Дебора Хоу - Return To Howliday Inn

ground snapped. “You sound like an old married couple.”

Chester and I looked at each other. This was getting weirder by the minute. I asked Howie to help me and we began to dig.

It didn’t take long before we’d found something suspicious.

Bones. Small, white, dry bones.

The others gasped as Howie and I laid them out in a line on the ground. Then Howie noticed something else, a pinkish something studded with shining stones that glittered in the moonlight.

Howie extracted it carefully with his teeth and dropped it at Chester’s feet.

“What do you make of it?” I asked.

“It’s a collar,” Chester said. The crowd bandied the word about in amazed whispers as Chester struggled to read the dirt-smudged gold letters embossed on the side.

“R-O-S-E-B-U-D,” he read. “Rosebud.”

“But what does it mean?” I asked.

Chester began to pant, a sign that he was either very excited or dehydrated. The fact that he didn’t ask for a glass of water led me to believe it was the former.

“This is incredible!” he exclaimed. “Harold, we’re having a real paranormal experience here.”

“Are you sure it’s not mass hysteria?”

Chester gave me a cool look, which was no mean trick considering he was still panting. “Cats don’t

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participate in mass hysteria, Harold. If we’re going to be hysterical, we do it on our own. We’re individuals, not groupies like you canines. No, this is the real thing. Talking bones! And Rosebud! Rosebud, Harold!”

“But what does it mean?” I asked again.

“It was my name,” said the voice.

Howie was a couple of feet away from me, but I could feel him trembling as he whimpered, “I want to go home, Uncle Harold. I don’t want to stay in a place where bones and collars talk.”

“I am not a talking collar,” said the voice. “I am the spirit of Rosebud. These are my bones. In life I was a Yorkshire terrier.”

“Good heavens!” Hamlet exclaimed.

“What is it?” I asked.

He turned his anguished face to me. “Alas, poor Yorkie,” he said. “I knew her, Harold.”

“You did?”

“She was being boarded here when I first came. She was supposed to stay seven days, but on the morning of the fourth day she was gone. We all assumed her owners had come for her during the night. But apparently …”

Chester nodded his head slowly. “Apparently, she met with foul play,” he said.

“Foul play?” The Weasel repeated. “Surely you don’t mean—”

“Murder,” said Chester. I gulped. Chester had said the same thing the last time we stayed at Chateau

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Bow-Wow and had been so far off base he may as well have been in a different ballpark. But this time, the evidence was right before our eyes.

“Murrrder,” Rosebud echoed eerily. “Murrr-der.”

Chester inched his way toward the talking bones. “But why?” he asked. “Why were you murdered?”

It took a moment before the voice spoke again. “Because … I stumbled upon … the truth.”

A cold wind blew. No one dared to speak. No one, that is, but a pile of bones and a worn pink collar named Rosebud.

“It happened one morning when the door to the office had been left open by mistake. Curious, I followed my nose in and poked about, hoping to find something good to eat.”

I noticed Felony and Miss Demeanor nod appreciatively.

“One door was locked,” Rosebud went on, “but another door—a door at the end of a hall—was open just a crack. This was the door that led to my demise. When I pushed it open, I sealed my fate.”

She stopped to clear her throat, which was more than a little bizarre, since she didn’t have a throat that I could see.

“Be warned,” she said when she resumed, her voice now full of fear and foreboding. “None of you is safe! Get out while you can, escape … before the secret of Chateau Bow-Wow does to you what it did to me.”

“But, um, excuse me,” The Weasel said, “I don’t

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mean to interrupt Your Ghostiness, but if we stay out of the office, away from that forbidden door, how can we get in trouble?”

There was a long pause. And then: “The secret is bigger than the place that contains it. If you do not find it, it may find you. Escape, all of you, before it is too late.”

“But—,” Chester said.

The voice, faint now, fading into the darkness of the night, cut him off. “Remember me,” it said, “Rosebud, the blossom that never opened. The terminated terrier. Remember me, remember me.”

“But, wait,” Chester said, “the secret of Chateau Bow-Wow, why can’t you just tell us what it was?”

“There is …”

We all moved in to listen. The voice was so tiny now we could barely make out the words.

“There is a—”

“What is going on out here?” a new voice thundered.

Terrified, we turned. There in the doorway to the office stood a giant of a man. A beam of light stretched out from his hand and caught us all in it like a net.

I swallowed hard as the man began walking slowly toward us.

“On the whole,” I said to Chester, “I think I might have preferred oral surgery.”

The giant, it turned out, was none other than Dr. Greenbriar. And while his anger was great, the rest

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[Image: We afraid giant sound thundered]

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of him was no bigger than usual. He had seemed like giant because of the way his shadow fell from the doorway .

I don’t understand it, he mumbled as he rounded us all up and returned us to our bungalows. Howie, thinking quickly, had covered Rosebud s bones and collar with loose dirt. “How do you fell as keep getting out? I think it must be Daisy.

She’s such a scatterbrain I’m going to speak to Jill about her . Oh, what a nuisance!”

He sighed and grew into a yawn .What was he doing here in the middle of the night anyway?

From our bungalow we watched him retreat into his office, The light stayed on for a long time. I

Don’t know about anything else , but I was wishing Dittos blanket were off so she could report on what was happening in there.

“Psst.”

I looked up. The Weasel was outside my cage.

Meeting at Hamlet ‘s when the light goes out,” he whispered. He scurried off and I heard him repeat the message to Howie and Chester and then watched him slither across to the bungalow opposite to tell others.

I began thinking about everything that happened. Talking bones , secrets , murder escape to a place with normal social activities? Volleyball, maybe, or bingo.

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“Chester,” I called softly through the wall of my bungalow.

“Yes, Harold?”

“What do you think?”

There was a pause before Chester spoke again. “I think we are in danger, Harold, that’s what I think. Until we discover the secret of Chateau Bow-Wow, no one here is safe. Any one of us could wake up like Rosebud, nothing but a pile of bones. So whatever you do, stay awake, Harold. Stay awake, keep alert, be ever vigilant because …”

I don’t remember the rest of what Chester had to say. I had fallen into a deep sleep.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Meeting

I WAS jarred awake by Chester’s rattling the door of my bungalow. “What are you doing out there?” I asked.

“I came to wake you,” he said pointedly. “We have a meeting, remember?” He nodded toward the office; the light was out. “Dr. Greenbriar left a few minutes ago. Come on, Harold, shake a leg.”

I yawned and slouched toward the door. It was the middle of the night and I was hungry. I wondered if they’d be serving doughnuts at this meeting.

Howie was waiting outside with Chester. We started toward Hamlet’s bungalow.