by James Howe
“Harold! ‘Crafty’ as in ‘sly,’ not ‘crafty’ as in ‘pinecone bird feeders’!”
“Ah,” I said, although I didn’t see what pinecone bird feeders had to do with anything. And I still needed socks.
“Besides, Harold, you’re forgetting that there is something that makes Edgar anything but a regular crow.”
I thought about it. “He doesn’t like corn?” I ventured.
“He never makes a sound,” said Chester. “Unless of course that too is all an act. There’s so much for us to find out. It’s a good thing Howie is going to spend the night under the bed. And this time he had better stay awake!”
“Aren’t you worried about him?” I asked. “What if we wake up in the morning and he’s been transformed into a steel-plated gummy bear?”
“I can assure you, Harold, that we do not have to worry about Howie. It’s Bunnicula they’re interested in. It’s Bunnicula they’re after.”
Just then, Howie came racing into the room. “Guess what!” he exclaimed. “I was the ninety-ninth caller! I didn’t win the trip to the Bahamas, but I did win a nice set of Samsonite luggage! I’m going to share it with you, Pop. Do you want the carry-on tote or the garment bag?”
Chester was spared being drawn into Howie’s Wonderful World of the Imagination by a very real knock on the door. Mr. Monroe appeared from the kitchen to answer it.
“Good evening,” said a woman’s voice.
“Ms. Pickles,” said Mr. Monroe. “What a nice surprise.”
“I hope you don’t mind my stopping by like this,” the school librarian said.
“Not at all” Mr. Monroe said. “Please come in.”
“Well, only for a moment” said the tall, frizzy-haired woman in a long, chocolate brown cape who entered. She was holding a covered dish in both hands. “I didn’t have room in my refrigerator,” she explained, holding the dish out to Mr. Monroe. “It’s a pretzel crust Jell-O mold . . . for lunch tomorrow. The recipe called for strawberries, but I used pineapple chunks instead. It’s so hard to find good strawberries this time of year, and besides .. .”
“Besides, I adore pineapple chunks,” came a rumbly voice from the top of the stairs.
The librarian nearly dropped her mold when she looked up and beheld the author of the Flesh-Crawlers series gazing down at her. Edgar was perched on his shoulder, and Pete and Toby stood on either side of him.
“Mr. Graves, I presume,” she said.
“It’s Tanner, actually. And you must be .. .”
“Ms. Pickles!” Pete cried. “Remember, we were telling you about her?” He poked Miles in the leg, presumably to remind him not to giggle at Ms. Pickles’s name.
“You were talking about me?” The librarian’s cheeks flushed. “I am honored. And please call me Marjorie.” She extended her arm as if to shake his hand.
“The honor is mine, and you must call me Miles,” said Miles as he descended the stairs. Edgar flew down ahead of him and alighted on Ms. Pickles’s extended arm.
“Oh!” she said. “How lovely. Is this ... ?”
“Edgar Allan Crow,” Miles Tanner said, as he approached and took Ms. Pickles’s hand in his own. “We were just upstairs saying hello to Pete’s unusual pet, Bunnicula.”
“I would say this is a house full of unusual pets,” said Ms. Pickles. “A fact that delights me, lover of animals that I am. Though it does make me sad to see a wild bird in captivity. Oh, I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t offend you.”
“It would be impossible for you to offend anyone,” Miles said. I noticed he was speaking without hesitation and that he didn’t sound as melancholy. I wondered if the change was due to his adoration of pineapples.
As if reading my mind, he said, “I not only adore pineapples, I’m wild for pretzel crusts. How did you know?”
“Your website,” Ms. Pickles confessed.
“How remarkable that you found a truth among so many lies,” Miles said mysteriously.
Edgar fluttered his wings, startling the librarian into a fit of nervous laughter and erasing Miles’s curious comment from everyone’s mind.
Everyone’s mind but Chester’s, that is. It was he who proposed that Miles and Edgar existed in a tangle of mysteries, where lies and truths made up a web of deception in which to catch the innocent and unwary.
I would have accused him of overreacting, were it not for a cry in the night—and the disappearance of not one unusual pet. . . but two.
SIX
It’s in the Bag
It was shortly before dawn when the cry of “Edgar!” woke the entire household from its slumber. It was Miles’s voice, but seconds later Toby’s voice joined in with, “Bunnicula’s missing, too!”
I quickly made my way upstairs from the kitchen, where I’d spent the night (I wanted to be first in line for Mr. Monroe’s famous pancakes, which had been promised for Sunday morning breakfast).
“But how could they get out?” Mr. Monroe asked as he rubbed sleep from his eyes.
Miles was shaking his head. His complexion, pallid to begin with, had become white as bone. “I don’t. . . know. I . . . don’t. . . know,” he repeated. “I got up to use the . . . you know . . . and . . . when I got back I saw they were both missing.”
“They must still be in the house somewhere,” said Mr. Monroe. “Let’s look for them.”
I started following the family, when Chester caught my tail in his teeth. I hate when he does that.
“Come on, Chester,” I said. “We’ve got to help them look.”
“Of course we do,” Chester agreed, after he’d dropped my tail. “But first let’s check in with our spy, shall we?”
Howie! He would know what had happened!
We entered the guest room and found Howie sound asleep under the bed.
“Howie! Wake up!” Chester ordered.
Howie’s eyes popped open. “Is it morning?” he asked groggily. He then sneezed. A dust bunny landed several inches from his nose.
“Howie, get out from under there and tell us everything you know!” Chester demanded.
“Okay, Pop.” Howie wriggled his way out from under the bed and cleared his throat. “My name is Howie,” he began. “I live with Mr. and Mrs. Monroe and their two sons, Toby and Pete, in the town of Centerville. My best friends are Chester and Harold, whom I call Pop and Uncle Harold. The capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. Two plus two equals four. Never wear plaids and stripes together. The average dog should have its ears checked once a week to see if they need cleaning. However, dogs with long, pendulous ears, such as those of a basset hound, should be checked more—”
“HOWIE!” Chester shouted. “I am asking what you know about Bunnicula’s disappearance!”
“Oh,” said Howie. “Did Bunnicula disappear?”
Chester gnashed his teeth.
“You really shouldn’t do that, Pop,” Howie pointed out. “It wears down the enamel.”
“Howie!”
“What? It’s something else I know.”
“Howie,” I said. “Did you notice Bunnicula getting out during the night?”
Howie looked down at the floor. “Well, I didn’t exactly stay . .. you know ... exactly ...”
“Awake?” Chester speculated. “Is that the word you’re searching for?”
“Kind of,” said Howie. “But I did hear some stuff before I fell asleep.”
“Fine,” said Chester. “Give us a full report, and then we’ve got to start looking for Bunnicula.”
Howie’s face took on a look of deep concentration. “Okay,” he began, “first of all, before Miles went to bed he went over to Bunnicula’s cage and started talking to him.”
Chester’s eyes lit up. “What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Nice bunny.’”
“That’s it? ‘Nice bunny’?”
“No, then he said, ‘Twitchy-nose bunny.’”
“Ooh,” I said. “I’ll bet that’s mad scientist code for-”
“You’
re skating on thin ice, Harold,” Chester warned. “Go on, Howie.”
“Well, he just talked to him like that for a while. You know, sort of baby bunny talk. Oh, at one point, he said, ‘You’re a rabbit, you’re okay.’ Then he took this deep breath—I mean, it was so loud I could hear it all the way under the bed—and then he was quiet.”
Chester snorted. “‘You’re a rabbit, you’re okay.’ What does that mean? Did he take Bunnicula out of his cage?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I couldn’t see. It didn’t sound like he took him out of his cage. All I heard after that was the sound of typing.”
“Typing?”
Howie got really excited telling this part of the story. “Uh-huh. He was writing, Pop! Can you believe it? My hero, M. T. Graves, was writing right here in this very room!”
I looked over at the laptop computer sitting on the dresser. I knew what Chester was going to say before he said it.
“No, Chester,” I said. “We are not going to break into his computer.”
Chester rolled his eyes as if the thought would never have crossed his mind.
“I was so inspired,” Howie went on. “I mean it. I couldn’t fall asleep for seconds I was so full of story ideas. I have this one idea that is so cool. It’s about this dog who has fleas, except it turns out they’re not ordinary fleas, see, they’re steel-plated Crypto- Fleas and they’ve been sent from another—”
“Howie!” said Chester. “I’ll listen to your ideas another time, okay?”
“Really, Pop?”
“Well, no. But Harold will, won’t you, Harold? Right now what I need to hear is what else happened with Miles and Edgar and Bunnicula.”
“Oh, well, while he was typing he was muttering things that I couldn’t really hear. And then he was quiet for a long time. And then he was muttering again, and then I heard him say, ‘I can’t do it alone, Edgar. You’ve got to help me.’”
“Help him what?” Chester asked suspiciously.
“I don’t know. He stopped talking. A few minutes later the bed sagged, and soon after that the snoring began. And that’s when I had all my story ideas, and then I fell asleep.”
“That’s it?” said Chester. “That’s the whole report?”
Howie thought for a moment, and then his eyes lit up. “Wait, there is something else! Before he went to bed, Miles opened the window. He said something about it being stuffy in here. Then he went over and picked up the black bag—”
Chester gasped. “The black bag!”
“Uh-huh. He got the black bag and took it to bed with him.”
“He took it to bed with him? Okay, that’s just weird.”
“I know. I woke up at one point and took a peek around the room. Edgar and Bunnicula were asleep. So was Miles—and he was hugging the black bag.”
“And that is even weirder,” said Chester as he raised himself up to peer over the top of the bed.
“There it is,” he said. “There’s our answer.”
“Where?” I asked.
“In the bag, Harold. It probably holds the tools of his villainous trade.”
Chester jumped up on the bed. He inched his way toward the black bag. Just as he was about to reach it, he looked up and let out a surprised, “Oh!”
It was Howie’s and my turn to put our paws up on the edge of the bed. Looking where Chester’s eyes were riveted, we saw a plate sitting on the night table on the other side of the bed. The plate was filled with limp, white lettuce.
“Déjà vu,” said Chester.
“I’m fine, thank you,” I replied. “But, Chester, this is really no time to practice your French.”
“‘Déjà vu’ is an expression used when something seems familiar, Harold, as if what is happening now has happened before.”
“Oh. Well. I knew that. And I’m still fine, thanks. Although I am getting hungry.” I was hoping that Mr. Monroe was still planning on making pancakes.
“I see what’s happened here,” Chester said. “The Monroes left a plate of salad on the night table—remember, Miles had asked for salad without dressing to be placed by his bed for a midnight snack. Was that the reason he wanted it there, or was it to lure Bunnicula out of his cage—into a fiendish trap?”
I thought Chester might be onto something. After all, that limp, white lettuce sure looked like Bunnicula’s handiwork.
“But where do you think Bunnicula is now?” I asked.
Chester’s eyes strayed back to the bag on the bed.
Howie gasped. “We’ve got to free him!” he yipped. “We’ve got to let the cat out of the bag!”
“Bunnicula is a rabbit,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but who ever heard of letting the rabbit out of the bag?”
By now Chester was struggling to get the bag open. “It’s stuck,” he mumbled. “Umph! Come on, you two, give me some teeth.”
I can’t say I love the taste of leather, but the thought that Bunnicula might be trapped inside gave me no choice but to hop up on the bed and join Chester and Howie in the rescue operation.
It was inevitable, of course, that at the moment the three of us were gnawing away at Miles Tanner’s prized possession he would appear in the doorway and cry out, “Stop!”
We jumped off the bed and raced down the stairs faster than you could say “steel-plated Crypto-fleas.”
“Now he’ll never want to use me as a character in one of his books,” Howie whimpered as we skidded to a halt on the kitchen linoleum. There before us were the Monroes, wearing coats pulled on over their nightclothes. They were all staring at the same thing.
It was, in Chester’s words, déjà vu all over again. For there, in the center of the kitchen table, was a mound of white vegetables: carrots and Zucchinis and tomatoes and string beans.
“Bunnicula was here,” I whispered to Chester. “That’s good, right? At least we know he’s not in the bag.”
“Perhaps,” said Chester, “but then where is he?”
“And where’s Edgar?” I asked.
“That’s easy,” said Chester. “Edgar went off to meet with the head crow. Why do you think Miles opened the window?”
“Ah, yes, the head crow.”
“I’m ready!” a voice called out behind us.
We turned to see Miles Tanner, towering over us in his black cape and a mood to match.
“Upstairs I saw ...” he began.
“We are in so much trouble,” Howie muttered.
“... the window . . . open. That must be how . . . Edgar . . . got out.”
Chester snorted. “As if he didn’t know,” he said. “Oh, it’s all theater, I tell you.”
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Monroe said. “We forgot to tell you there was no screen on that window.”
“Do you think Bunnicula got out that way, too?” Toby asked. “If he jumped ...”
“No,” Mr. Monroe said, squelching Toby’s fear. “Look at these vegetables. He must have managed to get down the stairs and into the kitchen and—”
“Through the pet door!” said Pete, pointing.
“Right!” Mr. Monroe cried. “Let’s go!” He waved a flashlight and threw open the door. We rushed into the yard, and what we saw there brought us to a standstill.
There were crows everywhere. On the grass. In the trees. In the air. Other than the occasional flapping of wings, they didn’t make a sound.
“Omens,” Chester hissed.
I didn’t try to talk him out of it this time. Omen-wise, a swarm of silent crows in a backyard is in a whole other league from a raisin in a bowl of oatmeal.
Suddenly a single bird cawed loudly. We looked up and saw it sitting on a branch, its mouth opening as it continued to caw. Next to it on the branch perched another crow, this one making a bobbing motion, bowing up and down, up and down. And then it stopped, looked directly at us, and swooped in our direction.
“It’s Edgar!” Miles shouted.
At the sound of his name, Edgar flew toward us ... and then f
lew off . . . and then back to us, and then away.
“He’s beckoning us,” Mr. Monroe said. You have to love a man who can use the word “beckoning” in a sentence before he’s even had breakfast. “He wants us to follow him.”
And so we did.
SEVEN
Astonished in the Pumpkin Patch
It didn’t take long for us to figure out where Edgar was leading us. For there, in the garden behind the last house on our block, was a blur of black and white caught in the beam of Mr. Monroe’s flashlight.
“It’s Bunnicula!” Toby shouted.
“But what’s he doing in Amber’s garden?”
“It’s Delilah’s garden, too,” Howie said with a wistful sigh.
Amber, as you may remember, is rumored to be Pete’s girlfriend. Delilah is Amber’s new puppy. Howie and I met Delilah on a recent jaunt around the neighborhood. After a perfunctory hello to me, Delilah joined Howie in an interminable round of—not to mince words—sniffing. I will spare you the details; suffice it to say that I have spent much of my life trying to rise above this barbaric canine greeting ritual. In any event, the sniffing routine was followed by an equally interminable game of nip-and-chase. In the end, it was clear that Howie was as smitten with Delilah as Pete is with Amber.
But I digress. It was not Delilah or Amber or any other member of the Gorbish family that was the reason Edgar had brought us here. It was Bunnicula—and something more. Bunnicula had disappeared behind a pumpkin. But was it an ordinary pumpkin? Oh, no. This pumpkin was white!
“How . . . astonishing,” Miles remarked as we approached. “I’ve never seen a white pumpkin. Which reminds me. When I went upstairs to get my . . . cape ... I noticed that the . . . salad next to my bed had turned ...”
“White,” said Mr. Monroe.
“Yes, how did you know?”
“Vegetables in the kitchen turned white, too,” said Mrs. Monroe, “although how in the world he got them out of the refrigerator I can’t imagine.”
“He?” asked Miles. “Surely you don’t mean ...”
