The Traveling Vampire Show

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe we’d found ourselves in such a predicament.

“Clean it up?” Rusty asked.

“I don’t think we can. That perfume… we’ll never get the smell out of the carpet. The minute someone comes upstairs, they’re gonna know something’s wrong.”

“Not to mention,” said Rusty, “we can’t exactly unbreak the glass.”

“Whatever we do, we’d better do it fast and get out of here.”

“Wanta just leave?” Rusty asked.

“I want to make it all go away!”

“Rotsa ruck.”

“Okay,” I muttered, sort of thinking out loud. “We can’t make it go away. And it’d probably take us fifteen minutes just to clean up all the glass. Then the place’ll still smell like a perfume factory. And in the meantime, we might get caught up here.”

Rusty nodded, then said, “If we just go away—leave everything exactly the way it is right now—they might not even realize anyone was here. I mean, if shutting a drawer too hard’ll knock that vase over, anything will. They’ll think it was just an accident.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“C’mon, man. A lot of stuff could’ve knocked the thing over. Like even the front door slamming.”

“Maybe so.”

“So let’s haul ass.”

We walked backward away from our mess, watching it as if to make sure it wouldn’t pursue us. On the other side of the doorway, we whirled around and ran for the stairs. When we were a block away from Slim’s house, we looked at each other, shook our heads and sighed.

“I feel like such a rat,” I said.

“Accidents happen,” Rusty said. “Thing is, we got away with it. Long as nobody blabs….”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Lying to Slim…”

“You’d rather have her find out we went sneaking through her house? That’d go over big.”

“If we explain why…”

“And what were we doing in her mother’s bedroom^?”

“I just went in to look for you.”

“Oh, so you wanta tell Slim what I was doing in her mom’s room?”

I shook my head. I sure couldn’t tell Slim the truth about that.

“You’d better not.”

“Why’d you have to do that?”

“Felt like it,” he muttered. “Anyway, you would’ve done the same thing if you had the guts.”

“Would not.”

“Only you would’ve gone through Slim’s drawers.” Grinning, he raised his eyebrows. “What were you doing by yourself in Slim’s room, huh?”

“Looking at her books.”

“Oh, sure.”

“I didn’t even know you were gone.”

“Uh-huh. Sure.”

“Go to hell.”

Laughing, he patted me on the back.

“Hands off,” I said.

He took his hand away. His smile sliding sideways, he said, “Seriously, you’re not gonna tell Slim about any of this, right?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“You guess not? C’mon, man! I’ve never told on you.”

“I know,” I said, and went a little sick inside at the reminder of all the things Rusty knew about me. “I won’t tell. I promise.”

“Okay. Good deal. It’s just between you and me.”

“Right.”

“Shake on it.”

I looked around. There were houses on both sides of the street and a few people nearby, but nobody seemed to be watching us. So I shook hands with Rusty. His hand was bigger than mine, and very sweaty. He didn’t pull any funny stuff, so I guess he was being sincere.

“If anything comes up,” he said, “we didn’t even go in Slim’s house today.”

“What if somebody saw us?”

“We’ll claim it wasn’t us.”

“Sure thing.”

“We just stick to our story, no matter what.”

“But if somebody saw us… somebody who knows us…”

“Simple. We just say he’s confused about which day it was. You know? We’ll say we did go into Slim’s house yesterday, but not today. Get it?”

“I guess so.”

“But don’t worry. It’ll never come up. It’s not like anybody got murdered in there.”

“That’s true,” I admitted.

But I got a sick feeling again, because the truth was a lot worse than a broken vase and perfume bottle. Sure, it wasn’t murder. If it ever got out what really happened in Slim’s house, however, people would be giving me and Rusty (especially Rusty) funny looks from now till Doomsday.

“Never happened?” Rusty asked.

“Never happened.”

“Great.” He smiled as if vastly relieved. “That’s that.”

“All we’ve gotta do now,” I said, “is find Slim.”

“She’ll turn up.”

“I wonder if we should check with her mom.”

“At Steerman’s?” Rusty asked. “Oh, great idea! And tell her what? ‘Gosh, Mrs. Drake, have you happened to see your daughter lately? She seems to be missing. We’ve already checked at your house, but she isn’t there.’ ”

“We don’t have to tell her that.”

“We go anywhere near her, she’s gonna know it was us in her bedroom.”

I supposed he was right about that.

“Anyway,” he said, “you think they’ll let us into that restaurant without our shirts on?”

“We could pick up a couple of shirts at your house,” I suggested.

“We can’t go to Steerman’s.”

“But we’ve gotta find Slim! I mean, where the hell is she? How can she just disappear? Maybe somebody jumped her or something. You never saw her make it into her house and she isn’t in her house and she didn’t show up at my house and we haven’t spotted her on the streets—so where is she?”

“She might’ve gone to the hospital.”

At this point, we were only two blocks away from the police station. “I think I wanta talk to Dad about it.”