by Byars, Betsy
“Albert, you’re in your pajamas.”
“But I’ve got to know what happened.”
“I want to know what happened too, but we cannot disturb them now. That girl has been through a terrible time. Her father had to actually help her up the steps.”
Meat peered out the window again. His shoulders sagged with disappointment.
“Now they’re in the house,” he cried in anguish. “Now it’s too late.”
“The news about Herculeah will keep until morning, as will the news about poor Neiman. Now go to bed.”
“Mom—”
“I agreed you could stay up until you knew about Herculeah. Now you know. Go to bed, Albert.”
Suddenly Meat was too tired to argue. He started slowly up the stairs, pulling himself along by the banister.
The phone rang. “I’ll get it,” he said quickly. He started down the steps.
His mother was quicker. She picked up the phone on the second ring.
Meat came down the three remaining steps and stood beside her. She tilted the phone so he could hear the conversation.
“Mrs. McMannis?”
“Yes.”
“This is Chico Jones.”
“Yes?”
“I saw your light on, and I knew you were anxious about your brother.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Your brother is unharmed.”
Meat felt the tension go out of her body and the relief flood in.
“Oh, thank you. And your daughter?”
Meat held his breath.
“Herculeah’s unharmed as well. She’s exhausted and shaky, but her mother’s getting her to bed.”
“Where is Neiman, Lieutenant Jones?”
“Your brother’s in custody now.”
“Custody?”
“Partly for his own protection, ma‘am. We haven’t got the killer yet. We know his identity. He left an arsenal of weapons at the bookshop. His fingerprints were all over everything, but we haven’t got him.”
“Will there be—” Meat’s mother paused, apparently familiar with the right word but unable to say it.
Meat supplied it. “Charges?”
“There may be, but there do seem to be extenuating circumstances. Well, I’m sure you need to get to bed. I’ll be staying over here tonight, so if there’s any trouble, you give me a call. I’ll be standing by.”
“Thank you very much, Lieutenant.”
She put down the phone.
“What a lovely, thoughtful, kind man,” she said.
“I thought you didn’t like him. You’re always criticizing both Herculeah’s parents.”
“A person can occasionally be wrong,” she said.
26
HOMOPHONE
“They got him!”
Meat said, “Herculeah?”
He was sitting by the kitchen phone waiting until nine o‘clock. That was the absolute earliest his mother would allow him to call. But Herculeah beat him to it.
“Yes! It’s me! They got him.” There was a shocked silence so Herculeah added, “The gunman! They got the gunman!”
Meat was already sitting down, but he felt as if he had just gotten lower with relief.
“Guess where they got him?” she went on.
“I can’t.”
“At Death’s Door. He went back for his guns. This man was not terribly bright.”
“If he was bright at all,” Meat commented, “he wouldn’t be a hired killer.”
“Too right,” Herculeah said. “I was hoping you’d stayed home from school today. Can you come over?”
“If they’ve got the gunman, I can. Otherwise my mom would make me stay in the house for the rest of my life.”
“I’m having a cup of coffee. My dad said I deserved it. ”
“Is there enough for me?”
“Of course.”
“I’m on my way.”
When Meat was sitting across from Herculeah, waiting for his coffee to cool he said, “My mom wouldn’t let me call. She said you needed your rest.”
“Actually, I have been awake since dawn,” Herculeah said.
“Didn’t your mother let you sleep in?”
“My mother did. Tarot didn’t. At first light the parrot started yelling, ‘Beware, beware.’ I said, ‘Go back to sleep. It’s too early for that.’ But Tarot kept it up. ‘Beware. Beware.’ Finally my mother came and took him out of the room, but I could hear him all the way down the hall.”
“Did your dad explain what happened? I’m still not sure about things.”
“I know everything. What happened was that a man named Piranna—it sounds like the fish, but it’s spelled differently—”
“A homophone,” Meat said.
Herculeah looked at him in surprise. “How did you know that?”
He tried to act as if it were nothing. He took a small sip of coffee and was proud that he swallowed it without spitting it back into the mug. He managed a modest shrug.
“That’s what I love about you, Meat—that you come up with things like homophone.”
He blushed with pleasure. He would remember that sentence until the day he died—the first part anyway.
“So, this fish guy, this Piranna,” she pronounced the word carefully and grinned at him, “he shot at the mayor.
“And your uncle Neiman may not be able to see very well, but like a lot of people with a handicap, his other senses go into overdrive to make up for it. So Uncle Neiman has great hearing.
“In fact he was the only one who heard the shot. He looked up—right at the window where it came from—but he couldn’t see a thing.
“The gunman—piranha Piranna”—she grinned at Meat again—“panicked. He had to get out of town, but first he hired a gunman to take care of Uncle Neiman. Uncle Neiman’s newspaper picture was still in the gunman’s duffel bag.”
“Where is Uncle Neiman now—still in custody?”
“No. He’s back in his apartment over the shop.”
“That’s a relief.”
“And guess what they called the gunman?”
“I couldn’t.”
“They called him the Bull.”
She gave a slight shudder, remembering how well the name had fit. In her nightmare she still saw those terrifying red eyes.
“Bull?”
“Yes, don’t you get it? The Cretan Bull! You’re the one who told me about it when I had my last premonition. Capturing it was one of the labors of Hercules.”
Meat said nothing.
“Isn’t it exciting?”
“What?”
“I’m following almost exactly in the footsteps of Hercules.”
21
TICKLED TO DEATH
“So this is the famous hat?”
It was a woman’s voice. She was speaking from the entrance to Death’s Door.
Both Herculeah and Meat looked up from their work. Meat waited a moment. When no one answered, he called out, “Yes, it is.”
“Oh, there you are.” The woman glanced into the room, waved at them and went back to the hat.
Uncle Neiman had put his hat under a large glass dome. It stood on a table beside the cash register and had become sort of a tourist attraction. The woman admired it a moment more.
“And there’s the bullet hole,” she said almost reverently.
Neither Meat nor Herculeah answered, though Meat unconsciously rubbed the side of his head as if to assure himself there was no hole there. The woman crossed to where they were working.
“And are you the person who was wearing that hat when it got that bullet hole?”
Meat nodded.
“And you’re the girl who almost got shot, too?”
“I sure am.”
“Well, now I’ve seen all the celebrities but the one I came to see. Magoo, where are you?”
“In the rentals,” he called back.
The woman disappeared through the doorway, and Herculeah and Meat went back to sorting books. Both shelves—t
his one and the one Herculeah had pushed over on top of the gunman—were now erect. Herculeah and Meat were reshelving the books.
They were working on the Gs. Meat was taking great satisfaction in his work. “Gillis ... Gilman ... George, Elizabeth, goes back there. Grafton—she belongs in the Gr’s. You’re doing those, aren’t you?”
He held out the book to her. She didn’t take it. He looked around. She didn’t even seem to see it. “Here!” he said.
“Oh.”
Herculeah took the book in a distracted way and set it on an empty shelf. Meat was suddenly aware that Herculeah had stopped working altogether.
She was holding one book in her hands. She was not staring at it, but looking into the distance.
“Did you find something interesting?”
Herculeah nodded.
Still she didn’t look at him or the book in her hands.
“Uncle Neiman will give you any book you want to read—me too. He says the shop is ours.”
“I don’t want to read it.”
“What is it?”
She turned the book over in her lap so that the title was hidden.
“So? What’s the big secret?”
“It’s not a big secret. I just picked up this book, and I had a premonition about something.”
“Your premonitions usually work,” Meat said uneasily. “I didn’t believe your last one about the bull, but it turned out to be true.”
Herculeah didn’t say anything.
“So what’s the premonition?”
Herculeah glanced up as if to check the books she’d shelved. “Not yet.” She dropped the book in her lap, picked up two others from a pile and shelved one. “Anyway I never had a premonition your uncle was going to kidnap me.”
Meat glanced at the door. “You know he doesn’t like that word.”
“Well, he better get used to it. I’ve had to get used to some hard things, too. It was not easy for me to come back here to Death’s Door, the very spot where I was almost killed.”
“Yes, but you’re stronger than most everybody. You could do something like that. Uncle Neiman is more like me.” He was going to add the word “unhardy,” but he decided not to.
Herculeah shrugged.
“So what’s the title of the book?”
She didn’t answer. She glanced down in her lap. She seemed to be in a world of her own. Meat hated it when she shut him out like that.
“At least tell me the author, If I knew the author, then I could find one of her books. They’d have her other titles inside.”
When she didn’t answer, he said, “Well it has to start with G.”
“No, H. It was out of place.” She smiled, as if at herself. “The reason I’m not telling you is that this makes no sense at all.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
She hesitated, then turned the book around so he could see the title.
“Funny Bones.” He read the words aloud. “You’re right. It makes no sense.”
“I told you. All the same, Meat, when I picked this book up, I got a premonition.”
“I do not think one of Hercules’ labors had anything to do with bones. And they certainly weren’t funny.”
“I know. Maybe I’m safe at last.”
Herculeah put the book on the shelf. She watched it for a moment and then smiled at Meat.
Meat didn’t smile back. He had a premonition of his own.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” he said.
What’s in store for Herculeah?
Don’t miss her next terrifying adventure,
DISAPPEARING ACTS
When Herculeah’s best friend, Meat, decides to take a comedy class, he expects to get a few laughs. But then he discovers a dead body in the bathroom, and realizes that there’s nothing funny about murder. Things can’t get any worse—until the body disappears! Meat needs Herculeah’s help to uncover the clues, but she’s busy investigating a case of her own. One that just might change Meat’s life forever....
