Murder, Magic, and Moggies

by Pearl Goodfellow

  It wasn’t a bad analogy. Maude’s state-of-the-art lab was often a place where heaping platefuls of information were digested. Chewed up and spewed out to churn out facts that helped us solve some pretty baffling cases. My empty stomach started to growl in protest.

  “That’s it. As soon as we’re done here, I am going to meet Governor Shields at the pizza parlor!” I sounded a little petulant, which caused my cheeks to flush with childlike shame.

  But, the sight of what Maude had served up on the slab instantly destroyed any sort of appetite I might have had. It positively wiped out any feelings of embarrassment I had just been feeling.

  “MAUDE!!! YOU KILLED HECTOR!!!”

  Laughter was NOT the reaction I expected to receive. Nor was the sight of Maude slapping her knee so hard that her right hand snapped clean off and skittered across the floor. Past the motionless form of Hector Muerte and careening by a second, draped body, finally coming to rest under the bank of chiller drawers.

  “Whoa,” Carbon muttered. “It’s a good thing Fraidy’s not here. That scaredy cat? Would have lost his kibble by now.”

  But, the loss of limb didn’t seem to faze Maude one little bit.

  “Well, fudge,” she said, matter-of-factly. She gestured with her one good hand. “Do you know that’s the second one this week? I think I need to find a new supplier.”

  She tottered nonchalantly over to the chillers on two left feet and slid open one long drawer.

  “Mmm, let’s see, fingers. No. Noses. No. Although this little button number is adorable. Note to self for allergy season. Left foot. Right foot. Ah!” she exclaimed. “Hands!”

  David and I gave a collective shudder. One of the few things we seemed to have in sync lately.

  When you were a ghoul, like Maude, I suppose it was a common occurrence for body parts to decay and wear after a while. Fortunately, she kept a ready supply of replacement parts on hand…including right hands as it turns out. She grabbed a Hagedorn needle and some suture thread and, with an expert whip stitch, attached the new appendage in a blink. Easy as if she were cross-stitching “Home, Sweet Home.” She closed the chiller drawer and wiggled the rigor out of her new fingers.

  “Good as new! Well, gently used, anyway.” She beamed that thousand-watt smile. I stood, speechless.

  “But, Maude!” David finally managed to find his voice and gestured to the motionless body of Maude’s assistant on the slab. “What the Bast happened to Hector?”

  My unwilling eyes drifted toward the stationary form. Granted, the zombie had never been a “hop-to” sort of fellow. At best, he sort of slumped along at a snail’s pace, shuffling one size thirteen Doc Marten in front of the other as he went about his daily tasks as assistant coroner. But, his eerily still form rippled another set of shivers down my spine.

  An odd, metal halo was fitted around his head. Fierce metal bolts gnashed into his translucent, yellowish skin. His flesh was pulled so tautly over his high cheekbones you could trace the ripple and ridge of each ropy, sinewy vessel beneath. His stringy black hair, already sparse by regular follicular standards, poked from beneath the metal frame in scattered clumps. Hector's pallid lips remained set in rigored stillness.

  Maude’s wispy brows knotted in a confused little twist. “Hector? What are you talking about? There’s nothing wrong with Hector. He was helping me with an experiment and must have fallen asleep while I was welcoming you two in. Probably just got bored waiting.” Maude Dulgrey shrugged nonchalantly.

  “Waiting for what?” I asked, relief returning my voice now that I knew that Hector wasn't more dead than he usually was. Maude shuffled to an ominous-looking switch on the wall. She paid no mind to Carbon toying playfully with the long, twisting cable that hung limply from the switch. The cord trailed in loops and twists, up and directly into a socket at the crown of the metal millinery on Hector's enormous head.

  “Why, a shocking revelation of course!”

  Maude threw the big-handled switch and plunged the entire lab into complete and inky darkness.

  “Me-YOW-YOW-YOW!!!” Carbon hollered at ear-splitting decibels and launched, claws first, for the popcorn-textured ceiling.

  The artificial night lasted only a moment as a bolt of brilliant lightning arced across the room – directly into Hector’s haloed head. Everything glowed a psychedelic electric violet. The chromatograph. The mass spectrometer. The specter of Hector’s rotting, clenched teeth. It was a nightmare scene ripped from the mind of Shelley. The zombie’s big body arched higher than I’d ever seen the cats accomplish. Then suddenly, he started jerking along doing the one-twenty hertz shuffle.

  “Betcha didn’t know Hector could dance, huh?” Maude jibed, her bony shoulders shaking in laughter as both David’s jaw and my own dropped nearly clean to the floor. “Although, he’ll never be as spry as Horace Mangler? Did you hear we’re taking dance lessons? For a big man, he’s incredibly graceful.” Maude smiled affectionately, at an intimate memory of Gless Inlet's bartender, Horace Mangler, in dancing flight. I glanced at Maude's two left feet. I could only shake my head before a jagged spark connected with my foot, crisping my beach sandals into fried bits of cowhide. The lab suddenly smelled like smoked jerky. I yelped in pain, instinctively drawing back, and tried to dance feeling back into my smoldering foot.

  “Hattie!” the Chief lunged to help me.

  An errant bolt also licked David’s shoes, but, strangely, he didn’t flinch, or even indicate that he’d even felt it. I didn’t take the time to consider the implications before I yelled out. “Maude!”

  The ghoul’s eyes widened in shock when she realized the parameters of her little experiment were zapping afoul. Her two left feet suddenly found agility and speed, and she lurched for the large wall switch.

  The high pitched shuddering hum rumbled to a stop, and the arcs of electricity collapsed with their source of energy turned off.

  “Heavens to Brigid!” Maude cried. “Dearest, Hattie. I am so sorry. I have no idea why the electricity is behaving that way. It should not have channeled anywhere but Hector! That just shouldn't have happened!” Maude's thin hair was standing in an alarming formation, as she whipped her head around looking for the culprit who might have sabotaged her voltage-testing.

  “You intentionally deep-fried your assistant?” David asked, concerned but none the worse for wear after our electrifying experience.

  Maude pursed her dry lips. “What? Hector? What’s the big deal? He’s a zombie. It’s not like he can get any deader.”

  David blinked rapidly and looked at me. I shrugged. Maude had a point.

  “Besides,” she continued, disconnecting the zapped zombie from all his electrical accoutrements. “Something about Millicent’s remains was bothering me. I needed to replicate the damage that the average electrical surge of a lightning bolt would have on human tissue. I didn’t think you would approve of me conducting my little experiment on a live subject so, of course, Hector was the next logical choice. So, I hooked him up, Franken-style, and wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, I got the results I expected.”

  Maude struck a little “tah-dah” pose just as a blackened puff-ball dropped from the ceiling. Maude gave a tiny yelp of shock as Carbon stumbled drunkenly across the lab floor looking like a dust-bunny on crack.

  “Well, maybe a little more than I expected.”

  Carbon hiccoughed. A small plume of black smoke wafted from his mouth as he left a wobbly trail of charcoal paw prints across the linoleum. I winced. Maude was gonna need a bucket-load of salmon treats to earn Carbon’s forgiveness on this one.

  “Carbon! You okay?” I cried.

  “S-s-smokin’, Hat.” He gave two furry mitten paws up and stumbled an ashen trail in the opposite direction. I might need to have Dilwyn Werelamb give my cooked kitty a once over, just to be sure. I’d have preferred to have taken him to see Anima Mink, but she had just moved to Talisman to open an even larger animal practice there. Dilwyn was hardly a qualified vet. And, yet, the crotchety
old man did have a remarkable way with animals, and was lauded as one of the best diagnosticians for animal ailments on the islands. So, as the town’s unofficial veterinarian, of both mythical and ordinary creatures alike, he’d be able to tell if the zap had sapped anything crucial from the immortal feline.

  “And just what results were you expecting, Maude?” David pressed. “I thought Millicent was struck by lightning? Did you discover something unusual about her death?”

  Maude pressed her thin lips together and haughtily crossed her arms.

  “Well, of course, I did,” she declared. “Do you honestly think I’d put poor Hector through all this if I didn’t expect a definitive result? Look at this.”

  She gestured to Hector’s feet, charred and blackened around the edges. “See here? Lightning is nothing more than electricity. One hundred thousand amperes of electricity, but electricity nonetheless. A flow of either positively or negatively charged electrons. A channel of ionized air develops from a charged region in the thundercloud and seeks the most direct path away from the region of dense charge.”

  “S-s-somebody say charge? D-d-drinks all ar-r-round! Put it on H-ha-hattie's Alchem-m-m-y Express C-c-card,” Carbon slurred.

  Yeah. Make that a LOT of salmon treats.

  Maude grimaced. “Oh, dear. Anyway, do you see these markings on Hector?”

  She pointed to a series of branched, tree-like markings traveling up the length of Hector’s pasty legs. David and I nodded in tandem. Maude continued. “Lichtenberg figures. Keraunographic markings that form when capillaries beneath the skin rupture due to the electrical discharge. Other than that, true lightning doesn’t leave much of a mark on its victims. Most people who have been struck by lightning die, not from burns and charring, but because of atrial defibrillation. Heart failure. But, Millicent here? Not only was she generally cooked like a blackened redfish, but she had one particular super-doozie of a burn. Right over her sternum. Strange, too, because there was no evidence of a conductive source of any kind there. Just the burn in this weird kind of starburst pattern. Right over the old ticker.”

  “It’s a shame, really, because she might have been saved with prompt administration of CPR.” Maude sighed. “Sadly, many people labor under the delusion that bodies that have been struck by lightning somehow still retain an electrical charge and could zap a would-be rescuer. Tsk, tsk. The only true danger is ignorance.”

  She shook her gray head. “So, the unfortunate truth is that most often, much-needed help doesn’t get administered in time.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that a person who's been struck by lightning would not be twerking and jerking from a residual current after being struck.” David stretched his words out slow and long.

  Maude nodded. “Highly unlikely.” She cleared her throat. "Actually, almost impossible."

  David returned an even slower nod. “Got it. And such, ahem, unusual mobility would likely rule out death from natural causes.”

  “It would certainly steer the investigation toward a more supernatural explanation, yes.”

  Great. There went any hope of wrapping things up and stealing a quick slice with Cathedral’s devastatingly handsome governor.

  Maude’s face twisted in that odd, quizzical look again. “But, I don’t understand, Inspector. Why so curious about residual current?”

  “’Cause Miley Cyrus has got nothin’ on Millicent and her moves!” Carbon exclaimed, his frazzled brain rocking back on all four cylinders. “She’s ALIVE and TWERKING!!!”

  His claws skittered uselessly on the hard tile as he vainly attempted to find traction. “Get MEOW-t of here!”

  No amount of wood stoking the fire was going to keep Carbon in the lab for even a second longer. He shot, frizzed fur and all, like a bat out of hell and disappeared into the dark stone corridor. I stared blankly at David who raised a stiff arm toward the still figure on the far side of Hector. Only, the figure was no longer still. It twitched and writhed in foul, jumpy movements under the white shroud. For a moment, I toyed with the concept that Maude’s little experiment with Hector had, indeed, brought the recently deceased back to life.

  David clutched my arm, and I felt an entirely different kind of electricity. For a moment, our eyes locked. There was a surge…

  …and then...

  …Millicent’s body fell still.

  Flat.

  Dead.

  “Well, Hattie,” David began once he found his voice again. “Looks like we have another murder investigation on our hands. You should probably call Gideon and tell him you’re definitely not going to make it to the pizza parlor.”

  I couldn’t be sure, but I’d almost swear I saw a satisfied little grin creep into the edges of David’s mouth.

  Great. Gless Inlet gets another murder, and I don’t get any food.

  Another one bites the crust.

  Chapter 6

  Whoever came up with the phrase “green with envy” never tried to satiate the gnawing pangs of a devastating hunger with broccoli. As I crunched down emphatically on the cruciferous vegetable Hector had so graciously donated to my growling stomach, I decided I was in no way envious of the vegetarian zombie’s restrictive diet. No matter how healthy it might be.

  There was something green I was very interested in, however. When I reminded Chief Inspector Trew of the reports of Beryl lightning arcing in the gloomy skies over Gaunt Manor, he had nearly yanked my arm from its socket dragging me to WYRD, Gless Inlet’s local television station. I’d barely had time to grab the broccoli on the way out the door.

  “Okay! Okay! Okay!” I hollered as we booked it away from Maude’s.

  “But, I need to stop at The Angel for a second. Thanks to Maude’s little experiment, I need new shoes.” I pointed down to the still-smoking sandals on my feet.

  “And, thanks to you, I could use some real food.” I waved an annoyed floret of broccoli in his face for emphasis.

  Fortunately for him, he looked acceptably sheepish at that last. “You’re right. I haven’t exactly been the best friend lately, have I? I’m sorry, Hat.”

  He lowered his baby blues behind his round-rimmed glasses, dark lashes brushing the tops of his cheeks. Damn, but it was hard to stay mad at him for very long.

  “It’s okay, David. I’m probably not going to win any awards for being Miss Congeniality either. I turn into kind of shrew when I’m hungry. In case you haven’t noticed.” I tendered a smile as a peace offering and rested a broccoli-free hand on his arm.

  The sudden sensation that shot through my fingers as it touched his bare skin caused me to draw back instinctively. Hot and cold at the same time. Like when the bath water runs scalding hot, yet feels icy cold.

  I tried to remember my high school science class. What was it called? Paradoxical cold? I vaguely remembered Malaise Dred, my stuffy ninth grade Physics teacher who always smelled of mothballs, talking about how both cold and heat thermo-receptors would sometimes fire simultaneously when exposed to temperatures above one hundred and thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. It was one of the mysteries science could not explain.

  I chalked it up to frazzled nerve endings from the jarring jolt I’d received in Maude’s lab. Who knows what other little side effects would result from her experimental escapade? I thought of poor Carbon. I hoped he was okay.

  If David noticed my involuntary reaction, he didn’t say anything. I let the matter drop as we strolled briskly toward my family’s shop.

  “What exactly do you hope to find at the television station?” I asked, rubbing my fingertips together trying to regain feeling. “I thought we were going to question Portia Fearwyn.”

  “Three things a good detective always looks for, Hattie. Motive, means, and opportunity. Sure, there have been reports of green lightning over Portia’s neck of the woods, but to assume that she’s got something to do with Millicent’s death based solely on that? The powers that be on Talisman would have me out on my keister faster than you could say ‘abracadabra. But, st
ill. She IS using electricity. And she DID have a beef with old Millicent. She’s looking good for suspect number one, wouldn’t you say?’”

  I gave a thoughtful crunch on my broccoli. It was an adorable keister. Would be a shame to see it bouncing and bruising down Main Street.

  The celestial bells on the door of The Angel Apothecary chimed brightly as David opened the door and stepped aside to allow me passage. Fact of the matter was, David wasn’t wrong. I’d worked enough cases with him and the GIPPD to know that somebody had to have a legitimate reason to dispatch someone into Oneness with the Divine…at least if you were going to make a murder charge stick. And as unpleasant as Portia Fearwyn was, I guess we couldn’t just go around accusing her of every single murder that occurred on Glessie Isle. No sooner had we stepped inside the door, did we collide with my assistant. Millie gushed a torrent of panicky words from under her cheery hair-do.

  “Hattie! Hattie! Hattie! Portia Fearwyn? She’s a murderer!”

  Then again…

  “Whoa, there, Pinkalicious!” David caught Millie under the arms as she skidded into us. “What do you mean Portia’s a murderer? Did you hear her confess?”

  As long as we’re talking about true confessions, I have to say; my tummy did a little dance of joy. If Portia had admitted to killing Millicent, we were more than well on our way to meeting the criteria for the murder trifecta. Maybe we could wrap up this whole investigation, and I would still have time to meet Gideon for dinner. Or, at least a late night snack anyway. I swept my tongue over my broccoli filled teeth.

  Millie shook her mane of pink curls. “No, no, no!”

  My salivating taste buds blew a big fat raspberry.

  Peanut butter and jelly it is.

  “But, she just ordered a truckload of baneful herbs! Hellebore, Datura, Wormwood! Demongrass!” Millie waved the inventory slip under our noses. “She had all the legal paperwork. But, Hat! She ordered so much! I can’t even begin to think what that evil old crone is up to with that many lethal supplies. What are we going to do?