"I saved your table!" she said cheerfully.
Kelly thanked her as we herded the girls to the table. "How did you know we were coming?"
"Hal told me." She paused to wave at Hal and Nigel, who were at a booth in the corner. "I figured it was getting too late for you to make dinner, so you'd come here."
Murl barked from the kitchen, and Nancy excused herself.
"This place is weird." Kelly looked like she might be regretting her decision to come here.
"What are you saying?" Betty said. "This place is awesome. There's a giant tooth, a killer princess, and everyone keeps mentioning aliens." When she saw the look on my face, she explained, "I can read lips. I saw what Hal told you through the window. Like I said, staying at Camp des Morts is awesome!"
I wondered what on the menu would make them so sleepy that they wouldn't want to go on a ghost hunting hike. Was it too much to hope that Murl could make us an entire turkey?
"Eating here is perfect. It gives us more time for our night hike," Lauren said. "Good idea, Mrs. Albers!"
I thought it was my idea, but I let it go. I had other things to think about. If we survived tonight, tomorrow we'd have to survive the spider house. And I'd have to figure out if Aunt June was murdered or just crazy. Considering I was in for a long night keeping the girls inside, I hoped it was the latter.
Why did I feel a little twinge of disappointment? Was I hoping to have a case to solve away from home? Maybe. I'd have to be careful not to let enthusiasm for murder get the best of me. I needed to focus and be totally impartial if I was going to figure this out. And if it wasn't murder, we still had ghosts and aliens.
There had to be almost fifty people in the place. And Nancy was doing all the table waiting. She wasn't taking notes. As someone came in, she waved them to what I assume was their usual table, and then she'd shout an order at the unseen Murl. The people at the table would nod, and Nancy would move on to the next table.
People here must order the same thing every time they came in. I couldn't blame them, as I wondered if she had more fried chicken.
"Do you want to hear the specials?" Nancy appeared at my side, causing me to jump.
"Sure," Kelly answered for everyone.
"We have meatloaf and potatoes, a hot roast beef sandwich with potatoes, and a stuffed Iowa pork chop." She looked at us expectantly.
That's when I realized we didn't have any menus.
"Can we have hamburgers and fries?" Kaitlyn asked.
"Of course, darling! We have the best burgers in the state!"
She was wrong, of course, because Oleo's back in Who's There had the best burgers hands down. But it seemed rude to mention this since they lost out to Dubuque and all. The girls all ordered hamburgers—Betty ordered hers done very well.
"As much like a charcoal brick as you can," she insisted.
"Briquet," Kelly corrected.
"Whatever." Betty threw her hands in the air.
Betty ate everything burned to a crisp. Her toasted marshmallows were the worst. Blackened completely on the outside, molten lava on the inside. And don't get me started on how she cooks her hot dogs. The very idea made me shudder.
"I'll have the hot beef sandwich, please," I ordered.
This might be an Iowa thing, but my Grandma Wrath always judged a restaurant by its hot beef sandwich. Oddly enough, the hospital had the best one in town. Adelaide Wrath ate there so often that many on the staff assumed she was a terminal patient.
A hot beef sandwich starts with a slab of white bread. You layer sliced roast beef on top of it then add a healthy dollop of mashed potatoes on top and pour gravy over the whole thing. It's genius really.
Oh sure, the South claims it too, and I've even heard that it's called Roast Beef Manhattan in New York City. But it's a Midwestern dish through and through. And I'm pretty sure, with no evidence to back it up at all, that it originated in Iowa, home of the Tater Tot casserole.
Come to think of it, all of our food was like that. We had Jell-O and strawberry pretzel cream cheese salad, both of which were really desserts. And we had bars, which were like brownies. Oh, and sweet corn. There's nothing better than sweet corn in the summer.
Now that I mention it, this may be why there's an obesity epidemic in the Midwest.
As the girls and Kelly talked about ghosts, my thoughts turned to the people around me. If I was right, then a good portion of the population of Behold was right here. It was a possibility that one or more of these citizens of Behold had murdered Aunt June.
Nigel had thought it was ridiculous. He believed that she'd died of natural causes. He also thought she was crazy. The problem with that was I had no idea if he was right. I didn't know anything about the woman, other than the fact that she collected some dangerous insects.
What if he was right? I mean, who would want to kill someone like her? Small towns usually embraced their crazy folk. Although it was possible that everyone here was crazy, the way they mentioned aliens and ghosts.
I needed more information. Tomorrow I'd go to the house and visit Dr. Morgan. I needed an idea of who Aunt June was before I did any investigating. There might not be anything to investigate.
These people looked just like the folks you'd see in Who's There—socializing and having a good time at the town hotspot. Where should I begin to investigate? You might think it would be easy in such a small place to find a killer. But you'd be wrong. Because I had nine hundred people to consider. In a small town, everyone knows everyone—which
