Thomas creeper and the p.., p.16
Thomas Creeper and the Purple Corpse, page 16
“Heading out so soon?”
“Thanks for having me,” said Cyril, reaching for the door knob. “I don’t know if Thomas told you, but I’m his replacement at the library. He’s helping me find some missing books.” Cyril chuckled and winked back at Thomas. Thomas felt like belting Cyril across the jaw, even if he had just saved the day with the Fipps lawsuit.
“Oh, that’s my Thomas,” said Mrs. Creeper. “Always thinking of others.”
“I think I know who he gets it from,” said Cyril, flashing another wink, this time at Thomas’s mother. Now Thomas really wanted to belt Cyril. If Cyril hadn’t scooted out the door with a wave of his gloved hand, Thomas would have done it.
Closing the door, Mrs. Creeper bounced her shoulders up and down in a perky, pleased motion that made Thomas want to vomit.
“You really are making some wonderful friends these days, Thomas . . . Thomas?”
The sound of his retreating footsteps was all Thomas had left to offer on the topic of Cyril Barnes.
Back in his bedroom, examining the gap underneath the closet door for any traces of the strange silver after-glows, but still finding none, Thomas wondered if he could be friends with someone like Cyril Barnes. Could he be friends with someone who had no problem going through his stuff, lying to his mother’s face one moment and then flirting with her the next? Had Cyril flirted with his mom? Gross!
Thomas clenched and unclenched his fists. Wherever Cyril was now, Thomas felt like he could see the older boy in his mind’s eye—strutting through the fog, grinning and chuckling like a madman. With a flash of Korvac’s enchanted book and a wave of his germaphobe gloves, Cyril Barnes could fix any problem he came across, even if it meant lying or using magic to brainwash those who crossed his path. Perhaps for the first time in his life Thomas felt a new sensation, a new drive coursing through his veins.
The drive to be better.
No, not better.
The best.
It wasn’t like the drive to surpass some family member who doubted him. Not in the way Thomas did everything in his power so he didn’t end up like Uncle Jed, or his father—stooped-shouldered, belligerent, a slave to the all-encompassing god of Work. No, Thomas had to be better than one person.
Cyril Barnes.
If that meant being a better Fixer, so be it. Sure, Cyril had tricks up his sleeves. But did Cyril have friends, friends who would stand by him in times of trouble like the Unicornettes? It was doubtful. How many real friends would stick around once they discovered Cyril’s lies?
Thomas pushed himself up from the floorboards. Whatever Cyril was snooping around for in his closet it would have to wait. There was a bigger problem to solve, a problem that wouldn’t go away until Thomas and Byron beat the killer at their game and caught them, once and for all, maybe with a little undead help from the Unicornettes.
Byron was right. They needed help. They needed illumination.
If magic was somehow involved in the killer’s game, it was still a crime. Even the most clever criminal left a trail of evidence. Evidence was the real illumination they needed to make all the horror stop. Fortunately for them, Thomas had a pile of it, right there in his bedroom.
He crossed the room and headed over to his desk drawer. Sliding out the photos from Korvin’s folder, he placed them side by side on his desk. Steadying his shaking hand, he breathed deeply and clicked on his desk lamp.
“Okay,” he whispered, his heart throbbing way up in his throat. “Okay.”
. . .
After ten minutes of carefully critiquing each crime scene photo, Thomas surveyed his notes.
A piece of Ströher’s hard pretzel, Thomas’s favorite snack of choice, dangled out the side of his mouth. He checked his official Ken Darby spy watch: almost nine o’clock.
On a notepad stamped with the words Property of Creeper & Sons Funeral Services—his father was both stingy and suspect of thieves—Thomas jotted down the names of the three victims, along with possible questions about their connections: Eddie Jones, Rocelia Sanchez, and an elderly man with a thin white mustache named Gunther Strasser. Did the three victims know each other? Or were they random selections made by the killer?
Thomas chomped the pretzel harder, eyes darting from one photo to the next. Nothing seemed random. All three corpses were dyed head to toe in purple ink, and all bore the letters R and N tattooed in purple ink on their left and right eyelids. Thomas gazed down at his handwriting, a furious scrawl of pen strokes beneath the light of his desk lamp. Why purple? What was the meaning of the color purple? What connection did it have to the killer?
He flew over to the old decommissioned dumbwaiter that ran from the kitchen to his bedroom. Though broken, the dumbwaiter still had a few good uses. If Thomas listened close enough he could hear conversations in the kitchen, find out what his parents were scheming, or whatever topic Thomas’s father was currently sour over so Thomas knew not to bring it up. Even more useful, the dumbwaiter held the spillover from Thomas’s overflowing bookshelves.
Snatching up a well-loved copy of The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs, one of Thomas’s favorite mysteries, Thomas thumbed his way to the page about Mrs. Zimmerman, the friendly witch who lived next door to Jonathan Barnavelt and his crime-solving nephew Lewis. Purple was Florence Zimmerman’s favorite color, a color often associated with witches. Thomas’s eyes brightened. Were the purple corpses victims of some kind of witchcraft?
He flapped blindly through the pages of the novel as if willing some other tantalizing bit of information to leap out at him. Stopping on one of the great pen and ink illustrations by Edward Gorey, he scratched his head. If the purple corpses were the work of someone practicing black magic, could there be other signs of witchcraft on the corpses? Hexes? A newt in the throat? Each corpse was discovered tangled up in sea-drift. Someone had thrown them into the water, that much Thomas knew for sure. If some black magic ritual had taken place high atop a cliff, or on one of the many islands out in Gloomsbury Bay, the ocean had erased any trace of such mischief.
He went back to the desk and flicked on his computer. He opened the web browser and did a quick search for associations with the color purple. Scrolling past a famous album cover by the artist Prince and the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker, he stopped. He moved the cursor and clicked on an image of a figure created by dozens of small painted tiles. A mosaic. The paint was faded in places, but Thomas could see traces of a man seated on a throne holding some kind of scepter. A robe was draped over his shoulders.
A purple robe.
Feeling his pulse start to spike, Thomas read the short paragraph beneath the image. Royal purple, often known as Tyrian purple, is a secretion produced by predatory sea snails of the Muricidae family known commonly as Murexes. From the robes of Phoenician and Roman kings, to the High Priests of Jerusalem, the Murex’s dye has distinguished the mark of royalty and piety for centuries.
Thomas clicked on the blue hyperlink underscoring the word Murex. A new window flashed open, revealing a textbook-style drawing of the spiny marine mollusk of the Muricidae family. Several sharp spikes rose from the Murex’s spine, rising and enlarging around the snail’s bulb-like central chamber. Underneath the image of the species was a chemical definition with numbers and dashes Thomas didn’t quite understand.
6,6’-Dibromoindigo is the major pigment component of Tyrian purple. It is not only the most expensive pigment, but the oldest and perhaps first of its kind to be subjected to major industry.
Thomas backtracked through the article to find out how many Murexes it took to make one robe, but he couldn’t find any immediate answers. If whoever was dumping bodies in Gloomsbury Bay was using Murex dye, that meant they were incredibly wealthy and knew something about ancient manufacturing and probably even more about the ancient world. The only person Thomas could think of who fit that description was blind, knew gobs about Roman history, and loved to train Icelandic rats. There was no way Byron could be the killer, no way, thought Thomas. His thoughts raced instead to the bag lady on the trolley, the one who’d warned Thomas about the Purple King. He looked back at the computer screen at the mosaic. The mosaic, the Murex dye, the bag lady’s warning . . . What did it all point to? Someone like Byron at the Alderfer Museum who loved Roman things and was in earshot when Byron mentioned the name of the gladiator Fulvius Marcius Cinta?
Thomas scooped up the crime scene photos and put them back in his desk where his parents couldn’t come across them. Clicking off his lamp, he got up out of his chair and went over to his bed. Even if he was just talking to himself, he wished Finn would appear. Where was his faithful companion now that he needed him the most? He hadn’t seen a green glimmer of him all night, nor any sign of the Unicornettes for that matter. Maybe they were doing what Thomas had asked: combing through Gloomsbury, searching for clues. He stared up at the ceiling, feeling incredibly small and alone, like a mote of dust flying around an empty coliseum. Who would have access to 6,6’-Dibromoindigo, or at least know where to get it? A gnawing feeling told him that it had to be someone from the Gold Coast. With wealth and connections at their disposal, they could live a life that was shuttered and unnoticed by the public eye.
Thomas drew in a few dusty breaths on his back, watching his stomach go up and down. He conjured the spiny Murex into his mind’s eye. The description had said “tropical marine mollusk.” He chewed the side of his lip. That means someone is either importing the shells into Gloomsbury and making the dye, or importing dye that’s already been—
“SHELLS!”
Thomas bolted straight up in his bed and covered his mouth. A muffled voice called out from the direction of the dumbwaiter. It was his mother calling from the kitchen, asking him if he was okay.
“GOODNIGHT!” Thomas shouted back.
A faint “Goodnight!” sounded in reply. Soon silence resumed downstairs, broken here and there by the usual creaks and sighs of the old house.
Though Thomas had tried to block the thought from his brain, he knew Saturday was only hours away, spinning back to him like some deadly boomerang. Saturday meant ballroom dance class—that was the terrible part.
But it also meant Marylène, marine biologist in training.
Thomas smiled and pulled the covers up to his chin. Marylène and her father probably knew everything there was to know about shells, or if not, at least more than anybody in Gloomsbury. Even though Thomas hadn’t figured out the connection between the three purple corpses—if there was a connection—if he could somehow find a way to confirm that the actual pigment was Tyrian purple, then he might be one step closer to find out what the letters R and N meant, whether they were someone’s initials, perhaps the initials of the Purple King himself.
There was still one crucial part, one gaping hole in all the scraps of understanding he’d pieced together.
Why would someone dye three bodies in the most expensive pigment in the world and then throw them into the ocean?
Above the house a fresh rainstorm fueled by Mad Marge began its splatter-assault on Gloomsbury. Thomas listened to the heavy drops pummeling his window. Fatigue from working all the angles and unanswered questions in the case had finally set in. Sometime around midnight, after taking one last look around the room for Finn, Thomas sank into a deep sleep with the covers pulled around his ears to block out the rain and the bag lady’s slithery voice echoing in his brain.
In the middle of the night he awoke to the scratch of something like sandpaper rubbing against his cheek.
Peering through the darkness without his glasses on, he spied a little pink tongue and a pair of eyes, blinking back at him from his pillow.
Usually aloof, the family’s large Maine Coon cat, Moses, crawled underneath Thomas’s arm and settled in. No longer alone, not completely, Thomas slipped back into the fog of sleep, a corner of smile peeking up over the top of his bedsheet.
. . .
Donning the hideous Bravado tuxedo once again the next morning—Sally at the Hygienic Hen had managed to salvage the family heirloom after all—Thomas climbed into the shotgun seat of the old Customline hearse.
He mentally prepared himself for the bumpy ride to Brindle & Marsh Ballroom Academy, declining the to-go cup of orange juice his mother had tried to hand him at the door, knowing it would only become a pulpy mess the moment they hit the first pothole.
What Thomas couldn’t prepare himself for was his father, not Jed, sitting behind the steering wheel.
A tense silence reigned in the car all the way from the funeral home to the Uppercrust, Jeni’s neighborhood. Passing Jeni’s house, Thomas looked out the window and spied Arnold Myers standing in front of a new mailbox, a bucket and paintbrush in his hands. Waving at the Customline as it rolled past, Arnold lost control of the bucket. Bright blue paint sloshed out, spilling down the front of Arnold’s shirt and pants. As the hearse sped away, in one of the side mirrors Thomas watched Arnold gnash his teeth and flex his arms like the Hulk. Don’t do it, Thomas whispered in his mind. Arnold’s arm cocked back . . .
The paint brush went aerial. Thomas shook his head and slunk back into his seat.
When they reached the state road leading out to Marvale, Thomas’s father cleared his throat and made a shifty glance over at Thomas’s seat. We’re almost there, thought Thomas. We won’t even have to talk—
“Soooooooo,” Mr. Creeper began, stretching the word awkwardly until it filled the space of a whole sentence. “I hope you know, Elijah Thomas, this momentary lapse in business doesn’t mean that there should be a moratorium on your studies, your apprenticeship.”
“Sorry. I’m trying to keep up with Mom’s assignments.” And a murder mystery that is WAY more important than my night class, he wanted to add.
“Yes, yes,” sniffed Mr. Creeper. “All that effluvia and filler your mother loves. Jane Austen and a bedtime story.”
“It’s not just Mom. I have to meet the requirements. It’s the law.”
Thomas flinched. Wrong word.
“Oh, yes,” seethed Mr. Creeper. “The law. Every little corner of this god-forsaken county governed by their oversight boards with their suckling bureaucrats . . .” Mr. Creeper seemed to have more to say on the subject, but broke off into a string of muffled curses.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Elijah Thomas.”
“Is Fipps really giving up the case? Mom said—”
“We’ll see. Gerry Fipps is about as trustworthy as a bank teller with a gambling addiction. Ah! Here we are. As usual, I suspect you would like to shame your ancestral profession and have me park out of sight, hmmm?”
“Yes . . . please.”
The Customline ground to a halt. Thomas flung open the squeaky door and clambered out onto the side of the road. He had to duck his head and maneuver his spindly body to avoid brushing a patch of poisonous scabber weed. Finding a safe place to stand, he looked back down at his father in the driver seat.
For the first time that morning he noticed the bracelet.
It was a small, ordinary rope bracelet. The last time Thomas had seen it was in the Preparing Room on his older brother David’s wrist. Before Thomas could ask why his father was wearing it, Mr. Creeper jammed the hearse back into drive.
“I’ll be home late tonight. I’m taking one of the Health Board commissioners out to dinner. Five-star dining just to get back to business as usual. Remember this lesson well, Elijah Thomas: it’s not what you know, but who you know in this life. The bureaucrats and committees of this world control everything. Never forget that!”
And with that cheery observation the hearse rattled away, shooting sand and road scum up into Thomas’s face.
Wiping himself off and sighing into his overly-starched collar, Thomas turned and made his way towards the winding gravel driveway that led to the dance studio. After dodging a few more patches of scabber weed that seemed to reach out their spiked tendrils to maim him, Thomas was soon standing inside the old slaughterhouse turned ballroom.
The paired dancers had already lined up along the wall, awaiting their instructions. Curiously, no schmaltzy waltz music blared from the overhead speakers. Thomas scoured the room. Where was Marylène?
Locking eyes with Daphne Muldroon, Thomas watched the girl scowl and slide farther down the wall, as if sensing another projectile vomiting attack coming on. Charlie Fipps was back in class too, right as acid rain. He sneered back at Thomas from the shadows near the poster of the leaping Mikhail Baryshnikov, the one Headless Jerry had oozed out of last class. Over the murmur of the chatting students Thomas could hear Mr. Brindle’s voice coming from the open office door:
“Well, that is regrettable, Mr. Gaumont. You see, without Marylène we’ll be an odd number today, which impacts our flow and movement quite considerably. But yes, yes, I understand. I’ve been following the papers along with the rest of town. Do tell us what you find out there. It all sounds rather fascinating. À bientôt, Monsieur Gaumont. Bon courage.”
So there it was.
Marylène wasn’t coming.
Thomas tried to think fast on his feet. He hadn’t been spotted yet by Mr. Brindle or Madame Marsh. He couldn’t see the latter, only smell the stench of her cigarette smoke nearby. Maybe he could make it out to Marvale on foot, catch the Gaumonts before they headed out from the Alderfer Foundation. Footsteps sounded from the direction of Mr. Brindle’s office. Ducking his head, Thomas scooted across the dance floor, heading for the door to the bathroom. Over his shoulder, he could hear Daphne’s mopey voice:
“Told you! Barf-face can’t hold it in.”
Thomas slipped into the bathroom right as Mr. Brindle’s voice sounded through the drafty ballroom.
“Alright, class! We’re down one today, I’m afraid. Shall we do a final head count?”
Panting with his back against the bathroom door, Thomas surveyed the miserable situation. The bathroom was smaller than a janitor’s closet. But there was a window. He couldn’t go back to class. He wasn’t going to spend another afternoon getting kneed in the groin by Daphne Muldroon or turned into a pin cushion by Charlie Fipps.
