The Penguin Who Knew Too Much (4 page)

“Lot of people down at the feed store last night?” I asked.

“Packed,” Randall said, with disgust. “They’re open late Fri
days, you know. All the damned city folks were out, getting ready for the long weekend.”

“We wouldn’t have gone down there at all on a Friday, but we had a job that came up suddenly, and we needed some supplies,” Vern added.

I’d noticed that the Shiffleys, like most long-term residents, often experienced the sudden, inconvenient need to visit the feed store at the very times when it was overrun by the dreaded city folks. If I found something that annoying, I’d rearrange my schedule to avoid it, but the Shiffleys seemed to find a perverse pleasure in being annoyed by the city folks.

Flugleman's Feed Store had been in business for about 120 years, supplying generations of local farmers. In the last several decades, the number of working farms in Caerphilly had declined—though only slightly, unlike some parts of the state, where whole counties of farmland had been built up and paved over. The Flugleman family had responded by expanding its business to include lawn and garden supplies and rechristened it Flugleman's Farm and Garden Emporium.

Flugleman's was also a major stop on the local grapevine. If Dad had been down at Flugleman's, loudly talking about his plans for the penguin pond and seeking advice from anyone and everyone there, within hours the whole county would have known that our basement contained a hole that was already far too deep for Dad's needs—a hole that he would probably have to begin partially filling in this morning before he proceeded with his pond construction.

A hole that would look like a godsend to anyone who happened to have an unwanted dead body lying around in need of disposal. Or, for that matter, anyone who wanted to commit a homicide while such a convenient burying place was available.

Chief Burke wouldn’t like it much, but I felt relieved to know that my family wouldn’t be the only suspects.

“Don’t worry,” Randall said, patting me on the shoulder. “Everyone knows the Sprockets have always been pretty strange. It’ll probably turn out to be some craziness one of them got up to.”

“Thanks,” I said. I decided not to tell them that the body was at least a year and a half too fresh to blame on the house's previous owners.

“Where’d you get those things from, anyway?” Vern asked, pointing at the penguins.

“You know Patrick Lanahan?”

“The lunatic who runs the Caerphilly Zoo?” Randall said. I got the feeling he wasn’t all that keen on Lanahan.

“Is he here?” Vern asked. “Because we really need to talk to him, too.”

“Sorry,” I said. “If he was here, you’d be welcome to talk to him, as soon as I gave him a piece of my mind about dumping the penguins on Dad.”

“The damned scoundrel,” Vern muttered. Apparently he took a dim view of Lanahan's foisting stray penguins off on innocent bystanders.

“If he drops by to visit his penguins, could you give us a call?” Randall asked. “We need to speak to him about something. Been trying to track him down for over a week.”

“Will do,” I said.

“Meanwhile, those things aren’t going to be happy for long in that little pen,” Vern said, indicating the penguins.

“Unfortunately, I think Chief Burke will put Dad's plans for a basement penguin habitat on hold,” I said.

“Why not fence off part of your father's cow pond for them?” Randall asked. “Works for the ducks. And we could run down to
Flugleman's for a couple rolls of chicken wire and some posts. Have it up in an hour or so.”

I glanced over at the penguins. They were a little crowded in the duck pen. And the fishy odor of penguin poop was already starting to permeate the yard. The pond was out of sight, and even more important, downwind. Moving the penguins to the pond sounded like a great idea.

Of course, the Shiffleys weren’t donating their services. And I suspected that a few rolls of chicken wire and some posts would cost far more than seemed reasonable—like everything else we’d bought for the house. Could our depleted bank balance cover the penguin fence?

Then again, they weren’t our penguins.

“Sounds like a great idea,” I said. “Dad will be happy to foot the bill—nothing's too good for his penguins, as I’m sure you’ve already noticed.”

“What about your camels?” Vern asked.

“Llamas,” I said.

“Look like camels to me,” Randall said.

I turned, intending to point out the key differences between a camel and a llama, and found that the Shiffleys were right. We had camels. Two of them, neatly tethered to the barn door. Through the hedge, I spotted a vehicle driving off at high speed—a pickup truck with a horse trailer hitched to the back. Evidently, Dad had also said “Just drop them off today with Meg” to whoever had fostered the zoo's camels.

“We’ll be putting the camels in your uncle Fred's old pasture,” I said. “With the llamas.”

“Probably a good thing to check first that there's no breaks in the fence,” Vern said.

“Let's do that now, before we go to Flugleman's,” Randall
suggested. “That way, if we need any wire or posts for mending the pasture fence, we can pick them up at the same time.” “Good plan,” Vern said.

They both nodded a casual good-bye and turned away. “I’ll let Dad know what we’ve worked out,” I called after them.

Let him know and extract a blank check made out to the Shiffleys, in fact. The Shiffleys paid no attention to me as they strode off to the pasture.

“Meg?”

I looked up to see Sheila D. Flugleman, the current manager of the feed store. Speak of the devil.

“I see you have all the zoo animals here!” she said. “How nice!”

“Not all of them,” I said. “Just the llamas and camels and penguins.”

“Well, it's a start.”

“And an end, I hope. We’re moving in today, in case you hadn’t noticed. We don’t need all these animals underfoot. You wouldn’t be dropping by to offer to foster some, would you?”

“Oh, I wish I could, but my dog is so territorial. It really wouldn’t work.”

“So how can I help you?” I asked. It sounded more polite than “What the hell are you doing here if you’re not coming to take any animals off our hands?”

“Do you mind if I collect the...um...droppings?”

“Droppings?”

“From the zoo animals.”

“Why?” I asked. Not that I had any objection to someone removing the animal droppings that were already starting to appear, and would doubtless continue to accumulate steadily as
long as the animals were with us. If Sheila had offered, matter-of-factly, to help us out by cleaning up after the animals, I’d have assumed she was a zoo volunteer with a strong stomach and an admirable sense of altruism.

But the furtive look of eagerness on her face made me nervous. That and her obvious reluctance to explain. What could she possibly want with the droppings? Was she some kind of dung fetishist?

“I sell them,” she said at last.

“The droppings?”

“I’ll show you.” She raced back over to her truck and opened the cab door. I followed, and watched as she rummaged through the contents of the passenger seat and the floor.

“Here it is!” she exclaimed, handing me something around the size of a five-pound flour sack.

It was a heavy paper bag printed in bright colors with pictures of various exotic animals—I spotted lions, tigers, elephants, zebras, giraffes, and monkeys. And blazoned across the front in a typeface that would have looked at home on a vintage Grateful Dead poster was the word “ZooperPoop!”

“You’ve probably seen it on sale at the store,” she said.

“Yes, I have.” I refrained from saying that I hadn’t decided whether it was the silliest thing I’d ever seen or the most disgusting. I’d assumed the gaudy little bags languished on the shelves until someone needed a gag gift for a gardener. Possibly a gardener he wasn’t really all that fond of. “And you’ve run out of the...raw materials?”

“Our supply is dangerously low,” she said. “I’ve been trying to call Patrick for over a week now, to ask why the zoo is locked and where the animals have gone. I saw the Eldens passing by the store with the camels in their horse trailer, but I was helping someone check out, and by the time I got out to my car, they’d
disappeared. But they were heading this way, and I remembered your dad talking about the penguins when he was in last night, so I took a chance and came out here.”

“That was a lucky break,” I said. And at least now I knew who to thank for the camels. “So people really buy that stuff?”

“I can’t keep it in stock. Patrick's animals really don’t produce an adequate supply.”

Possibly the first time anyone had made that complaint about penned animals.

“I’ve started negotiating with the Clay County Zoo to augment the supply.”

“I didn’t know Clay County had a zoo,” I said. “Though I suppose I should have guessed that if we had one, they’d want one too.” Caerphilly and Clay counties were such bitter rivals—in everything from high school football to the agricultural competitions at the state fair—that I was almost surprised to find the border between the two guarded only by back-to-back dueling signs telling motorists going in either direction that they were now leaving the most beautiful county in Virginia.

“Well, it's not much of a zoo,” she said, in the condescending tone most Caerphillians used when speaking of our less fortunate neighbors. “Not really much more than a glorified petting zoo. But it would be, technically, zoo poop.”

“And is there some special virtue to zoo poop that makes people pay a premium for it?”

“Not really,” she said. “It's the cachet. It's different—exotic! They can tell their friends they feed their prize azaleas nothing but ZooperPoop!”

“I’m not that fond of my azaleas,” I said, eyeing the price tag. Short of the filet mignon I’d fixed for our Valentine's Day champagne dinner, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fed Michael and myself something that expensive.

“It mostly sells in upscale garden stores. I only keep a few bags at the store for when the rich people from town come out. So can I get on with it?”

“Be my guest,” I said. “The llamas and camels really should be moved to the pasture next door as soon as someone has the time to do it.”

“Right,” she said. “I’ll look there for them next time.”

I’d been hoping she’d volunteer to do the moving, but perhaps I should have just asked outright instead of hinting. She grabbed a shovel and a pair of buckets from the back of her truck and trudged toward the temporary llama pen. I returned to my seat on the front porch.

“That damned Smoot here yet?”

I turned to see Chief Burke standing in the doorway behind me, frowning out at the road. “What's a Smoot?” I asked.

“Dr. Smoot, the new medical examiner,” he said. “We’ve got the body excavated enough to move it, if he’d just show up to pronounce.”

Dad appeared just behind the chief.

“If you’re getting impatient—,” Dad began.

“If I’m getting impatient, I’ll call Smoot to find out where the hell he is,” the chief said. “Thanks all the same.”

“Do you have any idea who the deceased is?” Dad asked.

“You know he won’t tell you,” I said. “But if you’re curious, I bet I could make a pretty good guess who our uninvited guest is.”

“And who would that be?” the chief said, looking rather smug, as if he didn’t think my guess was likely to be on target.

“Patrick Lanahan.”

“How the hell did you know?” the chief asked, scowling.

Chapter 6

“She's right?” Dad asked. “It is Patrick? Amazing!”

“You’re darned right it's amazing,” the chief said. “And I want to know how she knows.”

“Not because I had anything to do with putting him there,” I said.

“Then why did you think it would be him?”

“I must have talked to half a dozen people this morning who haven’t seen him for days,” I said. “And it's a small town, so while I suppose it's possible for two people to mysteriously go missing, it's unlikely, so odds are he's the one.”

It sounded weak—more like good guesswork than anything else—but after a moment the chief nodded. Which meant I didn’t have to tell him my second, more self-centered reason for guessing that the body was Lanahan's: that right now, if I tried to think of someone whose death was likely to cause me the greatest number of problems, Patrick Lanahan would probably head the list. Who knew how long the penguins, llamas, and camels would be with us?

Or for that matter, how many other people Dad had already told that they could drop off their unwanted animal visitors with me?

I felt a momentary pang of guilt. I didn’t particularly like the fact that my first reaction to hearing about the death of another
human being was annoyance at how it would inconvenience me. I made a silent vow to learn more about Lanahan when I got the chance. Maybe he’d turn out to be a wonderful person who cared deeply about his animal charges and had done much to make the world a better place. A philanthropist who’d made profound contributions to preserving endangered species. Or at least a decent guy who hadn’t deserved whatever had happened to him. For the time being, though, I felt a strong but unreasonable grudge against him.

I realized that Chief Burke was frowning at me.

“How well did you know Lanahan?” he asked. He was holding his little notebook. And unlike my notebook, in which I tried to capture everything in the world I needed to remember, the chief scribbled in his notebook only when someone said something that might turn out to be evidence.

“Not at all,” I said. “I’ve met him, but I can’t say I know him. Though I had every reason for wanting to keep him alive.”

“Why is that?” the chief asked.

“With him gone, who knows how long we’ll be stuck with the penguins and llamas?”

“Llamas?” Dad said. “How exciting!”

He scurried toward the backyard, presumably to commune with the llamas.

“And camels,” I called after him.

“Send Smoot down when he gets here,” the Chief said again, and disappeared back into the house.

A minute later, just as I was lifting my pen to scribble in the notebook, Michael drove up in our truck. I could see my twelve-year-old nephew Eric in the passenger seat, holding Spike, our furball of a dog. A small clutch of cousins sat in the truck bed. Cousin Horace leaped out before Michael had completely stopped, and sprinted for the house.