by Matthew Ward
“No, sir,” said the sergeant, hanging his head in shame.
“All right, Greenley—clean up this mess. I’ll be in the car, imagining I’m still being applauded by powerful men and beautiful women in a seven-star hotel—instead of surrounded by incompetent cops in the bowels of the city…. And as for you, Angus,” Smudge continued, shifting his attention to Arthur, “I’m afraid you’ve got a long, long way to go before any reputable law enforcement agency ever dreams of considering you an honorary detective. You had a promising start, but it seems you’ve outlasted your usefulness to this investigation. I’d have kept to the solo work, if I were you. Your judgment, it would appear, has been ill affected by the company you keep.” He nodded his nose to Ruby. “Indeed, if I ever catch you conspiring with this girl again, I shall have no choice but to arrest you both for obstruction of justice—a charge of which you will almost certainly be convicted. And good luck ever doing anything in law enforcement with a criminal record to your name. Surely, that’s not the sort of record you’re after, is it, boy?”
“No, sir.”
“I thought as much. Now, why don’t we leave it to the professionals from now on—and stay out of their way, so they can get some real police work done, hmm?”
Then, with a flurry of overcoat that momentarily smothered Arthur and nearly knocked the boy backward, Inspector Smudge turned and stomped off to the car, slamming the door behind him.
Arthur, finding himself unable to look at Ruby after being so thoroughly and humiliatingly chastised, simply stared at the ground.
Detective Sergeant Greenley recomposed himself with a deep breath, then returned to his detainees—and found that the giant and the dwarf had resumed their discussion on the intricacies of inner-guild politics.
“Ogre!” shouted the dwarf.
“Toad!” bellowed the giant.
“I hate to interrupt,” said D.S. Greenley, “but if you’ll just answer one more question for us, we’ll be able to release you, so you can get back to your meeting.”
“What is it?” the giant barked.
“Do any of your members happen to be employed as clowns?”
“Oh, only about half of them,” snapped the dwarf. “How else do you expect us to find work in such a discriminatory world?!”
“I see,” Greenley sighed, retrieving a set of keys from his pocket.
As the detective proceeded to free the men from their shackles, Arthur felt the full weight of his failed stakeout. He was as far away now from freeing Sammy as he ever had been.
“My apologies for the misunderstanding,” Greenley said earnestly, while the two men grumbled and rubbed their wrists.
Clearly unsatisfied with the sergeant’s apology, the dwarf offered one final diatribe. “You know, when we moved our headquarters to the city, we thought we would finally be able to break free from the blatant sizeism of our previous small-town police force, but it seems we were mistaken. Rest assured, Detective. The union will be conducting a full inquiry into this miscarriage of justice!”
And with that, the co-presidents of the Global Guild of Dwarves & Giants sharply turned their backs and strode into the bizarre boardroom, claiming their positions at the head of the table. As the loading bay door began to close in front of them, Stuart and Brian turned again to face the four policemen and two children, joining their fellow committee members in what may have been the Largest Synchronized Evil-Eyed Stare Ever Executed.
Amidst the whine of the motorized door, Arthur and Ruby heard the squealing of tires behind them and turned to catch a glimpse of Inspector Smudge’s car as it sped off indignantly down the street, disappearing into the gray light of the city.
When the metal door had finally sealed in its oddly sized occupants, D.S. Greenley broke the clumsy silence. “Well,” he said, struggling to conceal traces of disappointment and disgrace from his otherwise cheerful expression, “looks like this wasn’t our day—eh, Arthur?” Turning to Ruby, he extended his hand and added, “Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, miss. Detective Sergeant Greenley.”
“Ruby,” said the girl through chattering teeth, holding up a trembling arm to take the sergeant’s hand.
“Ah, look at you, poor girl!” Greenley declared, his face filling with compassion. “Out in the rain with no coat—you must be freezing.” Removing his trench coat, he promptly draped it around the shivering girl. “Hope this helps, miss. There are blankets in the car as well if you need them. Arthur?”
“Thank you, sir,” replied the boy, only briefly glancing up, “but I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“All right then,” Greenley concluded, opening the rear door of the car. “I’ll take the pair of you back to the Unsafe Sports Complex. Your parents have no doubt begun to worry.”
As the car wound its way through the dingy streets of the city, Arthur sat silently in the back seat, staring out the window at passing gray buildings. Meanwhile, D.S. Greenley and the officer behind the wheel immersed themselves in a comprehensive discussion of some new model of police truncheon: the JusticeStick 2K-O.
Though Ruby sat a mere two feet away on the other end of the back seat, Arthur couldn’t bear to even look in her direction. After all his talk about gathering clues and doing the “proper detective thing,” his so-called detective work had only managed to harass two innocent men, enrage the World’s Greatest Sleuth, and shame the amiable policeman who had believed in him. What a fool he must have seemed.
Just then, he felt a tug on his shirt. He tried to ignore it, but the first was soon followed by another. Risking a timid glance to his right, Arthur found Ruby looking at him with a strange smirk.
The girl promptly pulled back the right side of her borrowed coat. There, under Ruby’s arm, resting on her soggy pullover, was a golden magnifying-glass-shaped trophy.
“Where—How did you get that?!” the boy whispered in shock.
Ruby leaned in toward him. “Smudge set it down on Greenley’s car while he was lecturing you. Must have been too busy ordering his driver to peel out at us to realize he’d left it behind.”
“You know that’s stealing, don’t you? And from Inspector Hadrian Smudge, no less—I mean, he’s one of the world’s most respected record holders!”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Arthur, but he’s also sort of a swine. And besides, I have every intention of returning it. First thing tomorrow, I’ll have it forwarded straight back to him…by way of Beirut.”
“What?!”
“Serves him right for talking to you that way,” Ruby said matter-of-factly.
Arthur opened his mouth to insist she return the trophy as quickly as possible—but merely sighed instead. As much as he disapproved of Ruby’s revenge plot, he was strangely flattered by it. No one had ever shown so much interest in him that they were willing to break postal regulations just to avenge his honor.
“Look,” he said, after a stretch of silence, “I’m sorry for wasting your time today—and for being such a lousy detective partner.”
Ruby cocked her head in puzzlement. “Are you joking? This has been one of the best days of my life! I mean, today I found my first clue in a criminal investigation, I went on my first stakeout, I got to stay out in the rain without being forced indoors…. And you make a great partner. Look at me—I’ve tagged along with you less than a day and I’m already wearing an authentic police trench coat.” At this, she flipped up the coat’s collar, which was so large that it jutted up over the top of her head, causing her to look simultaneously like a hard-boiled detective and an alien overlord. “Not to mention the developments we’ve made in the case. In just a few hours of working together, we’ve already eliminated two suspects. We can now safely cross Stuart and Brian of the GGDG off our list. So that’s two less people in the world we need to investigate, isn’t it?”
The girl had a point, but Arthur still wasn’t convinced the day had not been a complete waste. “But now that Smudge has taken us off the case, does that even matter anymore?”<
br />
“Have you never read a detective novel? This is the part where the renegade detective and his loyal partner are thrown off the case by their domineering superior officer and forced to work outside the system. This is usually when they do their best work, actually. Oh yes, Detective Whipple—our investigation has only just begun.”
The boy was surprised to find a faint smile sneaking into the corners of his mouth. Though he had failed yet another record attempt and lost the mysterious clowns once again, Arthur couldn’t help but feel he had gained something that day as well.
A MATTER OF GRAVE IMPORTANCE
When Mrs. Whipple called him to the study the morning after the most disappointing Unsafe Sports Showdown in his family’s history, Arthur could have guessed neither the reason for his summons nor how profoundly it would prove to shape his future.
“Ah yes—there you are, dear,” his mother said as he met her outside the study door. “It seems you have a telephone call.”
“It does?” said Arthur. He could scarcely remember the last time anyone had telephoned specifically to speak to him.
He was then struck by a sudden thought. Could it be Ruby?
After returning from the GGDG to the Unsafe Sports Complex, Arthur had not seen the girl again for the rest of the evening. It had barely been twelve hours since they had parted—but somehow it seemed to him quite a bit longer.
Mrs. Whipple shrugged. “Try not to be too long now,” she said. “I’m expecting a call from the Culinary Genius Placement Agency. Of course they would choose today not to send the weekly candidate for Sammy’s old position. Just the sort of thing I’d like to be worrying about after a day like yesterday….”
Arthur nodded, smiling with equal parts sympathy and regret, then strode into the study.
Upon approaching the desk at the rear of the room, he picked up the receiver from its resting place and raised it to his ear. “Hello?” he said.
A hushed, distorted voice crackled over the line.
“Is this Arthur Whipple?”
Unless Ruby had contracted a truly horrific throat disease since their last meeting, this was not her.
“Yes,” replied Arthur. “Er…who is this?”
After a short pause, the voice answered.
“Somebody who may have some useful information for you…regarding the Cake Catastrophe case…”
Arthur gasped. “What? But how—?”
“Meet me at midnight at the Undertakers’ Graveyard. And come alone…”
“Hang on,” spluttered Arthur. “How will I know—?”
But the line was already dead.
After replacing the receiver, Arthur stood and stared at the telephone for several moments. What had just happened? To whom had he spoken? Was he really to meet this person in a graveyard at midnight? And honestly, what sort of person scheduled meetings in a graveyard at midnight anyway? Surely, there were much better meeting places. Lunch at a local café would have been nice. Or a picnic on a park bench—that would have been fine. But no. He had to get an informant who preferred to do business amongst crypts and corpses.
And yet, the more Arthur thought about it, the more he knew he had to go.
For a moment, he wondered if he ought to tell his parents or involve the police, but when he recalled the debacle he’d created at the GGDG with D.S. Greenley and Inspector Smudge, he immediately decided against it.
He then began contemplating the best way to contact Ruby, only to be sidetracked a moment later by the memory of Smudge’s warning—and the threat of what would happen to them if they were ever caught working on the case together. As fine a team as Arthur felt he and Ruby had wound up making, the thought of disobeying such a revered world-record holder suddenly gave him pause.
As for his own involvement, he could hardly cancel the graveyard appointment now; he had no idea how to contact the man—and failing to turn up to a scheduled meeting without first notifying the other party was surely a breach of informer etiquette. Bringing Ruby along, however—after Smudge had expressly prohibited it—was another matter entirely. The boy had no desire to pick up a conviction for obstruction of justice; he could not imagine Ruby had any either. And of course, the voice on the telephone had told him to come alone; the last thing he wanted to do was lose his informant’s trust before the man had even told him anything.
And besides, he thought, Ruby probably wouldn’t have wanted to come with him anyway. It had all sounded nice at the time, what she’d said to him in Greenley’s squad car—but looking back now, he couldn’t help but wonder if she hadn’t merely said those things out of pity. Surely, she hadn’t really cared about the investigation, had she?
No, he concluded. This time, he was on his own. If somehow Ruby was still interested, he could fill her in on the details the next time he saw her, without needlessly bothering her or endangering her life or reputation.
His mind made up, Arthur drew a deep breath and proceeded to the study door.
“What was that all about, dear?” his mother asked as he emerged from the room.
“Oh…nothing,” he replied, hurrying past her as nonchalantly as possible. “Just, um, an encyclopedia salesman—after the record for Most Volumes Sold. You know how pushy those guys can be. Well—all right then. See you at lunch….”
He had just reached the stairs when his mother’s voice stopped him in his tracks.
“Arthur?” she called in an unmistakably suspicious tone.
The boy turned his head, his heart beating suddenly faster. “Yes?”
His mother glared at him through arching eyebrows. “You haven’t bought anything, have you?”
Arthur let out a pent-up breath. “Oh, no,” he said. “I, uh, told him our encyclopedia needs are all well taken care of.”
“Good,” his mother nodded. “We’re still receiving volumes from that 101 Steps to Record Breaking Success series you signed up for last year.”
“Oh yeah,” said Arthur with further relief. “Sorry about that. I should’ve realized it wasn’t for me at Step 2: ‘Become a 101 Steps Salesman and Convince Your Friends and Family to Buy This Life-Changing Book Series.’ Somehow, my sales pitch was never even close to as good as the guy who sold it to me. Probably would have helped if I’d bought the companion series, 101 Steps to the Perfect Sales Pitch, like Step 3 recommended.”
“Well,” said his mother, “At least you’re learning from your mistakes.”
“Yep,” Arthur smiled as he started up the stairs. “Oh, by the way,” he added, “on a completely unrelated topic—apparently, there have been some…sightings…of an exceedingly rare bird in the area. The, um, Great Stripy-Eared Musk Owl, I believe. I thought I might have a go at the First Successful Live Capture—you know, before somebody else nabs one. Now, of course, they only come out after dark, so, you know—if it’s all right with you—I’d like to leave the house for a few hours this evening…at around, say, midnight?”
Gripping a lantern in one hand and a flimsy butterfly net in the other, Arthur approached the towering pair of wrought iron gates and peered up at the sign overhead. In the lantern’s soft glow, he could just make out the words UNDERTAKERS GRAVEYARD sculpted in the metal. This was the place.
From Neverfall Hall to the graveyard gates, it had been half an hour’s walk, the first ten minutes of which, Arthur had felt compelled to make stripy-eared-owl calls and actively search the foliage for fluttering feathers, just in case anyone was watching. Once or twice, he’d sworn he’d glimpsed the bird’s characteristic brown-and-white-striped ears and polka-dotted plumage—until, of course, he’d remembered the bird was merely an invention of his own imagination and did not in fact exist.
As awful as Arthur felt lying to his mother, he figured it would all be worth it if that night’s meeting contributed in any way to solving the mystery of the Cake Catastrophe and clearing Sammy’s name. Indeed, had another approach occurred to him, he would have gladly taken it, but it seemed the only way to get to the truth in this
case was to tell a lie. He was pretty sure this was that “moral gray area” crime-fighters were always referring to. Still, he knew it wasn’t something to be taken lightly. This time, it was fibbing to his mother about bird catching; next, he’d be planting evidence and forcing false confessions. Clearly, it was a slippery slope. If he wanted to keep that moral gray area from turning charcoal, he would have to be careful.
Arthur checked his watch. Two minutes past midnight. He looked about him, but saw no sign of anyone. Surely, he wasn’t meant to actually enter the graveyard? That did not seem practical at all. Clearly, the best course of action was to station himself outside the gates and wait for his contact to arrive.
After five minutes of this, however, with no such encounter, Arthur decided he would at least have to give the inside a look.
It would be the first time he had ever done so—despite living within walking distance of the graveyard—due largely to his father’s rather strong feelings on the matter. “Intolerable places, graveyards,” Mr. Whipple had told his children. “They’re full of graves. We’ve had more than enough burials in our family; we don’t need to be reminded of any others.” Arthur had thought this sounded reasonable at the time, whatever it meant, and had always kept away from the place—but then, he’d never had a reason to do otherwise.
As he pushed on the iron bars, the gate opened with a long, slow creak that pierced the silence and made him wonder if creaky hinges were simply a standard option at the cemetery gate factory. Unfortunately, the thought made the sound no less unnerving.
Swallowing hard, Arthur crept underneath the graveyard sign and into the graveyard itself.
Once inside the gates, he found himself at the edge of a weathered cobblestone square. It contained no visible signs of life, but at its center, he could just make out an imposing statue with outstretched angel’s wings. Somehow, it made him feel just a bit better about his murky situation to see an angel was watching over him. As he raised his lantern and approached the statue, however, it soon became clear this was no angel—or at least not the sort of angel he would ever want to have as a guardian.