Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (28 page)

Harry made a thoughtful noise of acknowledgment, but
something
new had caught his attention, and he turned slowly to look at the bathroom. The way his elegant face hardened and his focus
sharpened made my scalp prickle. Then he went to ring Mr. Merritt’s bell.

“Harry?” I found my pencil, and opened my diary to a fresh page.

Combat Butler appeared in black slippers and velvet robe,
cocking his head questioningly.

“I do believe I will do my reading in this room tonight, Mr.
Merritt, if you would kindly fetch my book and my
pince-nez
?”

“Very good, my lord.”

Harry staying to sit in my room while I slept should have been comforting. It wasn’t; Harry was newly concerned, and that meant something was wrong. His gaze had strayed to the bathroom again. His pupils were pinpricks in wide chrome rings. I slipped into my nightshirt, got into bed, and tried to snuggle in for the night. I was acutely grateful for the hot water bottle Mr. Merritt had tucked beneath the covers, because a chilly thread of my earlier unease was creeping back in like a trickle of cold air under an old door.

Dear Diary: It’s possible I’m wrong about the ghosts. Which means the whole preternatural science community is wrong about ghosts. Everything spooky is just happening so much. I can’t contain the happy.
In case my diary didn’t get the sarcasm, I jotted:
Psych! Love, Marnie.

“Sleep, pet,” Harry said, stroking my cheek tenderly, and,
despite everything else, I did.

***

A few hours later, I jolted awake from a half-remembered dream about thrashing around in the murky canal with entirely too many
eels and skeleton hands and ice dragons, like some kind of
synchronized swim routine in my own personal hell. I found Harry sitting ramrod straight on the foot of the bed, staring at the dark doorway to the bathroom. It was still cute when Bob the Cat stared intently at things only he could see and attacked them in the middle of the night; when Harry was tensed to spring, it was decidedly more ominous. The only light in the room was coming from a blue ceramic canary
night light, and Harry was facing away from me, but I knew his
fangs
were fully extended. Perfectly still, book open and ignored on his lap, Harry hummed with potential energy like a panther ready to
pounce
on an unsuspecting meal below its perch. His preternatural vision sought movement in the near-dark, while one of his cool hands
drifted almost without thinking to smooth the blankets covering my foot. He patted me gently there. I reached for my pencil and saw that the Asiatic lilies on the tea trolley had blackened and curled.

Dear Diary:
Having trouble sleeping. Ghosts are a pain in the bahookie. Love, Marnie.
I put the diary and pencil back on the night stand and tried to get comfortable, cramming my face into my pillow and reminding myself
it can’t hurt you
. It felt like a lie.

“Mustn’t fuss,” Harry told me, his tone warmly reassuring. It made my eyelids heavy. The weight of Harry’s comfort settled in the front of my skull, lulling me deeper toward peace. “Sleep deeply
now, my restless sprite.”

WHEN MY PHONE
started bopping the Inspector Gadget theme song at five-thirty in the morning I was alone again, and really glad I’d changed all my ring tones to reflect who was calling. I wouldn’t have even cracked an eyelid to pick up for Batten, but Schenk? That was safe enough. My arm flipped out from under the covers and snatched the phone up.

“Fnargh. Glerrr. Whaddayahuh?”

“Just about right.” Constable FunTimes didn’t sound like he’d slept yet. Either that or I was talking to a bear coming out of hibernation. “Can my psychic tell when someone’s lying?” he asked.

“Maybe, if they're really bad at it.” I dug sleep boogers out of my eye with a fingertip. “I’m not going to like where you’re going with this, am I?”

“Meet me out front of your place in ten.”

“What,
now?”
I groaned
.
“It’s ass o’clock in the morning.”

“Actually, it’s quarter past I’ll-Find-Another-Psychic.”

“We can’t work at…” I squinted at the alarm clock. “Five-thirty.”

“You can tell time,” he noted, as though impressed. “Lennie Epp, fifty-eight, local farmer, is available now. So, we go now.”

I didn’t so much jump out of bed as drool sideways, arm first to brace against the carpet, legs flopping as though boneless. Like a gymnast doing a cartwheel, if that gymnast had been sucking on
roofies. I was,
unofficially, the limpest gymnast ever. I tugged on my jeans while sitting bare-assed and listless on the carpet, pinching the cell phone between my ear and shoulder. “This Epp dude a witness to
something?”

“Says he saw some kids messing around down by the pond
about a month ago.”

“So? Aren’t there always kids messing around down there? It’s right near the Blue Ghost Tunnel.”

“Yeah, but this particular group had a metal detector. Our farmer says he’s seen them on more than one occasion, always at night, out there with headlamps.”

“Grave robbers?” I put the phone down to swap out my Derpy
Hooves nightshirt for a black t-shirt and my favorite cable knit
sweater, then picked it up again, wondering where I’d left my suede gloves.

“Wouldn’t jump to that,” Schenk was saying. “Probably just
being kids. Making out, messing with stuff, snooping around for old casket handles at the pond or what have you.”

“You’re sure you need me for this?”

“Wouldn’t dream of going without you,” he said, heavy on the sarcasm. “From now on, where I go, you go.”

“Did Malashock say so?”

“I said so,” he said sharply.

“
Sooooorr-eey
,” I grumbled, but he’d already hung up. Belatedly I
groaned at having reacquired my Canadian accent from hanging around with Schenk so much. I'd probably be taking responsibility
for the weather and apologizing to inanimate objects when I bumped into them if I didn't get out of here soon.

I found my gloves in the bathroom, both pairs, and put the suede ones on. I wondered what was crawling in Schenk’s craw this
morning; maybe he had developed a touch of Batten’s
I-shouldn’t-need-you
resistance. The fact that he’d summoned me just to question a local farmer, something he’d probably done a thousand times without the
help of someone like me… I winced. No wonder he was cranky. I vowed to keep that in mind and not harp on the subject. People
skills, me
? Point: Marnie
.

His Sonata was idling at the curb when I got downstairs, the
exhaust fogging the frigid air. I’d borrowed Mr. Merritt’s wool scarf to keep
my neck warm, but my cheeks nearly froze solid between my
reluctantly leaving the house and wrenching open the passenger door to throw myself into the car.

“I don’t suppose I could implore you to drive thr—”

He interrupted with the point of one big finger at the console where two familiar brown paper cups of coffee leaked steam
through the vents in their lids.

“Oh,” I said gratefully, “My hero. Hey, you look like roadkill, eh?” Okay, my people skills might have frozen off on the way to the car.

“I was feeling pretty today,” he deadpanned, “and you ruined it.”

I half-smiled at the sarcasm. “Seriously, you okay?”

“Just need coffee,” he sidestepped.

“Spill it, Tough Guy, what's the big secret?”

“Nightmare last night. Didn’t sleep well afterward.”

“Boy, you give up your secrets easy.”

He grunted. “Woke up aching, like I'd been swimming all night.”

Everything inside me went still and I flashed back on the chaotic dream of my own, half-remembered; drowning in the black water of the canal, swimming with a skeleton, an angry storm, a flash of light,
thunder, eels, and the shrieking approach of some spectral terror,
frost dragons circling overhead.

“Swimming?” I asked. “Why'd you say swimming? Why not running uphill, or boxing, or flying into a wall made of petrified moose testicles or something?”

“I don’t know. I just—“

“I had a swimming dream, too.” I told him every detail, only holding back the skeleton that went tumbling by in the turbulent waters. When I was done, he was holding onto his goatee, pulling on it, deep in thought.

“And that’s it?” he asked. “That’s everything?”

“What else should there be?”

“I had a similar dream, only there was this skeleton. With a spinning skull. It came off and rolled end over end in the water,
flashing jaw bone and forehead and…” He drifted, shook it off. “I should stop eating pizza with hot sausage and peppers before bed, that’s all.”

He took to the street carefully, minding the unplowed sections, coasting past black ice, navigating corners with more care than usual. He finished his coffee quickly, drinking with purpose; I had the feeling he’d have mainlined it if possible.

“Five forty-five,” the car said. I may have cost myself another six thousand dollars when it did.

***

The Epp farm was tucked behind an industrial park on the east side of the canal, not far from the Twin Flight Locks. From the looks of it, the farm had been there for generations, predating the industry by decades. It consisted of two barns and some henhouses, a maze of
chicken-wire fences topped with fresh snow, and a light blue farmhouse with doors and shutters freshly painted the brilliant yellow of egg yolk.

Downwind, it stank of years’ worth of guano. So did Mr. Epp, who came waddling out of the smaller barn wiping his hands on his olive green coveralls, trudging through the snow. His padded, red plaid jacket was the type that always made me think of lumberjacks.
Under a crammed-down, wrinkly Molson Canadian knit cap of
washed-
out grey, he had poker-straight orange hair complemented by a
silver-
streaked carroty handlebar mustache that he must have begun
cultivating about the time I was born. I thought Batten’s
upper lip would be sorely intimidated in the face of such manly follicles. When he opened his
mouth to talk I expected him to draw matching revolvers like Yosemite Sam. He was definitely the rootinest, tootinest, chicken-
poopinest dude I'd ever laid eyes on.

“Why, I know I said I’m up and at ‘em before dawn, officer, but I sure didn’t expect you to show before the sun did.”

I whispered, “Is he for real?”

Schenk elbowed me. Because of his height his chiding elbow connected with my left ear. “I understand you witnessed some
youths down by the pond recently,” Schenk said. “Why don’t we go inside and you can tell me all about that?”

“Sorry, you misunderstood.” The farmer rubbed one hand with the other in rough strokes, thumb-in-palm. “I said I knew they were down there, but I didn’t
personally
see them.”

“Oh?” Schenk withdrew a flip pad and his pencil from his inside jacket pocket and scribbled a note.

“The chickens saw them.”

Schenk didn’t miss a beat. “The chickens.” He wrote this, too, as though it could possibly mean something.

I raised my hand like I was in class. “Uh, how do you know the chickens saw them?”

“They told me. Well, not
me,
directly.” Epp smiled widely. “Obviously, I can’t talk to chickens.”

“You can’t,” Schenk clarified.

“No, not me, no sir.” When he shook his head Epp’s ginger handlebars waved hypnotically back and forth like magic tentacles.
“So,
I’ll just go get the Chicken Whisperer, and we’ll get to interviewing
your star witnesses, officer.”

Epp tromped off in the direction of the house. Schenk let a long, steady breath out of his nostrils and began to thump his pencil against his pad rapidly,
taptaptap
. My eyes snuck sideways and way, way up at him.

“Did he just say Chicken Whisperer?”

Unhappily, Schenk confirmed, “He did.”

“Oh, I’m
so
glad I answered your call this morning.”

“You owe me big time.”

“Wait a second. You woke me up, told me to come with you under pain of replacement with some less-awesome psychic, and I owe you? What kind of happy horse hockey are you trying to pull, Longshanks?”

“Hockey?” He paused, thoughtful. “I'll be damned. That's why he looks so familiar. He could be Lanny McDonald's twin brother.”

What I knew about hockey would probably fit on a puck with
room to spare, because I am the worst Canadian in the history of ever, so I kept my ignorance to myself. I thought he needed a pat on the arm to bolster his spirits, so I gave him one.

He glanced down at me. “Getting anything off him, Big City Psychic?”

“Not a thing,” I confessed. “The Blue Sense must not be awake yet.” I turned at the sound of the door. “Holy crispy crapsicles.”

Epp thumped out the back door of the farmhouse wearing a floppy blond Marilyn Monroe wig and a quilted housecoat thrown
over his overalls. He backhanded ropey platinum waves out of his hairy face. He’d smeared tangerine lipstick on his lips. It matched the color of
his facial hair almost perfectly. He made me feel like Janet Leigh
when the shower curtain tore open. It’s entirely possible I let out a little
eep
in lieu of a violin musical sting.

Schenk said tentatively, “Mr. Epp?”

“I’m Tina Epp, the Chicken Whisperer.” She handed Schenk a business card. “I’ll take you down to talk to Henny. She’s in charge of the girls out in the big barn. This way.”

I whispered out the side of my mouth, “It’s that new horror movie:
Mrs. Doubtfire Silences the Lambs
.”