’s. “Are you going to say anything to your parents about the you know what?”

  “Oh, yeah. I can just see me saying, ‘Hey, Mom, guess what? Last night after the game I found a severed arm. Except it mysteriously disappeared after the lights went out.’ I wouldn’t be allowed to watch another monster movie until I wore dentures.”

  “Do you think the hand really moved?” Carter asked.

  “Definitely not. I told you it was only a movie prop. I was just a little freaked out.” Nick looked up and down the street, keeping an eye out for Cody. The last thing they needed was Cody following them to the cemetery. If he didn’t want them playing on neighbors’ lawns, he definitely wouldn’t approve of hunting down body snatchers.

  “If it was a prop, then where did it go?” Carter asked.

  Nick shrugged. “Probably whoever left it there came back for it. Something that realistic-looking must have cost a ton.”

  At the end of the street, they stopped and waited for the light to change. “You think we can track down whoever took the corpses?” Nick asked.

  “I would imagine the police have removed most of the clues,” Angelo said. The light changed and the boys starting pushing their bikes across the crosswalk.