Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (12 page)

EXTRA
CREDIT
PROJECT
:
Defend yourself.

THE CORPSE HAD FRECKLES

The summer air hung as heavy and still as a significant pause in a personal hygiene lecture. Overhead, the desert sun glared down like a censorious, fire-lashed cyclopean eye on tourist and tarantula alike. Inside the thick adobe walls of Rancho Contento, however, all was so cool and dim that tomatoes wouldn’t even ripen. Bitty Borax and her legitimate cousin Anodyne sat in their grandfather’s well-dusted library of old deeds and desert realty law books, chatting away the afternoon. Ice cubes made the milk in their glasses even colder than regular cold milk, and their own mild dispositions contrasted with the scorching day outside.

“Mmmm,” Bitty murmured, idly fiddling with the tiny cattle-skull motif that capped her swizzle stick. “It looks hot enough out there to roast a ghost!” Ordinarily, Bitty was as pert and direct as a prize show terrier, only with straight hair, but the languorous pace of her desert vacation had relaxed the young crime-solver to the point of whimsy.

“Could you really roast a ghost?” Anodyne wondered aloud, and tried to sip her milk through her swizzle stick, forgetting for a moment that it wasn’t a straw. Anodyne wasn’t the brightest light on the Christmas tree, but she was always glad to be brought down out of the attic.

“I don’t know, Anodyne,” reflected Bitty. “It’s metaphysical, isn’t it? There was that time in the Hindi fanatics’ tomb when I set what I thought was a ghost afire, but it was just a thuggee soapnapper in a bedsheet.”

“Yes, I got your postcard,” Anodyne remembered. “I didn’t think you were going to make it!”

“Well, that’s all lemonade under the bridgework now,” Bitty countered breezily. “Let’s dwell on the utter safety of this moment.”

“All right,” said Anodyne sportingly. “I’m thinking of going sunbathing in the gulch. Would you like to join me?”

“No, thanks,” Bitty smiled. “I’m too high-spirited to sunbathe. I would never lie down if it weren’t to go right to sleep. And anyway, Aunt Addle should be back soon from gathering stalagmites for luncheon centerpieces down at the old cavern. She may need help cleaning herself up. I know the radiation level
there is next to nothing, but she’ll want to be decontaminated—just for ritual’s sake.”

“Poor Aunt Addle,” Anodyne mused. “She’s been so restless since Uncle Fleck disappeared.” Aunt Addle was neither of their mothers, but the Boraxes were a close extended family.

Suddenly, the sound of careening flesh knocking knickknacks off pedestals resounded from the ranch’s vestibule. The two girls leapt to their feet as if in reflexive response to an unholy but irresistible national anthem.

“Prairie dogs on loco weed!” guessed Anodyne, edgily snapping her swizzle stick in two.

“Maybe it’s the surly half-breed gardener getting the jump on happy hour!” Bitty postulated speedily. “But we’ll never know if we don’t go look!”

They rushed to the vestibule. There stood Aunt Addle, shaking like a guilty verdict held by a jury foreman afraid to read it. Bits of cat fur clung to her hair and apron, and if she had gathered any stalagmites, she was empty-handed now.

“Aunt Addle!” Bitty raced to her. “What’s wrong? Did you just discover the key to a very old and dangerous secret?”

Aunt Addle was as unhinged as a screen door in a twister, and stared at the girls as if she had just awakened into an intense and unconvincing fiction. “The—! The—!” she began, and fell senseless to the floor.

“Gee, that’s not much to go on,” said Bitty gravely. “So many things begin with ‘the.’ ” She knelt to examine her unkempt relation.

“There may not be anything to worry about,” offered Anodyne faintly. “She does this every night, and sometimes she doesn’t get up till morning.”

“Yes, but this is early afternoon,” Bitty pointed out sternly. “Aunt Addle wouldn’t abuse her only house-dress this way.” She felt for a pulse, and her own face paled to a cleanser-colored white. “I—I’m sorry, Anodyne,” she announced finally. “Aunt Addle is … unconscious!”

Anodyne’s eyes widened, twin burnt cookies of terror. “Unconscious! What does that mean?” Again, Anodyne tended to be a few measures behind the rest of the band.

“Unconscious is like being asleep—and not even knowing it!” Bitty explained. Silence fell over them like a dust cover.

Then, just as suddenly, they were interrupted by an ominous clicking sound from the porch. “Bitty!” breathed Anodyne. “Someone—or
something
—is on the front porch! This is scary times six!”

Bitty opened the thick windowless wooden door. There stood a handsome young man in a pristine lab coat, scanning the mission furniture with a Geiger counter.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” he smiled. “I was driving by and noticed a gum wrapper on your porch. I took the liberty of putting it in your trash can, but I thought I should check your radiation levels while I was at it. I hope you don’t mind. I’m Blaine Salvage.”

Anodyne sighed with relief. “Of course, Doctor Salvage! Bitty, Doctor Salvage is in the teen-surgery ward at Las Perdidas Hospital. He helped me out
with that little problem of mine in
The Mystery of the Co-Ed Dormitory.
This is my cousin, Bitty Borax. She was the one who saved the governor’s dog from those blackmailers.”

“I certainly read about that, Miss Borax,” the doctor grinned. “You’re beautifully groomed. Will you marry me?”

Bitty tastefully deflected his question. “Nice to meet you, Doctor.” A pause followed through which a symbolic train could have been driven.

“I’ll see to this old lady,” Doctor Salvage offered. “She’s dead, I take it?” He stepped inside.

“Oh, no, just unconscious, thanks!” Bitty answered.

The doctor lifted Aunt Addle into his arms and carried her out of the room. “I’ll just take her into the kitchen. If you like, I can perform an autopsy. Can I fix either of you a sandwich while I’m in there?”

“No thanks!” Bitty replied. “I never eat. But you might make one for Anodyne—she’s supposed to stay fifteen pounds heavier than me at all times. But again, Doctor, Aunt Addle isn’t dead.”

“I’m surprised,” he called from the kitchen. “She got her hands awfully dirty at the old cavern!”

“Isn’t he strong?” chirped Anodyne secretively. “He must lift a lot of heavy syringes!”

Bitty was preoccupied, however. “How did he know Aunt Addle was at the old cavern?”

“Well, maybe he’s a sleuth like you, and knows all the acid sludge in these parts by type.”

Before they could resolve their curiosity, though, a sound of lumbering footsteps echoed from the cellar, ghostly clunks ascending the steps to the vestibule.
With a disdainful clatter, a large, sinister man in a frayed dressing gown appeared, carrying several old-looking hatboxes.

“Mister Packaday, you startled us!” gasped Anodyne. “We thought you’d be in town at the Carnal Nugget, getting inspiration.”

Pilsener Packaday was a houseguest of the Borax family, a dissolute but assured writer from the East who had once saved Uncle Fleck in a beanery collapse. He was supposedly on a writer’s retreat, but several times Bitty had seen him furtively descend to the wine cellar when he said he was going out to scan the horizon charismatically.

“How’s your new book coming?” she asked cautiously, watching the disheveled celebrity place the hatboxes on a side table.

“I mustn’t be disturbed,” he answered testily, and lit a cigarette. He proceeded to stack and rearrange the inscrutable boxes as if absorbed in a game whose rules were private and unfathomable. “Leave me, please. I’m very busy.”

“I hope all this commotion hasn’t broken your concentration,” Bitty ventured. “Aunt Addle had a fit of some kind.”

Mister Packaday turned to her indifferently, his eyes as cold as fancy spherical ice cubes one gets from novelty ice cube trays. “I heard nothing. I must work. I tire of you both. Go at once.”

This seemed a presumptuous request in a family room, but Bitty bore in mind that he was a guest. “Have you made any progress on your
Quick Weight-Loss Way to Riches
, Mister Packaday?” He continued
to move the hatboxes around the table, as if seeking a perfect configuration.

Anodyne attempted to flatter him into responding. “A famous writer like you must know a lot about human suffering,” she offered hopefully.

“It’s true, I do. Get out please.”

Bitty felt she had to be frank. “Isn’t there enough privacy in the room we fixed up for you, Mister Packaday?”

He eyed her as if by legal compulsion, and the ash from his cigarette fell to the floor like a whispered insult. “I can’t work with a dead body lying around. Tell whoever changes the linen.”

Anodyne was becoming agitated, a sign that she was finally growing up. “A dead body! Whose could it be? It doesn’t seem to be any of us!”

Mister Packaday stacked his boxes in an apparent imitation of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, sighed enigmatically, and turned to face Bitty again. “I didn’t think it was my responsibility. But it seemed to be wearing corrective underwear.”