The Penguin Who Knew Too Much (3 page)

Maybe two weeks wasn’t enough. Maybe Michael should ask the college for a sabbatical so we could take a slow cruise around the world. Though for all I knew, that could be what Michael had planned. He’d made all the arrangements for the honeymoon, and refused to tell me anything. The theory was that I’d have one less thing to worry about on top of the move.

If he thought not knowing where I was going would stop me from worrying—

Anyway, that was The Plan. And it was working—so far. As far as I could tell, my premove and preparty nerves camouflaged any prenuptial jitters, and anyone who noticed Michael's good spirits would simply chalk it up to his eagerness at finally moving into our recently—and expensively—renovated house. I doubted anything my eager relatives could do while trying to help would annoy him. Dad's discovery, on the other hand—

“There's nothing wrong, is there?” Michael asked.

“Well, you might want to put loading the truck on hold for now and come back to the house. There's a slight hitch in our plans. Dad's found a body buried in the basement.”

I waited for a few anxious seconds.

“How exciting for your father,” he said, finally. “Unless, of course—dare I hope it's something an archaeologist would find more interesting than a doctor? A body left over from the Civil War, perhaps? Or something the Sprockets left behind?”

“I said body, not bones,” I said. “Dad says our body, whoever it is, hasn’t been dead more than a day or so.”

“Damn,” Michael said. “Do we know who it is?” “Not yet.”

“That's unsettling,” he said.

I knew what he meant. Until we found out who the victim was, we didn’t know quite how to react. The somber feeling induced by hearing of someone's death might swell into grief if we knew the victim. Unless it was someone we really didn’t like, in which case we might feel a hint of guilty relief. For now, we were in limbo.

“And not to sound too selfish,” he added, “but I bet this is going to throw a monkey wrench into things.” Into The Plan, he meant.

“Too early to tell,” I said. “Why don’t you postpone any additional loading for now and come back?” “Roger. I’ll bring Horace.”

“Good idea.” My cousin Horace was a crime-scene technician back in Yorktown, my hometown, and since the Caerphilly Police Department was too small to have many forensic capabilities, the chief sometimes enlisted Horace's help when a major crime occurred. If Horace was in town, that is; though these days he was almost always in town, since, like young Sammy, he’d also developed a crush on our distant cousin Rose Noire.

“It might take us a while to make sure everything's either securely loaded on the truck or safely locked back in the storage unit,” Michael said. “But we’ll be back as soon as we can.”

“Great.”

I put the phone away and was lifting the pen to make some notes when I heard a car door slam. I looked up and saw a woman striding purposefully down our front walk, leading a llama.

Chapter 4

“Hello,” I said, while frantically racking my brain to see if she was a relative I should recognize. Not that my family had a monopoly on eccentricity, but calling on people with a llama in tow was the sort of thing many of them would do. And an alarmingly large number of relatives seemed to be arriving early to help with the move, instead of waiting until Monday's giant house-warming picnic.

My latest visitor was short and plump, probably in her forties, with cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a face that would look pleasant if she stopped frowning. It was not a face that rang a bell, though, nor could I remember hearing that any of the family had taken an interest in llamas. I knew I’d never seen the brown-and-white llama before.

The woman didn’t answer my greeting until she had reached the porch and had climbed the first two steps. Then she handed me her end of the llama's rope. The llama, fortunately, remained on solid ground.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It's just not working anymore.”

I studied the llama for a few moments. Admittedly, I was no llama expert, but it seemed to be working fine to me. It stared back at me with calm, sleepy-eyed reassurance. It looked quite friendly, even warm. I had to remind myself that was just the
way all llamas look, and not a valid reason to take the llama's side over the woman's in whatever dispute they were having.

“I’ve been trying to talk to Patrick for a week and a half now and haven’t gotten an answer,” the woman said.

I glanced back at the llama. Was Patrick its name, then? Did she really expect the llama to answer? I resisted the urge to inch a little farther away from her.

“And no one's seen him for days,” she added.

Ah. Not the llama then. It was quite clearly visible, standing calmly in the middle of our front walk. I repressed the urge to pet its long, soft coat. It wasn’t a stuffed animal, and I had no idea whether llamas bit people.

“And when I talked to your father last night, he said that he might be able to help us out. We’re already two days late taking off to see our new granddaughter. We can’t stay here llama-sitting forever.”

Light dawned.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “The llama's from the Caerphilly Zoo.”

“Patrick said a few days, and it's been two weeks.”

Of course. Patrick Lanahan, the zoo's financially inept owner. The one who’d saddled Dad with the penguins. And, apparently, stuck this woman with a llama. If you asked me, she’d gotten the better of the bargain.

“Your father said he had some pastureland that would be perfectly suitable, and if I hadn’t found Patrick by this morning, I should bring them over.”

Them?

A man appeared at the other end of the walk, shortly followed by second llama. Then a third. Llamas kept popping one by one through the opening in the high hedge that screened our yard from the street until I saw that the man was leading six lla
mas, roped together like a pack train. As I watched, the third llama in line reached down with his nose and goosed the llama in front of him, which squealed with outrage and leaped into the air. Perhaps I only imagined the look of amusement on the faces of the remaining llamas. Or perhaps these were not merely llamas, but prank-playing juvenile-delinquent llamas.

“Where do you want me to put these?” the man asked.

I thought of several rude and improbable answers, but I suppressed them. I got up and led my charge to the backyard. My visitors and the rest of the llamas followed. I quickly got the idea that leading more than one llama at a time was a bad idea. Even the short walk to the backyard gave them plenty of time for goosing, biting, and kicking each other. At least they weren’t spitting, which I’d heard llamas were fond of doing.

“You can put them in here for now,” I said, opening the gate to the pen outside the barn. It was a little small for seven llamas, but at least it was in good repair, since we used it for a dog run. I made sure the dog door between the pen and the barn was closed, since I didn’t know how Spike, our dog, would react to the llamas when he returned. Well, okay, I knew how Spike would react; he’d try to kill one of them, and at eight and a half pounds, he’d be fighting way out of his weight class. Locked in the barn, he could only bark himself hoarse.

Neither of the llamas’ temporary caretakers expressed the slightest concern over the small size of the pen.

“I’ll get someone to take them over to the pasture as soon as possible,” I added. “We’re a little busy right now.”

“Yes, I understand you’re finally moving in today,” the woman said. “Your father said that was why I should drop them off here, instead of at his farm.”

Just drop them off with Meg. Yes, that sounded like Dad. The couple turned to go, without expressing any further concern
over the llamas’ well-being, which struck me as rather callous. It wasn’t as if the llamas had deliberately outstayed their welcome.

“Is there any message I should give Dad?” I shouted at the couple's departing backs. “About the llamas?”

Like maybe “Thanks for taking them off our hands”?

The man turned.

“No,” he shouted. “But if Patrick ever turns up, you can tell the no-good son of a—”

“George!” the woman hissed.

The man turned away again and they left.

I looked back at the llamas. They were standing clustered by the fence. They didn’t look at all upset at seeing their former guardians depart.

I was pondering whether to take them over to the pasture now or wait until someone else was free to do it, when two tall, lean figures came around the corner of the house. Randall Shif-fley, the foreman of the construction crew that had been working on our house, and one of his brothers or cousins—Vern, I thought, though I wasn’t sure.

I greeted them, a little warily. Had I asked them to come by to do some project? Not that I recalled. We still had dozens of projects inside and out, and we’d probably be hiring the Shiffleys to do the work, but not yet. The place was livable, though far from perfect, and we were looking forward to a few weeks or even months of peace and quiet. Not to mention a few months of not handing the Shiffleys every bit of cash we could scrape up.

Fortunately, Randall got straight to the point.

“We came to talk to your father,” he said. “About the rights to the land.”

Rights? Dad had bought the farm adjacent to our lot from Fred Shiffley, Randall's uncle. Was there some problem with the purchase?

My face must have revealed my puzzlement.

“The hunting rights,” he said. “I went over to the farm the other day to make sure we had everything straight on that, and I got the idea he was trying to avoid talking about it.”

“Was my mother there?” I asked.

“Think so.”

“That explains it, then. Mother's not all that keen on hunting.”

“Ah.” He frowned and considered this for a few moments. “How not keen is she?”

“She won’t let him use poison on mice. Only humane traps. So he could exile them across the York River. For a couple of years, every time I went home, Dad was trying another brand of humane traps.”

“He finally find one that worked?”

“No, most of them should have been marketed as mouse toys. But someone gave them a cat, and he turned out to be a natural mouser. Mother doesn’t seem to mind Boomer killing and eating mice—it's his nature.”

“I don’t suppose she feels differently about deer.”

“She shows
Bambi
to all my nieces and nephews every Christmas.”

Randall digested this news in silence. He didn’t utter the dreaded words “city folks!” in that familiar condescending tone, but he didn’t really have to.

“She loathes insects,” I said, trying to be helpful. “So if you could convince her that deer aren’t actually mammals but large, furry insects... “

Randall snorted at that.

“Doesn’t seem likely,” he said. “And I don’t suppose there's any chance you and your dad could convince her that we’re actually large, partly bald cats?”

I decided to assume this was a rhetorical question.

“You don’t keep after the deer and you’ll be kicking them off your doorstep in the morning,” Vern added.

I had to admit, I was torn. I didn’t share Mother's—and Rose Noire's—sentimental fondness for the deer. I’d seen too much of them since moving out into the country—the deer, that is. Though come to think of it, lately I’d also seen Mother and Rose Noire rather too often. Anyway, I’d gotten better at spotting deer droppings before I stepped in them, and was learning how to minimize the number of deer-borne ticks I had to pick off myself. I hadn’t had much time to think about landscaping our yard, so I didn’t yet have the typical gardener's grudge against the deer, but I understood the problem the local farmers had, protecting their crops from what they referred to as long-legged rats. So I wouldn’t mourn if the deer population took a steep drop—for example, if they all decided that Caerphilly was growing too civilized and migrated, en masse, out to West Virginia.

But the idea of someone shooting and killing deer practically in my backyard made me squeamish. So did the prospect of eating venison, though I had no problem wolfing down a juicy steak or a barbecued chicken leg. In some ways, I was still very much city folk after all. I decided to duck the whole issue.

“You should probably talk to Dad when Mother isn’t around,” I said. “And make sure Rose Noire's not there either. Or anyone else in the family, for that matter.”

“That include you?” Randall said, raising an eyebrow curiously.

“Especially me. I hate trying to lie to Mother, probably because she always sees through me.”

Randall nodded. And then frowned and pursed his lips as if trying to decide whether or not to say something.

“Everything else okay?” he asked.

“Just fine.”

He and Vern waited for a few moments. I saw Vern glance toward the street, where Chief Burke's car was parked. “So why's the chief here?” Randall asked finally. “Oh, Dad found a body in the basement.”

“Body?” Randall said. He sounded strangely agitated. “What kind of body?”

Chapter 5

“A human body,” I said. “Beyond that, I couldn’t say.”

“You didn’t see it?” Randall asked. He looked relieved. That was curious.

“They haven’t finished digging it up yet,” I said.

“Bet he found it while working on his penguin pond, then.”

Randall and Vern snickered.

“You’ve heard about the pond?” I asked.

“We were down at the feed store last night when he came in,” Vern said.

“Sounds like he’d already dug a hole ten times bigger than he needed,” Randall said with a chuckle. “Those preformed ponds don’t come more than two, three feet deep.”

“We could have told him that,” Vern said, shaking his head.

“Bunch of damn fool people who had no idea what they were talking about were giving him all sorts of wrong advice,” Randall added. “Hope he didn’t listen to them, or he’ll have the whole house down around your ears before you know it.”

Considering how much we’d already paid the Shiffley Construction Company to restore our three-story Victorian white elephant to reasonably sound condition, I hoped he was exaggerating.

I resolved to focus on the positive side of what he’d said.