Ernestine, Catastrophe Queen

by Merrill Wyatt

  “Goodness,” Maya repeated, blinking rapidly. “Wow. There are certainly all sorts of wild speculations flying around tonight, aren’t there?”

  “I don’t know about ‘wild.’” Ernestine crossed her arms grumpily. When did people start referring to the coming zombie apocalypse as “wild speculation”? Even the Center for Disease Control was preparing for it.

  “I lost it the other day after I helped Mr. Talmadge get one of the Swanson twins’ peacocks back into the carriage house after it got loose. The door jammed, so I had to use the crowbar to pry it open. Then the peacock startled at the sight of Mora in her swan costume, and Mr. Bara had to help me chase it down. In all of the chaos, I must have left it out by the carriage house door.”

  “Where pretty much anyone could have picked it up.” Detective Kim ran his fingers through his short black hair, making it stand up as though he had just poked his finger into a light socket. MacGillicuddie House also tended to have that sort of effect on people.

  “I’m afraid so.” With an apologetic grimace, Maya handed the crowbar back to him. “On the bright side, I suppose that rules out any of the residents of MacGillicuddie House, doesn’t it? I mean, no one who lives inside the house would have reason to break into it, right?”

  The detective made some sort of noncommittal answer, thanked them both, and sent them on their way. Ernestine could think of two problems with Maya’s statement. The window had been jimmied open the other night, not tonight. Plus, someone inside the house could easily have done it to throw suspicion on someone outside of the house.

  As they climbed back up the stairs, Maya said seriously, “Ernestine, with some sort of crazed murderer wandering around, I don’t want you wandering around at night as well.”

  “Mom, there are always crazed murderers around,” Ernestine pointed out. “They’re usually just masquerading as normal people.”

  “Still, until this crazed murderer is caught, I think you and Charleston need to spend more time around the apartment. After Rocco…”

  “After Rocco, I would think you’d want to keep an eye on me all the time!” Ernestine shouted, balling her hands into fists.

  Aghast, Maya stopped on the steps. “Ernestine, I didn’t understand what you meant at that time! And I’m so sorry for it. All I’ve ever done is to try and encourage you! My parents never gave me any freedom, never trusted me out of their sight—”

  “Maybe that’s because they shouldn’t have trusted you.” Cutting her mother off a second time, Ernestine had said the most hurtful thing she could think to say before continuing, “I mean, all you care about is your big, important day on Saturday, not anything else that might be going on.”

  Her mother remained frozen on the steps as Ernestine marched off, the victor of the battlefield.

  Not that victory felt that good. In fact, for some reason, it felt an awful lot like defeat.

  Stomping into her room, Ernestine shut the door so she wouldn’t have to see her mother’s sad face when she followed her daughter into the apartment a few minutes later. Charleston was already in bed. Well, mostly in bed. He had actually only half made it onto the mattress before passing out from exhaustion. His head, chest, and arms had made it in, but the rest of him dangled onto the floor.

  With a sigh, Ernestine heaved him the rest of the way in, shoved a pillow under his head, and covered him up with a blanket.

  She waited long enough to be fairly certain that both Maya and Frank were asleep, and then, grabbing a flashlight, crept back out into the living room. It had been an eventful night and she had school in the morning, but there was no way Ernestine was going to bed without first watching the tape that had frightened Mr. Theda so much. After all, he had spent years starring in hundreds of low-budget horror movies. What, exactly, could horrify the horror star?

  Snoozing sounds from behind the curtain separating Maya and Frank’s bedroom from the rest of the attic confirmed that they were both asleep. Tiptoeing past it, she lifted the curtain to Frank’s cavernous workspace and started sorting through his junk. She knew what she was looking for was around here someplace. She swept the flashlight beam over all sorts of strange discarded junk: an answering machine, floppy disks, CRT monitors, broken microwaves…

  A-ha! There it was!

  From the bottom of the junk pile, Ernestine tugged free an antiquated VCR. Lugging it out into the living room, she hooked it up to the TV, popped in the videotape, and sat back to watch what was on it.

  A sunset and palm trees filled the screen. As passionate music played, letters swirled over the pink and gold colors to give the title of the show: Torrid Dilemmas. Well, Ernestine already knew that. Even if she still wasn’t sure what might make a dilemma “torrid.”

  Then a very handsome young man with a very full head of hair and a shirt he seemed to have forgotten to finish buttoning burst through a door, snatched up a young woman with an equally full head of hair, and declared, “Darling, I can’t live without you! Forget my inheritance! I want nothing to do with it if it means I can’t be with you!”

  Ernestine slid right off the couch in shock.

  The handsome young man was Mr. Theda.

  “Whatcha watching?” Charleston yawned, padding out into the living room with a blanket wrapped around him.

  “The end of Mr. Theda’s career, if it ever got out.” Getting up from the floor, Ernestine made them a bowl of popcorn to share. Then they both settled down to finish watching the episode.

  Mr. Theda’s plotline was only one of many on what turned out to be a soap opera from the early 1970s. An online search revealed that it had only been on a season and a half before being canceled by the network. It must not have been very popular, because no one had bothered to upload a single episode to YouTube, and Google turned up only a single image related to it.

  When Ernestine clicked on the page linked to it, none of the actors were named, but in the background, a young Mr. Theda could clearly be seen smoldering over the shoulder of his on-screen girlfriend.

  Oh, my.

  It was just as well that it would be almost impossible for his fans to stumble across this picture without first knowing what to look for. Because Ernestine couldn’t imagine many things more embarrassing for the King of Horror Movie Villains (as Mr. Theda had been crowned by his fans) than to be seen spending most of the episode weeping and begging his girlfriend to run off with him.

  “Is it supposed to be a comedy?” Charleston asked, snorting back a laugh. “This is supposed to be funny, right?”

  “I don’t think so.” Ernestine popped the tape out and pushed it back into its sleeve.

  “Wow. If any of Mr. Theda’s fans found out…”

  “He’d be laughed out of the next convention he showed his face at,” Ernestine concluded. She looked down at the tape in her hands. “There can’t be that many of these left in the world. I mean, not many people had VCRs when this show was on.”

  “Really?” Charleston looked at it curiously. “What did they do when they wanted to watch something?”

  “Just watched it when it was on, I guess.”

  “Weird.” Charleston shivered, obviously pleased not to have lived through the Dark Ages. “No wonder Mr. Theda is so annoyed with Mrs. MacGillicuddie. She could ruin his career, if she wanted to.”

  Ernestine nodded slowly. “The question is, is he annoyed enough to murder her?”

  “If anyone wants to murder Mrs. MacGillicuddie, my bet is on her family,” Charleston said. “Not only are they annoyed with her all the time, they’ll inherit about a billion dollars when she dies. Plus, Rodney already tried to poison her with avocado.”

  “Accidentally, he says. And it’s about half a billion they’ll all inherit, actually.” Ernestine absently unhooked the VCR and took it back to Frank’s workspace. “Five hundred thirty five million, if the gossip around here is to be believed.”

  “That’s a lot of reasons to murder someone.”

  “It is.” Glancing at the time,
Ernestine groaned. “Come on, Charleston. It’s time to get ready for school.”

  “Oh, man.” Charleston flopped down face-first on the couch. “Nooo…”

  “Charleston, school is like the apocalypse. Complaining about it isn’t going to make it go away.”

  By the time they finished getting dressed, Maya had gotten up and started to make them eggs and toast. More or less awake for once in the morning, Charleston gave her a hand, adding goat cheese and chives to the mixture, before swapping out the ordinary white bread she was going to use for ciabatta.

  “Aren’t you the chef!” She smiled at him, and Charleston blushed, flattered.

  “Yeah, yeah. You’ll be the one feeding us dandelion salads and pigeon pies after the apocalypse.” Grabbing a spatula, Ernestine shoved some eggs onto the bottom slice of toast, squished on the top slice, and handed one to Charleston. “Let’s go. We’ve got an almost-murder to solve today. Which, by the way, Mom, is the eleventh. That makes Saturday the fourteenth, you know. Can you think of anything important that happens on February fourteenth?”

  “The gallery opening?” Maya asked, perplexed.

  “Valentine’s Day?” Charleston suggested.

  “Oh, never mind!” Dragging her stepbrother by the hand, Ernestine stomped out of the attic.

  From around a mouthful of sandwich, Charleston demanded, “What’s with you?”

  “Nothing.” Taking a bite of her own sandwich, she had to admit that it tasted amazing.

  “You know, for someone who always seems to have something to say about everything, you can be very good at saying nothing when somebody wants to know anything!”

  “Thank you!” That perked Ernestine right up, causing a pleased smile to spread across her face. “I’ve been practicing for when I’m president. It’s very important for a politician to talk a lot while saying nothing, you know.”

  As they reached the second floor landing, Ernestine’s ears perked up. She gestured for Charleston to stop and held her finger up to her lips for silence. Carefully peering over the balcony, she could see Mr. Sangfroid’s cane waving in the air by Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s tiara.

  “You’d better get them out of here!” Mr. Sangfroid jabbed his cane in Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s direction, nearly knocking the tiara from her bouffant black hair. Charleston joined Ernestine to sneak a look over the balcony railing.

  “And you had better stop threatening me!” Lacking its usual lazy drawl, Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s voice slashed right back at him. With one clawlike hand, she grabbed his cane and wrested it away from her head. “I’ve had a very trying night.”

  “There are things I could tell about the MacGillicuddie family that would turn your hair white if you only knew.” Thrusting out his chin, Mr. Sangfroid hobbled forward to glare right into her face. “Things that could keep you from ever showing your face in polite society again!”

  “Darling, they aren’t my family. They’re my husband’s, and I haven’t had to suffer through ‘polite society’ since he was kind enough to kick the bucket before I had to murder him myself!” She shoved the cane back into his arms. “And nothing will ever turn my hair white. Now get out of here, you horrible old troll!”

  “You’ll be sorry!” Mr. Sangfroid pounded his cane against her door as she slammed it in his face. “Last night should have proved that to you!”

  Unfortunately, right about then, a bit of egg fell out of Charleston’s gaping mouth to splatter onto Mr. Sangfroid’s bald head below.

  “Oops.” Charleston quickly swallowed the rest of his mouthful.

  “You vile little eavesdroppers!” Mr. Sangfroid roared, shaking his cane up at them. “You’ll be sorry, too!”

  “Let’s take the front stairs.” Grabbing Charleston by a backpack strap, Ernestine pulled him away from the back stairs as Mr. Sangfroid limped onto the first step.

  “Who do you think Mr. Sangfroid wants gone from the house?” Charleston wondered as they trotted down the hallway toward the other set of stairs.

  “Us or the Swanson twins,” Ernestine said, making a face.

  “He practically cackled when he pointed out that Mrs. MacGillicuddie almost died last night. Hey, you don’t think Mr. Sangfroid could be involved somehow, do you?” he asked as they went down the grand staircase.

  Looking up at the hole in the ceiling, Ernestine replied, “When it comes to murder, I don’t think you can rule anyone out.”

  Outside, they waved at the Swanson twins, practicing their acrobatic routine on the frosty grass. Icicles hung from Frank’s various sculptures, transforming the garden into an icy wonderland.

  “Have you heard anything about how poor Eduardo is doing?” one of the twins called as she vaulted up to stand on her sister’s shoulders.

  “Not really,” Ernestine admitted, her attention on Mr. Talmadge as he looked around furtively and slipped out the front gate. “But I suspect it takes more than a bit of poison to keep Eduardo from fulfilling his duties.”

  She steered Charleston out the gate, but when he would have turned right to go catch the bus, she pulled him to the left. “Let’s take the long way to the bus stop, okay?”

  “What?” Charleston looked appalled at the thought of all that extra walking so early in the morning. “Why?”

  “Zombie hunter’s intuition.”

  With Charleston tagging along reluctantly behind her, Ernestine trailed Mr. Talmadge down the block and around the corner. She made sure to keep at least a block behind him so he wouldn’t notice them, peering around corners to make sure she knew the next direction he was heading.

  He walked about three blocks and stopped in front of a dilapidated storefront next to Mitzy’s Coffee Shop and Bakery. The picture of misery, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and hunched his shoulders. With his heavy black boots, he kicked at an empty soda can rolling around in the gutter.

  “Ernestine.” Charleston tugged at his stepsister’s coat.

  “Shh!” Hidden behind the corner of Dill’s organic grocery store, Ernestine watched as two other thickset gentlemen joined him. From the looks of all the scars on their hands, she’d be willing to bet that they were chefs, too. They both looked to be a few years younger than Mr. Talmadge.

  “Well, then, mate. You got the money?” the one on the left asked in a British accent. Like Mr. Talmadge, he looked like an aging punk.

  “Naw,” Mr. Talmadge replied gruffly. “She won’t give me my inheritance early. I’m sorry, boys, but I’m telling you, you front me the money for this place and we’ll make a go of it.” He looked up at the vacant storefront wistfully.

  The one on the right laughed, and Ernestine instantly disliked him. That was the laugh of someone who usually laughed at other people and rarely with them. In other words, the sort of person she really hoped the zombies ate first when the apocalypse came.

  “Ernestine.” Charleston pulled harder on her coat, no doubt worried that they’d miss the bus and have to hoof it all the way to school.

  “Shh!” Ernestine hissed again. “I think this is important!”

  “Rupert, you haven’t made a go of it since the early aughts,” the guy on the right snickered. “Do you think we don’t know your last place folded? That you had to retire because no one would hire you after that?”

  “That you got put out of business by a sushi place?” Now the left-hand guy was laughing, too. “You’re lucky your wife made enough money for you both to retire on.”

  Ernestine wanted to march over there and give them a good piece of her mind. When she finally found her missing zombie, these two were definitely going to be on the dinner menu.

  Meanwhile, Ernestine had to slap away Charleston’s hands as he pulled at her coat with increasing urgency.

  “You’re over, mate. A has-been.” The guy on the right waved his hand dismissively.

  “Shown how it’s done by some vegan nutter.” Shaking his head, the guy on the left jerked his thumb toward Dill’s place. Ernestine ducked
quickly behind the brick wall and glanced upward. The sign no longer said Dill’s Organic Produce. It now read Dill’s Delicious Vegan Delicacies.

  Peeping out again, she heard Mr. Talmadge plead one last time. “I’m good for the money, boys. I stand to inherit a lot one of these days.”

  “Unless it’s today, you can forget about it. We’re selling the place to the nutty vegan.” The two future causes of zombie indigestion turned around and walked off, leaving Mr. Talmadge standing forlornly in front of the empty storefront.

  “Ernestine!” Fed up with being ignored, Charleston grabbed her and shook her so hard her teeth rattled. Ernestine opened her mouth to tell him off for grabbing her, but stopped when she saw the way his eyes were bugged so far out they might have been detachable.

  “What?” she demanded, yanking his hands off her shoulders.

  “ZOMBIE!” Charleston twirled her around the corner and pointed toward the army surplus store across the street.

  His cry startled the figure rummaging through the Goodwill donation bins in the alleyway next to the store. He wore what appeared to be several tie-dye shirts layered together, baggy pants, garden gloves, and a sunhat pulled low over his head. Before Ernestine could do more than confirm that he definitely had some sort of unfortunate skin condition that made him look all rotten and bloated, he skittered down the alleyway and disappeared.

  “Come on!” Ernestine cried, rushing after him.

  Just as they reached the alleyway, however, strong hands grabbed them both by the scruff of the neck.

  “Oi! What’re you two doing here?” Mr. Talmadge swung them around to face him.

  Ernestine wasn’t sure what to say, a rare occurrence in her life. She usually had something to say about everything, and if she didn’t, she was more than happy to make something up just to have an opinion. However, she couldn’t help but wonder if rather than looking into the face of her friend, she was staring into the eyes of a murderer.

  Mr. Talmadge had been begging Mrs. MacGillicuddie to lend him money just yesterday morning. From the sound of the conversation, he wanted to buy the space from those two jerks to start a restaurant. With money he didn’t have. He’d said that he was going to eventually inherit a lot of money. Could it be Mrs. MacGillicuddie who was going to leave him all of that money when she died?