Ernestine, Catastrophe Queen

by Merrill Wyatt

  The flyer reminded Ernestine of Charleston’s suggestion to put up missing zombie posters. If nothing else, it would raise awareness on a very important matter of public health.

  Tucking the flyers into her pocket, Ernestine went in search of her stepbrother, finding him at the site of the very first chore on his list. Only rather than fixing a squeaky floorboard in Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s apartment, he was standing on an ottoman while wearing an enormous flowered hat, high glittery heels, and a long lavender gown while a seamstress did something to the hem that seemed likely to end in Charleston stitched to the furniture.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” Ernestine said when she stepped into the palatial room full of lemon trees and gold furniture. Charleston just shrugged and went back to eating brownies from the plate he was holding.

  “So sorry, darling,” Mrs. MacGillicuddie drawled from where she lounged on a leopard-print fainting couch. She wore a hot pink silk robe with a feather boa and stiletto heels. Heirloom jewels encrusted her from the top of her head to the tips of her fingertips right on down to her feet where she wore emerald-and-diamond anklets worth more money than most people made in a lifetime.

  As Mrs. MacGillicuddie had said before, at her age you never knew when it might be your last chance to wear your jewels. Especially your no-good-lying-cheating-dirty-rotten-underhanded-crook-of-an-ex-husband’s family jewels, may he rot in his grave until he rises as a zombie to shamble about so Mrs. MacGillicuddie could whack off his head with her cane. (A delighted Mrs. MacGillicuddie had added that last part after Ernestine told her about the coming apocalypse.)

  When Ernestine was eighty, she wanted to be exactly like Mrs. MacGillicuddie.

  Several other people filled the room aside from Charleston and the seamstress. Rodney sat on a purple chair beneath two potted lemon trees, looking like he’d been sucking on the fruit dangling above his head. Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins, Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s cat, gleefully shed long, white hair all over his suit as Aurora Borealis preened in front of her phone, taking a selfie so all her followers would know that she was still as gorgeous as she was ten minutes ago.

  A man Ernestine didn’t recognize sat on a gilt chair covered in zebra print while scribbling down a bunch of notes. Kind of like Mr. Price, the school psychologist. Meanwhile, Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s nephew Lyndon tried to blend in with another lemon tree. Ernestine suspected that when the end of the world came, he’d be one of the first ones to get eaten because he’d be too busy trying to figure out how to make money off the zombies to pay attention to avoiding them. He’d probably just walk right up to the first zombie he saw and ask it if it wanted to get rich quick. He always had some sort of scheme that he was trying to get people to invest in, having already wasted his inheritance on bad investments.

  “As I was saying, Mother, last night was the final straw! You’re deranged.” Rodney peered over at the guy taking the impressive amount of notes and said, “Did you get that? Are you making a note of the fact that she’s deranged?”

  “Rodney, that chandelier might have rearranged my body parts had it hit me, but that hardly makes me deranged!” Eduardo hurried forward to fill Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s cup with tea as she waved it about irritably. He then discreetly removed a Fabergé egg from Aurora Borealis’s purse and returned it to its rightful place next to a Chihuly sculpture on a seventeenth-century desk Aurora Borealis had stuck her gum under. Ernestine noticed she was wearing the white sparkly shoes she’d stolen from the Swanson twins the night before.

  Turning back to Ernestine, Mrs. MacGillicuddie begged her, “Don’t be upset with Charleston, darling. I’m dreadfully afraid I forced him to remain with us so Peggy here could hem my negligee. He’s exactly my size, you know.”

  Ernestine approved of the way Mrs. MacGillicuddie tended to speak in italics. No sense in saying anything if you didn’t feel emphatic about it.

  “He’s half your size!” Ernestine protested.

  “Not on the ottoman and in my stilettos,” Mrs. MacGillicuddie trilled, while Peggy the seamstress looked up with a mouthful of pins and nodded in agreement. “I tried to get Rodney there to do it, but he’s much too busy consulting with that shrink he brought along to try and prove I’m crazy.”

  “You are crazy!” Rodney puffed up his chest and then whispered to the psychiatrist, “You got that, too, didn’t you? Put down that she shows clear signs of dementia.”

  “Plus, she said she’d give me twenty dollars,” Charleston interjected from around a mouthful of brownie.

  “Oh, Charleston,” Ernestine groaned, setting her toolbox down next to the loose floorboard Eduardo helpfully pointed out for her. “You can’t put a price on your dignity.”

  “I can on mine, and it’s twenty dollars.”

  “That reminds me.” Getting up from her fainting couch, Mrs. MacGillicuddie tottered on her stilettos over to one of the lemon trees. Reaching a hand into the pot, she rummaged about until she came up with a stack of neatly wrapped bills. This she promptly handed to Ernestine. “For you, darling, for saving me last night from that awful chandelier while my devoted son stood by and watched, hoping I’d die so he’d get to inherit even more of the MacGillicuddie fortune.”

  “Mother!”

  “Wait, you’re giving her money, Grammy?” Aurora Borealis froze in the act of sliding an antique ashtray into her purse. “But she isn’t even very pretty! And she doesn’t have any followers on Instagram. You don’t, do you?”

  That last comment was aimed at Ernestine, who was too busy thumbing through the stack of cash to bother answering. They were all fifties and there seemed to be about two hundred of them. That made…

  Gosh. That made ten thousand dollars.

  “Mrs. MacGillicuddie, this is too much.” Ernestine held the money out to her landlady. “I can’t possibly accept ten thousand dollars.”

  “Ten thousand?” Lyndon gasped. Then, in a low whisper to Ernestine, he added, “I’ve got this fantastic business I’m putting together to set up hot chocolate cafés all along the equator in Africa, if you’re interested.”

  Ernestine blinked. “Er, I don’t think so, no.”

  “Ten thousand!” Aurora Borealis whined. “But you only gave me five thousand for my last birthday!”

  “She only gave me a card!” For once, Rodney turned his open-mouthed outrage on someone other than his mother. He spent so much of his time with his chest puffed out, Ernestine half-expected him to float away like a balloon.

  “At your party, you served me avocado, which you know I’m deathly allergic to,” Mrs. MacGillicuddie said pointedly, swiping a brownie from the tray Charleston was still holding, and collapsing back onto her fainting couch.

  “That was an accident! I forgot to tell the chef!”

  “Ha! Who’s got dementia now, Rodney?”

  Rodney turned to the psychiatrist, only to discover the doctor studying him beadily as he tapped his lip with his pencil. Meanwhile, Lyndon peered into the barrel of the closest lemon tree as though hopeful of finding it mulched in fifty dollar bills.

  “Keep the money, darling. Use it to start your adorable little zombie apocalypse. It sounds like grand fun.”

  “Well, all right.” Ernestine didn’t feel entirely good about it, but she supposed keeping it herself was better than letting Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s awful family get their hands on it. She was going to need a lot of cash to run her campaign for president when the apocalypse was over.

  “Wait, what’s this about zombies?” Aurora Borealis glanced around like she thought there might be one lurking in the lemon trees along with all of that cash. “Are there dead things around? Ew, gross!”

  “There might be,” Ernestine warned. “As I was telling Mrs. Talmadge earlier, you never know for sure these days.”

  As Charleston explained that the ravenous undead might be wandering the neighborhood, Ernestine pulled out a hammer and some nails to fix the loose floorboard. However, when she looked at it, there didn’t seem to be anything
wrong with it. It didn’t stick up at all or look uneven compared to the rest of the floorboards. Yet that was the one Eduardo said had launched Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins into the lemon tree yesterday. Ernestine pressed down on one end with her hand.

  WHUMP! The other end sprang up and almost smacked her in the face.

  “Oh, I know, darling,” Mrs. MacGillicuddie peered over the fainting couch at her. “I would have broken my neck stepping on it, if Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins hadn’t stepped on it first, the brave, adorable, widdle darling.”

  “Is that why his face looks so squashed?” Charleston asked, earning him a one-eyed glare from Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins, whose face really did look like it had been flattened by a floorboard.

  Huh. Ernestine inspected the floor, her spider-sense tingling. Well, maybe it was her zombie-sense. Either way, something was tingling because something else wasn’t right. Two accidental almost-deaths in one day was one accidental almost-death too many.

  Then Ernestine spotted it. She bent closer to get a better look and noticed sawdust in the cracks.

  The board wasn’t loose. It had been neatly and deliberately sawed in two.

  Mrs. MacGillicuddie hadn’t accidentally almost-died. She’d been purposefully almost-murdered.

  Chapter Five

  A Little Late-Night Murder

  STILL TUESDAY, 5 PM

  “MURDER!” Ernestine screeched, pointing dramatically at the floorboard.

  Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at her. Lyndon pulled his arm out of the lemon tree. Aurora Borealis pulled her nose out of her phone. Rodney pulled himself up to his full height. Even the psychiatrist ceased scribbling in his notebook for the first time since Ernestine arrived. Only Charleston kept on calmly eating his brownies.

  Extremely pleased to have all attention focused on her, Ernestine smoothed down her overalls and cleared her throat. “Ahem. Mrs. MacGillicuddie, I believe someone is trying to murder you. Unfortunately, zombies don’t seem to be involved, but in my opinion, it is still an urgent matter that needs to be addressed. Because I don’t think the chandelier fell last night by accident.”

  “Oh, darling! How thrilling!” Rather than the horror Ernestine was expecting, Mrs. MacGillicuddie positively beamed. “It’s been ages since anyone last tried to murder me. No one has bothered at all since Rodney tried to kill me with that avocado.”

  “Mother!” Rodney cried. “That was an honest mistake! I thought it was asparagus you were allergic to!”

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s exactly what you would have said in my eulogy!”

  “It could be Eduardo they were trying to murder,” Charleston pointed out from a mouthful of brownie as the seamstress hastily gathered her stuff up to go, clearly unnerved by all of this talk of zombies and murder.

  “Oh, that wouldn’t be at all fair!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie pouted. “Someone tried to murder him just last year, didn’t they, Eduardo? You naughty boy!”

  Eduardo bowed modestly.

  “Did they do it with a zombie, a chandelier, or a trick floorboard?” Ernestine inquired. Perhaps Eduardo’s would-be murderer was back.

  “No, tried to strangle him with a leash at last year’s Purebred Pampered Puss Pet Pageant.”

  “It’s very competitive,” Eduardo murmured as though that explained everything.

  “Mother!” Rodney barked, clearly feeling it was time he took control of the situation. “This is too much! I’m having you committed to a home for the elderly and insane!”

  He turned optimistically to the psychiatrist, who made a face and shook his head. Deflating like a pricked balloon, Rodney turned to his mother and tried wheedling. “Please, Mother? It’s in your best interests. That’s all I want.”

  “I already live in a home for the elderly and insane, and I quite like it here. NOW. GET. OUT.” She jammed the tip of her cane into his derriere, causing her son to yelp and scurry out of the room, followed by Aurora Borealis, the seamstress, and the psychiatrist.

  As the doctor passed by Ernestine, he handed her his business card. “If you want to use some of that cash and come see me sometime, I can tell we have fertile ground to discuss.”

  “Well, you don’t really need to fertilize the ground before you raise the zombies, but I’d be more than happy to give you some pointers,” Ernestine told him, immensely flattered. “I have a whole zombie survival guide put together. It will definitely be a bestseller when the zombie hordes finally arise to devour us all, you know.”

  “Er—” The psychiatrist seemed to be thinking twice about giving her a card that had his address listed on it, but in the end, he let go of it, anyhow.

  “Lyndon, darling, you’ll find a stack of fifties in a secret panel behind that cuckoo clock on the wall over there,” Mrs. MacGillicuddie said wearily, having just noticed that Lyndon was trying to pry a lemon open with his bare hands.

  “Oh!” Hastily, he dropped the lemon into the pot. “I, uh, wasn’t—”

  “Oh, get it and get out!” She jabbed her cane in his direction, causing him to leap up, swing the cuckoo clock open, and grab his cash.

  “Thank you, Great-Auntie Edna!” he babbled. “Incredibly generous of you! Can’t thank you enough! Don’t know what I would do without you!”

  “Inherit a third of my fortune and promptly lose it all, I suspect,” she sighed to Ernestine and Charleston as he departed. “You know the last business venture he tried to get me to invest in involved trying to sell frozen yogurt to Eskimos in the Antarctic.”

  “But there aren’t any Eskimos in the Antarctic,” Charleston pointed out. “They live in the Arctic.”

  “Yes, I know, darling. Why do you think I wouldn’t invest?”

  “Lyndon is one of your heirs?” Ernestine asked curiously as she helped Charleston out of his heels and fancy dress.

  “Yes, darling. There aren’t any heirs on my side of the family, and Rodney, Lyndon, and Aurora Borealis are the only surviving heirs on my husband’s side. Of course, they won’t get all my money. A few million here and there will go to others outside of the family, but the bulk of it will be split between the three of them. Awful people, but they are family, I suppose.” As Mrs. MacGillicuddie talked, Eduardo brought her the sort of fancy, curvy, gilded phone Ernestine had only ever seen in one of Mr. Theda’s old movies. “Now do get out, you two! You’re lovely, but I need to call my personal beautician to come over and fix me up. I want to look my best if I’m going to be almost-murdered again. Fancy being almost-murdered with curlers in your hair or a mud mask on your face!”

  Mrs. MacGillicuddie shuddered as though the thought of it was the most appalling thing she’d heard all evening.

  “Gosh, it sounds like a lot of people have reasons to want Mrs. MacGillicuddie dead,” Charleston remarked as they left the room. He looked a bit like a talking chipmunk as his cheeks stored enough brownies to last him the remainder of the winter. “Her family inherits if she dies. Mr. Theda was threatening her. Mr. Talmadge is mad at her, and armed with kitchen knives.”

  “And Mr. Sangfroid was telling me that he wished she was dead,” Ernestine said, recalling their earlier conversation as she and Charleston headed back up to the attic. “He said it was a pity the chandelier didn’t kill her last night. He doesn’t like that she’s letting people like us and the Swanson twins live here.”

  “What’s wrong with us and the Swanson twins?” Charleston asked in astonishment.

  “Apparently we’re garbage and just haven’t noticed it,” Ernestine said grimly.

  Charleston sniffed his shirt and muttered, “I think I’d notice if I was garbage.”

  Back up in the attic, Ernestine went into Frank’s studio to take a look at the remains of the chandelier. Most of it was just twisted metal and shards of crystal, but the base was still attached to a chunk of the ceiling with a few bolts.

  Inspecting the bolts, Ernestine sucked in her breath. “Charleston, look at this.”

  “Can’t. I don’t feel so good.” Clutching his stomach
, Charleston slumped down onto the couch. “I may have eaten too many brownies.”

  “The screws were deliberately unscrewed!” Grabbing him up off the couch, she propelled him over to the broken light fixture. “Look, you can see the scratch marks.”

  Looking at them now, each bolt was longer than her longest finger and almost as thick as her wrist. Whoever had loosened them must have had a difficult time of it, as the wrench had cut deep grooves into the reddish-brown metal.

  “How do you know they’re new? Maybe they had a hard time putting it in a hundred thousand years ago or whenever.” Charleston belched and grabbed his tummy again. “Uuuuggghhh.”

  “Because those scratches are shiny. If they’d been made when the chandelier was put in, they’d be rusty by now, too.”

  “Yeah, but they’d had to have snuck through our apartment to do it. Unless—oh, jeez, Ernestine—you don’t think your mom and my dad did it, do you?” He looked green at the thought. Well, mostly he just looked green. It might not have been the thought causing it.

  “Don’t be stupid, Charleston. Our parents could never get themselves organized enough to murder anyone.” Ernestine pondered his point for a moment. How could anyone have made it through without Frank and Maya noticing? Easily, as far as she was concerned. Her mom got so wrapped up in her artwork that she didn’t notice all sorts of important things, and as far as Ernestine could tell, Frank was every bit as bad. Then she remembered what Frank had said the night before. “He had the metal cutters running for most of the day! With the curtains pulled across their studios and those metal cutters going, you could march a high school band through here, and Frank and Maya would never even know anyone had been inside! And—oh, Charleston!—look at this!”