“See, he’s fine.” Mrs. MacGillicuddie poured milk into cups for all four of them as Eduardo took a delicate sip from his. “Now we all need a cup to sooth our nerves.”
“You can’t give kids bourbon!” This time it was Charleston who was shocked. Ernestine had sort of given up on it.
“Whyever not? I gave it to Rodney all the time when he was little, and he always slept right through the night.” Just as Ernestine and Charleston were trying to wrap their minds around Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s questionable parenting skills, Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins screeched a horrible screech. Mrs. MacGillicuddie froze in the act of lifting her china cup to her lips.
Back arched, tail stiff as a board, Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins hacked like he was about to spit up a hairball. Eduardo jumped backward to protect his purple slippers.
Only Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins didn’t spit out a wad of half-digested fur.
He keeled over on his side, dead as a doornail.
Chapter Six
Sometimes It Takes More Than One Try to End the World
WEDNESDAY, 2:23 AM
Eduardo immediately clapped one hand over his mouth and the other over his stomach, and ran to the bathroom to throw up the milk he had just drunk. Mrs. MacGillicuddie scurried after him, pulling out an impressively high-tech phone for someone so elderly as she shrieked, “Don’t die on me, Eduardo, darling! I shan’t be able to carry on if I lose both you and Fluffy in one night!”
Ernestine and Charleston stared down at the sad furry body lying on the floor.
“Well,” Charleston said, trying to find a bright side. “At least we know it was probably Mrs. MacGillicuddie the zombie was trying to kill. We must have caught it right after it poisoned her bottle of bourbon.”
“I don’t think zombies normally poison a person before they eat them,” Ernestine pointed out. “Zombies just sort of grab the first person they see and gobble them down, Charleston.”
“People like salt and spices on their food. Why shouldn’t zombies be the same way?” Her stepbrother argued. “You don’t know. Maybe zombies season us before they eat us.”
Ernestine opened her mouth to explain that zombies weren’t exactly picky eaters when someone pounded on the kitchen door that led out into the house’s main hallway.
“Is everything all right in there? We heard screaming!” a voice cried anxiously.
Ernestine unlocked the door, allowing Mr. Theda, Mr. Bara, and a typically irate Mr. Sangfroid to tumble into the room. The Swanson twins followed after but had some difficulty getting through the doorway as each was dressed in an elaborate, spangly peacock outfit complete with iridescent stiletto heels, and headdresses as wide as their outstretched arms.
“We’re used to hearing some screaming around here, but never this much.” Mr. Bara said, the thick gold hoop he wore in one ear glinting as he looked around as though expecting to find a zombie massacre.
“What sort of wild hootenanny is she throwing now?” Mr. Sangfroid demanded, practically trembling with rage before turning on the Swanson twins. “This is all your fault, you know!”
“Our fault?” They each pressed a hand to their chests in identical gestures of shock. “What have we done?”
Mr. Theda spotted poor Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins’s body on the kitchen floor and fell to his knees next to him, crying out, “Alas, poor Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins! We knew him well, Sharav! A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy!”
“That’s from Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” Mr. Bara explained gravely.
“Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins knew Shakespeare?” Charleston asked.
“Your first name is Sharav?” Ernestine inquired.
“Get out of my way, darlings!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie screamed as she dragged a semiconscious Eduardo back out into the kitchen. “I’ll drive him to the hospital myself if that blasted ambulance isn’t out front.”
After that, the night got even more exciting. The ambulance was, in fact, waiting outside to rush Eduardo to the hospital to get his stomach pumped before Ernestine needed to try out her zombie-raising skills on him. A whole squadron of police officers also arrived, drenching the mansion, the neighborhood, and rather a large portion of the cemetery in red and blue light, almost as though Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins’s passing warranted a whole fireworks show.
Detective Kim, a young officer dressed in an impressively crisp suit and tie in spite of the late hour, sat Ernestine and Charleston down along with Frank and Maya to ask them what they saw.
Taking charge of the interview, Ernestine explained that the not-dead Mrs. MacGillicuddie was a significantly smaller problem than the definitely-dead zombie who had been on a murderous rampage earlier in the evening.
Detective Kim blinked rapidly at her. “Er—you think it was a, um… zombie that tried to poison Mrs. MacGillicuddie?”
“Possibly but not necessarily,” Ernestine replied primly, sitting very straight on the edge of an enormous settee. Charleston had slipped so far back into the cushions that he looked like he might get swallowed by them. Even Maya and Frank were having a hard time not falling backward. “The zombie was definitely trying to eat her, but I haven’t been able to ascertain yet whether he was also trying to season her first.”
“Season her?”
“With the botulin. You did say you thought it was botulin that was in the bourbon bottle, right? If it was avocado, I might suspect her son, Rodney, but I’m not so sure if it’s botulin.”
Detective Kim remained silent for a very long time before turning to Charleston. “Do you have anything to add to this statement?”
“Nope,” a muffled voice somewhere deep inside the pile of velvet replied. “Sounds about right to me.”
To Ernestine’s outrage, Detective Kim dismissed them to their parents’ custody rather than inviting her to help him investigate the case further. She’d been about to show him the chunk of zombie she had stored in a Ziploc bag in her pocket, but after that, she wasn’t about to trust him with important evidence. He didn’t seem at all interested in the fact that there was a zombie wandering around, possibly gobbling up taxpayers.
What was the point of finally unleashing an undead army on the city if no one was going to notice it? Ernestine wondered in disgust. The whole point of the apocalypse was for people to realize it was the apocalypse. Not go about their business as usual while their friends and neighbors tumbled several notches down the food chain.
“Oopsy, I forgot my slippers back in Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s kitchen!” Ernestine smacked her head with her hand as they reached their attic apartment.
“You were wearing slippers?” Charleston asked, earning him a whack in the ribs from her elbow. “Right! Your slippers. How could I forget about the slippers you were, uh, wearing?”
“Ernestine, I’m not so sure about you wandering around…” Maya began, but Ernestine was already shooting down the stairs.
“It’ll take just a second!”
Not only had the police not secured the kitchen door against zombies, they didn’t even notice the almost-thirteen-year-old girl slipping through it, either. Ernestine shook her head at their shoddiness. Clearly, you wouldn’t be able to count on police protection when the apocalypse came. She couldn’t even get them to care about the zombie already wandering about.
All sorts of enormous old antiques, heavy draperies, and exotic plants filled Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s apartment to a distracting degree. Combined with all of the sparkling crystals, animal prints, and gold leaf, the effect seemed to have dazzled the police into a state of utter confusion as they wandered about, prodding things in a futile search for evidence.
Well-accustomed to all of the gaudiness, Ernestine easily slid from behind the marble bust of Mr. MacGillicuddie’s great-grandfather to beneath a grand piano near where Detective Kim was continuing to conduct his interviews. However, in the cramped space beneath it, Ernestine immediately began to feel panicky. Stuffing her fists in her mouth to keep from hyperventilating, she quickly scampered over to a jungle’s worth of ferns. The clo
seness of the space still bothered her, but not enough to trigger a full-on anxiety attack, allowing her to eavesdrop on the detective in relative peace.
As she peered out from between the fronds, he rubbed his temples and said to the Swanson twins, “So, let me get this straight. You’re saying you actually saw a zombie, too?”
“Yes, on our way back from practicing our routine over at the Palace Theater,” one of the twins agreed chattily. Like Ernestine and Mrs. MacGillicuddie, they always seemed quite pleased to be the center of attention. “We had just put our peacocks back in their kennels inside the carriage house, and we were walking through the garden—”
“When it ran right past us! I almost died of fright, didn’t I, Libby?”
“Horrible creature, wasn’t he, Mora?” Libby shuddered, the blue and green feathers on her headdress shivering along with her.
“Just dreadful!” Mora reached out and took her sister’s hand for comfort. “Although…”
“Although what?” Both Detective Kim and Ernestine perked up.
“Well, if he was a real zombie, that is.” Mora looked at her sister uncertainly.
“Whatever can you mean, Mora?” Libby cocked her head, almost sweeping a passing police officer off his feet with all her feathers.
“It’s just… it’s rather far-fetched that it could be a real zombie, isn’t it? And Mr. Bara was a top-notch special effects expert back in the days when you had to be a real expert to turn an actor into a monster. Not the way they do it these days with those awful computers.”
“You think the zombie had the look of one of Mr. Bara’s creations?” Detective Kim scribbled furiously in his notebook.
“Well, it looked quite real, so if it wasn’t an actual zombie, then yes. I did think it looked like something he would put together for Mr. Theda so they could both have a little fun scaring us.”
“But, Mora!” Aghast, Libby snatched her hand back from her sister. “They said the zombie was seen inside this very apartment, trying to murder Mrs. MacGillicuddie!”
Mora covered her mouth in shock, her eyes wide. Her voice wavered, “Oh, then it couldn’t have been them! They’d never do such a terrible thing! Libby, you realize what that means, don’t you?”
“We could have been eaten by a zombie!” Libby swooned backward onto the couch, landing in her twin’s arms. “We must find that strange little Montgomery girl and see what she suggests we do. She seems to know quite a bit about those awful creatures.”
Ernestine preened with pride even if Detective Kim looked skeptical. He didn’t seem as certain as the twins that neither Mr. Theda nor Mr. Bara could commit murder. Ernestine had to admit she was with Detective Kim on that one. Everyone was capable of murder. Anyone who has spent any time at all out on a school playground could tell you that.
Detective Kim escorted the Swanson twins out and brought Mr. Theda in. Settling on the couch that had almost eaten Charleston, Mr. Theda crossed his legs so that one foot rested on his knee and held one hand aloft. He looked like a king sitting on his throne.
“Dreadful business.” Maybe it was all his years playing cultured-but-homicidal villains in B horror movies, but Mr. Theda managed to make the word “dreadful” sound quite ominous. As though he knew for a fact about other impending events that people should be dreading.
“Yes.” Detective Kim shifted around uneasily, looking at Mr. Theda as though he worried that the retired movie star might be keeping a dungeon in the basement that the police should know about. As it happened, Ernestine knew that Mr. Theda did have a dungeon but he kept it in his apartment. It had been a set for his movie, Sometimes They Come Back No Matter How Many Times You Slam the Door. Now he and Mr. Bara used it as their dining room. “Can you explain to me how you and Mr. Bara came to be standing outside Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s door earlier tonight?”
“Well, I had some, ah, business matters that I needed to discuss with her.” Suddenly, Mr. Theda no longer looked like a king. He looked as nervous as a zombie’s appetizer.
“At one o’clock in the morning?”
“It’s of a very sensitive nature,” Mr. Theda huffed. “I didn’t want anyone eavesdropping on our private conversation.”
“Mm-hm.” Detective Kim looked skeptical. “And why was Mr. Bara there?”
“Moral support?” Mr. Theda looked around shiftily. His gaze fell on an enormous antique cupboard over by the equally enormous (if much newer) television. His eyes widened in horror, as he straightened upright, both gestures missed by Detective Kim as he consulted his notes.
“I see here…” he began, only to be cut off by Mr. Theda, who suddenly gave a very good imitation of a frail, elderly gentleman having a heart attack.
“My heart! Oh, my heart!” Clutching his chest, Mr. Theda fell backward onto the cushions with his head rolling and his face contorted in pain.
Leaping to his feet, Detective Kim pulled out his phone. “I’ll call an ambulance!”
“No, no, dear boy!” Mr. Theda gasped. “Mr. Bara has my pills. Quick, go get them from him!”
Detective Kim rushed out of the room. As the other officers had been assigned the task of taking the Swanson twins upstairs, no one other than Ernestine was there to witness Mr. Theda leap up and rush over to the cupboard, slamming the doors shut. Mission accomplished, he threw himself back onto the couch and resumed his fake swoon just as Detective Kim hurried back in with a glass of water and Mr. Bara.
“Here are your heart pills.” Mr. Bara gravely handed Mr. Theda two “pills” that Ernestine bet were really breath mints. To Detective Kim, he said, “Perhaps we could resume this interview another time? Sterling needs some rest while I call his doctor.”
Detective Kim could hardly say no. Instead, he gave Mr. Bara a hand lifting Mr. Theda up and escorting him to their apartment upstairs.
As soon as they were out of the room, Ernestine bolted out of her hiding place and over to the cupboard containing whatever Mr. Theda had been so determined to hide.
Upon opening it, Ernestine expected to find poison or some other nefarious object.
Instead, she found videotapes.
Lots and lots of VHS tapes. The sort Frank frequently used in his sculptures since no one else had much use for them anymore. Picking one up, she read its label:
Torrid Dilemmas, Season 1, Episode 12, Frankie Nelson
Ernestine had absolutely no idea what a torrid dilemma might be or why Frankie Nelson might be having one. She did, however, know that Mrs. MacGillicuddie had called Mr. Theda “Frankie Nelson” just yesterday. Grabbing a tape, she shoved it into her robe and scampered out of the apartment. Only to smack right into Detective Kim, followed by her mother.
“What are you doing here again?” the detective demanded, snagging her by the robe before she could squirm past him.
“Let go of me!” Ernestine wrenched herself free and pulled herself up haughtily. Glaring over his shoulder at Maya, she said very precisely, “I don’t like people grabbing me.”
Detective Kim gaped at her. Ernestine balled her fists, bracing herself for an argument. Ernestine didn’t mind arguments at all. She quite liked them because she was very good at winning them.
Instead of scolding her, Detective Kim said, “I apologize, Ernestine. But you understand you can’t wander around a crime scene, don’t you? You could destroy evidence.”
“She came back downstairs to get her slippers.” Maya joined her daughter, putting an arm protectively around her. “Did you find them, Ernestine?”
Ernestine admitted that she had not. Then, because Detective Kim had actually apologized to her, she said, “But I think you should know that someone tried to break in through the laundry room window the other night.”
As Ernestine led them down the lengthy hallway to the back of the building, Maya whispered into her ear, “By the way, your slippers are upstairs in the bathroom.”
“Oh!” Ernestine cocked her head and widened her eyes, looking as innocent as possible. “That’s wher
e I left them!”
“Right.” Maya clearly didn’t buy the act but she didn’t say so in front of Detective Kim.
Ernestine showed them both the broken window and the crowbar, which she had hidden behind the washing machine.
“Oh my,” Maya gasped, reaching out to take the crowbar from Ernestine.
Both Ernestine and Detective Kim thought that a strange response.
“It’s just…” Maya stammered. “That’s my husband’s crowbar.”
Chapter Seven
Zombie Shopping
WEDNESDAY, 4:30 AM
“That’s Frank’s crowbar?” Ernestine demanded, aghast. How on earth was she supposed to tell Charleston that his dad was a murderer? Maybe she could get the zombie apocalypse started before her stepbrother could notice that his father had been dragged off to prison. “How do you know it’s his crowbar? A crowbar is a crowbar. They all look the same!”
“Because, look, there are grooves on this end from the time he tried to use it as a femur in a sculpture of Lennon. John, not Vladimir, I mean.” The curls on Maya’s head shook as she babbled, more embarrassed, it seemed, than appalled to find out her husband was a murderer. Even Ernestine was rather shocked by that, and she knew from personal experience that her mother had terrible taste in men.
“Are you saying that your husband broke into this building?” Detective Kim scribbled furiously in his notebook. Ernestine noticed for the first time that his suit and tie looked a lot less crisp than they had when he entered the building an hour or so before. MacGillicuddie House seemed to have that effect on people. “Would he have cause to want to see Mrs. MacGillicuddie dead?”
“What? No!” Now Maya did look appalled. “Goodness, no! He’s the maintenance man, so he has a set of keys. He wouldn’t need to break in. And he wasn’t even the one who lost the crowbar. It was me.”
“You’re the zombie?” Her mother could definitely be spacey when Ernestine needed her to be focused, but she certainly had never seemed in need of brains before.
Ernestine, Catastrophe Queen Page 8