by Dixie Lyle
I looked over at Paul and frowned. “You’re saying this conversation never happened?”
Despite having eight arms and no shoulders, he still managed to convey a shrug. {i’m sorry but no~i have an excellent memory and no reason to lie~whoever you talked to it wasn’t me~}
My built-in bullshit detector is pretty accurate, but it’s tuned more toward the human range than the cephalopod or the avian. Still, some things hold true despite species: Lies are always told for a reason, and it’s usually a selfish one. Was Paul trying to get the part promised to FJ? Was FJ trying to cash in on a vague promise by insisting it was a firm offer? And when did I become a Tinseltown executive?
I turned back to Fish Jumping. “Okay, I’m going to clear this up, right now. That part is yours. Right, Tango?”
“Tango…”
Oh, thank you, kind lady! I’m forever in your debt! “Awk! Back to kissing ass! Back to kissing ass!”
* * *
So much for mulling things over. For my second attempt I left the graveyard and went back to the estate; I wound up in the gardens, which are an excellent place for walking and pondering. This time of year there weren’t a lot of blooms on the plants, but they were pretty all the same. Something about the spare simplicity of bare branches seemed appropriate to what I was trying to accomplish in my head, too.
What I’d learned from my eavesdropping operation was that out of all our guests—Trentini, Tervo, Nesbitt, Fikru, and Keene—only Keene had a solid alibi for that evening: He was playing croquet with Oscar. Trentini spent most of the evening alone in front of a roaring fire in the study, going over footage on his laptop; Fikru was meditating in his room; Tervo went for a long walk, by himself, in the graveyard; and Jaxon Nesbitt did some reading in bed. The only party animal was Keene, who seemed determined to make up for the rest of them. All of them said that the last time they’d seen Rolvink had been at dinner, where he’d mentioned he was planning on going into town that evening.
Forrester didn’t talk to Catree.
So as far as the murder went, Keene was in the clear. The rest of them, not so much—but there was at least one whose story I could verify.
I left my office, checked in on Ben to make sure dinner was coming along nicely, popped my head in on ZZ to check on her latest project—some sort of sculpture, apparently inspired by Keene’s monstrosity—and double-checked with Forrester to make sure it was okay to clear the lawn and got Victor and our biweekly gardening crew to start the takedown process.
Then I headed over to the Crossroads.
Tervo claimed he’d been in the graveyard all evening. If that were true, then either he was innocent or he’d killed Rolvink inside the Great Crossroads itself—an event I was pretty sure I’d have heard about.
So I asked around. I questioned guinea pigs, I spoke to homing pigeons. I made inquiries of rats, of gerbils, of mice. I talked to cats, dogs, lizards, and monkeys. I interrogated fish.
In the end, it was the prowlers that came through for me. Prowlers are sort of like transients: They don’t quite belong here, but they don’t really have anywhere else to go. They usually fall somewhere between feral and domesticated, not really pets but not really wild, either. Often they’re from zoos or public aquariums, places they became used to human contact but never really bonded with people.
One of these was Two-Notch, a slightly confused shark. Two-Notch was convinced the Great Crossroads was actually a huge, water-filled tank, and she was in the habit of patrolling its perimeter in a very regular fashion. There was nothing to prevent her from leaving the confines of the graveyard other than her own belief in the existence of invisible glass walls, but that was enough. Funny how often that’s the case, even for the non-aquatic.
I found her on one of her endless perambulations, gliding along just inside the fence, about six feet off the ground. I used to worry about her trying to eat other fish ghosts—heck, I used to worry about her trying to eat me—but she doesn’t seem terribly interested in eating anymore. It’s as if her instincts are slowly eroding away, and all she has left is the desire for constant movement.
I caught her eye and waved her over. A shark’s mind is actually very precise; Two-Notch might have been wrong about the existence of that glass wall, but she knew where it was supposed to be to within an inch, and her own depth, heading, and position at all times. Time was a little trickier, but I’d long ago figured out exactly how long it took her to make a circuit of the graveyard and could make a rough estimate from that.
Between what Two-Notch told me and what I learned from other ghost sources, I could reliably put Maxwell Tervo inside the Great Crossroads between just after dinner and ten PM. It looked like he was off the hook, at least for Rolvink’s death.
At last, some real progress. I was congratulating myself on my success as I headed back toward the mansion when I heard Tango’s mental voice in my head.
That sounded intriguing enough that I had to investigate. I walked toward Davy’s Grave and saw that, sure enough, every ghost actor was paired up with a ghost bird. And as they scattered to the four corners of the Crossroads, I saw that one ghostly pair was hanging back with the erstwhile director: a brilliant blue macaw and a near duplicate of Tango herself.
Unsinkable Sam.
Tango was perched, very director-like, upon a headstone, with Sam looking up at her from the burial plot. They had locked eyes in that way cats have, a stare-off that managed to combine aloofness and alertness in the same posture. I am completely aware of your every twitch, that posture said, and I don’t care about any of them in the least. Was this the big showdown?
It was—but not in the way I thought.
Tango started to groom one paw.
There are all kinds of animals that come through the Great Crossroads. I’ve seen armadillos and alligators, falcons and foxes, bears and bats. But this was the first time I’d seen a black panther.
It slunk from behind a mausoleum like it had invented the word (slunk, not mausoleum). It was a black that gleamed like the highly polished metal body of a hearse, with glowing green eyes. It didn’t come to a stop when it reached Tango and Sam, just kept pacing around them in a circle that suggested it couldn’t decide which one to eat first.
To his credit, Sam didn’t look cowed at all—not even in the about-to-become-a-burger sense.
Tango continued her grooming, unperturbed.
I walked up. “Not interrupting anything, am I?”
“Your star? I thought Pal was your star.”
She snorted.
One of the most trustworthy, beloved animals to ever grace the screen is her villain? Of course he is. “So you cast Uns
inkable Sam first? I thought you two didn’t get along.”
“Yeah, he’s perfect. So you’re using birds to help your actors memorize lines? That’s pretty good.”
“Please, Tango. You never use the S word in Hollywood. It’s an homage.”
Leaving Tango to her directorial duties, I was almost to the gate when I heard the Voice of Doom.
[The Great Cataclysm approaches,] the voice said. I spun around, because when you hear the Voice of Doom and it’s coming from behind you, spinning is clearly called for.
The Voice of Doom belonged to the ghost of a dog.
The ghost was standing on top of a small rise, of which there are many in the graveyard. He was an English setter, with long, silky white hair on his belly and legs, and two large black splotches on his back. His muzzle was white but his head was black, making it look a little like he was wearing a dark mask over his eyes.
The Voice of Doom might have shut me up when I first started this job, but you can get used to all sort of things. “When you say Cataclysm, are you talking about actual cats being involved?” I called out.
I thought it was a reasonable question, but the dog stared down at me with pity in his eyes. [Lo, there will be much suffering and gnashing of teeth,] he intoned. [And none will be spared—not the living or the dead.]
And then he turned and darted away.
“Wow,” I said as I trudged up the hill. “Spooooooky. Seriously, how do you do that thing with your voice?”
But when I got there, the ghost dog was nowhere in sight.
14.
I made a perfunctory search of the graveyard, but it’s a big place—and if a ghost wants to disappear it’s pretty easy to hide, especially in a crowd of other ghosts. I sighed and headed back to Davy’s Grave to let Tango know of this latest development.
“So anyway, I just saw something weird,” I said. “Well, weirder.” I told her about the English setter and his ominous pronouncement.
Tango twitched her tail in annoyance.
“Okay, there’s some truth to that,” I admitted. “But this is the Great Crossroads, not the Great Crossroads Studio. When I hear dire predictions from a deceased animal, I tend to take them a little more seriously than some guy on the corner with a cardboard sign and a wild look in his eye.”
Tango sighed. (Yes, cats can sigh.)
“Jim the Wonder Dog?”
My cat knows me all too well. I scurried off to my virtual burrow to nibble away on the rich bounty of the Internet …
* * *
Jim the Wonder Dog was an English setter in the 1930s. During his lifetime he was studied by psychologists from two different universities as well as a variety of skeptics, but nobody could quite figure out how he did what he did.
And what he did was remarkable. He picked the winner of the Kentucky Derby seven years in a row. He determined the sex of unborn babies, seemed to understand several languages (unlike his owner, who only spoke English), and predicted the victor of the 1936 World Series.
What really struck me, though, is that his owner, a man named Sam Van Arsdale, didn’t profit from any of Jim’s accomplishments. From all accounts he refused to display the dog for money, and took him to both veterinarians and psychologists in an effort to understand the abilities of his amazing pet.
Jim was a hunting dog, used for quail. His owner claimed he’d flushed out over five thousand birds during his career, an unheard-of total. More than anything, though, he was smart; he could follow just about any command, including orders to pick out a car by the number on its license plate or a person in a crowd by their profession.
And now his ghost was in my graveyard, warning me of an impending disaster.
As soon as I knew what I was dealing with—well, as soon as I knew what kind of weirdness I was dealing with—okay, as soon as I had a general idea what sort of weirdness—
You know what? I really didn’t know what I was dealing with.
What I knew was that this particular iteration of the unusual had issued forth from a denizen of the Great Crossroads. (Yes, sometimes I use my impressive vocabulary to disguise my actual ignorance. I’m not the only one.) Therefore, in order to gain greater understanding, it behooved me to—okay, that’s enough of that. I’m starting to sound like Whiskey on a lecture tour.
I went back to the graveyard.
And arrived just in time to see Tango and her actors preparing to rehearse a scene. They were gathered around as before, her sitting on the headstone she used as a director’s chair, listening to last-minute instructions:
I strolled up as the animals scattered, resisting the urge to stroke her head; a director needs to maintain a certain amount of mystique. “Tango. Looks like you’re almost ready to roll.”
For a moment there was silence. Then Midnight slunk over the top of the hill, black as a shadow and sinuous as an anaconda. He flowed up to a tombstone, disappearing behind it, then darted from that one to another. His great dark head peered out cautiously, his brilliant green eyes alert for danger.
Suddenly his ears perked up. He heard something, though I couldn’t—not at first.
Then I did. A low, steady, rumbling, almost like the beating of drums, coming from all around us. Midnight looked left, then right. He snarled.
And then the bunnies swarmed over the hills.
White-furred, pink-eyed rabbits, hundreds of them. A huge, rippling tide of snowy fur, flowing toward us like a gigantic, mutant Angora sweater.
An angry Angora sweater, it seemed. When it reached Midnight, it attacked.
Rabbits are not always the timid vegetarians people see them as. Those big legs aren’t just for hopping, and those claws aren’t just for digging. In the wild they can deliver vicious kicks and bites in both self-defense and aggression.
What I hadn’t realized is that they also knew kung fu.
That’s the only way I can describe the fight that followed. Martial arts mayhem, with plenty of kicks, leaps, and punches—though the punches were more like swats, since it was Midnight delivering them. Rabbits flew through the air, buck teeth bared, and were promptly smacked down, up, or back the way they came. There was plenty of violence, but no blood.
When it was all over, Midnight stood panting in the middle of a circle of sprawled white bodies. One or two occasionally twitched an ear or nose, but otherwise they all seemed down for the count.
And with that, all the rabbits came back to life—well, afterlife. Midnight padded over to his director, sparing me only a cursory glance.
A large white rabbit looked up and said, (I’m okay!)
The panther slunk away. I wondered if he slunk everywhere he went, and if he’d done so when he was still alive. Then I wondered if slank was a word, and decided that if it wasn’t it should be.
“Wow,” I said. “That was certainly … action-packed.”
Tango drew herself up smugly.
“Terrific. So. Jim the Wonder Dog.”
“No, I mean I know who Jim the Wonder Dog is, now. And I have to say, his résumé is kind of impressive.”
“I’m talking about prognostication, not acting. His uncanny ability to know things he shouldn’t have been able to know.”
I couldn’t tell if she was missing the point or just being obstinate. “Tango, when somebody who demonstrates the ability to predict the future starts predicting imminent doom and disaster, don’t you think it’s prudent to pay attention?”
She gave her head an annoyed shake.
“Only in a vague and extremely irritating way.” Those things were the nuts and bolts of how the universe actually worked, which apparently dead pets knew more about than human beings who still had a pulse.
I frowned. “Let’s say I take that at face value. If he can’t, how did he do all the things he did? And why is he running around proclaiming that terrible things are about to happen?”
