When a huge, hulking ogre steps through the office doorway, you take notice. I was just glad he decided to turn the knob and enter the traditional way instead of smashing through, as ogres often do.
He was huge (I know I already said that, but it bears repeating), with burly shoulders, pebbled gray skin, muscles the size of backpacks, shaggy hair like a dried kelp forest, and a mouth as big as a garage. He wore a brown tunic tied at the waist with a jaunty yellow sash. The bags under his eyes were so large they wouldn’t have qualified as carry-ons. He was covered with melting snow from the recent blizzard.
I greeted him with my professional smile. “New client?” I asked.
The ogre moved his mouth and puffed his chest. “I am Stentor.” I expected a deafening roar, but the voice that came out was a ridiculously tiny, high-pitched squeak. “The opera singer. You may have heard of me?”
Such a clumsy voice would never have graced even a Sunday-school stage for fourth graders. “Sorry, sir, my knowledge of opera doesn’t go much further than ‘Kill da Wabbit!’”
Sheyenne drifted forward, letting out an exaggerated sigh. “Beaux, I am going to get you more cultured if it kills you. Again. Stentor has been performing to sold-out audiences in the Phantom’s opera house for the past two months. He caused quite a stir in the cultural scene.”
“The most fabulous performance by an ogre opera singer in weeks!” Stentor squeaked. “That’s according to the National Midnight Star.”
“Know your client” is a good catchphrase, and I was sure I would have to research opera and the ogre’s career. Sheyenne wanted to make me a better man, a better zombie, and I liked being with her. She had already dragged me to performances of Shakespeare in the Dark, and since I cared about her, I would even endure an opera. If I was with my beautiful ghost girlfriend, it couldn’t be all that bad … could it?
With fist clenched and arm raised, Stentor tilted his enormous head back and belted out a succession of meepy atonal noises that contained neither sturm nor drang. After the abortive performance, the ogre hung his head, sniffled with the sound of a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, and began blubbering. He sobbed with such palpable dismay that I felt sorry for him without even knowing the problem. Tears flowed down his seamed face in rivulets, like a potential flash flood. “It’s gone. I’ve lost it.”
“Lost what?” I was pretty sure I knew, but never having attended an ogre opera, I wanted confirmation.
Stentor blinked his huge bloodshot eyes at me. “Are you deaf? My voice is gone!” I had to lean forward to hear him. “Someone stole it, kidnapped it—you’ve got to help me. I’ll do anything to get it back.”
Now this was more like it, a case I could sink my teeth into (if I were the sort of creature who sinks his teeth into uncooperative flesh). I preferred to use brains, not eat them. “You’ve come to the right place, Mr. Stentor.”
I started to direct the ogre toward my office, but realized the office wasn’t large enough unless I moved the desk to accommodate him. So we went into the much larger conference room to talk. The ogre shook himself off like a shaggy, waterlogged dog, sending sprays of snowmelt everywhere.
Robin emerged from her office to join the intake meeting, where we could decide whether Stentor would need her legal expertise, my detective skills, or both. She held a yellow pad, ready to take notes—a special legal pad, given to her by Santa Claus himself after we helped him out on a case. The paper never, ever ran out, and a magically connected pencil took notes for her exactly as she thought them, which left Robin’s hands free to do other incomprehensible lawyerly things.
“That isn’t your normal voice, I take it?” she asked. She set the legal pad down, and the pencil dutifully jotted down the basic information.
“I’m a baritone,” Stentor said in a shrill peep. He continued with greater fervor, gesticulating to demonstrate an intensity that his vocal cords couldn’t convey. “My voice is my livelihood, my very soul—and now it’s gone.”
Before he grew too emotional, I calmed him with a no-nonsense voice. “Just start at the beginning and tell us what happened, Mr. Stentor.”
“I did my nightly performance of Don Giovanni at the opera house—and it was a great one. An artist can feel it when everything clicks.” He pounded a boulder-sized fist against his chest as if to pummel the voice out of his throat. “It was my first three-window performance.”
I looked over at Sheyenne for an explanation. She said, “He means he shattered three windows with his singing.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“In some circles,” Stentor said. “The Phantom has an insurance rider just for that.”
Robin’s legal pad made notes. She said, “So your voice was fine during the performance.”
“Yes, and afterward, I went back to my dressing room, as always. Gargled with lye, as always, then went to bed. I woke up with a frog in my throat—and my voice was gone.”
I pursed my lips. This was indeed a strange case, so I asked the obvious question. “Do you still have the frog?”
“Yes,” the ogre answered. “Yes, I do.” He shifted his brown tunic and struggled with a small cloth sack tied to the sash, but his fingers were the size of kielbasas and too unwieldy to undo the delicate knot.
My zombie fingers weren’t very nimble either, but they were sufficient. I retrieved the bag, loosened the string, and dumped a shivering frog onto Sheyenne’s desk. The creature looked dazed and confused; it didn’t even have the ambition to hop away.
“He’s very cute.” Sheyenne reached her ghostly hands down to cup the frog, but they passed right through. As a ghost, she can’t touch living, or formerly living, things—including me—but she likes to go through the motions.
As Stentor gazed at the frog, his face was a billboard-sized canvas of emotions that rippled from dismay to affection. “At first, I thought I might have gotten a case of warts on my vocal cords, considering that it’s a frog and all.”
I corrected him with my newfound knowledge. “That’s just an old wives’ tale. Warts are caused by toads. Frogs get a bad rap.”
“I know, I did my scientific research,” the ogre said. “That’s why I suspect some dark magic instead, and that led me to you, Mr. Shamble. Only you can help me—I’ve read your novels.”
I grimaced with embarrassment. “Those stories are highly fictionalized, written by a ghostwriter. Don’t put too much stock in them. Some of the adventures are … exaggerated.”
Ever since I’d allowed Howard Phillips Publishing to use my life and cases as the inspiration for a series of “Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.” novels, I had been embarrassed by the attention—and even more so as the books continued to sell well.
“But you’re the best in the business,” Stentor said.
I shrugged. “Thank you. Honestly, though, I just do my best to take care of folks. If you wouldn’t mind leaving the frog with us,” I said, “I’ll see what I can find out. Let me talk with a couple of witches who act as my special advisers in cases like this. We’ll get your voice back. You’ll be singing the blues again soon enough.”
“Opera,” Stentor corrected.
I clapped a reassuring hand on his backpack-sized bicep. “After I find your voice, you can do whatever you like with it.”