The Penguin Who Knew Too Much (20 page)

“That's about the size of it,” he said. “And I bet it's the very ones we’d have to build something for that you’re most interested in getting rid of. Those hyenas, for example. Bet you’d be happy to see the back of them.”

“You have no idea,” I said. “When I’ve got a list, I’ll get in touch. Where can I reach you?”

“Hang on,” he said. He pulled a wad of assorted papers out of his shirt pocket and shuffled through them for a few moments, glancing at several business cards until he came across the one he wanted.

“You can reach me here most days,” he said. A card for the Antique and Junque Market. “I own a couple of other businesses—in fact, between me and my brothers, we own just about everything in Clay County that isn’t a farm. But me, I’m trying to get out of the low-rent businesses. Used cars, bait and tackle, the shooting range—they’re all very well right now, but you can see the writing on the wall with them. You get more of your gentrification going on, more rich commuters moving in, and your upscale businesses, like the antique market, are going to take off.”

“Sounds like you have a plan,” I said.

“I do indeed,” he said.

Of course, to me it sounded like a flawed plan, if not a downright demented one. About the only sign of gentrification I’d seen in Clay County was the petition they’d been circulating to have the county's first traffic light installed in Clay Hill—and they were doing that only because they didn’t want to be the last county in the state without one, not because more than three cars had ever reached the intersection at the same time.

But maybe I was being short-sighted, and Ray Hamlin was a man of vision, in touch with the pulse of his community. I wished him a good afternoon and went to extract my car from the muddy parking lot.

I stopped for gas at the service station on the corner—it was a good ten cents cheaper than in Caerphilly. Of course, odds were it would turn out to be so low-test that even my faithful Toyota would balk at consuming it, but I could still hope. I was frowning as I watched how rapidly the dollars rolled by and how slowly the gallons crept, even at this cheaper rate, and wondering if Ray Hamlin also owned the gas station, and whether there was any point to going in to find out. I could buy a soda from the grocery end of the little office. Yes, and then—

“Not you too!”

Chapter 32

I looked away from the gas gauge to see Sheila Flugleman standing in front of me with her hands on her hips and an expression of righteous indignation on her face. “Not me too what?” I asked.

“So you’re going to sell your dung to him too!” she said. “First Patrick and now you! Of all the low-down, sneaky things!”

“I’m not selling anything to anyone right now,” I said. I glanced over at the gauge. Should I leave now, before Sheila really lost it, or stick around for the last couple of cheap gallons?

“Oh, so you just came all the way over to the Clay County Zoo to pet the goats,” she said. “Explain this, then!”

She held up one of the little brightly colored bags she sold the zoo dung in. At least it looked like one of her bags, though I noticed that the product name had been changed from Zooper-Poop! to Dung-ho! A catchier name, but the quality of the printed package had gone downhill.

“Ah,” I said. “Is this a rebranding effort or—?”

“That snake in the grass! Ray Hamlin! He pretended he was going to let me collect his dung, and all the time, he was planning this!”

She shook the Dung-ho! package in my face. Its contents rattled unappealingly. I backed up as far as I could without abandoning the gas hose.

“Well, for your information, I wasn’t here to negotiate selling the zoo animals’ dung to Hamlin,” I said. To my relief, the gas pump clicked off, and I pulled the nozzle out of my tank.

“So you say!” she said, shaking her finger at me. “I’ll have you both in court if—”

“Shut up and listen!” I said, gesticulating with the nozzle of the gas hose for emphasis. “I did not come over here to sell dung to Ray Hamlin! I had no idea he was in the market for it, and now that I know, I don’t care. I came to see if his zoo was a suitable place to house the animals that are currently living in highly unsuitable quarters in our backyard!”

She began backing away slightly. I wasn’t sure if she was cowed by the fierceness of my tone, or my waving the gas hose about.

“And we’ll be making that decision based on the animals’ welfare, not on what happens to their dung. And if you want to keep collecting the dung in our yard while the animals are there, go away and leave me alone!”

I hung up the hose with a flourish, ripped the receipt out of the slot, and threw myself into my Toyota. She stepped out of the way, and I pulled out of the gas station a little faster than was quite safe. Fortunately, the road was as empty in both directions as most of the roads usually were in Clay County, and after a mile or two, I calmed down.

And then it hit me. “First Patrick and now you,” she’d said. Had Sheila found out that Patrick was planning to sell his zoo's dung to Ray Hamlin?

Of course, dung seemed an unlikely motive for a murder. But Sheila had been genuinely angry. Livid. If she’d run into Lana-han when she was that mad at him...

Of course, given the peculiar circumstances of the murder, she’d not only have to be mad at Lanahan when she ran into him,

she’d also need to have a loaded crossbow in her hands. Still, probably a good idea to let Chief Burke know that there was bad blood between Sheila and the victim.

And probably an even better idea to see what was going on back at the house.

The cars were the first clue that things had gotten out of hand in my absence. As I neared home, I found myself in a pack of six cars following a tractor for the last several miles of the trip. Normally the tractors and I had the road to ourselves. And cars lined the road for the last half mile leading up to our house. Near the house, a young police officer was standing in the road, directing traffic. Not someone I recognized, so I deduced that Chief Burke had called nearby counties for reinforcements.

Well, that was a first. We’d never previously needed a police presence at the beginning of a party.

Of course, it wasn’t just the party. I pulled up beside the young officer to convince him that I had the right to enter the driveway.

“You’ll have to move along, ma’am, and park down the road,” the young officer said.

“It's all right,” Dad said, strolling up to the car. “She's family.”

“They all claim to be family,” the officer said, frowning.

“They are,” I said. “But I actually live here.” I reached down to fish out my driver's license. “This is my driveway, and—what the dickens is that?”

Shea and the rest of the SOBs were marching up and down in front of our house, carrying their “Let My Creatures Go” and “Animals Are People Too” signs and singing “We Shall Overcome.”

“The chief told them they had to stay out of your yard and not block the road, or he’d arrest them,” Dad said. “So far they’re being very careful.”

“That's nice,” I said. “But I’d rather have them very gone.

Why are they picketing us, anyway? Do they think we’re running a game ranch here?”

“Perhaps they’re associating us with Patrick's misdeeds.”

“Alleged misdeeds,” I said. “And if you ask me, they’re just too lazy to make new signs. And what's with the singing?”

“Oh, don’t you like it?” Dad said. “That was my idea, really. For the longest time they were just trudging up and down in silence— not a very picturesque protest at all. So I taught them the song. I thought it would make a nice note of historical continuity.”

I felt sure Michael's film student appreciated Dad's effort. He was standing on a stepladder across the road, filming busily.

“That's nice,” I said. I handed my driver's license to the young officer. He peered suspiciously at it, and then, when he’d verified my address, he stood aside to let me pull into my own driveway. But he was still staring at me suspiciously.

No wonder. I was, theoretically, the hostess. He probably thought I’d planned everything that was happening.

In my absence, a prototypical Hollingworth family party not only had begun but had hit its stride earlier than usual for such events.

Apparently Michael had given in to the temptation to use the Sprockets’ excavations as the starting point for a swimming pool. Dad had always had a sneaking fondness for water features of all kinds—ponds, lakes, streams, fountains, even fishbowls. Mother had spent much of her married life discouraging Dad's repeated efforts to irrigate the landscape around him. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that Michael had caught the bug. He and a mixed crew of Shiffleys and Hollingworths were crouched over one of the tables, arguing and dropping bits of relish and potato salad onto some rough sketches. A work crew was busy filling in some of the ditches and joining others together, in a plan known only to themselves. Or perhaps there
wasn’t a plan at all; perhaps it was a free-form earthmoving event, with everyone pitching in to create or fill holes, according to his or her impulse of the moment. Perhaps I should suggest that at least one of the pool planners keep an eye on them.

But the hole fillers appeared to be in the minority, and their efforts were somewhat hampered by the fact that various other picnic guests found the trenches so interesting or useful. A quartet of uncles had decided that they would work splendidly for pit-roasting an entire pig. Many of the younger kids were playing an elaborate game, rather like a cross between tag and Whack-a-Mole, that required them to scramble in and out of the trenches with much squealing.

And a number of slightly older relatives, not realizing that Dr. Smoot's vampire guise was a form of therapy, had decided to join in the fun. I couldn’t walk ten feet without having a figure in a black cape leap out of the shrubbery or pop up from a pit to laugh sepulchrally at me. Dr. Smoot was in his element— probably the first time in his life that he’d been a trendsetter.

Of course, it was a little incongruous, seeing vampires slinking about the yard on an afternoon so warm and sunny that many of the undead were wearing shades and sipping lemonade. Perhaps the incongruity was a key part of Rose Noire's therapeutic plan.

Rob sidled up and held out a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

“Squames de chats?”
he murmured.

“Yuck,” I said. “You’re not going around saying that to everyone, I hope.”

“Mais oui!”
he said. “Evidently you’re the only Francophone in the family. Everyone else just smiles, helps himself, and says thank you.”

“Just don’t get carried away and say it anywhere near Mother,” I said as I helped myself to a couple of prosciutto-wrapped melon balls.

“Do you think I’m a total idiot?” Rob said. “Never mind; don’t answer that.”

He strolled away to offer the tray to another group of guests. I spotted a flurry of activity at the other end of the lawn and went to see what was up.

Dr. Blake was performing for the cameras again, presenting a pro-zoo case to counter the protesters out front—at the moment, he was holding forth on the important contribution zoos could make to conservation and the preservation of endangered species. He was speaking eloquently, and I approved of every word he said, but I suspected it wasn’t playing as well as he wanted it to. Yesterday, he’d charmed the reporters with the lemur, but today's living prop, the baby possum, wasn’t working as well. Why had he chosen the possum anyway—surely he knew better than anyone that the term “playing possum” had been coined to describe what possums do under stress. Apparently the baby possum had gone limp shortly after the cameras began rolling, and it looked rather as if Blake were posing for the cameras with a large dead rat draped over one shoulder.

While I was watching, he figured this out, and gestured to Dad to come and take the possum. The reporters all breathed a visible sigh of relief, and the cameramen, who had been focusing tightly on Blake's face, pulled back to show the rich panorama of activity around him—to the great delight of all my family members who wanted to lurk just behind Blake, making a V-sign behind his head and waving to people at home. The only people not happy with the situation were a couple of protesters in SOB T-shirts lurking at the back of the crowd, leaning on their battered placards and scowling disapproval at all comers.

I wondered if the demonstration had ended or if Shea had merely declared a break until Blake was finished and the SOBs could reclaim the spotlight.

Not my problem. I needed to find Chief Burke and tell him the various things I’d learned today without giving him the impression that I was butting into his investigation. Probably not an easy task.

Then again, maybe I didn’t need to tell the chief everything. Maybe I should find a middleman. I looked around till I spotted my cousin Horace, leaning against the fence around the penguin pen, digging into a plate of food.

Horace. Not only could I enlist him to communicate what I’d learned to the chief, I might be able to get some useful or at least interesting information out of him at the same time.

Chapter 33

I cruised by the buffet table, grabbed a burger, and joined Horace.

“You know I can’t talk to you about the case,” he said when I leaned against the fence beside him.

Apparently Horace knew me too well.

“Fine,” I said. “We can talk about something else. Want to know what I’ve been doing today?”

“You mean you haven’t been running around prying into the murder investigation?”

“I’ve been running around trying to do something about the zoo animals’ plight,” I said.

“That's nice.”

“Of course, since the murder and the plight of the zoo animals aren’t entirely unrelated—” “Thought so.”

“Never mind, then,” I said. “I don’t suppose the chief wants to know that Sheila Flugleman was furious with Patrick Lanahan because he was ruining her ZooperPoop! business. Or that both his fellow zookeeper, Ray Hamlin, and Shea Bailey, the temperamental head of the SOBs, suspected Lanahan of involvement in canned hunting. Or that fifteen years ago Lanahan survived the car accident in which Dr. Blake's only grandson died. I don’t suppose any of that's of interest.”