Leaving Charleston behind with his mouth hanging open, Ernestine went to her first stop. Which was actually neither Mr. Theda and Mr. Bara’s apartment, nor was it in MacGillicuddie House at all.
No, her first stop was at the police station four blocks away. Well, to be technical again, her first stop was actually at Mitzy’s Coffee Shop for a coffee and an éclair. These she presented to a very weary Detective Kim as he peered at his computer, trying—and failing—to summarize the night’s events in a believable way.
“I brought you some coffee because I thought you’d be tired after last night.” Ernestine handed him the cup and the bag with the éclair in it. She had put on her school blazer and navy skirt to make her look more professional.
“That was very nice of you.” Surprised, he accepted them gratefully, tearing the lid off the cup so he could guzzle the scalding liquid as though impervious to burns. “Wait, shouldn’t you be in school?”
“I’m out sick due to psychological trauma,” Ernestine bragged, actually quite pleased to have such an interesting injury. “Also, I have some questions.”
“Of course you do.” Detective Kim set the éclair down just as he had picked it up. Looking around to see if anyone was listening, he whispered, “Look, I’ll answer what I can.” In a much louder voice, he announced, “OF COURSE, I CAN’T SHARE CONFIDENTIAL POLICE INFORMATION WITH YOU.”
“I UNDERSTAND,” Ernestine replied loudly and, she felt, convincingly. Then she plunked herself down in the chair next to his and said in a low voice, “How’s Mr. Sangfroid doing? Have you been able to question him?”
“Not yet,” Detective Kim admitted ruefully. “The doctors say he’s going to be fine, but he’s had quite an injury to his head. He’s not exactly coherent yet. He keeps babbling about his cat, Tiddlywinks, and dancing the tango with Libby Swanson down in Brazil. None of it makes a lot of sense yet, to be honest.”
“Do you think he did it?” Ernestine asked.
“I don’t know,” Detective Kim sighed. “It doesn’t look good for him, but it also looks a little too convenient to me. Let’s just say I’m not ready to arrest him, and I’m not ready to rule him out.”
This all sounded very sensible to Ernestine, who was beginning to think that Detective Kim would do just fine in the apocalypse. He seemed like he knew how to keep his head about him.
“Okay, have you confirmed Mr. Talmadge’s alibi? Could he have tried to murder Mrs. MacGillicuddie, then run over to Dill’s store just in time to be caught by the Swanson twins?”
“Definitely not.” Detective Kim clicked around on his computer and pulled up video of Mr. Talmadge skulking around outside Dill’s store before pulling out his can and spraying paint onto the bricks below the camera. “Dill turned the video over to us this morning. If you look at the times, you can clearly see he arrives around midnight and doesn’t get caught until the Swanson twins walk up at 12:25 on their way back from practicing at the Palace Theater. Since you caught the zombie attacking Mrs. MacGillicuddie at 12:17, he’s accountable for until eight minutes after the attack.”
He fast forwarded to that part, showing the twins coming out the theater’s front door across the street and marching up to Mr. Talmadge. Outraged, one of them put him into a pretty good headlock while the other removed the can from his hand while giving him what looked like the scolding of his life. Even through the camera, she made Ernestine sit up straighter and uncross her legs.
“Do we know what time they arrived at the theater?” Ernestine tapped her lip thoughtfully.
“You think just like a detective.” Detective Kim grinned at her. Ernestine beamed in response. She did so love to have her intellect appreciated. “The janitor said they arrived at eleven, just like they always do as he’s leaving for the night.”
“Hm.” Ernestine tapped her lip with her pen. “What about Rodney, Lyndon, and Aurora Borealis? Do they have alibis?”
Detective Kim shook his head. “They say they were all home asleep at the time of the attack, but none of them can prove it.”
“What about Eduardo? Could he have faked his earlier poisoning and then attacked Mrs. MacGillicuddie?”
“Faked? No. The doctor’s report came back, and he was definitely poisoned. But I suppose it’s always possible that he did so deliberately to throw suspicion away from himself. Heck of a way to do it, though.”
Maybe he poisoned himself with the intent of coming back as a zombie. Though, like Detective Kim, Ernestine rather doubted it. She thanked Detective Kim and headed out. On her way, she pulled out her list and crossed off two names:
MR. TALMADGE
THE SWANSON TWINS
For now, Ernestine decided to leave both Eduardo and Mr. Sangfroid on the list. As she walked, she looked for signs of either one of her zombies, Herbert and Ella, but came across nothing other than her own MISSING ZOMBIE posters. From the people she passed, everyone seemed to think the flyers were just part of Mr. Theda’s upcoming appearance at the Palace Theater. The marquee advertised both him reenacting scenes from his most famous movies and the Swanson twins doing a death-defying act beforehand.
As she continued toward MacGillicuddie House, she passed Dill’s store. Spotting her through the plate glass window, he raced out the door and brandished one of the flyers at her. “Is this yours?”
“Er, yes?” Ernestine wasn’t sure if he meant the zombie or the flyer, but either way, she supposed the answer would still be yes.
“He was in yesterday, eating some of the tulip bulbs I’d just gotten in! Shuffled off without even paying for them! Just grunted when I tried to stop him.” The skinny vegan grocer glared at her with his hands on his hips, jaw thrust out like he wanted to know what she was going to do about it.
Ernestine just blinked at him before finally admitting, “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
In answer, Dill thrust out his hand, palm open.
Sighing, Ernestine dug into her pocket for change. “How much were they?”
“Twenty dollars!”
“For tulip bulbs?”
“They’re vegan.” Taking the money, Dill crossed his arms, clearly still unhappy with her. “He’s not going to be back, is he?”
“They always come back,” Ernestine warned in her most foreboding voice.
“Huh. Well, tell them to bring cash when they do.” Dill turned to go, but Ernestine grabbed him by his grocer’s apron and refused to let go.
“Hey, that twenty dollars doesn’t just cover the cost of the tulip bulbs. I want some information, too.” Now it was her turn to thrust out her chin to let him know she meant business.
“What kind of information?” Jerking his apron free from her grip, Dill suddenly looked as hunted as a rabbit, a reaction Ernestine found both unexpected and very, very interesting.
“I want to know why the Swanson twins would be coming to see you at 12:30 in the morning.” That they were coming to visit him was just a wild guess. Well, not entirely wild. Based on the video footage Detective Kim had shown her, the Swanson twins had seemed disproportionately angry at Mr. Talmadge’s vandalism. It was the sort of outrage Ernestine would have shown if she’d caught someone messing around with MacGillicuddie House.
“They weren’t coming to see me.” Suddenly, Dill’s skin color didn’t look so good. His eyes twitched this way and that, as though to see who else might be listening.
“Liar.”
“I am not. You’re the liar.” Dill tried to scoot back in through the door, but Ernestine quickly threw herself in front of it.
Spreading her arms and legs out wide, she said, “If you don’t tell me, I’ll go tell Detective Kim there’s something fishy about you, and then he’ll start wondering if you had anything to do with Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s attempted murders. And then she won’t let you cater any more of her parties, if you’re lucky. If you aren’t, Eduardo and I won’t be able to get the shotgun out of her hands in time.”
Dill gulped. He clutched the twenty she had
given him to his chest like he could use it to deflect the imaginary bullets when they started flying. Glancing around to confirm that he wasn’t being stalked by an angry old woman in a sequined dress and tiara, he hissed, “Shhhh! Keep your voice down, will you?”
“I will if you’ll tell me what’s going on.” Ernestine stiffened her arms when he tried to push them down so he could get inside.
“There’s nothing going on!” Dill slapped his face. “Look, Mora’s my mom, okay?”
That was the second time within a few minutes that he’d left Ernestine completely flabbergasted. “Say what now?”
This time Dill was successful in pushing her out of the way, but he didn’t go inside. Instead, he repeated, “My mom is Mora Swanson. Don’t tell anyone, though. I promised her I wouldn’t say anything when she moved in. She doesn’t want anyone to know that she’s old enough to have a grown-up son.”
“Um, okay.” Ernestine was fairly confident that people could guess she was that old anyhow, but she wasn’t about to point that out right now. “So what was she doing here last night?”
“Well, they would have been coming by to see me, if they hadn’t run into that nutjob Talmadge. They stop by every night after they finish practicing over at the Palace.” Dill waved down the street at the fancy old movie theater. He continued on, “What a lunatic that guy is! And Mom and Aunt Libby had even been trying to make things better between us ever since they found out he wanted to open a restaurant in the same space I did. They even convinced Mrs. MacGillicuddie to let me cater her party, thinking he might be in a good enough mood to at least give my food a try. Maybe let a young, new guy have a go at success since he already had his. It, uh, didn’t exactly work out that way.”
“So I noticed,” Ernestine said dryly, remembering the fight about to take place right before the chandelier put a stop to things. “Why do your mom and aunt care if you and Mr. Talmadge get along, anyhow?”
“They’re concerned he might make things difficult for my restaurant if we don’t. Tell people that there’s really chicken in my tofu tacos or hamburger in my meatless lasagna. That sort of thing.” Dill shuddered at the very thought.
Well, that certainly explained what the Swanson twins were doing here last night and what they had been doing while the zombie was off trying to murder Mrs. MacGillicuddie.
With a rodent problem to take care of and a murderer to ferret out, Ernestine returned to MacGillicuddie House around noon. That put her just in time to witness Aurora Borealis scuffling with both Swanson twins outside over an absolutely enormous bouquet of red roses. It was so humongous that Ernestine’s first reaction was to wonder who had died. Her second reaction, of course, was to wonder whether she’d have more success raising a zombie from that corpse, it being really fresh and all, than with Herbert or Ella.
“They’re mine!” one of the Swanson twins cried from the other side of about a hundred blooms. “It clearly says ‘Mora’!”
“It does not!” Bracing her stiletto heels into a crack in the garden path, Aurora Borealis tried to wrench the bush free of the other two. “It says ‘Aurora’!”
Charleston huddled nearby under a sculpture of a rhinoceros made out of old game systems. Red flower petals decorated his hair. As Ernestine approached, he warned, “Don’t try breaking them up. I did, and they all beat me with roses. I’ve still got thorns stuck in my scalp.”
Not one to run away from a confrontation, especially one that promised to be interesting, Ernestine was just about to turn the hose on them and freeze them into decorative sculptures when she noticed Aurora Borealis’s phone lying on the ground.
Snatching it up, she cried, “Selfie!”
Aurora Borealis instinctively stopped what she was doing and posed with her hand on one hip and her lips puffed out in a pout.
That allowed the Swansons enough time to jerk the giant-sized bouquet free and shout, “Ha!” before staggering backward under the weight of all those flowers. Before one of them could be impaled by the Nintendo rhinoceros horn, Charleston shot gallantly forward and steadied them. Ernestine snatched the card off the bouquet and read it. In snowflake-smudged handwriting, it read: Morora. Or possibly: Aumora.
Goodness. Whoever wrote the name out had terrible handwriting.
“Yeah, I’ve got no idea.” Before the squabbling could start up again, Ernestine yanked the bouquet apart. She shoved about fifty roses into Aurora Borealis’s arms and about fifty more into Mora’s arms. “There, each of you gets half. And there better be no complaints, or I’m going to give them all to Charleston for getting thorns in his head. Then you’ll just have to complain to Mrs. MacGillicuddie if you don’t like it.”
“I’m going to tell my daddy on you!” Aurora Borealis whined, clearly not pleased to be receiving a mere two hundred dollars’ worth of roses.
“Oh, don’t be such a crybaby,” Libby said sourly. “And give us back our shoes!”
Aurora Borealis went pale and skittered backward. She glanced guiltily down at her feet, where a pair of high, white shoes covered in crystals glittered up at them all.
The shoes she’d stolen from the Swanson twins the night the chandelier fell.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sticking her nose up in the air, she marched up to the house, dumping her flowers in the garbage can sitting out on the front porch.
“What an awful girl,” Libby muttered, staring after her. “She can afford thousands of pairs of shoes of her own. Why does she have to keep stealing ours?”
“She’s stolen more than one pair?” Ernestine sucked at the various cuts the thorns had made in her hands, trying to get them to stop bleeding.
“Well, someone has! If not her, then who?”
That was an excellent question. Aurora Borealis was, indeed, an awful girl. The question was, had she stolen the green iridescent shoe found on Mr. Sangfroid? Had it once belonged to the Swanson twins or had it come from somewhere else?
Wherever it had come from, had the would-be murderer stolen it from Aurora Borealis?
Or was she a budding murderer as well as a thief?
Chapter Eleven
Mice and Missing Children
THURSDAY, 12:56 PM
Before she left the Swanson twins behind to fish the flowers out of the dumpster, Ernestine showed them the picture of the little girl that she had found clutched in Mr. Sangfroid’s hand the night before.
“Do either one of you recognize this kid?” she asked.
Libby’s eyes widened in recognition and Ernestine’s heart leaped in elation. Finally! A lead!
“Oh, look, Mora! It’s that darling little girl from The Addams Family!” Libby cried, and Ernestine’s heart immediately sank back down again.
“What?” Mora dug a pair of spectacles out of her purse. Pinching them on her nose, she peered down at the picture. “That’s not Wednesday Addams, you goose!”
“It isn’t?” Libby took the spectacles from her sister and squinted closer at the picture. “Oh dear, it isn’t, is it?”
“No, it’s not.”
Making a face, Libby handed it back to Ernestine. “Sorry, dearie.”
“That’s okay.” Ernestine had to admit that the girl did sort of look like a toddler Wednesday Addams. Which might explain what was so unsettling about the photo. However, that hardly explained, either, why it was in a MacGillicuddie photo album or why Mr. Sangfroid had been carrying it around.
Feeling no closer than ever to solving who was behind the false zombies and the murder attempts, Ernestine and Charleston went off to apply disinfectant to the spots where the roses had mauled them.
“Maybe it’s a picture of Mrs. MacGillicuddie when she was a kid,” Charleston suggested as they daubed their wounds. “Maybe Mr. Sangfroid has—or had—a crush on her. Maybe that’s why he stole the album and was carrying the picture around. The Talmadges said love makes people do crazy things.”
“But she wasn’t born into the MacGillicuddie family, she married i
nto it,” Ernestine countered, handing him a bandage. “And that picture was definitely taken at MacGillicuddie House, remember? It’s written on the back, and I saw the mirror frame down in the basement. No, I think it had something to do with the secret he was threatening to reveal—and maybe why he tried to murder Mrs. MacGillicuddie, if it was him.”
Their wounds covered, they went off to deal with Mr. Theda and Mr. Bara’s mouse problem.
“Thank goodness you’ve arrived!” Throwing an arm across his forehead, Mr. Theda collapsed into a tall wingback chair next to the fireplace as Mr. Bara let Ernestine and Charleston into the apartment. The former horror movie star wore a cravat and an elegant silk smoking jacket. “It’s been horrendous! Just dreadful! I didn’t know how much longer I could go on!”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Mr. Bara sighed, shutting the door and stepping onto a footstool made out of a crocodile (possibly fake, possibly not). He held a feather duster in his hand to clean an array of skulls, candelabras, and stuffed ravens. “It’s just a mouse.”
“It’s vermin.” Mr. Theda cringed in his chair as though about to be devoured. Unless it was zombie vermin, Ernestine didn’t know what he was so worried about.
“It’s fuzzy wuzzy,” Ernestine pointed out as Charleston squatted down next to the mouse caught in the no-kill trap by a suit of armor that had been a prop in a movie called The Knight It Came Alive!
“It has fangs,” Mr. Theda said sulkily, straightening up in his chair and smoothing out his smoking jacket while Mr. Bara rolled his eyes and wiped off a two-headed cobra posed as though about to strike.
“They’re called teeth,” Mr. Bara said, “and it’s using them to eat a hunk of Muenster.”
“Just get it out of here,” Mr. Theda snapped, dropping the dramatic act and sounding quite practical.
Ernestine, Catastrophe Queen Page 14