Floodlight Page 4
Juniper nodded; she’d gone to college there.
After a brief wait, I heard a cultured voice say, “Four Seasons.”
“May I have Ms. Dresser’s room please?”
“One moment.” A pause. “Ms. Dresser is not a current guest of ours.”
“Can you tell me when she checked out?”
“And you are?”
“Mitzi Fowler,” I said without hesitation. “Did you have any messages for me?”
“One moment.”
The voice returned. “Actually yes, it wasn’t picked up apparently. Madame Dresser said, ‘I would love to see the pendant you were given by your mother, the one you showed me in Germany. See you Sunday.’” I wrote it down to make sure I got it word for word. God bless expensive hotels; the No-Tell Motels on Pacific Coast Highway wouldn’t have bothered.
I’d put it on speaker, and the girls crowded around so they could hear it all.
“Is she talking about that octopus pendant?” Valerie asked.
“Maybe, I guess.” I held it away from my body and looked at it as if it could speak. “Mitzi never got the message, so I wore it today like I always do.”
“Who is this Madame Dresser?” Juniper snapped her fingers and pointed to the sketchpad. “Everything you know.”
“Mitzi met her when she paid for a trip for her semester abroad.”
“Did she pay for any of the other students?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know. It was so long before I met her. It was just a story from college. I must think.” I grabbed a handful of hair and shook my head.
Valerie, the healer, said, “I’m making tea. Do you have Chamomile?” She rooted around in the cupboard.
Images popped into my mind. “The note. There’s a note in the back of my car. Let’s get the weird writings all together.”
“Meanwhile,” Juniper said, “I’m going to look through these pictures for this Madame Dresser.”
Pretty soon, I located the original invitation, the balled-up note in the back of Sweetpea, and the note waiting for me at home today. We put them side by side on the table.
This ticket will admit Panda and Mitzi Fowler and two guests to the Garden Circle in Hercynian Forest
The day is that of the dog sun
Choose well...
The Witching Hour 12 April.
April 12, 2019. Er hat Tentakel und sieht aus wie ein riesiger aggressiver Oktopus.
“Only some of it’s in English. It’s clearly sent to me and Mitzi, so someone is behind this. How could I show this to the police though? They would send the padded truck and take me to Metro Hospital.” I sat down hard, frustrated. “Wait, some of this isn’t in English, but Oktopus must be octopus. Maybe my octopus pendant is valuable and this lady was coming to steal it.”
“The pendant!” Valerie quickly got on Google translator. “Here’s what Mr. Google says.”
Juniper raised her eyebrows. “How do you know it’s not Mrs. Google?”
I looked back and forth between my dear, exasperating friends. “Girls, focus.”
“Okay. Here goes. It has tentacles and looks like a giant octopus. Aggressive.”
“That’s it?” I said, no closer to understanding its meaning. “Other than the fact that Mitzi gave it to me and it has an octopus on it, I think that’s a dead end.”
“But Madame Dresser specifically asked Mitzi about it.” Juniper added that to the list.
Brutus meowed, and once again I wished I knew what he wanted to say. The clock ticked in the background as we all feverishly thought. Valerie sipped her tea and leaned on the stove.
Juniper was quiet, sitting at the kitchen table and staring at the photos then the paper pieces. When she finally spoke, we all jumped a bit. “Okay, put it together this way. This ticket will admit Panda and Mitzi Fowler and two guests to the Garden Circle in Hercynian Forest. Period. Then, The Witching Hour, that’s midnight, right?”
“What about the dog sun?”
“I’ll Google that, too.” After some typing, Val read from Wikipedia: “Wow! Sun dogs typically appear as two subtly colored patches of light to the left and right of the sun.” Juniper and I crowded around her and looked over her shoulder. “Also called phantom sun or mock sun. The etymology of sun dog largely remains a mystery. The Oxford English Dictionary states it as being of obscure origin.”
“There’s an understatement.” I missed Mitzi. She would have had lots to say. As a researcher of everything, she deprecatingly referred to herself as “a storehouse of useless knowledge,” but it was what made her such a good tour guide.
Val said, “Holy crap, the next one is scheduled to appear April twelfth—that’s Friday!”
I sat up as these bits of information started to gel. “Okay, so we know when, if we take them all together. April 12, 2019, at midnight. This must be the day of the dog sun.”
Juniper looked me in the eye and smiled. “And we know where.”
Valerie glanced at me and Juniper. Clearly both of us were having the same idea. “Oh, no. No, no nonono.”
Juniper looked at Valerie. “We need to go to the Hercynian Forest at midnight on April twelfth. That’s just days from now.”
“No, this is some kind of joke,” Valerie said. “Come on, guys, this sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life. You know how crazy you both are, right? Mitzi is going to come waltzing in after having a late lunch with her friend, and you’re going to look like lunatics. Tea?” She poured us Chamomile in floral cups that Mitzi loved. Tears welled in my eyes. Was I losing it? This was way too much for Lulu to be behind.
“Besides,” Val said, “there’s no sun at midnight, silly girls.” Val was so rational.
I put my fist to my mouth and willed my mind to focus. “Maybe we should give her a few hours more.”
Juniper turned back to the sketchpad. “What else do we know? Is there something you’re not telling us?”
I’d never been able to keep a secret. I told them about seeing the fleeing garden gnome at the office.
“Was it a dwarf or an elf?” Juniper asked, all serious.
I’ve always heard the joke about true friends helping you bury the body and never speaking of it again. I didn’t plan to test that theory, but I was happy they didn’t think me crazy. Valerie might tease about us being lunatics, but only to guide her more fanciful friends back to reality.
“I don’t know. It looked like one of those little statues in the garden, but bigger. I thought it was weird when Mitzi read about the Hercynian Forest, where it says helpful dwarves try to balance the scales, whatever that means. The Hercynian Forest is actually the Black Forest in Germany, so called because it’s so dense and dark in there.”
They both looked at me, surprised at my knowledge. “Mitzi,” was all I said.
“Have you talked to Lulu since?” Juniper was back on it like a Schnauzer, refusing to be sidetracked.
“No, she comes in at nine-thirty p.m.”
“Then tonight you need to go talk to her. Somebody must have paid her to leave those notes.” Valerie still refused to entertain the possibility it wasn’t a hoax of some sort.
Juniper added to the sketchpad, “Dwarf or elf?” Eye roll from Valerie.
“It’s going to take that long just to catch up on my tax work. Do you know what time of year this is?”
“Yes, terribly inconvenient of Mitzi to disappear,” Juniper said.
My eyes filled with tears. Juniper put her arm around me.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the plan. You go to the office, work your ass off making 1040s, or whatever, in case we need to go”— she looked at a very disapproving Val—“somewhere before the fifteenth. And talk to Lulu when she arrives.”
“Will one of you stay here and see if Mitzi shows up?” I asked in a tremulous voice.
They clasped hands and plunked down on the couch almost in unison. “We both will,” Juniper said. “It’ll be nice to escape our ringing telephone at our house for a while.�
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I left, thanking the Goddess for such good friends and glad to have a plan. You can put one foot in front of the other when there’s a plan. A big part of me held out hope that Mitzi would come home or call or something, and this budding nightmare would end.
Chapter Four
BACK AT THE office, I couldn’t concentrate on work and spent the time Googling Madame Dresser. I didn’t know her first name. Why didn’t I listen more closely? Did Mitzi give me these details? I couldn’t even name one student who went to school with her; this was fifteen years ago—before I met her. I couldn’t call the college today because it’s Sunday. Beyond that, what was this all about? Would Mitzi have left the country without saying something to me? I called home, and Valerie answered.
“Find anything?”
“Nothing yet, but we’re going through the pictures. Do you know what this gal looked like?”
“No, other than female, German, and she was no spring chicken fifteen years ago. Hey, will you go upstairs and make sure Mitzi’s passport is still in her bedside table?”
A few minutes later, Val returned. “Yours is, but hers isn’t.”
“Dammit! I should be calling the airlines.”
“Check your credit card.”
“Of course! Call you back.”
None of our cards had been used, and I wondered if the mysterious Madame Dresser had paid for yet another trip to Germany. Why? Mitzi wasn’t even German. As far as I knew, she was Euro mix of some sort—I guess German could be in there. Stomach rumbling, I hunted around for food and found old popcorn and a power bar. It wasn’t yet dark. Even in the worst of times, Panda must be fed and my meager supplies wouldn’t cut it. As I walked down to the corner market, I saw a flash in the periphery of my vision.
I walked slower and pretended to tie my shoe. I yawned and stretched as I turned my head toward the bushes. The trees were manicured right up to the planter by the wall, where several bougainvilleas had enthusiastically and colorfully filled in the spaces behind the broken border. It was kind of pretty, if haphazard, and some of the feral cats Fiona had railed about lived in the little tunnels created by the thicket. There was movement, and I saw a touch of green fabric.
Everything that had gone sideways seemed to happen here, at the office. This was where the first invitation had come. This is where Lulu and I had sighted the...whatever it was. I was so tired of being baffled and being the target of unseen and unknown forces, something snapped.
Perhaps it was my desperation or anger driven by hunger, but I suddenly ran toward the bushes and jumped in, ready to tackle a tiger if need be. Thorns tore at my sleeves, and I connected with what at first appeared to be a child, who was as startled as I was. It was the garden gnome, as I’d taken to calling him in my mind.
Before he could react, I put my hands in his underarms and lifted him to eye height. He was heavy. Neither of us spoke at first; his little hand tried to reach his dagger and his feet kept kicking out. He was strong for his size, but no match for this Rambo tax preparer whose mate had gone missing. Soon the dagger was mine, shoved into my back pocket.
It was four o’clock on a Sunday when I said words I never dreamed would leave my mouth, “Are you a dwarf or an elf?”
His little, perfectly shaped mouth opened, and he said in heavily accented English, “Dwarves get all the credit. I’m an elf. Will you put me down now?”
“Not a chance.” Not trusting the little fella, I body hugged him and marched back to the office. He squirmed at first, then he went limp the way cats do, but there was no way I was letting go. Here was concrete proof of...of...of something.
I unlocked the door with one hand, placed him in a desk chair opposite mine, and said, “Talk.”
He was elfin, all right. Fine features; little pointed ears like in the fairy tales; sunburned cheeks; and bloodshot, water-blue eyes. His soft little hair was blond like straw, and he looked very tired and disheveled.
I felt sorry for him at this point; he was so small, and his exposed skin was covered with scratches from the Bougainvillea.
“Do you have anything to eat?” was the first thing he said, an elf after my own heart.
“Do you like popcorn?”
“Anything, I’m starving.”
“Me, too.”
When the microwave was busy doing its thing, and the shock had lessened a bit, I handed him the power bar and asked, “Do you know where my wife is?”
“Maybe.”
I grabbed his little shirt. “Where? Don’t play games with me you little...elf!”
“Easy, easy. I know who took her, and maybe where they are, but I can’t say for sure.”
“Don’t make me stick you with this.” I took his weapon out of my pocket and shook it at him before putting it on a top shelf, out of reach. He looked suitably cowed.
“You weren’t supposed to see me.”
I never took my eyes off him as I backed up to get the popcorn. As he tore into it, I called my home number again.
“Did you find out anything?” Juniper asked.
“Sort of. You guys need to come to the office. Now.” My voice was strangely calm. “Will you ask Val to bring a first-aid kit?”
“What’s wrong, are you hurt?”
“No, it’s just a couple of scratches.”
“What if Mitzi comes home?”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, but just in case, leave her a note.”
The strange little fella and I sat there eating popcorn together until he said, “Do you have any water?” Not trusting him not to bolt, I handed him an unopened bottle I kept under my desk. He drank from it greedily. It was about now I noticed he was a bit smelly.
“I thought elves were clean.”
“We try to be, but all this travel makes it kind of hard. I’ve been living in a bush for a week.” He paused. “You weren’t supposed to see me.”
“I get that. Who are you?”
“Ekkehard, most call me Ekk.”
“My name is Panda”
“That’s a weird name.”
“Really? That’s the first thing that comes to mind from an elf named Ekk? Okay.” This whole conversation was surreal. I was in such shock, I still wasn’t sure whether or not I was hallucinating. “Where are you from?”
He just kept shoving popcorn in his little mouth, his eyes straying to the top of the shelf. I admit I was fascinated by his little mouth, chewing.
“Germany?” I guessed.
“The Hercynian Garden.”
“Are you really an elf?”
“Yes,” he said, bits of popcorn clinging to his lips.
“How could you even travel in that get up? Come on, who paid you to dress up like that?” I reached forward and tugged on a pointed ear.
“Ow. That hurts.”
The girls knocked on the door. Again, I backed over there and didn’t take my eyes off him for a second.
They came in talking but became silent after laying eyes on my new acquaintance.
“Ladies, this is Ekkehard, Ekk for short.”
Val walked in slowly and put her bag down with one hand, the other traveling to cover her mouth. “Great Spirit in the sky!” I guessed this was the Native American version of, “Oh my God.”
“He was about to tell us what happened to Mitzi,” I said. With my own scratches and bits of Bougainvillea in my hair, I probably looked as crazy as this whole thing sounded. “He’s an elf and he’s here from Hercynian Garden.”
“In Germany,” Juniper said, looking incredulous.
“In Germany,” I repeated.
Val finally spoke. “I need to say this out loud for my own sanity. Officially, this day cannot get any weirder.”
I turned to Ekk. “Where’s Mitzi?”
“My dagger will tell the story.”
Having believed way more than six impossible things today, I calmly retrieved it and inspected it closely. “You want to stab me now? I’m really not in the mood, little elf.”
“From whom?” I asked.
“You‘ll find out if you look at the holograph.”
I touched the biggest ruby, which slid easily. A projection of a tough-looking woman in battle garb appeared in a pre-recorded, three-dimensional message like I’d only seen in sci-fi films.
“Greetings. My name is Heloisa. I’m a guardian of this place. There’s a war that has gone on outside the edges of your world for eons. There are many legends. Volkort the Necromancer, tales of werewolves, and...others. This enemy, called Wolfrum, is worse, and has spilled over into your world. He leads a twisted religion that requires the death of anyone who will not convert to it. At first it was subtle, but then beheadings began. Whole villages of peaceful griffins were rounded up and enslaved or killed. Our coalition is that of all the free creatures, elves, unicorns”—Juniper smiled widely at that—“griffins, both mixed and pure, friendly dwarves—there’s a split—and others.”
Her manner of speaking was a bit frustrating.
“The people were not wary enough and accepted the enemy’s story of being followers of a peaceful way. When they had sufficient numbers, they took over. Many elves are enslaved, many have died. We need the help of our distant descendants, who have powerful abilities that are still dormant. I sent Ekk to you because of his special skills. We need anyone who carries even a drop of griffin blood to help us, or the world will be lost, ours and yours. The octopus is safety—when all else fails. Unfortunately, Odilia, the one you know as Madame Dresser, got to Mitzi first. Time is short. We are learning your ways, but there was no time to contact you sooner. If you will help us, come. We need three humans to help Mitzi, daughter of Ehrenhardt, to form the sacred pattern that will extend protection we have had for centuries. Ekk will tell you what you need to do next.”