Lord of the Wings (16 page)

“No,” he said. “It seems my slacker raven started vocalizing like crazy when he got home. Ravens started showing up here at the zoo croaking ‘Beware!' and ‘Doom!' and ‘Nevermore!' So I thought, fine. I'll train a couple of them to sit on my shoulder for treats.”

“And now you have the entire conspiracy on your hands,” I said. “Or rather, on your head and shoulders.”

Just then a raven appeared overhead and began circling. Grandfather looked up without enthusiasm.

“They're very intelligent birds,” he said. “Especially when it comes to acquiring food. But once I stop feeding them, they should lose interest in me.”

I nodded.

The raven landed on his shoulder, folded its wings, and looked at Grandfather expectantly.

“Stupid bird!” it croaked. “Go away!”

Grandfather sighed.

“Yes, eventually they should lose interest,” he said. “Unfortunately they're pretty stubborn birds. Caroline's in here.”

We had arrived at a small door in the side of the Creatures of the Night building. Grandfather shooed away his current raven passengers, waved his security badge at a small pad, then opened the door and led me inside into a small corridor.

“This would be the supersecret zookeepers-only part of the building?” I asked, as I followed him down the corridor.

Instead of answering he opened a door along the left side of the corridor and strode in. I followed, and found myself in a large, brightly lit room. Several young people in purple overalls were doing things with cables, hard drives, monitors, and other electronic devices.

“We were going to use this space for a special veterinary facility for the nocturnal animals,” Grandfather said. “But for now it's electronics central.”

“Meg!” A small figure clad in a gray hooded robe jumped up and ran toward me.

“Hello, Caroline,” I said, returning her hug. “Just what are you organizing?”

“Damned technology,” Grandfather said.

“We're setting up a state-of-the-art security center,” Caroline said. “And when I say we, I mostly mean the technicians from the Security Wizards branch of your brother's company.”

“Overdue,” I said.

Grandfather growled. Caroline had probably been bossing him around. She was carrying a staff with a large crystal on top. Clearly she was also supposed to be a wizard, although I hoped she had not also saddled herself with ravens. Her plump, cheerful face made her a slightly incongruous wizard.

“Long overdue.” Caroline walked over to a bank of screens mounted on the wall, three high and five wide. “Especially considering his own grandson owns one of the top security companies on the East Coast.”

“Well, how was I supposed to know that?” Grandfather demanded. “I just thought his company made silly games?”

“He's set up all kinds of subsidiaries to do other stuff involving computers,” I said. “You'd know that if you ever listened to the conversation around the family dinner table on Sundays.”

“Oh, he does,” Caroline said. “But only when he's the one doing the talking. Move a couple more feet to the right.”

I was starting to follow orders when I realized she was talking into her cell phone. The picture on one of the screens wobbled, and then lurched a bit before settling down.

“We're ringing the perimeter with security cameras,” Caroline said. “Of course, that will take some time, even with all these brilliant young people working on it, so we're also organizing patrols and posting sentries. That's perfect,” she added into the phone. “Let me know when you're ready to work on the next one.”

We conferred for a few moments, and I was reassured that she and the Brigade would be able to handle security at the zoo. I was relieved—this would let me pull the half-dozen goblins I had patrolling the zoo and reassign them to areas where our numbers were reduced when I'd assigned guards to all the cemeteries. I made a few phone calls to give the troops their new marching orders and headed back to town.

Assigning the cemetery guards turned out to be a good idea. Mr. Dandridge's vigil in the Baptist cemetery proved uneventful for the rest of the afternoon, but the watcher in the Catholic cemetery spotted one would-be tombstone rubber, dressed as a zombie. His counterpart in the Congregational cemetery, which was the oldest in town, spotted two—a vampire and a grim reaper, complete with scythe. Unfortunately, all three costumes were ones that made it hard to identify their wearers, and all three wearers were fleet of foot—fleeter than the pursuing goblins, at least—so all we could do was report the incidents and share with the police what photos they'd been able to take before the intruders fled.

“Do you know how many vampires we have in town at the moment?” the chief asked, when I showed him the latest tombstone rubbing photo capture.

“I know.” I'd caught up with him on the steps of the town hall, and from our vantage point, halfway up, we could see at least fifty vampires scattered through the crowd. “It would be different if they all had wildly different notions of how a vampire should dress. But most of them—including our tombstone rubber—look as if they bought their costumes at Vampires R Us.”

“Is there such a place?” The chief looked alarmed at the notion.

“Not that I know of,” I said. “I thought I was making a joke. But seeing how many of them there are, who knows? Dr. Smoot would know—shall I ask him?”

“Let's not,” the chief said. “He might think it sounds like a brilliant business proposition.”

“If you want me to stop sending the photos of tombstone rubbers and other pranksters, just let me know,” I said.

“No, keep sending them,” he said. “You never know. The next shot could capture some detail that will let us identify the perpetrator. And if nothing else, it gives us an idea of the scope of the phenomenon.”

“Yeah,” I said. “At least a dozen, but thank goodness not hundreds.”

“The day is young,” he said. “And some of the participants may be planning to make their graveyard visits under cover of darkness.”

So I continued arranging for an evening shift at each of the town cemeteries. And then I took a few hours off, so I'd have the stamina to stay out late on patrol myself. I picked the boys up from school and decided to take them to the library for a new book fix before going home to root through the pantry in search of something I could serve for dinner. Normally on days when both Michael and I were working long hours we could count on Rose Noire to take care of the cooking, but I knew she'd be putting in long hours of her own down at her organic herb tent in the town square.

“Mommy,” Josh said, as I was buckling in. “We need to figure out costumes for Spike and Tinkerbell.” His tone suggested that he was being deliberately and commendably calm in the face of a massive oversight on the part of his unfortunate parents.

“Well, dogs don't have to have costumes, you know,” I began.

“Mom-my,” Josh moaned.

“Noah's cat is going to be a unicorn,” Jamie said. “And Mason's dog is going to be an Ewok.”

Well, that answered the question of where the pet costume idea came from.

“We have to think of something even better for Tink and Spike,” Josh said.

“I'll think of something,” I said.

Maybe they'd forget about the dogs' costumes by the time we got home. I didn't much mind the idea of trying to put a costume on Tinkerbell, Rob's enormous Irish wolfhound, who was a mellow soul and would put up with almost any kind of human nonsense as long as there was hope of a treat afterward. But Spike, our eight-and-a-half-pound furball, had not acquired the nickname “the Small Evil One” for nothing. I shuddered at the idea of putting a costume on him.

Then again, Spike was besotted with the twins and had never once bitten either of them in spite of what even I, their doting mother, recognized as extreme provocation. Maybe if the boys put it on him?

I'd worry about that later. It would make a nice change from worrying about murder and burglary. I followed the boys as they scampered toward the library door.

The walk leading up to the library was lined with what I thought of as middle-of-the-road pumpkins—not too scary looking to pass muster in the daytime, but not so cutesy that they'd be out of place when Caerphilly flipped into the Night Side. Inside, every room was festooned with black and orange crepe paper garlands, smiling pumpkins, happy ghosts, and fierce black cats. And displays of Halloween-themed books were everywhere. Collections of ghost stories, for children and adults. Nonfiction books on haunted houses. A major infestation of vampires and zombies in the young adult section. Manuals on pumpkin carving and Halloween party decorations. Halloween-themed mysteries in the mystery fiction section—who knew so many authors had chosen to set murders in the spooky season? An exhibit on Ray Bradbury in the science fiction and fantasy section, featuring
October Country
,
The Halloween Tree
, and
A Graveyard for Lunatics
.

We had arrived just in time for a special Halloween story hour, and the boys happily scampered to take their seats. I waved to the reader—one of Michael's grad students who was planning a career in children's theater—and left the boys in her charge while I roamed around the library, snapping pictures of some of the books on display with my cell phone, as a reminder to come back and check them out when I actually had some free time to read them.

Well, when the festival was over, and my free time was back to its normal, not-quite-nonexistent level.

I spotted Ms. Ellie Draper, the head librarian, carrying a stepladder down one of the aisles, and followed to see if she needed help. Or, rather, if I could offer to do something that a woman in her seventies might be better off not attempting to do atop a stepladder. She spotted me as she was setting it up.

“You're a bit taller than me,” she said. “Can you reattach that?” She handed me a small two-sided adhesive patch and gestured up toward a poster that had come undone at one corner and was flapping down and in danger of falling.

I climbed up and performed the repair, revealing a poster printed in bright orange and black that proclaimed L
IVE
D
ANGEROUSLY!
R
EAD A
B
ANNED
B
OOK!
followed by the titles of fifteen famous books that had suffered banning.

“Banned book week was last month.” Ms. Ellie nodded with approval of my handiwork, so I climbed down. “But I left it up because it fits the color scheme.”

“Nice,” I said.

And then it occurred to me that Ms. Ellie, both as a librarian and as a longtime resident, was something of an authority on town history. If the murder had anything to do with the contents of the museum …

“By the way,” I asked aloud. “Have you been to see Dr. Smoot's new town museum?”

“Not yet.” She frowned slightly. “Frankly, I've been a little afraid to. I'm not sure I want to see what kind of a picture he's painting of us. And since I'm not the world's most tactful person, I'm not sure I want him around when I take my first look. There could be swearing involved.”

“Want a sneak preview?” I asked. “I have pictures.”

I held up my phone, with one of the pictures on screen.

“I would love a sneak preview,” she said, peering at the phone. “But not on that thing. Come with me.”

She led me back through the “staff only” door and down the hall to her small but welcoming office.

“Sit,” she said. “I'm pretty sure I have the cable to fit this. I can copy your museum pictures to my computer and we can look at them in comfort. There we go.”

As we waited for the copying process to finish, Ms. Ellie began clicking through the first pictures. She seemed to find the non-wax waxworks as silly as I did. But she rather liked the wartime photos.

“Very nice,” she said. “I must see if I can get copies of these for the library. As soon as Halloween's over we're going to put up a Veterans' Day display. I'll ask Dr. Smoot.”

“Better yet, ask Fred down at the
Caerphilly Clarion
.” I pointed to the small line at the bottom of one of the accompanying placards, which informed us that the photo in question was from our local weekly's files.

“You're right,” she said. “And your photos of the photos will let me start planning our exhibit. Dr. Smoot doesn't really have very much information here, does he? I need to do some research!” She said this in the same tone the boys would use to announce that they'd found a stash of candy.

“I was hoping you'd feel inspired to research,” I said. “You heard about the murder, right? It could have something to do with the contents of the museum.” I clicked through until I found one of the pictures of Arabella's dress, and explained about the article the chief had found in the dead man's pocket.

“Oh, dear.” She frowned and peered over her glasses at the bloodstained dress. “Let's hope not. But yes, I will definitely let you know if I find anything that would suggest a motive for murder.”

“And the chief,” I said.

“Of course.”

“Ellie?” One of the other librarians stuck her head into the office. “Chief's on TV.”

Ms. Ellie reached up and turned on a tiny TV sitting on a nearby shelf. The earnest face of a young newscaster from one of the Richmond TV stations filled the miniature screen.

“—from the mayor and the chief of police of Caerphilly,” he said. Ms. Ellie and I both frowned—he'd mispronounced the name of our town. Then the screen cut to a shot of Randall and the chief standing in front of the police station, with a dozen reporters surrounding them.

“This morning at approximately nine thirty a.m., two local citizens found a body in the woods outside Caerphilly,” the chief said.