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!”

“Urp.” Rather than looking, Charleston slapped a hand over his mouth and ran for the bathroom.

Ernestine waited patiently until he’d finished puking up the brownies, rinsed his mouth out, and collapsed once again on the couch. Then she held up the slender thread of fishing wire she’d found. “Someone loosened the bolts, then attached a wire to the chandelier. While all the fighting was going on, that someone tugged on the wire to make the chandelier fall onto the crowd below.”

“But who?” Charleston asked weakly. “I didn’t see anyone pulling on it.”

“Neither did I,” Ernestine admitted. “But the fishing line is so thin, I don’t think anyone could see it unless they knew it was there. And with all of the cheering and the fist-pumping going on during the fight, anyone could have yanked it down without anyone else noticing a thing.”

“Who do you think was supposed to get murdered?” Charleston asked, sliding down off the couch. “Do you think it was Mrs. MacGillicuddie? Or Eduardo? Or maybe even the Swanson twins? They were the ones most likely to die in the accident since the chandelier smashed right through their tightrope when it fell. It was just chance that Mrs. MacGillicuddie was even under it. Hey, I’m hungry again. Let’s go help the Talmadges make supper.”

That was an excellent point about the Swanson twins. Although, what about that floorboard? Ernestine wondered as she followed Charleston down the stairs. If someone wanted to kill the twins, that didn’t add up.

Maya and Frank were actually already down in the Talmadges’ kitchen, helping them chop vegetables. Normally, Mrs. Talmadge would be fixing Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s supper, but after all of the excitement last night, Mrs. MacGillicuddie had decided to go on a juice cleanse to make sure she looked fantastic in case she was murdered. As she said, “No one wants to be an unattractive corpse on the society page, darling. Imagine the embarrassment!” So the Talmadges had invited Ernestine and her family to their apartment for dinner instead.

After last night, Ernestine was a bit afraid that Mr. Talmadge might go bonkers at the sight of the carrots and start throwing knives around, insisting that they have their chicken with ham on the side and a nice salmon mousse for dessert.

But he just placidly chopped some rosemary instead.

“Mr. and Mrs. Talmadge, can you think of anyone who might want to kill the Swanson twins?” Ernestine asked, pausing from her work. “Well, you know. Aside from zombies, who I think it’s safe to assume want to kill everyone.”

“Who? Libitina and Morana?” Mrs. Talmadge asked, surprised.

“Um, I think?” Ernestine had never actually heard their full names before. Which, if Maya had named her Libitina or Morana, she’d make sure that no one ever heard it, either.

“Lots of disappointed boyfriends, I suspect,” Mr. Talmadge snickered, dicing a pile of carrots with several rapid whacks of his meat cleaver.

“Now Rupert, luv, that isn’t nice. You make them sound like maneaters.”

“From what I hear, they broke a lot of hearts.”

“Oh, and who did you hear that from?” Mrs. Talmadge stopped stirring whatever was in a saucepan on the stove and put one hand on her hip.

“Mr. Sangfroid. Apparently he used to date Libitina many, many years ago.” If Mr. Talmadge was snickering before, he positively guffawed now. Until the disapproving glare of his wife caused him to sober up. Chastened, he concentrated on chopping the rest of the carrots.

“But Mr. Sangfroid hates the twins.” Ernestine recalled how angry he had been when speaking of them. Angry enough to murder someone, it seemed like. “He said they were garbage.”

“You don’t hate someone like that without having loved them first,” Mr. Talmadge said wisely. His wife nodded, too, even though that didn’t make a bit of sense to Ernestine.

“Love, man,” Frank agreed sagely. “It’s a many-splendored creation.”

Ernestine had absolutely no idea what that meant, either, but as she loathed admitting that she didn’t know something, she decided to just google it later. Of course, it was entirely possible it only made sense to Frank and no amount of googling would make it sensible to anyone else.

“How about Mrs. MacGillicuddie? Can you think of anyone who might want to kill her?” asked Ernestine as Mrs. Talmadge showed Charleston how to pour the sauce over the leftover chicken legs from last night’s cemetery expedition.

“Her family,” everyone responded in unison and then looked at each other.

Maya’s face scrunched up as she set the table with silverware and plates. “Oh, that’s rather sad, isn’t it?”

“Yes, families should be very protective of each other,” Ernestine told her mother meaningfully.

“And supportive,” Maya agreed, hugging her as though they were on the same page. “And encourage them to be individuals who seek out their own destinies.”

Ernestine pulled away and crossed her arms. “In the zombie apocalypse, no one will have a destiny to seek out if we don’t keep a very close eye on each other.”

Maya winced and let her go. In a slightly wobbly voice, she said, “The apocalypse sounds awful. Like when I was a girl and my mother would never let me out of her sight, not even for a moment. I ran off when I was eighteen and never looked back.”

“Grandma probably wanted to make sure nothing terrible happened to you,” Ernestine pointed out, satisfied by the stricken look her words brought to Maya’s face.

Mr. Talmadge broke the awkward silence that followed by saying to Maya, “You sound like me. I ran away from home when I was fourteen. I was living in London back then. Got me first job cleaning up at the Black Swan Pub. You had to be tough, you did. Not like these days, eating all these frou-frou garden weeds and worrying about whether your food had legs to try and run away with…”

He had started to ramble on, but a whack on the shoulder with Mrs. Talmadge’s wooden spoon brought him back to the present. Mr. Talmadge looked around sheepishly. “Sorry. I know I do go on about the old days sometimes.”

When dinner had finished cooking, they sat down together to eat it. Ernestine pointed out to Mr. Talmadge that zombies, like him, felt meat should be a staple of any proper diet, while Mrs. Talmadge asked Frank and Maya about their gallery opening on Saturday.

“Yes, Saturday is a big day,” Ernestine agreed grumpily. “We should all definitely pay attention to what a big day Saturday is.”

Charleston was the only one who noticed her tone. “What do you mean? It’s the fourteenth, isn’t it? That’s Valentine’s Day, right?”

It was, but that wasn’t what made it a big day for Ernestine. “Oh, never mind.”

After supper, Maya and Frank went off to work on their very big, important artwork for their very big, important day, while Charleston tried to sneak off to watch a competitive cooking show with Mr. Talmadge. Ernestine caught him and marched him upstairs to do his homework.

“You have a math test tomorrow!” She pointed at the note in his agenda book. Their teachers made them fill it out at the end of each school day so they wouldn’t forget anything. “And you’re barely passing as it is. We have to maintain good grades or they’ll kick us out! And then you’ll have to go to the public school, and you’ll never get into college.”

“So what?” Charleston sulked, opening his math book without enthusiasm as a bored-looking swan wandered past.

“So what?!” Ernestine repeated, shocked. “So what?!”

She sat down next to him and folded her hands on the table. “Have I taught you nothing? When the apocalypse comes, it will be the stupid people who get eaten first. If you don’t exercise your brain properly, it gets all mushy like a rotten apple. That makes it easier to suck out when they crack open your skull! So, if you don’t want to be a zombie Slurpee, you will pass your math class with at least a B!”

“Fine.” Charleston thunked his head against his open book. He did, however, study with Ernestine for the next two hours. At the end of that time, she was reasonably sure he’d get at least a C on the test and not rot away into zombie baby food. Not tomorrow, anyway.

In bed, with Charleston snoring down below, Ernestine took out a flashlight and read some of her comic books underneath the covers. You never knew when you might have missed something critical, so it was always a good idea to go back and reread things as many times as possible. She was looking for anything that might suggest that sometimes zombies didn’t look or act like zombies while actually being zombies. Just in case it really had been a zombie trying to break in last night and not a homicidal maniac. Eventually, she gave up and turned her flashlight off, safe in the knowledge that she probably wouldn’t get eaten tonight. Probably.

In the deep dark of the night, something woke her up out of a sound sleep. Ernestine shot upright, immediately on the alert. She’d heard a noise downstairs in the foyer, she was sure of it. The Hep Cats didn’t have any gigs tonight, there wasn’t a party going on in Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s suite, and no one else had any plans to be out late as far as Ernestine knew. So whatever was going bump in the night had an excellent chance of being either a murderer or a zombie. Whichever it was, Ernestine was quite sure she didn’t want it sneaking up on her while she slept.

Crawling down out of her bunk, she pulled on the zombie mask she’d worn last Halloween and then shook Charleston’s bed violently. When he rolled over and squinted blearily at her, she shoved her face down by his and moaned, “Brains… braaaaaaaiiiiins…”

“AAAUUUGGGHHH!!!” Charleston screamed and skittered backward, slamming against the wall.

“What sort of zombie attack response was that?” Ernestine yanked off her mask. “If I’d been a real zombie, what good would going, ‘AAAUUUGGGHHH’ do? A zombie isn’t going to run away because you yelled at it!”

Charleston flopped against his mattress. “I gotta get my own room. One with a lock on the door.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.”

As Charleston mushed his glasses onto his face, Ernestine handed him his baseball bat, while keeping a second one for herself. “I think something’s trying to break in downstairs. Let’s go kill it.”

“Couldn’t we just tell my dad and your mom about it?” Charleston pleaded.

“No, they’d just paint it or wrap it up in aluminum foil and tie it to a sculpture. C’mon.”

Weapons held aloft, the two of them tiptoed past the sleeping swans, out of the attic and down the back stairs to the third floor, where they switched over to the better-lit front stairs. The stairs zigzagged around the foyer so that you could see down all three stories. Peering over the railing, Ernestine couldn’t see anything but shadows below. Which didn’t mean anything because everyone knew that both zombies and murderers loved to lurk in shadows.

“You know, getting a good night’s sleep is highly recommended before taking a test,” Charleston hissed on the way, apparently holding a grudge.

“So is surviving until morning,” Ernestine pointed out.

No one appeared to be up at the moment, not even Mr. Ellington and the Hep Cats, who frequently stayed up until the wee hours of the morning even when there wasn’t a party going on, scatting and reminiscing about the time Jack Kerouac threw up in Mr. Ellington’s saxophone. Even the mice seemed to have called it a night.

Reaching the bottom of the steps, they both stood still, listening. Far, far away, Ernestine could hear the sounds of cars on the expressway. Much, much closer, she could also hear the slow shuffling of feet.

“Erk.” Charleston strangled a gasp in his throat, his eyes bugging out in fear. Ernestine elbowed him and put her finger to her lips.

The back door. Something was definitely lurching about somewhere near the back door. Right next to the laundry room with the broken window latch. Ernestine and Charleston peered slowly around the edge of the elaborately carved banister. When nothing tried to murder and eat them, they slowly tiptoed forward.

A long, long, loooooong wood-paneled hallway led to the back of the house, with doors off of it leading to various rooms. Through the mudroom, a pale square of light marked the window in the back door. Moving silently, they stepped closer and closer with Charleston huddled against Ernestine’s back. Closer… closer…

Something rose up out of the shadows, so nearby that it loomed up and over them, its hideously decayed face just barely visible from the security light in the backyard.

“ZOMMMBIEEEEEEEE!” Charleston screamed and swung at it with his baseball bat. He missed and knocked Ernestine into the wall in the process. Then he threw his bat at it, and retreated behind Ernestine in a state of panic.

The zombie screamed, too, but at least it had the sense to snatch up the bat and take a swing at Ernestine.

“Oh great, Charleston. Arm the zombie, why don’t you?” Ernestine snapped in exasperation as it tried to play t-ball with her head. She ducked and struck back at it with her own bat, smacking it right in its zombie gut. It grunted in pain as a bit of it fell off, which distracted the creature long enough for Ernestine to aim for its head.

Rats. Displaying amazing reflexes for something half-decayed, it swerved backward just in time, and her bat whistled right past its nose.

“You’re not eating our brains!” Ernestine screamed and swung again.

Apparently that was too much for the zombie. It threw Charleston’s bat at Ernestine, knocking her down and gaining enough time to run out the back door. By the time she reached the backyard, there wasn’t a zombie in sight. Seriously, had her zombie been an Olympic runner in life or something? Zombies were supposed to shuffle slowly along since necessary body parts were probably hanging on by just a tendon or two. They weren’t supposed to sprint zestfully along as though they’d been working on their glutes with an undead personal trainer.

Charleston joined her at the doorway, glasses askew on his face.

“That was sorta embarrassing,” he admitted.

“You think?” Ernestine wanted to bang her head in frustration. Zombies were not supposed to be this hard to catch.

Behind them, the hallway lights flipped on. Ernestine and Charleston both screamed and clutched at each other in terror, rather proving Charleston’s point about the whole embarrassing aspect of the night’s fiasco.

It was not, however, the zombie back for a better look and possibly a nibble. Instead, it was Mrs. MacGillicuddie, dressed in a leopard-print robe and purple turban, green creamy stuff spread all over her face. Eduardo popped up behind her, green goo spread all over his face, too, and a shotgun crooked in his arm.

Ernestine and Charleston shrieked again.

“Goodness, darlings. What is all this racket about?” Mrs. MacGillicuddie demanded.

Half an hour later, Ernestine and Charleston were sitting around Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s kitchen table, china cups of hot chocolate in their hands, compliments of Eduardo. Mrs. MacGillicuddie was there, too, her face still slathered in beauty cream. A Ziploc bag lay in the middle of the table, and they all peered at it with interest. It contained the bit of zombie that had fallen off during the fight, proof they had a zombie problem on their hands. Ernestine couldn’t have been any more delighted.

“How shocking!” Mrs. MacGillicuddie said as she sipped at her cup. “I’ve never had a zombie problem before. Rats and cockroaches, yes, but never zombies! It’s positively thrilling!”

“I know!” Ernestine enthused, glad someone appreciated what a positive turn of events this was. At this rate, she might be able to achieve a full-scale, city-destroying, rotting-corpse infestation by the end of the week!

“And here you thought it hadn’t worked,” Mrs. MacGillicuddie said as though reading Ernestine’s thoughts.

“Wait. How did you know about that?” Ernestine asked, positive she hadn’t said anything to Mrs. MacGillicuddie about Monday night’s failure. She turned and glared at Charleston, who suddenly found the marshmallows bobbing in his cup to be awfully interesting.

“What?” he asked guiltily.

“Charleston, you do not run around telling people that you tried to start the apocalypse and failed. You only brag about it when you’re sure it succeeded! Otherwise, you’re not an evil genius, you’re just some idiot with an undead problem!”

“Ha! That’s my son, Rodney.” Mrs. MacGillicuddie leaned back as Eduardo sat a china plate of chocolate chip cookies on the table. “He’s an idiot with an undead problem. Only I’m the undead he has a problem with! Eduardo, be a darling and make me some warm milk, please. I’ll never be able to sleep knowing I was almost eaten by zombies if I don’t have some warm milk first.”

Eduardo did as she asked, pouring it into a pink teapot. As Ernestine watched, he pulled a bottle out of his pocket and discreetly tipped a bit of whatever it contained into the pot.

“MURDERER!” Ernestine shrieked, springing out of her chair so quickly, she knocked it over. She yanked the bottle out of Eduardo’s hands and gave it a sniff. It smelled dreadful.

Eduardo muttered something in Spanish, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. Mrs. MacGillicuddie snatched the bottle from her. “Don’t be so dramatic, darling. It’s just bourbon.”

“Mrs. MacGillicuddie!” Ernestine exclaimed, shocked.

“Well, you don’t think the milk is going to put me to sleep all by itself, do you, darling? It’s just milk from a cow. It’s not like their udders have any magical properties.”

“It could still be poisoned bourbon,” Charleston pointed out, munching on a hopefully unpoisoned cookie.

“Oh, darlings. Don’t be so silly. Here, put some in a bowl for Mr. Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins to try. That’ll prove to you that it’s fine.” Mrs. MacGillicuddie tipped some of the bourbon–milk mixture from the teapot into a saucer and sat it down on the floor for the cat.

“You can’t give a cat bourbon!” Ernestine said, shocked all over again.

“Whyever not? I do it all the time. Keeps Fluffy from clawing the curtains in the night.”

Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins settled down daintily at his dish and lapped at the milk. The four of them leaned toward him, waiting to see if he keeled over.

“See, he’s fine.” Mrs. MacGillicuddie poured milk into cups for all four of them as Eduardo took a delicate sip from his. “Now we all need a cup to sooth our nerves.”

“You can’t give kids bourbon!” This time it was Charleston who was shocked. Ernestine had sort of given up on it.

“Whyever not? I gave it to Rodney all the time when he was little, and he always slept right through the night.” Just as Ernestine and Charleston were trying to wrap their minds around Mrs. MacGillicuddie’s questionable parenting skills, Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins screeched a horrible screech. Mrs. MacGillicuddie froze in the act of lifting her china cup to her lips.

Back arched, tail stiff as a board, Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins hacked like he was about to spit up a hairball. Eduardo jumped backward to protect his purple slippers.

Only Fluffy-Wuffy-Kins didn’t spit out a wad of half-digested fur.

He keeled over on his side, dead as a doornail.