The Answer Was Right Under Our Ghosts Alternate Ending

CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Answer Was Right under Our Noses

The answer to Twist’s question came two days later, clearly stamped on Seth’s pale face. “Mr. Greene’s dead.” “Did you say murdered?” I asked, thinking that after sort of solving the great ghost caper, a slaying would put the now revered Dead Wood Detective Agency’s name on everyone’s lips. “No, I said dead,” he insisted. “Ohhh . . .” “Twist wants us to meet him at Gray Meadow Manor.” He pushed back his lawn chair and strolled across the driveway, leaving me alone on my front porch. A minute later, he was rocketing across the yard on his faded blue bicycle. I grabbed my bike and cruised past him. We rode through town, beneath big, clumsy clouds like white giants with colorless
We assembled on the sweet, green and yellow-tipped grass beneath a stand of pine trees and crepe myrtles. People trickled in over a hill past a Gothic mausoleum adorned with an assortment of arches and pointy steeples—probably driven by their curiosity. Chief Chizelmen said a few words, then a bugler played taps. I had picked a few forget-me-nots from the garden and threw them in on top of the coffin. My mom, who stood next to me in a navy blue suit and matching pumps with her yellow hair swept up around her heart-shaped face, grabbed a handful of dirt, and tossed it into the hole. Then she wrapped her arm around my shoulder and guided me to the
“He was probably too sick by then to mix the ingredients together and crawl through the tunnel to his wife.” Twist laughed. “The genius strikes again.” Seth socked him in the shoulder. The chief’s eyes drifted from Seth, to Twist, to me. “I was going to tell you we haven’t found Bane yet. I think he either made good his escape and is now a violent desperado on the run—if so, we’ll capture him—or he’s come to some kind of woe in the canyon.” I envisioned a brave-hearted sheriff in tinkling spurs bumping a tumbleweed out of his way with his rifle as he snatched the masked bandit Bane up by the bootstraps. “Aunt Emma wouldn’t press charges on Mr. Shaw,” Chizelmen continued. “She just sent him away and told him never to return. Anyway, now that the ghost has vanished, her workers have returned. What a madcap concept—drinking liquefied gold and a piece of stone to stay alive.” The chief raised his eyebrows as if he’d surprised himself with his powers of presumption. “As far as I’m concerned, it all sounds like a lot of ridiculous superstitious nonsense . .