Ernestine, Catastrophe Queen

by Merrill Wyatt

  To Ernestine’s horror, a sob welled up in her throat. She tried to strangle it before it could get out, but that also meant she couldn’t breathe, which made her even more panicky.

  “Ernestine?” Her mom must have been able to feel her shivering because she raised her fingers to stroke Ernestine’s hair as best as she could through the ropes. “Oh Nestea, it’ll be all right. There’s a birthday present for you in my pocket that will help with all of this.”

  “Birthday present?” Charleston asked. “It’s your birthday?”

  “It is,” Ernestine admitted. Still feeling sore and not quite able to believe Maya hadn’t forgotten after all, she said, “You remembered? I thought you forgot.”

  “Ernestine, I know I get distracted easily. I know I sometimes forget to buy things like milk or to pay the electric bill, but I would never forget the best day of my life.”

  Unaccountably, Ernestine let out a little snuffle, suddenly—for a moment—quite ridiculously pleased in spite of of everything.

  “I’ll get it.” Charleston scooted past Ernestine to feel around for Maya’s coat.

  “I hate the dark.” Ernestine sniffled again, her happiness of a moment before quickly swallowed up by the dark as she realized that it was Charleston taking over to get things done, not her. Her stepbrother thought she was always brave and clever, and now he was finding out he was only half right. “I hate small places. I can’t imagine anything worse than being stuck down in the ground in some tight little coffin!”

  “I’m sorry, baby.” Her mom hugged her as best as she could. “It’s my job to protect you, and this is the second time I’ve failed you, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” Charleston asked, still rooting around in Maya’s pocket. In the dark, it felt a bit like a very helpful golden retriever was trying to wiggle between Ernestine and her mom. He’d found the package but seemed to be having a hard time yanking it free.

  Normally, when Maya brought up the past and Charleston wanted to know about it, Ernestine shut him down. Now, in the dark, the words fell out of her mouth whether she wanted them to or not, and it helped that she couldn’t see where they landed. “Mom had this boyfriend named Rocco when I was in kindergarten. He was really awful, but she didn’t know because he was only ever awful when she wasn’t around. He used to shut me up in a really tiny trunk down in the basement when he got mad at me, which was pretty much all the time she wasn’t there.”

  “That’s terrible!” Charleston stopped pulling at the package and found Ernestine’s fingers, pressing them like he was trying to squeeze all of the bad memories out like toothpaste out of a tube.

  “Ernestine, I’m so sorry,” her mom said for what had to be about the thousandth time. “I didn’t understand. When you told me he was shutting you in, I thought you meant he was giving you a timeout in your room.”

  “I tried to tell you!” Ernestine tensed up. If she had been a porcupine, all her quills would have popped out, but to her relief, Maya didn’t stop hugging her. “I told you it was a really small space!”

  “Baby, I’m sorry. I wish that I had asked more questions, but I didn’t,” her mom said gently.

  “Getting shut in there one time was enough,” Ernestine continued. “So after a few times I hid a fork down in the bottom of the trunk, and the next time he tried to push me in there… I jammed it right up his nose.”

  “Ernestine!” Charleston cried out, apparently tumbling over backward as he finally tore Ernestine’s birthday present free of Maya’s pocket. At least, Ernestine assumed that was why one of his sneakers whacked her chin. “You didn’t!”

  “Oh, yes, she did,” her mom said grimly, her arms tightening around her daughter. “And then she jammed it into his leg.”

  “For future reference during the apocalypse,” Ernestine said proudly, beginning to feel a bit better as she remembered the way Rocco had tried, unsuccessfully, to tug the fork out again as he hopped along after her, “it’s very hard to walk when you have a fork sticking out of your thigh. I ran all the way to the library five blocks away and had the librarian call the police.”

  “Wow.” Charleston was silent for a really long time before saying, “I’m really sorry, Ernestine.”

  “For what?” Maya asked, working hard to sound brave. “You shouldn’t feel bad for Ernestine, Charleston. You should feel proud of her. She made a plan, and it was successful. My daughter can do anything, when she puts her mind to it.”

  “Why do you always say things like that, Mom?” In exasperation, Ernestine wiggled out from underneath her mother’s arms, accidentally knocking Charleston over just as he was getting up.

  “Oh, heck,” he muttered. “I dropped the package. It’s gotta be here somewhere though, right?”

  Pushing themselves onto their hands and knees, Ernestine and Maya helped him feel about for it on the floor, but Ernestine wasn’t about to let up on her mother. “You’re always talking about how proud of me you are! Shouldn’t you be scared for me?”

  “No,” Maya said flatly and practically. Ernestine normally thought of her mom as being sort of artsy and oblivious, so it always surprised her how direct she could sometimes be. “Because the important part isn’t that something bad happened to you. The important part is that you were able to do something about it. I don’t want what other people did to define who you are, Ernestine. I want what you do to define you.”

  Unaccountably, Ernestine felt a glow of pride. Perhaps it was crazy to feel that way right then, considering they were still tied up and locked someplace deep and dark. But Ernestine felt it just the same. They hadn’t talked about any of this in years, and so Ernestine had come to think her mom just didn’t care.

  That hadn’t been the case at all. Her mom believed in her. Believed in her strength, her ability to do anything.

  As Ernestine realized this, her fingertips encountered something that felt like a brick wrapped in a crinkly paper sack. “I think I found my present. Mom, did you forget my birthday until the last minute and then get me a brick?”

  “Ernestine, I would never forget your birthday. We all decided to surprise you, though this wasn’t exactly what we had in mind. Go on and open it.”

  She tore off the paper sack and ran her fingers over the object inside. It appeared to be made of heavy, durable plastic with both smooth and ridged parts. She could also feel a switch, which, when she pressed it, shone a beam of light directly into Charleston’s eyes.

  “Ow!” Still tied hand and foot, he keeled over in surprise, scrunching his eyes shut to block out the sudden beam of light.

  “Mom! You got me a flashlight!” Ernestine blinked about in a daze, her eyes slowly adjusting to the light.

  Maya squinted, too. “I was on the way back from getting it at that twitchy guy’s army supply store around the corner when I spotted you two. I’d say that he keeps strange business hours, but given that I have a daughter and stepson who were dragging a goat around a graveyard at eleven o’clock at night, I’m not sure I’m in any position to judge.”

  “Oh, hey. I hope the goat’s all right.” Charleston rubbed at his eyes with his bound hands. “Did you see that open grave? I’m not sure the Swanson twins are the only problem we’ve got. What if our zombie starts eating people?”

  “Then at least the goat should be safe.”

  Shining the flashlight around, Ernestine could see they were definitely stuck in the basement of MacGillicuddie House, inside the storage compartment belonging to the Swanson twins. Dozens of feathery costumes surrounded them, each one done in duplicate: the two flamingo costumes the Swanson twins had worn on New Year’s Eve, two sparkly phoenix costumes, two silky black raven costumes, two birds of paradise costumes, etc. There were also posters advertising the twins’ act all over South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. They seemed to have started dancing and doing acrobatics quite young, as there were also framed pictures of them dancing together from the time they were about three years old.

  The
girls in those pictures were most definitely the same girls as in the picture Mr. Sangfroid had been carrying around in his pocket.

  Ernestine scowled at them before returning her attention to her mom, a big smile erasing her glare. “This is great, Mom. You shouldn’t have!”

  “Clearly, I should have,” Maya said dryly. “If you look in the base of the compartment, you’ll find a little survival kit.”

  As her vision returned, Ernestine popped the bottom off of the flashlight. No wonder it was so much bigger and heavier than an ordinary flashlight. Inside a little drawer, she found a compass, a small pair of binoculars, and a Swiss Army knife.

  “I suggested it,” Charleston said proudly, scooting upright again. “I thought you might need them in the coming zombie war.”

  “Mom, Charleston, you’re geniuses, both of you!” Ernestine wished she could hug them both. Of all the moms and stepbrothers in the whole wide world, there weren’t any others with whom she’d want to face either twin murderers or the apocalypse.

  As Ernestine used the knife to saw through her mother’s ropes, Maya said, “What I don’t understand is why Libby and Mora attacked us to begin with.”

  “Oh, that’s easy.” As her mother’s ropes fell apart, Ernestine handed her the knife so Maya could cut through Ernestine’s bonds. “They’re trying to murder Mrs. MacGillicuddie, of course. They’ve also been making it seem like there was a zombie wandering around the neighborhood, too.”

  “What?” Appalled, Maya stopped sawing at Ernestine’s ropes. “Why?”

  “Well, they’re impersonating a zombie to make it easier to sneak around and get away with murder.”

  “Yes, well, I did mean the murdering part when I asked why,” Maya said dryly, resuming her work.

  “Oh.” Personally, Ernestine was quite offended by the zombie part, given they’d gotten her hopes up that she’d actually managed to raise one. The ropes had frayed enough for Ernestine to finish freeing her hands by yanking them apart. She fished Mr. Sangfroid’s photo out of his pocket. “They’re trying to murder Mrs. MacGillicuddie because they’re the lost MacGillicuddie heiresses!”

  Ernestine’s deduction did not meet with the astonished gasps she felt it deserved.

  Instead, Maya finished untying the ropes around her feet before taking the photo from her daughter and raising a skeptical eyebrow. “The what now?”

  As she untied her own feet, Ernestine quickly filled Maya in on Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s story about her husband’s mysterious sister who had gone missing as a child down in Rio de Janeiro. The one the MacGillicuddie family had thought was a monster.

  “Only there wasn’t one little girl, there were two!” Ernestine explained, pointing at the ribbons. “See, these are in the wrong places to be reflections! The mirror must have broken, and after they took out the glass, someone must have thought it would be funny to position them so that they’re looking at each other.”

  “I think you’re right about the girls,” Maya agreed, “but what could possibly have been so monstrous about them that the MacGillicuddie family would abandon them?”

  “Um, a little help over here?” Charleston raised his hands to remind them that they were still tied together.

  “Oh, sorry.” Embarrassed, Ernestine turned her attention to freeing him. In the zombie apocalypse, it was very important not to leave your friends tied up unless you were planning on using them as zombie bait because you needed a distraction.

  Hmmm.

  Ernestine looked at Charleston. Charleston looked at her looking at him and clearly didn’t like what he saw. “Hey, why are you looking at me like that?”

  Ernestine glanced down at the knife in her hands. Then she sat back down on her heels.

  In rising alarm, Charleston demanded, “Why are you looking at me like that? Maya, why is she looking at me like that?”

  “I’m sorry, Charleston.” With a truly apologetic grimace, Ernestine tucked the knife back into the compartment in the flashlight’s base. “But we need a distraction.”

  “What do you mean, you need a distraction!” Charleston’s voice continued to spiral upward with hysteria. Diving forward, Ernestine clapped a hand over his mouth.

  “Did you hear that?” she hissed.

  All three of them went very still. In the distance, a rusty scraping sound warned that someone had opened and shut the basement door far away on the other side of the house.

  Going very still, Ernestine listened. In the silence, she heard high heeled shoes tap-tap-tap toward them.

  Ernestine stuffed the gag back into Charleston’s mouth before he could protest further.

  “I’m really sorry, Charleston,” she whispered as he tried to call her names through the cloth in his mouth. “But I need them to think for a second that we’re all still tied up. And if they see you there, they might think we’ve just wiggled off to the side. Which we sort of will be.”

  Shoving the flashlight into her mom’s startled hands, Ernestine snatched up one of the Swanson twins’ stiletto heels for protection.

  “Ernestine! What are you planning on doing?” her mom asked in a low, urgent voice.

  “Turn off the light, then hide on one side of the door, and I’ll hide on the other.” Ernestine pushed her mom toward the door. “When they open it, they’ll see Charleston, and it will take them a second to realize what’s going on. While they’re looking at you, we attack.”

  “Oh, this sounds like a very bad idea.” However, Maya must not have been able to come up with anything better because she did as Ernestine said and snapped off the light.

  The door flew open, haloing one of the Swanson twins with the dull light from the single bulb outside.

  “What—” she began, her eyes widening in shock as she took in Charleston.

  Whatever else she was going to say was lost as Ernestine launched herself forward, swinging the stiletto heel down onto the twin’s head.

  The woman staggered backward but did not fall down. In one hand she held a wicked-looking syringe, the type doctors use to give painful injections. Turning her attention on Ernestine, her eyes narrowed. “You.”

  “And me.” Leaping out from behind the door, Maya brought the flashlight crashing down onto the Swanson twin’s head. This time, the other woman collapsed onto the floor. Her fingers went limp, and the syringe rolled out of them.

  Ernestine and Maya looked down at the unconscious woman on the floor. She wore a zombie costume, though the sparkly stiletto heels on her feet somewhat ruined the effect.

  “Do you think she’s dead?” Ernestine asked.

  Maya checked her pulse. “No, she’s still alive. I’ll keep an eye on her while you untie Charleston.”

  Ernestine did as her mother said. As Charleston spat out his gag and she removed the ropes around his hands and ankles, he said bitterly, “Bait! I can’t believe you used me as bait!”

  “If it’s any comfort, you were very good bait,” Ernestine reassured him.

  “I was?”

  “Sure.” Ernestine gave him a hand getting up. “And in the zombie apocalypse, I bet you could make good money renting yourself out as bait.”

  Together, they went over to Maya and looked down at whichever Swanson twin had come to finish them off.

  “What do you think is in the needle?” Charleston asked.

  “Something horrible.” Maya smashed it beneath her heel as the ceiling above them shook and the sound of something breaking tinkled down through the floorboards.

  “Mrs. MacGillicuddie!” Ernestine cried and took off through the darkened basement, her mom and Charleston close behind. Bursting out into the foyer, they heard a faint scuffling sound inside Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s half of the floor, followed by a muffled scream. The door to her apartment hung open, the latch broken.

  “Go call the police!” Ernestine hissed, grabbing Charleston as he tried to follow Maya into the apartment. Ernestine had already put him in enough danger for one night and wanted him safely out of the path
of murderers (and possibly—but not probably—zombies). She pushed him back toward the stairs. “And then bang on every door! Wake everybody up!”

  “What are you going to do?” Charleston cried, clinging to the bannister as she tried to force him upward.

  “Stop a murder, of course!” Letting go of her stepbrother, Ernestine ran into Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s apartment. It was pitch black inside, the heavy velvet curtains blocking out the neighborhood lights.

  “Whoa!” Almost immediately, Ernestine tripped over something large and squishy that should not be lying in the middle of the room like an animal-skin rug. Flicking the lights on, she saw that it was an unconscious Lyndon, a gun in his hand and gash in his forehead big enough to cause the world’s worst headache once he woke up.

  After checking his pulse to confirm that he would, in fact, wake up eventually, Ernestine vaulted over the settee, only to once again land on something else large and squishy.

  As Ernestine’s legs collapsed from beneath her, a very frightened Aurora Borealis jumped up, grabbed a Ming vase, and raised it threateningly.

  “I’ll bash your head in if you try to kill me!” she shrieked. Then, realizing it was just Ernestine blinking up at her, she lowered the vase in relief. “Oh, it’s just you.”

  “It’s just me,” Ernestine agreed, getting up. “What are you doing here?”

  “Almost getting murdered, that’s what! By those crazy Swanson twins!” Both her clothes and her hair were in wild disarray, and her Instagram followers would have been shocked by her lack of makeup. They might (or might not) have been even more shocked by the blood pouring down the side of her face. “Lyndon and I got an urgent text from Grammy saying she needed to see us about our inheritance. When I got here, I found them standing over Lyndon, putting a gun in his hand while he was lying there unconscious or dead or whatever. When they saw me, they shot me, too! Well, it hit that vase of flowers instead, but I pretended like the bullet hit me.”

  “You’re bleeding.” Ernestine thought she should probably point that out just in case Aurora Borealis hadn’t noticed it.