Neighbors become worried when a hideous stench starts to come from the house next door, and are horrified when they discover the truth.
There was an old house on the corner of Garson and Madison streets, a big yellow house with a steep roof and lots of chimneys. It must once have been a lovely, welcoming place, but now its paint was flaking off, and some of the roof tiles were missing.
The steps up to the porch were warped, and you could see that it had been a long, long time since anyone had bothered to mow the lawn or trim the hedges, and even the white picket fence was missing slats, like a mouth without teeth.
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Once, the grownups said, that house had been the pride of the neighborhood, and the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Curzon had won prizes with their roses, and the delicious scent of fresh-baked cookies was always in the air.
Now things were very different. Mr. Curzon had passed away, and the couple’s two grownup sons had moved in, supposedly to take care of their mother, but when they were around, they seemed to spend all their time drinking beer on the porch in their undershirts.
As for Mrs. Curzon, she very rarely came outside anymore, and when she did, she looked very pale and weak and leaned on the arm of one of her unfriendly sons so that people were afraid to greet her or strike up a conversation.
This all went on for a long, long time until something changed. One day, Tommy Garcia and his friend Fred Halloran were bicycling past the house when they smelled something weird.
Tommy stopped and looked back at the yellow house over his shoulder. “That’s really weird,” he said to Fred. “Smells bad, like a dead rat.”
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“Dead rat?” scoffed Fred. “More like a dead buffalo!”
“That’s disgusting… How can anyone live in there?” asked Tommy.
“Well, I don’t think anyone IS living in there,” said Fred. “I saw the Curzon boys drive away in that fancy truck of theirs a week ago.”
“Oh!” Tommy frowned. “But what about old lady Curzon?”
Fred’s eyes grew big and round and he leaned to whisper, “Maybe they killed her and buried her in the basement, and that’s what we’re smelling!”
“No way!” cried Tommy, his eyes shining with excitement. “A murder right in our street?”
“And if we’re...
