Chapter 3
The screaming starts immediately.
Not the fun, roller-coaster kind of screaming that usually fills my theme park, but the authentic, primal, there’s-a-dead-body-at-my-feet variety.
Tourists shriek and scramble backward. Phones are out and still recording, because apparently modern hoomans document everything, even their trauma.
The crew drops equipment with expensive-sounding crashes.
Someone’s coffee mug shatters on the cobblestones, adding to the general atmosphere of this wasn’t in the brochure.
The castle’s Halloween decorations cast grotesque shadows over Duffy’s body, making the whole scene look like a community theater production of a murder mystery, except the corpse isn’t getting up for a curtain call.
The fog machines keep pumping mist over everything with mechanical indifference, creating an atmosphere that our special effects team could never achieve on purpose—genuine horror.
Not again! Fish groans from her throne, her tail puffing to twice its normal size. That’s it. This park is officially cursed. We need an exorcist. Or better security. Maybe both, just to be safe.
We’re definitely on the case, though, right? Chip asks, looking my way while bouncing on his marshmallow paws. I call dibs on interrogating the breakfast buffet! Someone needs to sample everything for poison.
Fish grunts in response. That’s not how investigations work, Chip.
It is when food might send all these good people toes-up in the morgue, he insists. I’m taking one for the team here. It’s a hero’s burden.
Fish slashes her tail at him. You just want to eat the evidence.
I prefer to think of it as a thorough analysis. Chip seems rather proud of it, too.
A young assistant director—his badge says Kyle, but his face says I don’t get paid enough for this—steps forward on shaky legs. He’s maybe twenty-five and probably dreamed of directing a prestigious television show one day. He definitely didn’t sign up for corpse management.
“Cut to reruns! NOW!” he shouts into his headset, his voice cracking as if he’s going through puberty again. “Run the Halloween special from 2019! The one with the singing pumpkins! I don’t care if it’s dated. Just get us off the air!”
He frantically gestures at the camera operators while carefully not looking at Duffy’s body, like if he doesn’t acknowledge it, maybe it’ll disappear. Little does he know, we’re not that lucky around here.
“Well,” Georgie says, sidling up to me with remarkable calm for someone standing twenty feet from a corpse, “your park has a higher body count than a horror movie franchise. Have you considered that might be bad for business?”
Ree winces my way. “At this rate, you’ll need to add a morgue to the park map. Right between the funnel cake stand and the haunted house.”
“That would be very convenient,” Savvy says, appearing with a fresh latte as if it wasn’t just featured in an on-camera homicide. “Maybe rebrand? ‘Huckleberry Hollow: come for the fun, stay because you’re dead’? It’s honest advertising.”
“This is all just a coincidence,” I protest weakly. “Parks have accidents. People have medical conditions. Not everything is a homicide.” I hope.
The look they give me could rust steel.
I’m about to offer up a better excuse, when Cupcake makes her entrance, trotting onto the set as if she’s on a runway in Milan.
The white standard poodle’s pom-poms bounce with each step, her rhinestone collar catching the lights and throwing sparkles across the crime scene, which somehow makes everything worse and better simultaneously.
She’s perfectly groomed despite the chaos, not a single curl out of place, looking as if she stepped out of a dog show where they judge on poise during homicide investigations.
Well, I do declare, Cupcake gives a soft woof, but thanks to my supernatural quirk, I’m privy to what she’s really saying.
And for the record, her Southern accent is thicker than Savvy’s and twice as sweet.
This is quite the situation. A body before noon?
How terribly uncivilized. In my day, people had the decency to die after lunch.
Would you look at that cutie pie? Chip immediately loses all higher brain function. She’s like a cloud that learned to walk! A beautiful, sophisticated cloud! With legs! And opinions about proper murder etiquette!
Pull yourself together, you big oaf, Fish scolds. We have a murder to solve. You can embarrass yourself later.
I nod. And embarrass himself he will. Chip has been head-over-paws for the dainty doggie ever since he laid eyes on her a few weeks back.
“This is all YOUR fault, Josie!” Delora’s voice cuts through the chaos like a scalpel through a corpse. She storms toward me, her perfect French twist somehow unmoved by the morning’s events, wielding her clipboard like a weapon.
She takes a moment to seethe my way. “Dead bodies follow you like ducklings follow their mother! It’s unnatural! Somebody needs to do something!”
Before I can point out that I’m a theme park owner, not a resurrection specialist, the cavalry arrives.
Dexter and what looks like half the Seaview Sheriff’s Department swarm onto the scene. He’s in full professional mode with his badge out and authority radiating from every handsome inch of him. I’ll admit, it’s a hot look.
“Seaview Sheriff’s Department, everyone back!” His voice carries over the chaos with a command that makes people obey first and think later.
Deputies begin stringing yellow tape around everything that doesn’t move and some things that do. One tourist gets accidentally taped to a fake tombstone and has to be cut loose.
Dexter pulls me aside, looking more than a little worried. “Josie, what happened?”
I quickly relay the morning’s events, from the interview disaster, to the coffee cup shuffle, to Duffy’s dramatic final performance.
“It could totally be a heart attack,” I suggest hopefully. “Or an allergic reaction? Not everything comes down to murder, right? Sometimes people just die. You know, natural causes? That’s still a thing, right?”
Ree, Georgie, Savvy, Delora, and even Dexter all raise their eyebrows in perfect synchronization at me, as if they’ve been practicing together in their spare time.
“Natural causes? At your park?” Dexter asks gently, like he’s talking to someone in denial about their hoarding problem. And the thing I happen to be hoarding is bodies.
“Hon, denial isn’t just a river in Egypt,” Georgie adds. “It’s also what you’re swimming in right now.”
“Statistically speaking,” Savvy chimes in, “what are the odds? You’ve had more murders than birthday parties this year.”
“That’s not true!” I protest. “We had three birthday parties last month!”
“And three murders,” Ree points out.
“You’re bad luck!” Clyde’s voice booms across the scene as he storms over, his television makeup running slightly, making him look like a melting news anchor. “This whole place is cursed! Cursed, I tell you!”
“Oh, hush up,” I’m quick to tell him. “You’re the only curse around here.”
He gestures at the body, then at me, then at the castle, like he’s conducting an orchestra of doom. “If we stay here all week filming, we’ll all be corpses by Friday!”
“I’m not that lucky,” I mutter.
“This place is a death trap disguised as family entertainment!” He rages on like the unhinged lunatic he is.
He’s not wrong, Fish mewls like the traitor she’s turning out to be. The statistics are concerning.
Did she have to bring math into this? I scowl at the thought. Everyone knows you can’t argue with numbers.
But the snacks are worth the risk, Chip counters, still staring at Cupcake. Plus, now we have a beautiful witness to interview.
She’s a poodle, not a witness. Fish wastes no time hissing.
Chip bristles. She could be both. She’s very refined.
Dexter steps between Clyde and me with an authority that makes my knees a little weak, even at a crime scene. “Sir, I’m going to need you to step aside. This is an active investigation.”
Let’s face it, anything that comes between Clyde and me, and happens to be wielding a badge, is a total turn-on.
Clyde retreats, but not without one last dramatic gesture that would make a telenovela actor proud.
Dexter turns to me, and his features soften just a notch. He kisses my cheek quickly—oddly professional and yet affectionate, a kiss that says I care, but I also have a job to do.
“Handle the park,” he says quietly. “I’ll handle this.”
He takes off toward the body with his team, already pulling on gloves, already in detective mode. I watch him go, then turn my attention to the living.
Willow, Crystal, and Cooter stand in a perfect triangle around Duffy’s body, as if they’re about to perform some kind of morning show séance.
And each one of them is staring down at him with expressions I can’t quite read.
It’s not grief—there sure aren’t any tears, no shock either.
It doesn’t even seem to be a surprise, really.
It’s something else entirely. Something that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
Calculation, maybe. Or relief. Or worse—satisfaction.
The plot thickens, Fish mewls as her fur bristles.
Thickens like gravy, Chip adds, because everything is food-related in his world. Suspicious, potentially poisoned gravy. But, oddly, still delicious.
I stand there, surrounded by caution tape and chaos, watching three people who definitely had motive look at a dead man who definitely had it coming.
Three suspects, one body, and a thousand possible motives—just another day in Huckleberry Hollow Wonderland.