The Call of the Mild Read online

  “Train?” As the word left Gus’ mouth, the image flashed in his head, and he realized that the Thing that had terrified him so completely was not a creature after all. The rest of reality rushed into his mind like the passenger cars following the locomotive.

  The wilderness Gus and Shawn were standing in was actually the Camellia Forest, part of a large public garden. The trees towering above him were some of the thirty-four thousand plants in the seven hundred camellia varieties that had been spread out over twenty acres of prime suburban landscape outside Pasadena. Just past the steel tracks Gus could see the bright colors of the International Rosarium glinting in the sunlight, and beyond that the rest of the one hundred and fifty acres of park.

  “Yes, Gus, it was a choo-choo,” Shawn said. “More precisely, it was the Descanso Gardens Enchanted Railroad, a one-eighth-scale replica of an actual train, and a major highlight for the young and young at heart, according to the garden’s brochure. What did you think it was?”

  “I knew it was a train,” Gus said as reality replaced the fantasy landscape that his dream-induced panic had instilled in him. “I was waiting to hop a boxcar.”

  “I can see why you’d want to do that,” Shawn said. “The three-dollar ticket price does seem steep for a five-minute ride, and it’s not like they have a dining car. Although this pink popcorn they sell at the snack bar goes a long way towards making up for that.”

  Shawn held out the remaining piece of pink brick to Gus, who broke off a chunk and nibbled at it sullenly.

  “We’re on a case,” Gus said. “You were handling the officials. I wanted to speak to the denizens of the demimonde, to see if they had any insight on the subject.”

  “So you thought you’d hop a freight, gain the confidence of the local hobo community, see if they’d open up to you?”

  “Exactly,” Gus said, finally feeling the terror draining out of his muscles.

  “That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “Except, of course, for the fact that the boxcars on this train are so small the three-year-olds ride on top. But maybe there was a mouse inside who could have given you the inside squeak.”

  “You can laugh if you want, but I was pursuing every possible lead to try to recover our client’s property. What were you doing?”

  “Nothing as clever as riding the really, really little rails,” Shawn said. “I was checking out the lost-and-found department.”

  “I’m sure that was useful,” Gus said.

  “Compared to straddling a miniature railroad waiting to be struck down by some forest-dwelling monster, maybe not.”

  Gus glared at him, then grabbed another chunk of the pink popcorn. “Fine. I took a wrong turn on the nature trail. The sun was too hot. I left my water bottle in the car. I guess I got a little dehydrated, and from there disorientation is only moments away. I didn’t want to take this stupid case to start with.”

  That was true, but it didn’t have anything to do with Gus’ fear of the wilderness. It had to do with his fear of monsters.

  In the years since they’d established Santa Barbara’s premier psychic-detective agency, Shawn and Gus had caught murderers, blackmailers, grave robbers, serial killers, oil well bandits, and seal slayers, and Gus had stared them all down with a quick grin and a clever retort—at least in his memory he did.

  But there had been a handful of cases when they had had gone up against ghosts, dinosaurs, and mummies, and those were the ones that still kept Gus up at night. Even though they all turned out to be fakes, the idea of fighting slavering supernatural beasts from beyond hell was simply something Gus preferred to leave to others.

  There was only one thing he dreaded more than the idea of going up against monsters.

  And that was working for one.

  Chapter Three

  Ellen Svaco didn’t have dripping fangs, her hair wasn’t a nest of hissing vipers. Her arms weren’t pus-filled tentacles.

  But the instant she walked through the doors of the beach bungalow that housed Psych’s offices, Gus knew she was a monster. And not just any monster, but the worst kind.

  Ellen Svaco was the sort of monster who would call a second-grader up to the blackboard and make him stand there until he correctly spelled the fiendishly difficult name of California’s state capital no matter how many times he had already failed and no matter how many of the other students were laughing at him and no matter that the lunch bell had already rung. Gus had met one such ogre before, and the encounter had scarred him so badly it took many years before he could bring himself to say the word “Sacramento” without a shudder and a stutter.

  Like that other creature, Ellen wore her graying hair tied back so tightly it stretched every centimeter of her skin across the contours of her skull. Her shapeless shift looked like it came from the sale rack at the Mormon Fundamentalists’ thrift shop. She could have been forty or four hundred or anywhere in between.

  “My name is Ellen Svaco and I’m looking for a detective named Spenser.” She said the name in a tone that made it sound like she was referring to a skunk that had crawled under her house to die. “With an ‘s’ like the poet. At least that’s what I was told.”

  Shawn barely glanced up from the newspaper photo of Detective Carlton Lassiter he was busy defacing with a ballpoint pen. “Whoever said that is playing some kind of joke on you,” he said as he added eyeballs to the ends of the springy antennae he’d drawn on Lassiter’s forehead. “There is no ‘s’ in ‘poet.’ ”

  Gus saw the skin around the woman’s eyes tighten in irritation and felt his hand shooting up in the air. He tried to stop it before his fingers had cleared the desk, but he had spent so much of his school years saving Shawn from academic selfimmolation that it had become a reflex as impossible to restrain as jerking his leg when the rubber hammer hit his knee or fleeing from a movie theater when they started showing a trailer for any movie where Eddie Murphy played more than two roles.

  “Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene, is considered one of the most important Elizabethan poets,” Gus said.

  “That’s nice for him,” Shawn said. “But can he fit all one hundred and twenty different colors of Crayons in his mouth at the same time? Because I can.”

  That was true, as Shawn had proven only the night before. Gus saw the skin around the woman’s eyes tightening even further. He felt his pre-adolescent terror of any teacher’s disapproval rising in his chest.

  “This is Shawn Spencer, and he is a detective,” Gus said. “How can we help you?”

  The woman glared at Gus. “I’m having a very hard time believing that you are a walking weapon, the physical incarnation of street justice, and the unstoppable id to Spenser’s superego,” she said.

  “It’s amazing how many people have that same problem,” Shawn said. “I told him not to stop shaving his head.”

  “I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding,” Gus said.

  “More like blatant misrepresentation,” the woman snapped. “Are you or are you not Hawk?”

  “My name is Burton Guster. Most people call me Gus.”

  “Which is a kind of hawk,” Shawn said.

  “It is not,” Gus said.

  “Gus the Hawk. I remember you showed it to me on some flag when you thought you wanted to be a flexitriloquist.”

  “First of all, the bird on the flag of the Azores is the Goshawk, not Gus the Hawk,” Gus said. “And a scholar who studies flags is a vexillologist.”

  “Then what’s a flexitriloquist?” Shawn said.

  “There’s no such thing. You just made it up.”

  “I’m pretty certain I saw an ad for it on Craigslist,” Shawn said. “Are you sure it isn’t someone who can throw her voice while she does Pilates?”

  Ellen Svaco let out the kind of sigh that could paralyze a class of second-graders within seconds. “But you’re Spenser?” she said to Shawn.

  “With a ‘c,’ like the shell,” Shawn said. “Or should that be like the saw?”

&nbs
p; The woman breathed silently for a moment, and Gus had the sudden desire to find the nearest elementary school so he could report to the principal’s office.

  “I can’t believe that policeman lied to me,” she finally said. “He said this Spenser was America’s finest detective, his street-smart sidekick was as lethal as he was loyal, and for proof I had to look no further than a seemingly endless series of fictionalized accounts of their cases.”

  For the first time, Shawn looked interested. “And how exactly did this come up in conversation?”

  “I went in to see the police about a very serious matter,” she said. “It was serious to me, in any case. Apparently the detective in charge thought it was some kind of joke.”

  “Did this detective have a handlebar mustache, thick glasses, and eyeballs on stalks protruding from his head?” Shawn said.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, if he did,” Shawn said, slipping the newspaper across the desk to her, “would he look something like this?”

  She gave the paper a quick glance, as if years of practice had taught her to see pictures through layers of defacement. “That’s him.”

  “Lassie sent her here?” Gus said. “Why?”

  “Because he knows when a case is too big for him,” Shawn said. “He realizes that there are some things that are so explosive, so filled with pitfalls and dangers that a mere policeman can’t be expected to handle them.”

  “Or he’s trying to get back at you for having Papa Julio’s Casa de Pizza deliver seventeen pineapple-and-anchovy pizzas to his house.”

  “Or that,” Shawn conceded. “I guess we’ll know when Ms. Svaco tells us what her case is about.”

  “Why should I tell you anything?” she said. “I have no idea who you are, and I have no intention of being the butt of some policeman’s practical joke.”

  “As I said, this is Shawn Spencer and I’m Burton Guster,” Gus said. “We are Psych, Santa Barbara’s premier psychic-detective agency.”

  Ellen Svaco stared at Gus as if he’d just shot a spitball at her. “Psychic detectives? You people must really think I’m an idiot.”

  She turned and walked towards the door, her sensible pumps thwocking hollowly on the linoleum. Gus felt a huge sense of relief to see her go—until he glanced over at Shawn and saw that his partner was studying her carefully as she walked away. Studying her in the way Gus knew meant that he was observing all sorts of tiny details that no one else would ever notice, details that Shawn would put together to tell a story about her. Just as her hand hit the doorknob, Shawn grabbed his forehead with both hands and let out a moan.

  “Murder!” he wailed. “Murder most foul!”

  Chapter Four

  Ellen Svaco froze at the door. When she turned around, Gus was surprised to see there were no actual icicles hanging off her ears. “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what you should have said if you wanted the police to take your case,” Shawn said. “An accusation of murder always gets their attention.”

  “But there is no murder,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” Shawn said. “Because that would be a hell of a case. Especially if you were the victim.”

  “If I’d been the victim of a murder, how could I go to the police?”

  “I have no idea, but it’s a great way to start a story,” Shawn said. “Gus, take a note in case someone ever wants to write a seemingly endless series of fictionalized accounts of our cases.”

  “Maybe the fictional version of you won’t be an idiot,” Ellen said, turning back to the door.

  “Yes, but would the fictional version of me know how to find your necklace?”

  For the first time since she came through their door, Ellen Svaco didn’t appear to be suffering from stomach pains.

  “What about my necklace?” she said dubiously, almost exactly at the same time as Gus.

  “Not much,” Shawn said. “Just that you ordered the head detective of the Santa Barbara Police Department to find it for you.”

  “I did go to the police station to request help in finding my necklace.”

  Gus sighed and settled back in his seat. It looked like they were getting a client. “Where was the last place you saw it?” he asked.

  Shawn held up a hand to stop her before she could respond. “If she knew that, she wouldn’t have come to a psychic-detective agency,” Shawn said. “A regular detective is perfectly capable of asking the same questions your mother did every time you lost your mittens.”

  “I grew up in Santa Barbara,” Gus said. “I never had any mittens to lose.”

  “Which made your perpetual search for them even more pathetic,” Shawn said, then turned back to Ellen Svaco. “I don’t want you to tell me anything. I just want you to think about the necklace. Think about how much it means to you, about all the good times you’ve had together.”

  She looked like she was about to say something, but Shawn gave her a calming shush and she stopped herself, closing her eyes. Shawn studied her carefully and he saw. Saw the small scratch on the side of her neck. Saw the four red stripes of rash on the back of her hand. Saw the smudge of chalk dust high on her forehead and the small brown spot on her blouse. He pressed his fingers to his temples and bowed his head.

  “I’m sensing something,” he said. “A banana.”

  “A banana?” Ellen Svaco sat back up in her chair.

  “Not just a banana,” Shawn said. “A giant banana, hurtling through the world at amazing speeds, filled with songs of joy. Does that mean anything to you?”

  It did to Gus—that they were going to be here all day while Shawn played silly games with the new client. “Sometimes the visions take a while to coalesce,” Gus told her. “He just gets random images at first, and eventually they come together into a coherent whole. So maybe we could call you tonight and—”

  “That’s what we call the school bus,” Ellen said. “On Monday I took my second-grade class on a field trip to—”

  “No, wait,” Shawn said, again pressing his fingertips to his temple. “I see a magical land of enchantment. A place of peace and happiness where no voice is ever raised in anger and everybody loves everyone else.”

  “She took them to Fairyland?” Gus said.

  “Nicer than that,” Shawn said. “Canada.”

  “It was only a half day,” Ellen said. “And I’d be fired if I took the kids out of the state, let alone the country.”

  “No, not Canada.” Shawn scrunched his eyes shut even more tightly. “La Canada. You took them to the Descanso Gardens outside Pasadena.”

  She stared at him suspiciously. “How do you know that?”

  “That’s where the necklace is,” Shawn said. “You left it there, and a little piece of your soul with it. That’s what was communicating with me.”

  For a moment a pleased expression almost appeared on Ellen’s face, but she managed to banish it before it resolved into a smile. “You must think you’re pretty clever,” she said. “Now I’m supposed to write you a check and go off happy?”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Shawn said. “You pay us in cash, and we won’t care what your mood is.”

  “Meanwhile, all you’ve said is that my necklace is somewhere within a hundred and fifty acres of public gardens, not including the parking lot. So when I can’t find it, you can still say you solved the big mystery.”

  “We’ll recover your necklace,” Shawn said.

  “We will?” Gus said.

  “And we will bring it to your doorstep. I might even bring it across your doorstep if you promised to open the door when I got there.”

  Ellen made a show of thinking it over then scrawled an address across the top of Shawn’s newspaper. “Just put it in the mail along with your bill. But don’t even think about sending the bill without the necklace. I’ve got every state licensing agency on my speed dial.”

  Gus waited until she’d left the bungalow, and made sure the door was closed, before he said anything. By the time he wa
s certain they were alone, Shawn was rooting around on Gus’ desk.

  “I don’t know what that little piece of her soul is telling you, but the necklace isn’t on my desk,” Gus said.

  “No, but these are.” Shawn held up Gus’ keys, then tossed them to him. “If we hurry, we can get to La Canada before lunch-time. There’s a new burger stand I’ve been dying to try.”

  “It’s going to take us at least two hours to get to La Canada from here,” Gus said. “And besides, we had lunch an hour ago.”

  “Which means we’ll be ready for another one as soon as we grab that necklace,” Shawn said as he headed towards the door.

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me why you’re so sure it’s there. And if I hear the word ‘soul’ one more time I’m going to throw up.”

  Shawn sighed and turned around. “We could save an awful lot of time if you’d just watch my eyes when I’m observing. Then you could see what I see. Pretty soon you could think like I think.”

  “And right after that I could commit myself,” Gus said. “How did you know about the field trip?”

  “She had a strange rash—four short stripes on top of her hand and one across the heel of her palm,” Shawn said. “At least it was strange until you knew what it was. It was the shape of four little fingers and one thumb clutching her hand.”

  “She’s allergic to children?”

  “Only if they’ve been picking a bouquet of pretty green and red leaves,” Shawn said.

  “The kid got poison oak on his hand and then grabbed Ellen Svaco’s?”

  “Exactly.

  “But poison oak grows all over Southern California. How did you know this happened at Descanso Gardens?”

  “I didn’t know,” Shawn admitted. “But I did read the Santa Barbara Times today.”

  Shawn refolded the newspaper and handed it to Gus. On the bottom of the page was a small article about a group of parents who were furious because their children had gone on a field trip to Descanso Gardens and come back covered in poison oak. A couple of them had even been sent to the hospital.