"You're not doomed," Kelly said. "But the girls are getting bored, and we need to corral them before they find the third floor a little too interesting."
"Alright," I grumped. "Maybe the mud will get it out later."
We walked out into the hallway on the second floor to find the girls sitting in a circle, waiting. They jumped to their feet when they saw us. Bridling like hopped-up horses before a race, they were waiting for us to say it was okay to charge the most dangerous floor in house history.
I led with Kelly bringing up the rear. The girls were told not to touch anything but their shoes to the floor.
The floor plan for the third floor was completely open. The walls were lined with the various enclosures that started three feet from the floor to the ceiling. All of the animals were behind glass. They seemed to be aquarium-like in nature, but some were larger than others.
"Are we supposed to feed them?" Lauren looked worried—probably for the spiders. I wondered if she'd named them already.
"What do you think they eat?" I asked her.
"Flies. At least for the spiders and frog." The girl pulled out her cell and began researching.
"How do we feed them?" I peered into the glass. The enclosures appeared to be part of the wall with no discernable openings.
"I don't think we should worry about that." Kelly shifted her feet uneasily. "In fact, I'm okay with them dying."
"How can you say that?" Lauren cried.
"They're bugs," I said.
"Bugs have mommies and daddies too!"
"And Scout leaders," Inez added.
Nearest to the stairs was a huge, glassed-in area. The plaque said Sydney Funnel Spider.
"Is that a cloud?" Kaitlyn pointed to what certainly looked like a cloud coming through the branches of a small tree. It was the size of a bucket.
"That's a web." Lauren read from her cell, "They lunge out from their hole and grab prey." She squinted into the depths. "I think I see him!"
The other four little girls crowded around, pressing their faces to the glass.
The black silhouette chose this time to lunge toward the glass, causing the girls to stumble backwards screaming. Kelly ran halfway down the stairs, and even I backed up against the rail.
Betty, however, was unfazed. As the spider blinked at her, she stepped forward and gave him a defiant scowl. Please, I thought, don't let her poof him out of his cage.
Lauren regained her poise. "It says here one bite will kill a man in fifteen minutes! Do you think that's what killed her?"
"The sheriff said it was the brown recluse. Their fangs are smaller than this thing." I waved at the glass. No way was I getting closer.
"How did he know?" Inez seemed dubious.
"He had the spider in a baggie…which reminds me." I skipped the black widow spider's enclosure and went straight to where the brown recluse was kept. A little brown spider seemed to wave at me from a branch that nearly touched the glass.
"Reminds you of what?" Kelly appeared at my side.
"In the inventory of the place, there was only one brown recluse. And the sheriff claims to have it. So who's this guy?"
Kaitlyn suggested, "Maybe he was a twin?"
"Or a secret baby, like on my mom's TV show that she watches at lunchtime," Ava announced.
"I think it's the aliens." Betty was still staring down the funnel spider.
There was general agreement that this was, in fact, the answer. Aliens had fooled us all by putting a second spider in the enclosure, removing it to bite Aunt June, and then squishing it.
Ava snapped her fingers. "Maybe the spider is the alien!"
They moved closer to the glass, causing the little spider to beat a hasty retreat into the shadows.
"The black widow isn't out." Kelly had rejoined us and was studying the enclosure from a bit of a distance.
We joined her. The spider wasn't visible.
Kelly wondered, "Do you think they confused the brown recluse with the black widow?"
I shook my head. "The sheriff didn't have a black widow. Those are, you know, black, with a little red hourglass on the abdomen. The spider he had was brown."
"Ewwww!" Ava shrieked a little ahead of us. "What is this?"
"The deathstalker scorpion," I said as I looked at the light tan arachnid.
Lauren consulted her phone. "It's the deadliest of all scorpions. Its venom can't kill a healthy adult but can kill a child or someone who's sick. Wow."
"Cool name," Inez said. "But it's ugly!"
Kaitlyn agreed, "Even if it was a baby it would be ugly!"
That was saying something. My experience with these girls taught me one thing—if there's a bat or mouse or daddy longlegs, it's far less repulsive if you tell them it's a baby bat, mouse, or daddy longlegs. Well, on everything but this ugly scorpion, that is. And baby bugs seemed cuter and safer with little girls. Which was why I wasn't going to encourage the idea of them being babies.
This particular enclosure was made up to look like a desert, with large heat lamps simulating the sun's rays. The critter in question was sunning himself on a rock until we showed up. Then he raised his claws in the air, opening them menacingly as his tail curled upward, displaying a nasty stinger.
I stood there as the girls were studying these little critters of death and couldn't help but wonder if Nigel was right. It was possible that Aunt June could've been accidentally bitten by one of her "pets." Of course, an alien could've put another brown recluse in the terrarium. It seemed irresponsible to rule them out just yet.
My mind reeled back to the clue in the tuba. It only said she knew she would be murdered because she could feel it in her bones. If she knew that, why couldn't she tell me about her killer?
And if she was killed, was it by one of three disgruntled boyfriends or even the jealous Nancy? It had to be. I couldn't think of
