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- Herausgeber: Black Cat Weekly
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Another great selection of mysteries and science fiction by great modern and classic authors. Here are 8 short stories and 2 novels:
Mysteries / Suspense / Adventure:
“Ear Worm,” by Robert Jeschonek [Michael Bracken Presents short story]
“Who Slew the Valkyrie,” by Hal Charles [Solve-It-Yourself Mystery]
“Pot o’ Gold,” by Shannon Taft [Barb Goffman Presents short story]
“Trouble in Paradise,” by Veronica Leigh [short story]
The Scarlet Imperial, by Dorothy B. Hughes [novel]
Science Fiction & Fantasy:
“A Time To Die,” by Harold Calin [short story]
“Out of Nowhere,” by E.A. Grosser [short story]
“Star Chamber,” by H.B. Fyfe [short story]
“Pogo Planet,” by Donald A. Wollheim [short story]
The Kid from Mars, by Oscar J. Friend [novel]
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Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
THE CAT’S MEOW
TEAM BLACK CAT
EAR WORM, by Robert Jeschonek
WHO SLEW THE VALKYRIE?, by Hal Charles
POT O’ GOLD, by Shannon Taft
TROUBLE IN PARADISE, by Veronica Leigh
THE SCARLET IMPERIAL, by Dorothy B. Hughes
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
A TIME TO DIE, by Harold Calin
OUT OF NOWHERE, by E.A. Grosser
STAR CHAMBER, by H.B. Fyfe
POGO PLANET by Donald A. Wollheim
THE KID FROM MARS, by Oscar J. Friend
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2024 by Wildside Press LLC.
Published by Black Cat Weekly.
blackcatweekly.com
*
“Ear Worm” is copyright © 2024 by Robert Jeschonek and appears here for the first time.
“Who Slew the Valkyrie” is copyright © 2022 by Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet. Reprinted by permission of the authors.
“Pot o’ Gold” is copyright © 2024 by Shannon Taft and appears here for the first time.
“Trouble in Paradise” is copyright © 2024 by Veronica Leigh and appears here for the first time.
“The Scarlet Imperial,” by Dorothy B. Hughes, was originally published in 1946.
“Out of Nowhere,” by E.A. Grosser, was originally published in Future, October 1941.
“Star Chamber,” by H.B. Fyfe, was originally published in Amazing Stories, March 1963.
“Pogo Planet,” by Donald A. Wollheim, was originally published in Future, October 1941.
“A Time To Die,” by Harold Calin, was originally published in Amazing Stories, June 1961.
The Kid from Mars, by Oscar J. Friend, was originally published inStartling Stories, September 1940.
THE CAT’S MEOW
Welcome to Black Cat Weekly.
It’s the time of year when things get really crazed here at Wildside Press, as we are preparing books for the Malice Domestic mystery convention. (We usually publish the official convention book—in this case, Malice Domestic 18: Mystery Most Devious…plus release other titles there, such as the sports crime anthology Three Strikes—You’re Dead!, edited by our own Barb Goffman, with Donna Andrews and Marcia Talley). Should you wish to attend, it’s held in Bethesda, Maryland from April 26 to 28 this year. Info at malicedomestic.net.
So it’s going to be a very brief intro this time.
Here’s the complete lineup—
Mysteries / Suspense / Adventure:
“Ear Worm,” by Robert Jeschonek [Michael Bracken Presents short story]
“Who Slew the Valkyrie,” by Hal Charles [Solve-It-Yourself Mystery]
“Pot o’ Gold,” by Shannon Taft [Barb Goffman Presents short story]
“Trouble in Paradise,” by Veronica Leigh [short story]
“The Scarlet Imperial,” by Dorothy B. Hughes [novel]
Science Fiction & Fantasy:
“A Time To Die,” by Harold Calin [short story]
“Out of Nowhere,” by E.A. Grosser [short story]
“Star Chamber,” by H.B. Fyfe [short story]
“Pogo Planet,” by Donald A. Wollheim [short story]
The Kid from Mars, by Oscar J. Friend [novel]
Until next time, happy reading!
—John Betancourt
Editor, Black Cat Weekly
TEAM BLACK CAT
EDITOR
John Betancourt
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Barb Goffman
Michael Bracken
Paul Di Filippo
Darrell Schweitzer
Cynthia M. Ward
PRODUCTION
Sam Hogan
Enid North
Karl Wurf
EAR WORM,by Robert Jeschonek
Since when is a crowded roadhouse in a Louisiana bayou on a Friday night almost completely silent?
As I stroll through the door of Guillaume’s, I see dozens of folks sitting at tables and the bar, but I don’t hear a single voice nor any music. Glasses clink, chairs scrape the wooden floor, a rack of balls breaks on a pool table…but nobody says a word.
Out loud, anyway. Plenty of hands are in motion, though, dancing and weaving in the hot, sticky air. Everyone’s speaking in sign language.
So much for picking up some cash playing the guitar on my back. I guess I should have told the trucker who gave me my last lift to drop me at a bar with a hearing clientele.
Just as I’m turning to walk back out into the full-moon bayou and find a not-so-deaf joint further up the road, someone touches my shoulder. Only then do I realize this place isn’t entirely hearing-challenged.
“Get you something?” The stunning young woman signs as she says it aloud in a light Cajun accent, her long fingers flickering with practiced skill. “Abita Purple Haze drafts are half off tonight.”
“Okay.” I’m so caught up in the way she looks, it’s all I can think to say at first.
She stops signing. “Great!” When she smiles, her face lights up like she’s overjoyed—dark eyes glittering, full red lips parted wide over pearly white teeth. “I’m Ida.”
When she offers her hand for a shake, it’s almost too much, I nearly don’t take it. When I do, I feel my mind and soul in their entirety are focused on the soft fingers and warm palm enfolding my own. “I’m Declan. Declan Minarette.”
“Good to meet you, Deck.” She breaks the handshake, reaches up, and pushes her long black curls behind her ears. At a glance, I’d say she’s about my age—somewhere in her mid-to-late twenties. “Come on and I’ll set you up.”
“Thanks.” My heart thunders as I follow her through the quiet crowd to the one empty stool at the end of the bar.
Taking my eyes off her for a second is not an option. Her movements, as she walks behind the bar, are graceful and sensual. The curves of her back and bottom flex hypnotically under the cropped white T-shirt and skintight faded jeans.
“One Purple Haze, coming right up.” She grabs a pint glass, tilts it under the Abita tap, and fills it. “So, you’re a musician, too, huh?”
“Too?” Did she just say that? Meaning she’s a musician? “What do you play?”
She smiles as she slides the beer my way. “I guess you could say I’m a singer.”
“What kind of music?”
“Covers, mostly. Oldies but goodies. I don’t get to perform much anymore, though.”
“Why?”
She spreads her arms to encompass the crowd. “Not much call for live music around these parts.”
Not sure if it’s the beer or the beauty who served it, but the Abita tastes delicious. “Is this some kind of special community or something? Is there a facility for the hearing-impaired nearby?”
“Nothing like that.” Ida pulls a bottle from the cooler, uncaps it, and slides it to a customer. “A localized outbreak of spontaneous deafness just happened one day. Nobody knows what caused it…or why I’m the only local who wasn’t affected.”
I frown. “Spontaneous deafness? That’s a thing?”
“Exactly. Are you in a hurry?”
“For what?”
Ida leans on the bar, locking eyes with me. “To get wherever it is you’re going.”
“Not really.” Even if I was, that gaze would have changed my plans.
“Need a place to stay?”
“You know of one?”
“There’s a cabin out back. Used to be a Cajun fishing shack. Nowadays, it’s more a crash-pad for folks too drunk to drive home.”
“How much?”
“On the house…if you help me with a project I’m working on.”
Should my guard be up? Not with those perfect dark eyes of hers fixed on me. “What kind of project?”
“It’s right up your alley, Deck. It’s a piece of music. A song. A real oldie.”
Even if I tried, I could never keep my smile from spreading. What did I do to deserve this perfect situation, other than get mixed up in a drug deal gone bad, bullshit my way across the country to escape the heat, kick some guy’s ass outside a Waffle House, and steal his guitar?
Maybe there’s such a thing as undeserved grace after all. Maybe, if I play my cards right, I can still be redeemed by this beautiful woman, and all the evil shit I’ve done can be forgiven…the evil shit that sent me on the run from the law for the past six months. If helping a girl with a song can do all that, then sign me up.
Music is the one thing in this miserable life that has never let me down.
* * * *
I’m awake when Ida comes knocking at eight the next morning, as promised. Even after working till three a.m., she isn’t wasting any time moving her project forward.
“Aren’t you bringing your guitar?” That’s the first thing she says.
“Should I?” I’m in a bit of a daze from insufficient sleep…and gazing enraptured at her face, which is even more beautiful in the morning light.
She looks amused. “This is about a song, so yes. Bringing the guitar might help.”
“Gotcha.” I step back into the cabin, which is sweltering—the real reason I got up early without having enough rest. Mid-July in the Louisiana swamp is not exactly what I’d call “good sleeping weather.”
When I emerge with guitar in hand, she leads me to the beat-up red Jeep idling nearby. “Let’s hit the road, Deck. We’ve got some traveling to do.”
“Long as we start with a cup of coffee, I’m up for it.”
“We’ll hit a drive-through on the way.” She grins as she hops into the Jeep.
“Awesome.” Maybe I won’t need that coffee after all, the way she looks in that tight white tank top and those denim micro-cutoffs.
“I’ll fill you in about the project on the fly.” She revs the engine. “But I’ve gotta swear you to silence. This is top-secret shit we’re dealing with, monami.”
* * * *
Ms. Monet Dulcinea flings open the patched-up screen door of the tar-paper shack with an angry glare and a flurry of sign language that gets her point across loud and clear.
“Ms. Monet.” Ida signs back at her just as fast. “We’re sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for something André promised me. A recording.”
Monet is a Creole with honey-colored skin, taller than either of us by at least half a head and maybe two decades older. I think she could tear either of us a new asshole without ever drawing the revolver from the holster on the hip of her tattered floral housecoat.
When Monet lets loose another storm of signs, Ida responds with a barrage of her own. “He was not good-for-nothing,” Ida tells her, translating for my benefit, “and you’re wrong, a bet is a promise. He lost to me at pool, best two out of three.”
At that moment, Monet is livid, her weathered features etched with barely-contained fury.
Then, something distracts her. She turns, and a barefoot child emerges from the shack—a twig of a girl, maybe seven years old, in a ragged yellow dress. Her hair is a dark brown puff around her angular, bronze face.
The child’s signing is more graceful than Monet’s, without the angry choppiness. When it ends, the girl marches past with a summoning wave, and we fall in behind her.
“Her name is Claire,” says Ida, “and she’s taking us to what we came for.”
* * * *
Claire leads us to a deserted, dilapidated chicken coop that looks like it was built a century ago. We pick our way through the mangled wire fence and duck our heads to enter the ramshackle structure.
There’s a splintered wooden shelf along one wall, and it’s occupied by loaded black plastic garbage bags instead of egg-laying hens. Claire signs something, then opens the twist tie on one of the bags and reaches inside.
“She says it’s in there,” Ida tells me. “Her mom threw out everything of her dad’s when he died, but Claire saved some of it and hid it from her.”
Claire pulls out a beat-up portable cassette tape player and hands it to Ida. If I had to guess, I’d say it was made sometime in the 1970s.
Ida gives me the player and signs with Claire, translating aloud for me. “Thank you for passing along what your daddy said. We’ll be careful.”
* * * *
“Careful about what?” I ask when we’re driving away.
“Huh?” Ida frowns.
“What did you mean when you told Claire that we’d be careful?”
“We need to be careful what’s in here isn’t destroyed.” Ida taps the tape player on the seat between us. “It’s the only copy in existence.”
“Good thing André left it to you, then.”
“He didn’t.” She shrugs. “I knew he had it, and I gambled he left it behind when he died.”
“You didn’t win it playing pool?”
She shakes her head. “I made that part up.”
“What happened to him then? How did he die?”
“He killed himself,” she says grimly. “And he wasn’t the only one.”
Driving on through the bayou toward the next fragment’s location, she finally explains the project. She tells me there are legends of an ancient song called the Primatorio—the first song, the one God Himself sang when shaping creation. According to the legends, that song has echoed down through the ages, preserved in the music of nature and faith…until, in the modern era, it was all but lost, drowned out by the clamor of progress.
Fragments of the song survived in the wilderness of the bayou, though, watched over by members of a now-extinct holy order similar to the Knights Templar. Recently, three unlikely allies—a singer of traditional folk songs (André), a musicologist, and a genius of AI-driven data analysis—discovered those fragments, assembled and analyzed the Primatorio…then split it apart again when they realized how dangerous it was. The Primatorio had special properties that could drive even the most good-natured individuals to commit heinous acts…which is exactly what happened to the three song-finders themselves.
Eventually, though, desperate measures enabled them to overcome the song’s wicked influence. As penance for the dark deeds they’d done while under its control, each of the three took a fragment of the Primatorioand hid it away, pledging to prevent the song from being unleashed further upon the human race.
This, Ida tells me, is where the two of us come in. She heard about the Primatorio at Guillaume’s when one of its three caretakers—André—got drunk and blabbed the story. She realized that if the tale were true, the Primatorio could lead to great wealth and power in the right hands…and those hands were hers.
“I know a little hoodoo, thanks to my Cajun grandma,” she explains. “I know something about properly harnessing mystical forces like the Primatorio…making them work for you and not against you. Those other idiots didn’t know what the hell they were playing at, and they paid the price in the end.”
According to Ida, that price was steep indeed. Of the three who found and protected the fragments, two are dead by suicide, and one isn’t answering the phone.
“That won’t happen to us,” she assures me. “As long as we’re careful, we’ll be all right.”
I can’t deny she’s winning me over. Working as a team with her is as close to a perfect situation as I can imagine…and the possibility of scoring a better life makes the risk of dealing with the ancient song worth taking.
Come what may, I’m all in on this. I trust her, I believe fate has given me another chance, and I’m ready to leave my dark past behind.
Taking the next step is a no-brainer.
“Let’s hear what that first fragment sounds like,” says Ida as the Jeep flies over bayou roads under branches dripping with Spanish moss. “Go ahead and hit the play button, Deck.”
When I do just that, a series of tones emanates from the player’s speaker—musical notes in a sequence. It repeats, and I turn up the volume, holding the player high between us to defeat the roar of the Jeep’s engine.
“Is that it, do you think?” I pause the tape. “Is that all there is to this fragment?”
“What fragment?” She frowns. “I didn’t hear anything.”
I play it from the point where I paused. This time, I hear the same tune again…and over it, a deep male voice uttering a strange chant.
Hosixyavacodiwaquaswapurjanox,
Exumurderviginokagonexyayahuascairidis.
I pause the tape. “You heard that, didn’t you?”
Ida shakes her head. “Nothing but static, Deck.”
I hit play again, and the chanting repeats. I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean, but it gives me an ominous feeling.
“Did you hear it again?” she asks.
I hit the stop button. “Yes, but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe we’ll find out more at our next stop.” She flicks the left turn signal and slows at an intersection. “We’re almost there.”
I resist the temptation to hit play again…but the truth is, I don’t need to. The voice keeps chanting to that weird melody in my head, again and again, on a constant loop. I’ve got myself an ear worm.
* * * *
“We’re here.” Ida parks in front of a sprawling white ranch house tucked in among a grove of cypress trees. “If the second fragment still exists, this is where we’ll find it, according to André.”
She explains further as we head up the sidewalk. “Dr. Landon Devereaux, the late musicologist, lived here.”
Something thrashes in the swamp not far away. “How did he die?”
She reaches for the doorbell. “It was self-inflicted.”
“A gunshot?”
“Nope.” She presses the button, and the doorbell chimes. “A stabbing.”
“In the chest? In the neck?”
“In the ears,” says Ida as footsteps approach from the other side of the door. “Just like André.”
Before I can say anything else, the front door swings inward, and a man in his thirties looks out. He wears a teal polo shirt, white chinos, and white loafers. His light brown hair is immaculately combed and parted on the left.
His expression is guarded as he signs and speaks at the same time. “Hello? Yes?” His spoken words are slightly garbled, pronounced as they are by a deaf man.
Ida translates for me as she signs back to him. “We’re here about Dr. Devereaux. Something we heard he was working on when he passed.”
The man stares at us for a moment before he pushes open the screen door. “Good luck with finding anything important in his things. I do believe my husband was the sloppiest man in the parish.”
* * * *
He isn’t kidding.
Two hours later, we’ve just scratched the surface of Dr. Devereaux’s office, shifting piles of paper from one side of his massive desk to the other.
We’ve gone through multiple drawers as well, flipping through file folders and notebooks—always coming up empty. We haven’t even gotten to the overstuffed binders, cartons, and plastic tubs stacked around the room.
According to Devereaux’s husband, Erasmus, the laptop computer is a dead end, too, its hard drive drilled out by Devereaux before he killed himself. The man was thorough. Still, Ida is certain he must have kept something. A musicologist like him, she reasoned, could never completely destroy a find as significant as an actual fragment of the Primatorio.
“Is there anything else you remember?” She signs the question to Erasmus.
He scowls. “Nothing that matters.”
“Think back,” says Ida. “Maybe he brought something home that struck you as unusual?”
Erasmus shakes his head. “Sorry.”
A thought strikes me then. “Did he leave a will?”
Erasmus crosses the office and stops at a big, framed photo on the wall of him and Devereux. He takes down the photo, exposing the door of a wall safe, then enters a code on its keypad.
Ida and I walk over as he pulls the door open. From what I can see, the safe is empty except for a small stack of papers—and a square red envelope on top of the stack.
“This is it.” Erasmus reaches for the stack. “Our wills and a few other odds and ends.”
“What’s that on top?” I ask.
He smiles sadly as he holds up the red envelope. “The last thing he ever gave me. A Valentine’s Day card.”
“May I take a look?” asks Ida.
He hands it to her. “I didn’t find it until…after.”
The envelope has been unsealed. Ida folds open the flap and slides out the card, which bears the painted image of a bird—a robin, singing, its red breast in the shape of a heart.
“It’s one of those with a sound chip that lets you record a message,” explains Erasmus. “But it’s not working right.”
“What do you mean?” asks Ida.
“I mean, there’s a recording of Landon’s voice when you open the card, but it’s incoherent. It sounds like he’s mumbling creepy gibberish with weird music playing in the background.”
“You don’t say.” Ida slips the card back into the envelope and flashes me a meaningful look.
* * * *
Ida talks Erasmus into letting us walk out with the card, promising to fix the “broken” sound chip and return it. As we drive off to the next fragment site according to André, she hands it over, suggesting I give it a listen.
I tug out the card and open it. The roar of the Jeep makes it hard to hear, but then I raise the card to my left ear and play it again.
This time, I hear the recording just fine…and it gives me déjà vu. Just as Erasmus warned, a male voice recites a cryptic chant over a bed of weird music—the same music as the first fragment that’s still repeating in my brain.
Spa fonfugateramidiviktaaraloqui
Axayumakacarviboshinclenomashtashribi.
“Well?” asks Ida.
I close the card, hold it up to her ear, and open it. I hear the audio playing at a low volume from across the seat.
Ida just looks annoyed. “I don’t hear anything.”
As I take back the card, I still hear it playing clearly. Either I’m losing my marbles, or there’s some bizarre reason why I can hear the audio, but she can’t.
“You’re telling me you definitely hear something from the card?” she asks.
“Just like the tape.” I open the card once more, hear the chanting, then close it. The audio stops playing…aloud, that is.
But in my head is a different story. The second fragment keeps playing there right after the first, the two parts intensifying with each passing moment. Giving me ideas.
Dark ones. Ideas shrouded in blood. Ideas about deeds straight out of a nightmare.
The kind of ideas that must have driven the three song-finders to commit the atrocities that pushed them over the edge.
It is only now that I truly start to wonder if Ida might be wrong about the risks of this project…and if I might be wrong to trust her.
* * * *
Our next stop is a burned-out trailer in a densely wooded spot…a trailer so freshly torched that it’s still smoldering.
“Well,” says Ida as she parks. “Now we know why Fleur Broussard isn’t picking up her phone.”
At first, it seems we’ve driven all this way for nothing. As we poke around inside the trailer, we find little more than ashes and charred metal. At least we don’t find Fleur’s body—though it’s possible the ashes we’re wading through include her cremated remains.
It’s not until we go back outside that we find something of interest. Yards from the trailer, a sealed metal lockbox rests upside-down in a patch of mud, deposited haphazardly as if tossed from a window.
Miraculously, there’s a key ring nearby, too, with a single silver key on it.
“At least she left us something.” Ida puts the box on the hood of the Jeep, inserts the key, and pops the lid. She pulls out a rectangular black thumb drive, approximately an inch in length. “This might be what we’re looking for.” She pockets the drive, chucks the lockbox into the mud, and marches around to hop in the driver’s side of the Jeep. “André said Fleur was all about deep data analysis. If anyone could figure out the code behind the Primatorio—and back up everything she had on a thumb drive—it would be her.”
Following Ida’s lead, I clamber in on the passenger’s side. “Do you have a computer so we can view whatever’s on that drive?”
“There’s one in the office at Guillaume’s.”
As we launch out of there in a storm of spattering mud, I half-dread accessing the drive. Part of me hopes it’s encrypted so we can’t listen to the last fragment of the song. Two pieces playing on a loop in my head and creeping me out with twisted ideas and images are more than enough.
* * * *
Ida and I huddle around a laptop in the office at Guillaume’s, waiting for the machine to boot up. Beyond the closed door, the roadhouse is coming to life as Saturday evening rolls into Saturday night.
“It’s gonna be a busy night.” Ida glances at the door. “I won’t be able to stay back here for long.”
I nod, though I’m struggling to hear her over the ear worm playing in my head. It’s louder than ever now…though for some reason, I haven’t been able to play it on my guitar the way Ida wants. As loud and clear as it sounds in my brain, the tune slips away every time I try to noodle it out on the instrument.
When I finally give up and set the guitar aside, the computer finishes booting. Ida plugs the thumb drive into a USB port on the side of it, and the device quickly accepts the accessory.
When she double-clicks the thumb drive icon on the screen, a file browser opens, revealing the drive’s contents—a single folder labeled “VOX.”
Ida opens the folder, which contains three sub-folders—one labeled DATA, another labeled THEORY, and a third labeled NOTES. She opens THEORY first and finds a single text file with the same title. She pops it open, and we both start reading.
“This is about what makes the Primatorio tick,” she says. “According to Fleur, that is.”
I read fast, trying to wrap my head around the text while the ear worm continues to warp my brain with its poison. “Something about living sound?”
“Fleur claimed the Primatorio is a sonic wave of sufficient complexity that it has attained a state of sentient self-awareness…like computer code advanced enough to develop artificial intelligence.”
“But how would something like that exist on its own? Sound only happens when something causes it.”
“Fleur thought of it like a virus, transmitted from host to host. It’s dormant until it infects someone, at which point it activates and forces the host to transmit it to someone else.”
It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots to the ear worm in my head. “So that’s why Fleur, Devereux, and André broke it up and hid the pieces. To stop the spread.”
Ida stops scrolling. “But we already knew all that.”
“We did?”
“Everyone in town did. Why do you think they all went deaf?”
“But you said…”
“There was a localized outbreak of spontaneous deafness?” She laughs. “It never occurred to you that might be total bullshit?”
The chanting in my head gets louder, drowning out my thoughts. Things are going off the tracks, and I know it…or maybe I always did. Maybe I knew but wanted Ida so bad, I didn’t think too hard about it. Maybe I wanted to get rich from the Primatorio, too, if that was possible with something so volatile.
Now here I am, and I know I won’t get any of the things I thought I wanted…unless you count the gruesome visions in my head, the ones I find myself craving with an obscene and irrational intensity.
“Fleur and the others accidentally let the song loose,” explains Ida. “It spread like wildfire. Everyone who heard it passed it along…and they did terrible things to each other in the process.”
She opens the folder titled NOTES, which holds a single MP3 sound file. As she hovers the cursor over it, I see where this is headed. I kept hoping things would work out all right despite the danger signs, but now I realize that escape is my only hope.
“Folks did figure out how to immunize themselves,” she tells me. “All it took was a pair of knitting needles inserted in the auditory canals…though they had to be careful the cure didn’t turn out to be fatal.”
Leaping up from the stool I’ve been sitting on, I stumble across the office, aiming for the door. Before I can reach it, though, the ear worm ratchets up to its loudest level yet, slowing me to a hunched-over stagger.
“It was all for nothing,” says Ida. “The people of this godforsaken town couldn’t keep it caged for long with their deafness. Even the three original song-finders couldn’t stop it by killing themselves, hoping to sever the song’s purest, most powerful roots from living memory. I wouldn’t let them. I’m a priestess of the song, you see, the latest in a very long line—immune to the song’s effects and dedicated to unleashing it.”
Rising from her seat, she carries the laptop toward me.
“That’s where you come in.” She taps the laptop’s trackpad, opening the audio file. “I need you to host the Primatorio in full in your memory and spread it to every corner of the planet.”
Suddenly, the file plays through the laptop’s speakers…and the third and final fragment fills my ears.
Takanibrougochandapons!
Winuksachaayasistaxzefelorvilikrascapto!
“Did you hear it?” She circles me, leering. “Drink it in! Let it dominate you in every way!”
I feel it insinuating itself, worming inside me…taking me over. I resist with every fiber of my being, intent on pushing it away and charging out the door…but I’m frozen, sweat pouring down my face and back and sides.
The final fragment blazes in my brain in all its awful glory, then merges with the first two fragments to become the song supposedly sung by God Himself…though I’m having my doubts it was Him who did the singing.
Something snaps inside me. I straighten, the song booming in my mind, compelling me to obey its inhuman will.
Ida drops the laptop, grabs the phone from her back pocket, and opens an app. Grinning, she raises the phone with its camera lens pointing at me.
And its microphone, too. Especially that.
Because she knows what’s coming. She knows exactly what I’m about to do. What I have no choice but to do.
Even now, I feel the urge building, thrashing to get out like an alien embryo in a science fiction movie.
“You’re live online!” Ida giggles. “We’ve got 50,000 followers and counting!”
The chanting in my head grows ever louder and more insistent. It blots out everything but itself and every impulse but absolute obedience to its commands.
The bad ideas I’ve been having outnumber the rest. Thoughts of blood and torture and brutality overshadow every peaceful impulse within me.
Hosixyavacodiwaquaswapurjanox,
Exumurderviginokagonexyayahuascairidis.
Even as I lose my self-control, I gain an understanding of the chant by osmosis, by exposure to its overwhelming intellect. I know now that Fleur was right, that it is a thing of sentient sound, a viral vibration. Since the dawn of time, it has never been entirely silent. It has waited for this day, when the tools exist to spread it worldwide in a flash…and a vessel with a deep streak of darkness requires just a nudge to set the process in motion.
Spa fonfugateramidiviktaaraloqui
Axayumakacarviboshinclenomashtashribi.
The words are there in my mind, on the tip of my tongue. All I have to do is open my mouth and let them out. Put my conscience aside. Compartmentalize.
Just like I did at the Waffle House when I beat that guy nearly to death and took his guitar.
Did I say nearly?
Have I been lying to myself all this time about the real reason I’ve been on the run? What kind of asshole does that?
I take a breath.
The song thing grins, uncurling like a serpent about to hatch from my skull.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” Ida shouts like a ringmaster. “Preeesenting the greatest vocalist you have ever heard and a song you will never get out of your heads!”
I open my mouth.
“Sing along, everybody!” she cries. “Raise your voices!”
At the last second, I want to warn them, all the viewers, to save themselves…and maybe I could, if I were still in control of my vocal cords and lungs and lips and tongue.
But all that comes out is that song, the one that started at the Beginning and returns now at the End, the ultimate ear worm planting its seed in the minds and hearts of millions, with billions more singers yet to join in its fateful refrain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Jeschonek (bobscribe.com) is an envelope-pushing, USA Today bestselling author whose fiction, comics, and non-fiction have been published around the world. His stories have appeared in Clarkesworld,Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine,and many other publications. He has written official Star Trek and Doctor Who fiction and has scripted comics for DC, AHOY, and others. His young adult slipstream novel, My Favorite Band Does Not Exist, won the Forward National Literature Award and was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten First Novels for Youth. He also won an International Book Award, a Scribe Award for Best Original Novel, and the grand prize in Pocket Books’ Strange New Worlds contest.
WHO SLEW THE VALKYRIE?,by Hal Charles
Detective Kelly Stone parked her unit in front of the converted used-car lot labelled VALKYRIES. Walking past the four Harley-Davidsons parked in front, Kelly found her mother waiting at the door.
“I’m afraid our little group I call The Motorcycle Mystery Club has a deadly mystery you need to solve,” said Sheila Stone, who seemed a nervous wreck.
Usually the women’s quintet did nothing more mysterious than sitting around talking about Agatha Christie novels or taking short rides and long lunches, Kelly knew, but something had definitely rattled her mother. “What’s wrong, Mom?”
“It’s Lucy Davenport. When I arrived a while ago, she was dead in the rear garage bay.”
“What?”
“And I notified the coroner immediately after calling you,” said Sheila, opening the front door for her daughter.
After asking the three women by the coffee urn to please remain, Kelly went into the back. She found the back garage door locked and on the cement floor, next to her “hog,” lay Lucy Davenport, face down, her left arm straight out and bent at the elbow in a perfect right angle. Beside her head was a bloody wrench. Finding no pulse, Kelly stepped back so as not to contaminate the crime scene, then took a picture of what she had discovered.
When she returned to the front of the ex-business that the women had converted into an-easy chair-filled den, Kelly’s mother took her aside and said, “What pains me almost as much as Lucy’s death is knowing that one of my biker friends is a murderer.”
“What makes you say that, Mom?” said Kelly.
“There are only five keys to The Valkyrie. Each opens the front and rear garage door. It’s like a ritual that as each woman arrives, she unlocks the door and locks it behind her, so the killer has to be one of us.”
“Who arrived first?”
“Usually Lucy, but today that would be me,” said Susan Wright, “but I never thought to look in the garage. I just followed our rule that first one in makes the coffee.” She pointed to the urn on the counter.
“When I arrived,” confirmed Ellie Pritchard, “Susan was just opening a new container of coffee. Like her, it never occurred for me to check the garage in back.”
“I came in next,” admitted Moira Flowers. “I live the farthest away and am usually last to get here. I confess I was late because I was home trying to finish today’s book of discussion, Agatha’s Death on the Nile.”
“A usual, I was last,” said Sheila Stone. “Even on Saturday morning I go by city hall to work on something. By the time I unlocked the front door, The Motorcycle Mystery Club was sitting there drinking coffee…everybody but poor Lucy.” She fought back a tear.
“I got up to get your mother some creamer from the cabinet,” said Susan Wright. “As I passed by the door into the garage, I just happened to look through the glass and spotted something on the floor.”
“I had popped up to get a refill,” said Moira Flowers. “I thought that mass on the garage floor looked like a person.”
Ellie Pritchard chimed in. “I live next to Lucy, and for some reason I just knew it was her.”
“All four of us went back there,” said Sheila Stone. “When we were certain it was Lucy, I called you and the coroner.”
Moira Flowers began to sob. Suddenly Kelly found herself amidst a room of crying women.
Suddenly Sheila Stone stopped. “Here we are a bunch of mystery-loving motorcyclists. If only Lucy had left us one of Agatha’s so-called ‘dying clues,’ we’d know where to turn.”
“Actually,” said Kelly, “I think she did, and I know just where to turn.”
SOLUTION
Kelly remembered the dead woman’s exact positioning. In her dying moment Lucy had forced her left arm out and up in a right angle, which was the bicyclist and motorcyclist’s indication of making a right turn. From the grave Lucy was signaling her killer was “right,” Susan Wright. Under interrogation Susan confessed that Lucy had confronted her with proof she’d been stealing from the account used to purchase the Valkyeries’ clubhouse.
The Barb Goffman Presents series showcasesthe best in modern mystery and crime stories,
personally selected by one of the most acclaimed
short stories authors and editors in the mystery
field, Barb Goffman, forBlack Cat Weekly.
POT O’ GOLD,by Shannon Taft
“I don’t see why we had to get here so early, Mom,” my fifteen-year-old daughter, Hailey, complained as I drove through the open gates and entered the long driveway to Patrick’s house. My mother’s brother, he’d made a fortune decades ago designing a video game in which players tried to outwit a leprechaun and steal his gold. Pat had long since sold his company, but he still liked to dabble, creating game apps.
For as long as I could remember, Pat had invited friends and family over to his house for a St. Patrick’s Day Pot o’ Gold hunt, where we followed individualized clues around the two-hundred-acre backyard woods of Pat’s house, searching for the prize. A few years ago, he’d updated the event to switch from paper-based clues to an app designed just for us that still sent us scurrying around his property. Really, the “gold” at the end of the hunt was nothing more than chocolate disks covered in shimmering gold foil to resemble coins. But the point was fun, not authenticity.
While I’d always loved the game, Hailey had tried to get out of coming today. It didn’t help matters that I’d insisted on us getting an early start so I could talk to Pat before the other guests were due to arrive. The Hatfields and McCoys could not hold grudges half as well as a teenaged girl roused from bed, forced to eat breakfast, and pushed out of the house before ten on a weekend morning.
It was looking like I had no choice but to explain things to her. “Sweetie, do you remember six years ago, when Uncle Pat had cancer?”
Hailey straightened from the slouch she’d engaged in for the entire twenty-minute drive. Her blue eyes turned from petulant to serious in a flash.
“Last week, he told me it’s back.”
“He’ll beat it again.” Hailey made it sound as much like a question as a statement.
“That first time, I think he would’ve given up if Aunt Cathy would’ve let him. He says she bullied him into staying alive.”
“And now Cathy’s gone,” Hailey whispered, her voice barely audible over the sound of our car rolling to a stop.
Cathy had died without warning of a stroke just before Christmas, and Pat had taken her death hard. “Pat says the doctors told him his cancer is pretty severe, and he might not beat it even if he takes all the recommended treatments. He says he’d rather be with Cathy than fight the battle again. That’s why we’re here before anyone else. I need to talk him into fighting.”
“But why not wait for the others so you can all do it together—like an intervention?”
“He doesn’t want everyone to know he’s sick. Says it’s too depressing when someone eyes you like you have one foot in the grave. He hated that as much as the chemo last time, and he says he won’t go through either of those again.”
Hailey unbuckled her seatbelt, her eyes laser-focused on the three-story manor as if it held a set of Taylor Swift concert tickets. “So, we’re going to change his mind.”
I blinked back tears. As much as my daughter made me want to pull out my hair at times, I was immensely proud of the person she was growing into.
When we reached the porch, I resisted the urge to ring the doorbell. “Family doesn’t knock,” Cathy had always said, taking umbrage whenever I was expected at the house but still rang the bell.
I turned the knob and pushed open the heavy oak door. “Uncle Pat? It’s Nora and Hailey.”
There was no reply.
“Pat?” I hollered.
Still nothing.
Hailey turned to me. “The hunt starts in ninety minutes. And the door was unlocked. He ought to be here. If he doesn’t answer… How sick is he?”
A burst of terror-fueled adrenaline flooded my veins. “He said he had months to live. Months.” I shouldn’t panic in front of my child, I reminded myself. “He probably just didn’t hear me. Wait here, I’ll check his bedroom.”
Hailey shook her head. “I’m gonna help look. I’ll do the kitchen.” She didn’t give me a chance to respond before she dashed down the hall toward the back of the house.
I climbed the stairs with far less energy than she’d shown. But when I reached the master suite, everything looked in order. The large bed was neatly made, and a damp but clean white towel hung in the bathroom.
I called out, “Pat?” Again, there was no answer, so I made my way to his office at the other end of the hallway. The one he used to share with Cathy. The door was wide open. My eye was easily caught by the lime-green top hat sitting on the desk. It was not until I stepped inside that I realized what was wrong. On the wall behind their large partners desk there was a huge print of the family at a Pot o’ Gold hunt from about a decade before, framed and behind glass.
Shattered glass.
The cracks in what remained radiated outward from a central point.
I crept forward until I was scarcely a foot from the picture. There was a hole in it, maybe a half-inch wide. It looked like it could’ve been made by a bullet.
A prank,I told myself. It must be part of the game.
I stared down at the broken glass on the bamboo flooring, wondering if he would really go to such lengths. Then I saw a glimmering gold disk the size of a quarter resting atop some broken glass a fingers-width away from the desk. I bent to pick up the disk, but the second I tried to lift it, I knew it was not foil-wrapped chocolate. It weighed far too much.
“Mom?” Hailey’s panicked voice came from down the hall.
“In here, sweetie,” I called, rising.
“I checked the whole first floor,” she said, her voice getting closer. “No one’s there.”
When she stepped into the room, her gaze landed on me, then her eyes widened as she took in the damaged picture.
“Stay there,” I said, moving over to her by the door.
“What happened?”
“I think it’s a prank. Probably.”
Her brow furrowed. “What?”
I explained about the bullet-shaped hole in the photo and the coin, handing over the latter so she could feel its weight.
“What kind of prank would have this?” she asked, holding the coin up to catch the light from the window. It was heavily worn, but we could faintly make out something in Spanish along with the year 1798.
“Don’t you remember Uncle Pat’s game? The one he made almost forty years ago? I gave you the app version for your birthday when you were ten.”
“I only played for a few minutes. It was too babyish for me.”
“Oh.” I tried to mask my disappointment. “Well, the game was about forcing a leprechaun to give you his gold. You—the player, that is—chased him over mountains, across streams, through caves, and whatnot. I think this real coin and that broken glass are to give a bit more oomph to this year’s hunt. To make it feel like more is at stake than some slightly stale chocolate.”
Hailey eyed me warily. “You said there was a hole in the picture. Would he really have done that to any picture that has the family—that has Cathy—in it?”
I saw her point, then talked myself out of it. “It’s just a print. He can make as many of them as he wants.”
I strode back to the desk to search for any clues and headed straight for the hat. I picked it up, surprised and disappointed to find nothing underneath. I did not have the password to his laptop, but among his papers atop the desk, I discovered an invoice for two-dozen small cast-iron cauldrons and a separate one for a keg of green beer. I had my fingers mentally crossed that all he intended to do was make mini-shepherd pies in the cauldrons and serve the beer in normal glasses, but having endured his Guinness milkshakes one year, I wondered what he was planning to serve us after the hunt and just how bad it would taste.
While rummaging through the drawers, two things stuck out to me. The first was a tiny cache of three more gold coins in the top drawer on his side of the partners desk. The other oddity was on Cathy’s side of the desk. While some of her papers were still in the drawers, her gun was missing. Perhaps after her death Pat had locked it away someplace else? But it seemed even more likely that it had made the hole in the picture. In which case, where was it now?
“Don’t you think we ought to call the cops?” Hailey asked when I gave up the search for anything that might explain what was going on.
I shook my head firmly. “It’s St. Patrick’s Day. If I call the cops saying my uncle, who dresses like a leprechaun every year, is missing, and he left behind a green top hat and centuries-old gold coin, they’ll think I’m drunk. Or a lunatic. Or both. Probably both.”
I preferred not to mention that my soon-to-be ex-husband would use it against me in the divorce. But Hailey had overheard me and her father fighting often enough about child custody for her to understand what I was really saying. I couldn’t risk a police report that would almost certainly show me in a bad light.
Hailey’s head jerked a bit as she swallowed, then she nodded. “We’ll wait for the others. Someone else can call the cops if they think it’s necessary.”
I placed a hand on her shoulder. “Good plan.”
* * * *
More than an hour later, the living room held two-dozen people. Pat’s son, Michael, and daughter, Siobhan, were there with their spouses and children. My brother wasn’t there, having claimed a “prior commitment.” Something that Siobhan’s husband, Dennis, was only too willing to point out was a load of crap because it’s not like the annual Pot o’ Gold hunt that we’d done for decades was a last-minute surprise. My brother just preferred to play golf, which meant his kids were also off the hook for attending. However, several of Pat’s neighbors and old friends had come, as well as a few business acquaintances.
After extensive discussion, the consensus was that the hat, coin, and missing gun, as well as a bullet—which Michael had found in the wall behind the photo when we agreed someone should look—were all part of the game. The only dispute was whether they were an excellent addition to the annual hunt or in bad taste. I was greatly outnumbered on the “bad taste” vote, with a few abstentions and only my daughter and a man I’d never met before agreeing that Pat shouldn’t have done it.
Once the argument petered out, Hailey told me, “I’m gonna go get a soda.”
I nodded absently and opened the app we’d all been told to upload the day before. The screen still showed a leprechaun dancing in place next to a pot of gold. The creature’s movements bore a strong resemblance to the prance of a toddler in desperate need of a toilet.
A man’s voice said from my left, “Hello, I’m Steven Emmons.”
I turned my head, saw the man who’d agreed with me before about the joke being in bad taste, and wondered why his name sounded familiar when the face was not. In his late forties, with short salt-and-pepper hair and brown eyes, he was dressed appropriately for the event in hiking boots and jeans with a tan leather jacket over a green shirt.
“I’m from the land conservation trust,” he explained, apparently guessing at my confusion.
“Oh. Right. You wanted Pat and Cathy to donate the land next to the house to become a park of some kind, but he said no because he wanted to keep using it for the St. Patrick’s Day events.” Cathy had told me ages ago that the house would be Michael’s one day since Siobhan preferred living in the city, but the attached land was a more open question.
“Actually, Pat signed the papers a few days ago,” Steven said. “The transfer goes into effect at the end of the month.”
I sighed. It was one more sign Patrick really didn’t intend to fight the cancer. He’d given away the land because he didn’t expect to need it anymore. Doubtless that was also why he’d gone a bit over the top with the prank too.
“It will be the Cathy and Patrick O’Donnell Memorial Park,” Steven explained gently. “A hundred acres long and two acres wide. We’ll have a walking path in the shape of an infinity loop, and benches in a few spots for people to sit and birdwatch, but otherwise the land will be kept in a natural state.”
Of everything he’d just said, two words had caught my attention the most. “Memorial Park?”
Steven looked somber and glanced around before saying in a low voice, “Pat told me you knew about the cancer coming back. He said he’d shared the news with you and his son.”
I peered across the room at Michael. He was typing something on his phone, his jaw clenched. I wondered if he was sending a scolding text to Patrick, as I suspected this was not how Michael wanted to spend what little time he had left with his father. Siobhan was nearby, staring down at her phone while her husband, Dennis, was across the room, pouring a generous dose of whiskey into a cut-crystal highball glass.
Michael’s daughter and Siobhan’s son, both twenty-one, chatted with one another on the couch. Siobhan’s daughter, Zara, was sixteen and had joined Hailey by the soft drinks. I wondered if any of Pat’s grandchildren realized this would be their last Pot o’ Gold hunt, or at least the last with their grandfather running it.
I dragged my attention back to Steven and asked, “Does Michael know about the land donation?”
“He knows. I’ve learned over the years that no matter how much someone tells their family about their charitable giving plans, it can still cause some ugly scenes after the person is gone and the will is read. It’s one reason why I convinced Pat to do the transfer now, while he’s still with us. But it turns out that I was worried for nothing. Michael told me himself that he was fine with giving up the land, provided his parents’ house was not part of the deal.”
Silence fell for a moment, then Hailey came up to me, phone in her hand, and said, “It’s game time.”
I looked down at my phone. Sure enough, the leprechaun had stopped his dance. A new screen appeared, asking for my name and date of birth. “That’s odd. Pat never required a security code before.”
“Maybe because it was chocolate coins in prior years,” Steven replied. “At least, that’s what Pat said when telling me about the game a few years ago.”
“Isn’t it chocolate this time too?” I asked. “I mean, the gold coin I found on the floor was there to add ambiance to the game. And the broken picture glass was to make someone look around in order to find that coin. That’s what everyone said, right?”
“Most people said that, but I agreed with you that the bullet hole was in bad taste. I think it’s especially inappropriate if Pat’s using real gold coins as a prize.”
“But they’re never real,” Hailey said. “Maybe the one in Uncle Pat’s office was, but there’s no way he hid a fortune in the woods.”
Steven angled his head. “I wouldn’t be so sure. When Pat invited me to the hunt, he made me promise that anything I found would be used to support the memorial park. If there’s nothing to find out there but chocolate, then extracting that promise doesn’t make a lot of sense. On the other hand, if the coins are real, it might explain why Pat added the extra security of making everyone enter their birthdate.”
I hoped Steven was wrong, or at least that no one shared his suspicions. Otherwise, this year’s hunt could get extremely ugly.
* * * *
I logged in with my information, and the app began to play a man crooning, “My wild Irish rose…” Hailey logged in and received the same song.
Our eyes met, and she gave me an impish grin that told me we were both thinking the same thing. Cathy’s prized roses were planted right outside the kitchen window. We didn’t have far to go.
Steven’s phone began to play something entirely different, a jazzy piano tune that sounded like “The Entertainer” but a little different.
“I think the song is ‘Maple Leaf Rag,’” Steven said. “Composer, Scott Joplin. Pat and I talked about his music once. Pat had some vintage records and played this song for me.”
There weren’t many maple trees around, but I knew where one could be found on the far end of the property. “How well do you know the land that your trust is acquiring?”
He grinned at me. “Well enough to follow this clue.”
I wished him happy hunting, then Hailey and I headed for the back of the house.
At the base of one rosebush, she found a gold-painted rock with a four-digit number written in marker, just like in prior years. The rock didn’t weigh enough to be real gold, but I scraped it with a fingernail just to be certain, sighing with relief when a fleck of paint came off.
We each entered the code from the rock into the app and got the next clue: a photo of an osprey’s nest. It was a photo of an actual nest from the property, and I knew exactly where it was located. “Let’s go.”
We followed the makeshift trail through the woods, trying to dodge thorns on some plants and poison ivy in a few spots. As much as it saddened me that the land would pass out of the family, I couldn’t help but feel that Pat had done the right thing when he’d given the woods to someone who would make proper trails and allow other families to enjoy the area without any bushwhacking.
“Almost there,” I promised Hailey, pointing to the nest.
“Mom…” Hailey warned from behind me, her voice carrying a mix of worry and confusion. “What is that?”
Off to the right, there was something in lime green, the same color as the top hat I’d seen on Pat’s desk.
“Stay here!” I ordered before dashing in the new direction.
Hailey did not listen to me, of course, and was still by my side when I screeched to a halt and screamed, transfixed by the sight of the bullet-shaped hole in Pat’s forehead.
* * * *
My daughter had the common sense to call 911, while everyone came running at the sound of my horrified scream. Upon seeing the body, each person seemed to feel the need to express the scope of their dismay, disbelief, or grief. The overlapping voices were a cacophony until Hailey shouted, “Everyone shut up so I can hear the nine one one guy!”
People quieted down.
I saw Siobhan sobbing in her husband’s arms. Michael’s wife wrapped one arm around him and leaned her head on his shoulder. I felt a pang, missing what it had been like to have a spouse I could rely on in hard times like this.
After consulting with the dispatcher about having two dozen people tramping around the scene, a solution was devised. We worked out that Michael, Dennis, and Steven would wait with the body, while the rest of us would travel in small groups, keeping an eye on each other, and then all stick together in the living room until the police arrived.
The trip back to the house was a somber one and surprisingly silent. We arrived to find a cruiser pulling into the driveway, lights flashing. The officers did not jump out of the vehicle as I expected, but rather waited a minute for a second cruiser while everyone not in the woods stood around watching.
Twenty minutes later, all the family and guests were in the living room, with three body-camera-wearing officers keeping an eye on us while we waited for a detective to arrive. We’d each gotten a pat-down for weapons with no interesting results.
I needed something to do. Anything to occupy my brain so I could stop thinking about how awfully my uncle had died. With no better ideas, I went up to the sole female officer and said, “People are going to need to eat. Uncle Pat usually serves a feast after the hunt. Can I go to the kitchen and bring people some food?”
Michael’s daughter apparently overheard me because she said, “Yes, please, some food!”
The officer looked down for a moment, almost as if she expected the camera on her chest to give an answer, then she met my eyes and shook her head.
Steven came over and said to the officer in a low voice, “Look, we all liked Pat, and I think we’re going to cooperate and agree to wait as long as you need. But if people get hungry enough, that could change.”
“We can’t leave, even if we’re hungry,” I said. “I mean, if the police say to stay, we have to stay, right?”
“It’s called a Terry stop, not a Terry detainment,” Steven said. “They’re only able to hold us for a short duration.”
The officer gave him an angry glare, which made me think he likely had the law right. She told us to wait a minute, stepped away to consult with the other two officers, then returned and said that I could bring in the lunch.
