A Catered Halloween Read Online Free Page B

disgusted.”
    “Not me,” Libby said firmly. “Not in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I don’t think I want to go back there.”
    “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Sean told her.
    Bernie untwisted her legs and stood up. “Yes, we do. We have a contract.”
    Sean took a final bite of his pumpkin bar. “I think a beheading might count as a cancellation clause, don’t you?” he asked after he swallowed. He’d love a cigarette now, but since the girls didn’t know he’d gone back to smoking, he couldn’t ask them to get him any.
    Libby folded over the empty wrapper of the chocolate bar she’d been eating and creased the line with her thumb. Then she did the same thing again.
    “I’m serious. Maybe I won’t go,” she announced.
    “Why?” Bernie said. “What more can happen? Anyway, then we’d have to give back the money, which we can’t exactly afford to do.”
    Sean watched his eldest daughter run her thumb across the edge of the wrapper again. She didn’t say anything.
    “For real,” Bernie said to Libby. “What more can happen?”
    “Someone could cut off our heads,” Libby replied.
    Bernie rolled her eyes. “Please. You can’t be serious.”
    “Of course, I am. Why wouldn’t I be?” said Libby.
    Sean coughed. The girls turned back to him.
    “You know,” he said. “Amethyst has…had…a lot of enemies. I don’t think this crime was committed by some nut looking to get his jollies off. I think it was committed by someone looking to kill Amethyst. So you two have nothing to worry about.”
    “My sentiments exactly,” Bernie agreed.
    Libby stood up. “But you don’t know that for a fact.”
    “It’s true, but that’s what my gut tells me,” said Sean.
    Libby plucked at the top button of the shirt she was wearing, then absentmindedly rearranged the magazines on the table over by the wall. “She wasn’t well liked, was she?”
    Sean wiped his fingers on the napkin in front of him. “That’s one way of putting it. Look at what she did to Bob Small.”
    Bernie put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you. We saw him today. He was working at the Haunted House, as a skeleton.”
    Sean raised an eyebrow. “Now that’s interesting.”
    Bernie sat back down and took a sip of her Scotch. “I bet the police are going to pick him up in a hurry. I’d be surprised if he’s there when we go back.”
    Libby shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t see himdoing this. He’s just not the kind of guy who would chop someone’s head off.”
    “In my experience, you get someone angry enough and you’d be amazed what they can do,” Sean said. “Remember Bernard? He weighed what? One hundred pounds, if that? He was so shy he could hardly look you in the face when he talked, and yet he managed to kill his two-hundred-and-fifty-pound girlfriend, drag her out of the house, and put her in the trunk of his car before he was caught, and that was only because he couldn’t get the lid all the way down, so he tied it shut. If he’d gone to Boy Scout camp and practiced his knots, he might never have been found out.”
    Libby frowned. “Bob Small went to jail because he stole stuff.”
    “No,” Sean said. “Bob Small went to jail because he gave Amethyst a top-of-the-line BMW off the lot of the dealer he was working for so she could get to work and back while she had her car fixed. But instead of doing that, she took off to Florida with a guy she picked up at a bar and totaled the Beamer. Bob lost his wife and his job and spent a year in prison because of her little shenanigans. If that’s not a motive, I don’t know what is.”
    Libby was about to reply when the door buzzer rang downstairs.
    “You think Bob is guilty?” Bernie asked her dad as Libby went to see who was at the door.
    Sean shrugged. “Don’t know, but if I were the investigating officer, I’d like Bob for it. He had motive and opportunity. Of course, like I was saying, Amethyst had