I’m so bent out of shape that I even forget about the danger we might be in, and I let my temper do the talking. “Say you’re sorry!”
She sticks her tongue out at me, digs her hand deep into my shorts pocket, helps herself to a heaping handful of chocolate kisses, and singsongs, “I’m so, so, so, so sorry, Tessie, for not listening to you and running away,” but believe you me, the kid is not sorry, not even a smidgeon. Usually meek and mild Birdie is looking about as repentant as the gargoyle that’s glaring down at us from on top of the Gilgood mausoleum, because she is in the grips of #6:
SURE SIGNS OF LOONY
Seeing, hearing, and smelling stuff that nobody else can.
Acting more high-strung than a Kentucky Derby winner.
Wearing clothes that don’t go together.
Not understanding what’s going on in movies or television shows or the neighborhood.
Wetting the bed all the time sometimes.
Wild-streaking.
Extreme stubbornness.
Having a leaky memory and a drifting brain.
Not getting jokes and the ones they tell are lamer than Tiny Tim.
Murdering.
Drooling, when not asleep.
I hate it when she does this!
10:20 a.m. The famous saying “Life isn’t fair” couldn’t get any truer. Birdie is having a gay old time, throwing chocolate kisses up in the air and catching them in her wild-streaking smart-aleck mouth like they’re salted peanuts at Lonnigan’s Bar, and I’m left holding the bag in the graveyard, sweating bullets to come up with a they-went-thatta-way plan to escape a kidnapping killer who is probably already behind the mausoleum practicing his choking.
We could try to outrun him, but short-legged Birdie could never beat out a stork-legged man with murder on his mind, I don’t care how Marciano her footwork is. We could scream, but a fat lotta good that would do us. Mr. Gilgood avoided people like the plague when he was alive, and he must’ve put it in his Last Will and Testament that he be buried as far away as possible from everybody else, because Birdie and me are on the very edges of the cemetery. Nobody would hear us yelp for help. Even Gert Klement with her powerful hearing aids would be, pardon my French, shit outta luck. Not that she’d come running to rescue Birdie and me, no way, no how. That bad Samaritan would just smile to herself and mutter, My, oh, my. That sounds like the Finley sisters desperately yelling for assistance in the cemetery. I’d rush right over to save them, but they made their beds and now they can lie in them . . . at St. Anne’s Home for Wayward Girls and the county loony bin, and then she’d throw her head back, laugh evilly, and cut herself a great big piece of that devil’s food cake.
I close my eyes and plead for help.
Q. O, dear Magic 8 Ball, what useful advice can you offer me under these life-threatening circumstances?
A. Outlook not so good.
Well, that’s about as helpful as a rubber crutch.
What I need is some useful expert advice.
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.
What am I thinking?!
I do have some useful expert advice!
I haven’t read any pages yet in Modern Detection where it’s spelled out what a gumshoe should do if they find themselves trapped in this particular dangerous situation, but I’m 98% sure the New York City detective who wrote the book would recommend finding the nearest escape route, which, in Birdie’s and my case, would be through the #1 spookiest spot in the whole neighborhood. Phantom Woods.
Should we tiptoe past the mausoleum and slip into woods that even the sun and the streetlights are too scared to shine into? Run through those trees whose branches are so black and twisted that they remind me of German children getting eaten by witches in the fairy tales written by those brothers who certainly were named correctly—Grimm? No. That plan is the perfect example of that famous saying “Jumping from the frying pan into the oven.”
What else could I do to save our hides?