Elise clicked on the flashlight.

It was one of those cool police flashlights that really lit up the room. The bright white beam darted around, then landed on a shelf full of small cardboard boxes. Each box had a name and date.

"Apparently relatives don't always pick up their loved ones," Elise commented.

Sweet kitty.

Audrey didn't like being down there with a bunch of dead people even if they were ashes. At the same time, she was thinking about how nobody was going to believe her at school tomorrow when she told her friends where she'd been. They were going to, like, think it was the coolest.

A lot of people thought cremated bodies burned down to a tiny little pile of ashes. But Audrey had seen a show on the Discovery Channel, and it told how after the thing they cooked them in was cool enough to open, bones and teeth were still there. Mixed with the ashes. They had a machine that looked like a little cement mixer they dumped everything into. The machine ground up what was left.

Gross.

She fell into step behind her mom.

"Watch your head."

Elise shone the flashlight at the low ceiling, then back to a floor that had turned to rock and dirt. They entered a second room lined with metal shelves crammed with supplies. Bottles of pink liquid claimed to be embalming fluid. Others were called cavity cleaner. Pore sealer. Jugular tubes. Body inserts. Expression formers. Casket Mate, whatever that was. On the floor were drums labeled Drying Compound, Lightly Fragranced.

Audrey was feeling dizzy again.

Just a tunnel.

Right.

Her mother had said they were looking for just a tunnel. Maybe, if it was a tunnel from Night of the Living Dead. Her parents-well, her dad and Vivian-wouldn't let her watch those kinds of movies, but some of her friends had seen them so many times that they laughed at the scary parts. Audrey had been initiated at a sleepover. She'd had bad dreams for two weeks.

Cavity cleaner.

Body inserts.

She felt like she was going to throw up. She took a few deep breaths, then hurried to catch up with her mother, who was peering into an even smaller room.

Audrey couldn't wait to see what was in there. Ha-ha.

They had to walk hunched over.

It was tiny. And thankfully empty.

One wall was brick instead of stone.

"Is that it?" Audrey asked.

She'd seen the sealed tunnel at the Pirates' House Restaurant, so she'd kind of known what to expect, but still it was a letdown. Just a wall. How boring was that?

"Look." Elise pointed the light along the left edge where the bricks stopped, then down to a pile of rubble. "Someone's been doing a little excavating."

Audrey hadn't known what she'd expected when she'd come along. She hadn't really thought about it. But now her heart began beating faster.

She'd heard about the body that had been stolen from the funeral home. It had been all over the news, but suddenly the story changed from things kids at school were joking about to an actual crime. And here was a clue! A real clue!

She'd never seen her mom in action, actually working on a case. Suddenly she felt kind of amazed by her, kind of proud.

Elise pulled some bricks free and shone the light through the jagged black gap.

"Should we go inside?" Audrey asked, excited and scared at the same time.

"No. I need to get a crime scene team down here before anybody disturbs anything."

"Can I at least look?"

"Here." Elise handed her the heavy flashlight.

Audrey stepped forward and pointed the beam through the hole.

A tunnel. Cut from rock and earth, with the ceiling curved and lined with brick. In the distance it appeared to end, but Audrey figured it really turned.

Something hit her arm with a plop.

A bug! A huge black cockroach!

She jumped back, shook her arm, and screamed, dropping the flashlight.

Elise let out a funny yelp and knocked the roach from Audrey's arm. The bug went scurrying away, hunting for darkness. Then Elise retrieved the dead flashlight. She shook it and it made a broken-glass kind of sound.

Audrey gave her a pained look. "Sorry. But did you see that thing? It was huge. Mutant or something. Like half cockroach, half dog." She shivered dramatically.

"Jesus," Elise said under her breath, her own shudder mirroring Audrey's. "I hate those things."

That made Audrey feel better. Mainly because she'd always thought her mom wasn't afraid of anything.

It was nice to know she was.