Ernestine, Catastrophe Queen

by Merrill Wyatt

  Rodney straightened up, smoothing down his tie. “I’m sorry, Mother, but it was me. I’ve squandered my inheritance from Father so I wanted to get my hands on yours. All of this ridiculous talk of zombies gave me the idea for the disguise, and I tried to frame Mr. Sangfroid by putting the shoe on his foot. But it was me all along.”

  The crowd went quiet.

  “Daddy?” Aurora Borealis gasped, unable to believe what she was hearing.

  “I’m sorry, darling. I know I haven’t always been the best father, but I would truly do anything for you.” For just a moment as he gazed at his daughter, Rodney didn’t sound pompous or whiny. In fact, in confessing that he’d tried to murder his mother, he sounded to Ernestine the most likable she’d ever heard him to be. Then he turned to his mother and said, “Which is more than I can say for you, Mother.”

  Mrs. MacGillicuddie wavered as though his accusation had been a terrible blow. Still soaking wet, the Hep Cats stepped forward to catch her.

  Instead of falling, Mrs. MacGillicuddie picked up the shovel and ran at her son while screaming, “HIIIIIIII-YAAAAAAHHH!”

  Chaos broke out again. Several police officers swarmed Mrs. MacGillicuddie before she could accomplish the week’s first successful murder. Libby Swanson had to actually vault onto her sister’s shoulders and then spring up into the tree to avoid being sideswiped by the shovel.

  “You once left me in a department store while you went to Paris!” Rodney shrieked at his mother as Detective Kim sat on him to keep him from attacking her. This would have been impressive if it wasn’t for the fact that five police officers in riot gear were still struggling to wrench the shovel out of Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s hands. Meanwhile, the other Swanson twin and the dripping-wet bishop had also taken refuge up in the tree.

  “It was Tiffany’s, and some people dream of being left there over a long weekend!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie managed to shake the police officer off her right elbow. However, the officer hanging on to the tip of the shovel managed to keep her from swinging it at anyone.

  “I was all alone!”

  “You were fifteen! And the staff knew to look after you!”

  “Take a video of me being brave.” Aurora Borealis shoved her phone into Charleston’s hands, apparently having correctly identified him as the helpful one. Before Charleston could ask what she was planning, she took off her diamond earrings and screamed, “HIIIIIIII-YAAAAAHHH!”, sounding just like her grandmother, as she tackled Detective Kim and knocked him off her father.

  Rodney took off running through the garden and out the back gate, half a dozen officers pounding after him with police batons raised.

  Mr. Ellington and the Hep Cats looked at each other, nodded, and packed up their instruments. He had once told Ernestine that any decent band always knew when to clear out of a place before anyone could lose a limb. If they had decided it was time to go, Ernestine felt confident the police must be just about ready to call in air support.

  Quite unfazed by all of the officers hanging on to his enraged employer, Eduardo walked over to her and smoothly said, “Do remember what your plastic surgeon said about straining your facial muscles too far back.”

  Gasping, Mrs. MacGillicuddie instantly let go of the shovel and handed it to the police officer who had been dangling off of it.

  Taking the phone from Charleston, Eduardo continued over to where Detective Kim held a snarling Aurora Borealis. “Aurora Borealis, I believe your Instagram account just hit two million followers.”

  “Oooh! Gimme!” She immediately stopped struggling and snatched her phone from the butler.

  “And Detective Kim, you’ll find Rodney inside his limo just on the other side of the fence. The Talmadges were kind enough to slash his tires for me.” With a dignified bow to the detective, Eduardo took the shovel from the police officer holding it and went to work filling in Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins’s grave.

  Ernestine was impressed. When the apocalypse came, Eduardo might be humanity’s best hope.

  “Well, I suppose I had better arrange to go bail Rodney and Aurora Borealis out,” Mrs. MacGillicuddie sighed as the SWAT team helped the bishop and the Swanson twins down out of the tree.

  “Bail Rodney out?” Ernestine asked in surprise. “Mrs. MacGillicuddie, you did notice how he tried to kill you, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but he’s family, darling. If I left him locked up, who would I have to fight with?” Mrs. MacGillicuddie waved her hand dismissively. “Besides, I’m quite certain that I can make his life far more miserable than the prison can!”

  All in all, it was quite a funeral.

  Ernestine liked to think that Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins would have been pleased. Well, he probably would have been more pleased by it if he hadn’t been dead, but Ernestine had plans to fix that. True, her attempts to raise human zombies had been met with a few minor setbacks like not working, but perhaps that just meant she needed to start smaller.

  And possibly… fluffier.

  As the bishop walked past, wringing out his robes, he picked a piece of paper up off the flagstones. Handing it to Ernestine, he said, “I think you dropped this.”

  It was the picture of the little girl looking in the mirror. It must have fallen out of her pocket sometime during the brouhaha. Looking down at it now, Ernestine still felt quite certain there was something wrong with it.

  “Did you ever figure out who it was?” one of the Swanson twins asked as she tugged her harp out of the hydrangea bush.

  “No, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter anymore,” Ernestine reluctantly admitted. “I mean, if Rodney did it all just because he doesn’t like his mother, then I guess this has nothing to do with it.”

  “Would you like me to take it inside to Mrs. MacGillicuddie for you?” the other Swanson twin asked. Their landlady had already gone inside for a soothing cup of tea and reassuring call to her plastic surgeon in Switzerland.

  She reached for the photo, but Ernestine wouldn’t let it go. “No. I want to know why Mr. Sangfroid stole it in the first place. Even if it doesn’t have anything to do with all of these murder attempts, I still want to know why.”

  “Better you than me! I had enough of the old grump when I dated him all of those years ago!” Libby Swanson made a face. “Good luck!”

  The twins went inside with a little wave. Detective Kim showered Ernestine with compliments for breaking the case, and Eduardo oversaw the cleanup of the backyard. The eleven o’clock news featured the brawl, which pleased everyone. As Mrs. MacGillicuddie pointed out, fame was fleeting but notoriety was forever.

  Later that night after all of the fuss had finally settled down, Ernestine and Charleston dragged a goat into the graveyard to get the weekend started right.

  “Ernestine, it’s trying to eat me again,” Charleston complained, tugging his coat free from the goat.

  “Well, that’s good practice for fighting off the undead. Do you really think you’re going to be able to fight off zombies if you can’t even get the better of a goat?”

  “You know, I’m really beginning to think that maybe the apocalypse isn’t such a great idea if it might end with me as an appetizer!”

  “Oh, that won’t be the end of it,” Ernestine said vaguely as they wandered among the tombstones, trying to find a recent one. Well, relatively speaking. Less than half a century would be recent in this graveyard. There were also a lot of elaborate mausoleums, but Ernestine wasn’t about to willingly shove herself into such a small, confined space.

  “What do you mean that won’t be the end of it?” Charleston demanded, digging his heels into the frozen ground as he tried to drag the goat along.

  “Oh—er, nothing.”

  “Ernestine, you’re not planning on turning me into a zombie, are you?”

  “Only if you get accidentally killed in the apocalypse. Which you won’t, if you’ve been paying attention to everything I’ve been telling you! But if you do accidentally die, would you really want to spend eternity stuck down in some crampe
d, moldy grave? I’d much rather be up and moving about, having some fun.”

  “Eating people.”

  “Well, you’d be dead,” Ernestine pointed out. “Your ways of having fun are sort of limited.”

  “I don’t think I want to get eaten by a zombie. I want to grow up and turn into an old person. All of the people around here seem to be having lots of fun. Just look at the Swanson twins. I never get to somersault down off of a moving swing.”

  “Yeah, they do make it look easy,” Ernestine agreed, studying her various corpse choices.

  “Did you see them tonight when they dropped down above the crowd?” Charleston continued, “It was like looking in the mirror!”

  “Except for their halos,” Ernestine chuckled. “You should have heard them before the funeral, arguing about which side of their heads—hang on.”

  Ernestine stopped dead in her tracks. Charleston bumped into her. And the goat bumped into Charleston.

  “Ow,” said Charleston.

  “Oh!” said Ernestine. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the picture of the little girl. “Charleston! Oh, Charleston! I’ve finally figured out what was wrong with the photo of this girl! Look at the hair ribbons!”

  “What about them?” He didn’t sound very interested. Possibly because he was currently caught in a game of tug-of-war with the goat and his left-hand mitten.

  Ernestine yanked the mitten out of the goat’s mouth and stuffed a handful of alfalfa from Dill’s store into it instead. “Charleston, look. If this was a girl looking in a mirror, then her hair ribbon would be reflected on the same side of her head. But it’s in a different spot on the girl’s head! That’s because it’s not a mirror, it’s an empty picture frame. And that isn’t one girl standing in the picture, it’s two! The Swanson twins!”

  “The twins?” In his shock, Charleston let go of the goat so he could grab the photo and take a look.

  “Yes!” However, before Ernestine could continue any further, she saw a shadow speeding through the cemetery.

  An ominous shadow.

  A mom-shaped shadow.

  “Ernestine Verna Montgomery!”

  Ernestine winced. Never, anywhere ever, had it ended well for a child when their mother used their full name. “What are you doing in a cemetery at this hour of the night?”

  “Using a goat to raise a zombie from the dead,” Charleston said helpfully. Then, catching a glimpse at the appalled look on Ernestine’s face, he asked uncertainly, “Or were we not supposed to tell people that?”

  “No, Charleston, we were not.”

  “Well, you’ve been telling people we’re raising the dead! What difference does the goat make?”

  Ernestine opened her mouth to reply that it wasn’t so much the goat as it was being out without permission, but Maya arrived before she could.

  “Where did you get a goat?” Maya picked up its leash, fixing it with a stern look until it spat out Charleston’s other mitten onto a frosty grave. “More importantly, why do you two have a goat?”

  Charleston looked from Maya to Ernestine and then back again before obviously deciding there was wisdom in silence. Personally, Ernestine thought a better question would have been whether they planned on keeping the goat when they were done with it.

  Craning her neck over their shoulders, Maya had one last question. “And why is there an open grave over there?”

  “What?” Charleston asked in shock.

  “Where?” Ernestine demanded, whipping around in excitement.

  Sure enough, someone had been digging at Herbert McGovern’s grave. Whether that someone had been digging up or down, Ernestine couldn’t tell. Huge clumps of frozen earth sat on either side of a caved-in hole big enough for a rather large something to fit through. At the bottom of it was a splintered wooden coffin.

  An empty splintered wooden coffin.

  Maybe that really had been a zombie rummaging through the clothing donation bins.

  Maybe it also really had been Herbert eating tulip bulbs at Dill’s store.

  Maybe zombies really did wake up disoriented and unsure of what to do.

  Maybe it took them longer than one night to dig their way up out of the grave.

  Maybe if you were going to raise one from the dead, you should stick around longer than fifteen minutes or so to see if it worked.

  Ernestine had a whole lot of maybes and one definite that she didn’t think about until too late. No matter what else happened in a zombie apocalypse, you should definitely not stand about gaping at the zombie’s empty grave. The empty grave is never your biggest problem.

  Anything standing behind you is way more dangerous.

  Ernestine realized that just as she heard two dull thuds followed by the sound of two bodies hitting the ground.

  Whipping around, she saw one of the Swanson twins standing over Charleston and her mother as they lay unconscious.

  “You’re too smart for your own good, dearie,” that twin said.

  Then the other one smacked her across the head from behind.

  Just like that, Ernestine had a whole new set of problems.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Zombie Leftovers

  SATURDAY, 2:47 AM

  Ernestine awoke to find herself gagged as well as bound hand and foot. For a moment, she thought she was blindfolded, too, since she couldn’t see a thing. Perhaps the zombie had stuffed her down into its grave. Sort of like tucking a doggie bag in the fridge for later. Just as her hysteria bubbled over into a scream, Ernestine remembered that it hadn’t been a zombie who attacked her at all. It had been the Swanson twins, who had only made it look like a zombie was out and about to cover up their murderous plans. Probably, they weren’t planning on eating her, and given the amount of room she had to wiggle about in, they didn’t seem to have shoved her into the grave Ernestine now realized they must have dug as a distraction.

  In fact, she had an entire roomful of room in which to move around. A room full of stuff that she kept banging into and bruising herself on.

  Which meant she was either locked in an actual room or else this was the biggest, poshest penthouse of a coffin in the world. Since she was betting on a room, Ernestine immediately calmed down a bit.

  Not all the way calmed-down, of course. She still had all sorts of problems. Like the fact that she was tied up and gagged. On the bright side, she didn’t seem to be blindfolded, after all. If she could find a light switch, she might be able to find a way out of here. Which Ernestine would have liked to have done as quickly as possible before she could think too much about tight, dark places.

  Now that she was fully awake and only panicking a little, Ernestine remembered that it had been the Swanson twins who’d attacked her and her family. She appeared to be sitting on some rather dank paving stones, with the cold seeping up through her coat. It was hard to tell, what with not being able to see anything, but the air had a musty chill to it that reminded Ernestine of the basement in MacGillicuddie House.

  A bit of wiggling about indicated that Charleston lay tied up on the cold stone floor next to her. At least, Ernestine assumed the small, lumpy body that groaned when she poked it was Charleston. She supposed it could be anyone really since she couldn’t see, but he seemed the likeliest possibility. Where, then, was her mother?

  The answer to that came when she felt someone’s fingers creeping across her head before locating the ties on her gag and tugging at them. Actually, Ernestine hoped those fingers were her mother’s. In the dark, all sorts of things seemed possible, including detached-yet-helpful hands that just happened to be wandering around the graveyard, looking for their lost body. Having been unable to find it, perhaps they had followed Ernestine here like a lost puppy.

  The gag in her mouth loosened and then sagged as the fingers behind her undid the last knot. Ernestine spat it out and through a tongue that felt as fuzzy as if it had been stuffed with cotton balls, she asked, “Mom?”

  Whoever it was mumbled something back th
rough a gag of their own. Following the grunts, Ernestine scooted around, and raising up her bound hands, fumbled about until she found the back of the person’s head. From the soft, springy feel of her short curls and the sharp scent of turpentine, Ernestine felt confident it was her mother.

  “Ernestine!” her mom cried hoarsely as soon as her gag fell away. “Are you all right? Is Charleston there somewhere by you?”

  “I’m pretty sure Charleston’s on the other side of me, but I don’t think he’s awake yet. As for me—well, I’m tied up and locked in a small room,” Ernestine pointed out tightly, panic beginning to creep its way back into her voice. Fear always made Ernestine angry, which was fine with her. If she had to pick between being scared or mad, she’d pick mad every time.

  Maya leaned forward and kissed her daughter on top of the head. Well, in the dark, she might have been aiming for Ernestine’s cheek, but where her lips ended up was on her head. “I love you, Nestea.” Though her hands were still tied, she lifted her fingers up to ruffle Ernestine’s hair.

  Ernestine collapsed against her mother’s side and let herself give in—for a bit—to how good it felt to snuggle there. “I love you, too, Mom.”

  The body next to her made a snuffling sound as though it wanted to be hugged, too. Unless, of course, the body next to Ernestine was, in fact, Charleston turned into a zombie and he was now begging to be let loose so he could devour them both. Again, in the dark, anything seemed possible.

  As Ernestine curled up in a ball, wrapping her bound hands around her knees, Maya pushed past her to untie Charleston’s gag.

  “Ernestine!” he gasped when he could speak.

  “No, it’s Maya.”

  “Oh.” Charleston went quiet for a moment. “No offense, Maya. It’s just that usually it’s Ernestine who helps me.”

  “Well, there’s nothing for me to paint right now,” Maya said dryly. “Or at least, if there is, I can’t see it.”