by Dixie Lyle
Augustus? Mind if we talk for a bit?
He didn’t raise his head or even open his eyes, but I heard his reply. {I thought that nice man was going to talk to me, but he didn’t say anything. That wasn’t very nice.}
I apologize for that. I wanted to see if he could hear you the way I can, and he couldn’t. Thanks to you, now I know.
{You are much nicer than him.}
Thank you. The night you got sick, did anyone come to visit you, other than Caroline?
{The one with the blond hair?}
That’s right.
{No.}
Did anything unusual happen? Any strange sights, smells, or noises?
{It was all strange. I was in a new place.}
Good point. I thought for a second, then tried again. What about the pool? Did anything happen to it?
{Yes. It tasted different. I didn’t notice until after I’d swum in it and groomed myself. It tasted sweeter.}
The antifreeze. When did it change?
He opened his eyes and raised his head to look at me. {After the noises. I thought they were splashes at first, but even though I could hear the splashes, nothing fell in the pool.}
That must have been when the poison was added. But how? If I knew that, maybe I could figure out who had done it, too.
I knew exactly where I had to go now, and what I had to do.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I called Caroline and arranged to meet her at the liger enclosure. Then I found Ben, told him where I was going, and made sure a feline war hadn’t broken out. After that I headed for the zoo, collecting Whiskey along the way.
[You think we missed something?] Whiskey asked as we walked along.
“We must have. Augustus heard splashing noises, but didn’t see anything being added to the pool.”
We got to the enclosure, where Caroline was waiting. She’d repaired the hole she’d cut in the fence to get the forklift inside. “I haven’t touched anything since Augustus died,” she said. “Haven’t had the heart.”
She unlocked the gate and came in with me, but closed it on Whiskey’s face. “Sorry, pooch. Antifreeze is almost as dangerous for dogs as it is cats.”
I went straight to the pool. “How deep is this?”
“About five feet. Deep enough for him to actually swim in.”
I got down on my haunches and examined the lip. It was concrete, sculpted to look like natural rock. “The water looks very dark.”
“That’s because the bottom is painted black. Helps with heat retention, and makes it look more like a real jungle pool.”
I glanced up. The waterfall had been turned off, and the rocks it normally tumbled over were exposed. The artificial stone cliff the waterfall fell from was around twelve feet high, with a lip at the top that jutted out a foot or so. There was more cliff face above the lip, set back into the wall itself, with a little man-made cave mouth no more than a few inches in diameter that the water flowed from. The wall itself was quite tall, going up another twenty feet or so. The extra height must have been to eliminate any possibility of the pen’s resident trying to escape by using the top of the waterfall as a jumping-off point.
I walked around the edge of the pool and got as close to the artificial cliff as I could. I peered at the rocks intently, starting at the bottom and working my way up.
And then, near the top, I saw something.
“Caroline, can you get me a ladder? I want to look at something near the lip, but my rock-climbing skills are a little rusty.”
“Sure. Be right back.”
When she was gone, Whiskey said, [What do you see?]
“I’m not sure. I think there’s something caught between two rocks near the top. Might just be a shadow, but I want to check.”
Caroline was back within a minute with a lightweight aluminum stepladder. I took it from her at the gate, propped it open next to the cliff face, and climbed up.
There was something caught between two of the rocks, something thin and flimsy and black, almost invisible against the darkness of the stone. I took it gently between two fingers and tried to pull it out. It stretched, but didn’t come free. I tried harder and got it out.
I knew what it was immediately. This was how the poison was delivered.
“Caroline? I’m going to need you to drain the pool.”
“Did you find something?”
[And what is it?]
“Oh, I found something,” I said grimly. “And there’ll be more at the bottom of the pool. Make sure you use a screen on the pump; otherwise, it’ll clog.”
I climbed down from the ladder and showed Caroline what was in my hand. A tiny piece of black rubber, tied in a knot.
The remains of a balloon.
* * *
Caroline wheeled a portable pump in and drained the pool into a number of large blue plastic barrels. Sure enough, every couple of minutes the pump would start to whine and the flow would slow to a trickle as another scrap of black rubber got sucked onto the mesh screen on the nozzle of the hose. She’d pull the hose out, pluck the rubber off, and toss it onto the ground.
By the time the pool was empty, there was an impressive little pile of black rubber scraps. More littered the bottom of the pool, but they were much harder to see.
Caroline shut off the pump. “Water balloons,” she said. “Except they didn’t contain water, did they?”
I shook my head. “No. They were loaded with ethylene glycol. Thrown so they would burst against the rocks of the waterfall and the scraps would vanish into the pool.”
“But how? Security footage doesn’t show anyone near the pen.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure. But this is how it was done.”
[Perhaps they were dropped from overhead.]
Right. Because our killer has his own stealth zeppelin.
“I’m going to inform Shondra,” I said. “Maybe she has some ideas.”
That was my plan, anyway. It was about time I brought Shondra up to speed on Karst, Abazu, and Gunturu, even though I might have to fudge a few details on exactly how I’d obtained some of my information. Let’s see: Abazu more or less admitted who he was and what he’d done, Karst let something slip to Oscar, and Gunturu … well, I broke into his room with the help of my shape-changing dog and stole some of his personal property. Yeah, that one was going to need a little work.
But something was bothering me. You know how sometimes a stray thought can snag your attention and then just sort of dangle there, like a mental fly caught in the web of your thoughts? Twitching every now and then, playing dead when you try to zero in on it? That’s what was happening in my head. It was something someone had said, but that wasn’t quite right. Something someone had thought? Something I had thought?
Wait. Stealth zeppelin.
[Yes, I heard you the first time.]
“No,” I said out loud, “Not the killer. Us. We need a stealth zeppelin, and we have one.”
[We do?]
“We do. Ambrose.”
Ambrose was a prowler, one of the restless spirits pulled in by the metaphysical attraction of the Crossroads but who had refused to enter his own afterlife. They tended to stay close to the graveyard but weren’t restricted to its borders, and one of them was an enormous sea turtle. His roaming covered both the Crossroads and the grounds of the estate, and happened at all hours of the day and night. Most important, Ambrose—like all aquatic animal spirits—treated the atmosphere like it was made of water instead of air, gliding along as smoothly as if he were on the bottom of the ocean and not a dozen feet above a driveway.
[You think he might have seen something?]
“It’s possible. He keeps unusual hours, and he’s curious. If something did attract his attention, he might have investigated.”
[Worth checking out, I suppose.]
So I put off talking to Shondra and went in search of a deceased turtle instead.
Ambrose didn’t have any particular pattern to his route, but he liked to stay
around twenty feet in the air and avoided actually flying through walls most of the time. The first time I saw him I was mesmerized; he exudes a kind of blue-green glow that’s quite beautiful, almost exactly the hue of sunlight shining through a Caribbean sea. I’d never actually talked to him, but since all spirits—animal ones, anyway—share a common tongue that sounds to my ear like English, I didn’t foresee any linguistic difficulties.
But first, I had to find him.
The fastest way was probably just to go to the graveyard and ask Eli, who usually knew where most of the place’s deadizens were. But as I was on my way to do just that, I caught a glimmer of ghostly blue-green through the trees down by the stables, and went there instead.
I found Ambrose gliding through the central aisle of the stables, past whickering horses that either didn’t see him or weren’t bothered by his presence. I was a little unclear on whether or not living animals could see dead ones, and neither Whiskey nor Tango was willing to clarify the matter. In any case, Ambrose seemed to be enjoying himself, because when he reached the end of the aisle he looped around and came back to do it again.
Hello, Ambrose, I thought at him. Do you remember me?
Ambrose continued gliding toward me, but he slowed and dove downward a few feet so he was level with my head.
i remember you
His voice was like the whisper of waves heard while falling asleep in a beachfront cottage.
I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.
He didn’t reply to that, just slowed a little more. I realized I hadn’t actually asked a question, and then recalled how literal a shark named Two-Notch had been during a previous conversation.
I tried again. Two nights ago, did you go anywhere near the menagerie, where the live animals are kept?
He came to a slow halt, drifting sideways so he could regard me with one calm eye. His long, paddle-shaped flippers moved lazily up and down, like he was treading water. i did
Did you see anyone throwing or dropping black balls—about the size of a coconut—at or on the liger pen?
i did not not see someone doing that
I sighed. Damn. Well, I knew it had been a long shot—
but i saw the black balls
What?
they flew through the air like birds very fast
From where?
I do not know~~i chased them to see where they were going not where they came from
And they went to the liger pen?
yes they smashed into the wall above the downcurrent
Downcurrent meaning waterfall. What direction did they come from?
He blinked one great eye, slowly, and then surprised me. west and above~~the halfway angle
Well, of course a sea turtle would have a great sense of direction, and an animal living in a marine environment would have a nuanced way to describe degrees of up and down.
Halfway angle, I repeated. Like this? I held my arm at forty-five degrees in front of him.
He considered it for a moment. more
I adjusted it slowly until he said stop at around fifty.
So. An antifreeze-filled balloon, traveling fast, coming in at a fifty-degree angle from above and impacting high—with no thrower immediately visible.
And the mansion was to the west of the menagerie.
Thank you very much, Ambrose. You’ve helped me a great deal.
you are welcome foxtrot i am glad i could help
I hesitated for a second. Do you come here often? To the stables?
i do
Why?
i like horses i like to watch them run they are very beautiful
I nodded. “Yes, they are,” I said. Huh.
It’s funny. Animals are just as capable of appreciating other animals as we are, but we hardly ever think of them that way. “Dog eat dog.” “The law of the jungle.” We seem to think animals are locked in a continual, bloodthirsty battle with each other, either competing for food or trying to eat one another, but that’s not really accurate at all. Animals are just as capable of getting along with—even loving—another species as much as humans are. Maybe more.
I thought long and hard as I walked back to the house. I had a pretty good idea how the murder was carried out now—and all I needed to prove it was Whiskey’s nose.
* * *
[You are correct, Foxtrot. I’m detecting traces of both ethylene glycol and latex.]
We were on the third-floor deck of the east wing, the one with the view of the menagerie. Whiskey’s keen sense of smell had verified exactly what I’d suspected: The balloons hadn’t been thrown, they’d been launched.
[I’m still not sure I understand. Launched how?]
“By a very simple device, one you can either buy preassembled or build yourself. Some surgical tubing, a square of strong cloth or plastic, and two upright posts to string it between. Essentially, an oversized slingshot; drunken frat boys like to use them to bombard unsuspecting victims with water balloons from afar.” I pointed west. “You can plainly see the tall wall of the liger pen, the one the waterfall is embedded in, from here. You use a couple of ordinary water balloons to get the range, and then when you feel confident you can hit your target, you start launching antifreeze bombs. Makes little to no noise, and nothing shows up on security cameras.”
[Almost like stealth zeppelins.]
“More like aerial bombardment. Dispose of the tubing and empty jugs of antifreeze afterward and no one’s the wiser.”
[No one except us.]
“Too bad we didn’t figure this out earlier. There’s no telling who’s been up here since.”
Whiskey got up on his hind legs and sniffed one of the posts where the tubing must have been attached. [Maybe we can’t. But I can tell you other things.]
“Like what?”
[You know, I’ve always been envious of opposable thumbs. I sometimes study those who have them when they’re being used to do something that seems particularly difficult or intricate—like tying a knot. Lots of gripping and pulling and twisting.]
“I suppose. What’s your point?”
[My point is that the digits doing the manipulating and the object being manipulated come into very close contact with each other. Which is what transfers scent from one to the other.]
I bent over and peered at the post, but as my eyes weren’t keen enough to actually detect scent particles, it didn’t do much good. “So you can smell something that was on the killer’s hands?”
[I can. Perhaps more important, I can detect what wasn’t.]
He told me what he’d discovered, and I finally realized who the killer had to be.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I should have gone straight to Shondra and ZZ and told them what I knew. But little old multitasking me decided to check up on the other ongoing crisis first, just in case there was a fire that needed putting out.
Which there was. And really not so much a fire as a big pile of kindling soaked in gasoline with a pyromaniac standing on top of it giggling and striking matches.
Said pyromaniac being my cat.
<—I’m just saying, it’s a good idea to keep your options open, that’s all,> said Tango. She and Augustus were lying side by side in a patch of shade beside Davy’s Grave. Piotr the performing bear was nowhere in sight.
I frowned, then turned and nodded at Eli, who was perched on a headstone a few feet away. “Thanks, Eli. I’ll take it from here. Tango, can I have a word?”
“You. What’s this I hear about you advising Augustus not to go with Apedemek or Waghai Devi?”
She gazed up at me, her cute little black-and-white face as innocent as a penguin with a perfect alibi.
“Very clever. But if you think that hurts, wait until this place is overrun by a host of angry lion and tige
r ghosts. Then you might feel some pain.”
“Got it all worked out, huh? Sure. I mean, we’re only dealing with gods, right? How could they possibly cause us mere mortals any trouble?”
“No, Tango. That’s not going to work, because neither Apedemek nor Waghai Devi have infinite patience. It’s much more likely that’ll piss both of them off, and we’ll have twice as much trouble.”
I shook my head. “Trust you? Normally, I’d say sure. But you’re not thinking straight, kitty. Are you?”
“I’m talking about your feelings for Augustus. I’m talking about all the willing female lionesses in one afterlife and the eager tigress in the other one. I’m talking about jealousy, Tango.”
“It doesn’t, does it? Because he’s dead. And a different species.”
Her eyes narrowed.
She had a point. “Okay, but there’s still the whole species thing. Not to mention a certain discrepancy between your sizes.”
She gave her head an annoyed twitch.
That stopped me. “Well, no. I mean, not if they really loved each other—”
“What makes you say that?”
“Sure. They go room to room and investigate everything.”