Lord of the Wings (32 page)

“Good,” I texted back. “Hope I didn't wake you.”

“Wish you had,” he replied. “Nite.”

Michael was already asleep by the time I came out of the bathroom. I followed his example almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.

Though I did find a moment to feel grateful for the fact that we were already three hours into the very last day of the Halloween Festival.

 

Chapter 24

I could tell from the amount of light pouring across the bed that it wasn't early, but I didn't feel rested. I turned my head and opened one eye so I could see the alarm clock. Nine thirty. I decided not to calculate how much sleep I'd had. I'd survived on almost none for weeks on end the first year or two after the boys were born. I could do this.

I crawled out of bed and went over to peer out the window into the backyard. It was full of people. Michael's mother was standing in the middle of the yard, apparently giving orders, while around her the school decorating committee members were hanging decorations, setting up tables for the refreshments, and arranging hay bales for seating.

And if Grammy was out there giving orders, what was Mother up to?

I threw on my costume and hurried downstairs.

To my relief, Mother and Michael's mother appeared to have divided up the available territory in an equitable fashion. Grammy was in charge of the outdoors, while the house was Mother's domain.

“A little farther that way, dear.” I started, but she wasn't talking to me. Apparently Mother was in the living room, supervising the rearrangement of the furniture. Mother never overlooked an excuse to rearrange furniture.

I slipped into the kitchen. Several volunteers were slicing fruit into giant bowls. Someone was rinsing punch bowls in the sink. I could smell chocolate chip cookies being baked.

My stomach wasn't ready to contemplate cookies. I grabbed a yogurt and a spoon and fled before any of the kitchen workers could draft me to help with their tasks.

Mother was still giving orders in the living room, and I could see that the dining room was filled with people assembling party favors, so I slipped down the corridor to the library and let myself into Michael's office. I'd been hoping to find him there, holed up from the madness, but no such luck. Where could he be? He couldn't have gone far on crutches, and I doubted the two mothers would have let anyone draft him into a work party.

I pulled out my phone and texted him.

“Where are you, and are you taking care of your ankle?”

I started on my yogurt. If he hadn't answered by the time I finished—

“Barn,” he texted back. “Sitting. Supervising.”

I'd have texted back and asked “Supervising what?” but his terseness suggested he was busy with something. I could wander out to the barn in a few minutes.

I finished my yogurt while checking my e-mails. Nothing urgent. According to Randall, the chief now had four scavenger hunt participants in custody, but none of them had been able to provide any information we hadn't already heard from Justin Klapcroft. Charlie Gardner, my deputy chief goblin, reported that things had been quiet all morning, as if the majority of the tourists were resting up for new feats of partying this evening. I spent some time adjusting Goblin Patrol schedules and making sure everyone knew about the change of plans—that the food tents would be selling boxed dinners all afternoon and closing at four, and that the Rancid Dreads would be playing out near the Haunted House. And suggesting to Randall that maybe, if we offered half-price tickets at the Fun Fair between 5:00 and 8:00
P.M.
, it would lure a lot more of the teenaged and twenty-something revelers out of town during the trick-or-treating phase of the evening.

“Good idea,” he texted back. “I'm on it.”

At some point I looked out the window and spotted Jamie, who was standing in the middle of the front yard, looking as if he'd lost something. And as if he were on the verge of bursting into tears about whatever it was. I put my phone away and hurried outside to see what was wrong.

“Mommy!” He greeted me as if I'd abandoned him for weeks, and ran over to cling to me. He wasn't just on the verge of tears—they were starting to leak out and trickle down his cheeks. Not the sort of face you expect from a six-year-old on Halloween. And I noticed Josh standing nearby watching us. He wasn't as upset as Jamie, but he definitely didn't seem as excited as he had yesterday.

“What's wrong?” I asked Jamie.

“Daddy breaked his leg,” he said.

“Broke,” I said, automatically. “It's okay. He'll be fine.”

“But if he can't walk, how can he trick-or-treat with us?”

Good question.

“Don't worry,” I said. “Daddy has a plan. He'll be there.”

“You're sure?”

“Absolutely!” He'd be there, even if I had to load him into the boys' Radio Flyer wagon myself and haul him all over town. “Let's go talk to Daddy.”

The boys scampered ahead of me to the barn. We found Michael sitting on a hay bale, holding a rubber bat in one hand, and studying something that was out of our field of vision.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Ghouling up the llama cart,” he said, pointing to the vehicle in question.

Until Michael had come home one day with the llama cart—which looked rather like the sort of vehicle you'd hitch to a Standardbred horse for harness racing—I hadn't known that llamas could be used as draft animals. Pack animals, yes—we'd already taken the guys on several camping trips. But apparently as long as you had the proper harness, a llama could easily pull a cart. Michael had been trying to train the llamas to pull ours, though last time I'd heard, with only limited success.

Upon its arrival, the llama cart had been bright red. Now it had been repainted a matte black, and Rob and Dad were fussing over it, adding decorative bats, rats, and skeletons.

“It's shaping up pretty well,” Dad said.

“Needs more bats,” Rob countered, shaking his head.

“We'll have to make them, then,” Dad said. “The craft store has been out of bats for weeks now.”

“How about adding some of that orange glitter stuff?” Rob asked.

Orange glitter stuff? Making bats?

Hosting the Halloween festival had certainly revolutionized Halloween decorating in Caerphilly. There had been a time when most people just popped a jack-o'-lantern on their doorstop and called it quits. The few people who went further, with things like orange lights on their shrubbery, fake gravestones in the front yard, and skeletons dangling from the rafters, had been somewhat admired but little emulated. But this year, Caerphillians had applied to their Halloween decorating the frenzy they usually saved for Christmas. The local craft store had made valiant efforts to keep up, pumping tons of black and orange decorations into the local economy. The more energetic householders had made pilgrimages to larger craft stores and Halloween emporiums in Richmond and Washington, D.C., and not long ago, at one of Trinity Episcopal's potluck suppers, I'd spotted two matrons off to one side, in furtive conversation. I sidled close enough to eavesdrop and found that one was lending the other her collection of mail order catalogs with a good selection of Halloween merchandise.

I found myself wondering how hard it would be for some people to manage the transition from bats and skeletons to pilgrims, turkeys, and in due course, reindeer.

But in the meantime, it was both useful and amusing that even Rob and Dad could manage a reasonably competent Halloween decorating job.

“Are any of the llamas actually ready to pull the cart?” I asked.

“Groucho has been showing the most promise,” he said. I assumed this meant that unlike Harpo, Chico, Gummo, and Zeppo, Groucho didn't pitch a fit the minute he saw the cart. “If we bribe him with enough cantaloupe he'll be fine.”

“I'll drop by the grocery store and stock up,” I said, pulling out my notebook. Groucho would do anything for cantaloupe. Harpo was similarly fond of cucumbers. Perhaps we could change his mind about pulling the cart if he saw us offering cucumbers to Groucho when we harnessed him?

Time enough to worry about that later.

“What's this, then?” Grandfather and Michael's mother had appeared at the barn door.

“Grouchy is going to take Daddy trick-or-treating,” Jamie said.

“And if the boys' bags get too heavy, they can put them in the cart with me,” Michael was saying. “In fact, if they get tired out when we're half a mile from the car, like last year, we can put the boys in the cart.”

Learning that Grouchy would be taking Daddy trick or treating had restored Jamie and Josh to good moods, and they began discussing which of his costumes the llama should wear.

“Even the llamas have costumes here in Caerphilly,” Grammy said.

“Llama shows almost always have costume competitions,” I said. “Michael doesn't enter those, but Rob seems to enjoy them. Boys, how about the vampire llama costume for Groucho?”

The boys dragged Grammy off to the other end of the barn to inspect the contents of the llama costume closet—yes, we now actually had such a thing. I called Randall to ask if he could send a truck to haul the llama cart to town—not that Groucho couldn't cover the distance from here to there, but it would take rather a long time and tire him and Michael both.

“I'll have cousin Shep pick it up this afternoon and drop it off in the college parking lot,” Randall said. “And wait till you see what's going on in town.”

“I don't like surprises right now,” I said. “Give me a hint. What is going on in town?”

“Nothing at all,” he said. “The town square's almost empty—even the protesters didn't show up today. About ninety percent of the tourists are out at the Haunted House, or the Fun Fair, or just hanging around in the meadow, watching my workmen put the final touches on the new stage.”

“I assume we got permission from whoever owns that meadow to turn it into a concert venue.”

“My cousin Peewee owns it, and he's fine with our using it for now. The stage is portable—built on the back of an old flatbed truck—so if Peewee tries to hold us up for outrageous rent next time we want to have an outdoor concert, we can haul it someplace else. That was a stroke of genius on your part, moving the Dreads out here where the only creatures they can annoy are Peewee's cows.”

“As long as the Dreads don't curdle their milk,” I said.

“They're beef cows,” Randall said. “They're pretty stolid. And if the Dreads' music makes them suicidal, I'll save you and Michael a few steaks.”

Another problem solved.

For the next couple of hours, I pitched in to get ready for the party and followed the action in town from afar. More accurately, the lack of action. I'd have been delighted to hear that things were so quiet in town if not for the nagging fear that a quiet day meant an all-too-lively night.

I also helped encase Josh and Jamie in their costumes. Josh was an evil robot, complete with glowing red eyes in his mask and lights shooting out of the ends of his fingers when he pushed a hidden button. Jamie was a space alien. His headgear featured a Plexiglas panel that appeared to give a view of a glowing green brain, and when he flexed his fingers, little clusters of slimy green glow-in-the-dark tentacles shot out of the ends of his fingers. Rob's techies had outdone themselves—maybe in addition to Mutant Wizards, Data Wizards, and Security Wizards he should start another division: Costume Wizards. The boys roamed around, happily showing off their lights and tentacles to the assembled parents.

Around 11:30, Luigi, owner of Caerphilly's beloved town pizza restaurant, showed up with boxes of pizza.

“But the pizzas aren't supposed to be here till four!” the mother in charge of refreshments moaned. “The kids won't even get here till one!”

“My guy will be back at four with the kids' pizzas,” Luigi said. “These are for your volunteers. On the house.
Mangia!”

While we were still eating pizza, Frank Ledbetter, the owner of the
Caerphilly Clarion,
showed up with his digital camera to document the festivities. Mother and Grammy wanted to drag him all over the house and yard to take pictures of their work, but he managed to convince them that the decorations would show better with costumed trick-or-treaters included, so even he managed a slice of pizza. By the time the kids began arriving, we were all tired from our decorating efforts, but well fed, and the children's excitement buoyed everyone's mood.

Mother shooed the children inside for party games—bobbing for apples, throwing darts at orange and black balloons, and that old Halloween favorite, Pin the Tail on the Headless Horseman. This was intended to keep them busy while, outside, Grammy and her team spent the next hour or two hiding candy all over our yard for the candy hunt.

I stationed myself in the front hall with Frank so I could steer the arriving partygoers to the games.

“Nice of you to come and cover the party,” I said, during a lull between arrivals. “Especially with so much going on back in town.”

“I like to do it every year,” he said. “It's a popular feature. And frankly, I'm happy to have an excuse to get out of my office right now.”

“Too close to the festival action?” I asked.

“Festival's okay,” he said. “I'm getting a lot of great material—not just for the paper and the Web site, but for my freelance business. I sell a lot of my shots through stock photo agencies, and this Halloween stuff is going to be a gold mine. No, it's not the festival that's bugging me.”

“Is it the murders making things crazy at the office?”

“No—we're a weekly. We don't have the frantic scramble the dailies do. I bet the chief will have solved it before we put out our next issue. No, what's really bugging me is that some creep thinks he owns some of the photos in the
Clarion
archives. He must have called eight or ten times, and then yesterday he dropped into the office and I thought I'd have to call the police to throw him out.”