Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (13 page)

“Uncle Fleck!” theorized Bitty. “He
has
been missing!”

Young Doctor Salvage returned from the kitchen holding a large pair of hedge clippers.

“As near as I can tell from the autopsy,” he said tersely, “your aunt failed to wash her hands after petting the cat. Infection was immediate.”

“But she wasn’t dead five minutes ago!” protested Bitty, her head beginning to spin like a washing machine full of mismatched whites and colors.

“By the way,” the doctor continued. “I don’t mean
to alarm you, but it seems as if your phone lines have been cut.”

“A killer, or at any rate, fatal germs loose at Rancho Contento!” cried Anodyne. “This takes the cake for spooky!”

“Calm yourself,” cautioned Bitty. “You know what perspiration stains do to your clothes!”

Surprisingly, it was the urbane Pilsener Packaday who suddenly panicked. “No phone! What if the pet store wants to reach me!”

“What are you talking about, Mister Packaday?” Bitty asked. “By the way, this is Blaine Salvage. Doctor, Pilsener Packaday.”

The distracted author gathered his hatboxes and stumbled up the stairs to his room. “They’re not going to get us! We’re going away! Far away!”

“They? Us?” Bitty struggled to understand.

“I’ll give him a sedative,” Doctor Salvage said briskly. He opened his hedge clippers and followed Packaday up the stairs. “Smoking, no matter what they say, does not calm the nerves!”

Anodyne clutched Bitty in a frightened but non-suggestive manner. “Who’s getting who, Bitty? And what’s in those hatboxes?”

Before she could recap the story any further, the shadow of a figure filled the front doorway, which had been standing open since the doctor arrived. Anodyne jumped like a jackalope, but Bitty faced the intruder. It was Lazlo, the surly half-breed gardener. Nothing grew in the parched desert, which is one reason he was surly, but another might have been
that years before, when he had first come to Rancho Contento, Lazlo had been sleepwalking, owing perhaps to his conflicted nationalities, and groggy Uncle Fleck had mistaken him for an intruder and shot him in the shoulder. Supposedly the incident was long forgotten, but at this moment Bitty wondered.

“Lazlo!” she breathed, as if to demonstrate she knew who he was.

“City man take my boxes,” he said choppily. “I need boxes for debris. I must police area.”

“Did Mister Packaday take your boxes, Lazlo?” Betty surmised. “Were they
hat
boxes, Lazlo?”

Doctor Salvage came back downstairs, his hair tousled and his lab coat wrinkled. “I’m afraid lung cancer has claimed your Mister Packaday,” he announced impassively. “I think you’d all better come with me down to the airtight vault in the cellar.”

“But what about the hatboxes?” Anodyne gurgled plaintively. “And— Oh!” A new horror swept over her like a forward stranger in a crowded elevator. “Bitty! The lights have gone out!”

Bitty quickly surveyed the room. “You’re right! Luckily, it’s two in the afternoon!”

“Just one second there!” barked Doctor Salvage with uncharacteristic emphasis. He had spied Lazlo sneaking up the stairs to Mister Packaday’s room. “Where are you going?”

Lazlo turned, the lone feather in his headband drooping guiltily. “I need boxes—in case I have leaves to rake.”

“There are no leaves in this wasteland,” the doctor
shot back. He turned to Bitty. “Wait here, I’ll go with him. I don’t trust his mixed allegiances. Those bare feet suggest social discontent!”

He followed Lazlo out of sight up the not-so-brightly-lit-as-before staircase. The air tingled like an application of iodine.

“Bitty, this is Goosebump Central!” murmured Anodyne, nervously lighting a cigarette from the pack the late writer had left behind in his confusion.

“No, Anodyne, don’t despair!” Bitty cried. “I’ll call the sheriff’s office from the pay phone by the waste site.” She drew a coin from her pocket and stared at it in disbelief.

“Oh no! What’s wrong?” Anodyne babbled, puffing smoke like a toaster nearing short-circuit.

“My dime has been
bent
,” announced Bitty. “Making it useless in pay phone slots.”

Upstairs, the sound of a scuffle made the antler chandeliers in the vestibule shake. Bitty reviewed the evidence.

“Anodyne, how could Aunt Addle have gotten herself so covered with cat hair in the old cavern?”

Doctor Salvage reappeared at the head of the stairs, as obsessed as a locomotive, and steamed down to the girls with the hatboxes in his arms. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Lazlo seems to have succumbed to a rare case of fur balls in humans. His blood was more mixed than we knew.”

“Hurry, let’s see what’s in those boxes!” shouted Anodyne, stubbing out her cigarette. The doctor glared at her disapprovingly.

“Wait a second, it occurs to me that Aunt Addle
had a threatening phone call last night,” recalled Bitty suddenly.

Anodyne pulled the lid off one of the hatboxes and stared inside, at first with bewilderment, and then dismay. “Not more kittens! The ranch is overrun as it is, and there aren’t mice enough for the ones we already have.”

“Yes,” Doctor Salvage said ominously. “Your Midnight has been a very, very careless animal, hasn’t she?”

“Well, I—” Anodyne’s blank face seemed perfectly to complement the benighted mewing that rose from the open hatbox.

“You don’t even know who the father is, do you?” he continued, his voice as smooth and contained as a medicinal caplet.

Meanwhile, Bitty was absorbed in her real-life mental math. “Whoever it was must have been hysterical, because Aunt Addle got worked up herself. It was something about cycles of fornication, of profane and bestial horror, a rite of blood and rebirth.”

“Bitty!” Anodyne called faintly, but powerful fingers on her throat prevented her from disrupting Bitty’s concentration.

“Could Aunt Addle have taken Pilsener Packaday into her confidence? Where is Midnight, anyhow?”

“We must sterilize, sterilize all unclean substances!” young Doctor Salvage declared, releasing Anodyne’s lifeless form to tumble to the floor with a drama unknown in her life. The sound of Anodyne’s charm bracelet striking the parquet roused Bitty from her
distraction. She beheld her late cousin, whom several of the now released kittens were vainly nuzzling, and turned to face Doctor Salvage. He stood stiffly in his torn lab coat, and his breathing sounded like a great skyscraper’s heating ducts, soft but implicitly awesome in scope, and ineluctably mechanical.

“Well, Doctor,” she said in as even a voice as she could muster. “If you insist, I will marry you.”

THREE LOST POEMS

THE DOVE BAR