Kitty's Big Trouble
(The ninth book in the Kitty Norville series)
A novel by Carrie Vaughn
Acknowledgments
I had help from all the usual suspects, and more. Thanks to Daniel Abraham for reading an early draft. To Mandy Douglas for reading an early draft and offering very good advice. To Tor/Forge publicist Cassandra Ammerman for arranging my first book tour and working in the extra time for research in San Francisco, which helped immensely. Thanks as usual to Stacy Hague-Hill, David Hartwell, Ashley and Carolyn Grayson, and friends and family for the sanity checks.
The Playlist
NORMAN GREENBAUM, “Spirit in the Sky”
SOCIAL DISTORTION, “Making Believe”
WARREN ZEVON, “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS, “Wicked Little Critta”
P.K. 14, “The Other Side”
BLONDIE, “Atomic”
VERNIAN PROCESS, “The Maple Leaf Rag”
SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS, “Le Grippe”
PJ HARVEY, “Down by the Water”
CARSICK CARS, “You Can Listen, You Can Talk”
THE B-52’S, “Mesopotamia”
BILLY PRESTON, “Will It Go Round in Circles”
LISSIE, “Little Lovin’”
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
The Playlist
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
Epilogue
Tor Books by Carrie Vaughn
Praise for the Kitty Norville series
Copyright
Chapter 1
“I KNOW,” I said into my phone. “This isn’t exactly standard—”
“It’s impossible,” said the poor, long-suffering office receptionist at the Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis. He was too polite to just hang up on me. “It’s absolutely impossible.”
“Maybe you can give me the name and number of someone who might be able to authorize this kind of request? Is there any representative of the Sherman family on record?”
His responses were starting to sound desperate. “That information is confidential. In fact, I don’t think you’ll be able to get any further on this without some kind of a warrant or a court order.”
I was afraid of that. I’d been hoping there’d be a friendly way to accomplish this. That I could find a sympathetic historian who would back up my request or explain the situation to one of the descendants and get permission that way. Surely they would want to know the truth as much as I did. Also, I didn’t think I’d be able to convince a judge to issue said court order. The request was based on little more than rabid curiosity.
I soldiered on, as it were. “There has to be some kind of standard procedure for an exhumation. Can you tell me what that is?”
“Ms.… Norville, is it?”
“Yes, Kitty Norville,” I said, thinking
“Ms. Norville—can I ask why you want to have General Sherman’s body exhumed?”
General William T. Sherman, hero of the Civil War on the Union side, war criminal on the Confederate side, considered one of the greatest soldiers and strategists in American history, and all-around icon. And yeah, I wanted to dig him up. It was a little hard to explain, and I hesitated, trying to figure out what to say. Last week I’d received a package from the Library of Congress containing a copy of an interview transcript from the 1930s. It had been made as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal program that employed journalists and other writers to record local histories around the country. Many valuable stories were collected and preserved as part of the program. The one I’d been sent was an interview with a Civil War veteran—one of the last to survive, no doubt. He’d been sixteen when he joined the Confederate army in the middle of the war and was close to ninety when he’d been interviewed, and he claimed that he’d witnessed General Sherman transform into a wolf during the Battle of Vicksburg. A librarian who was also a listener and fan of my radio show discovered it and sent it to me. I had
