The Penguin Who Knew Too Much (2 page)

Our subterranean visitor's hand, like mine, looked well used rather than well cared for. Capable. On the large side. And hairier than most women's hands.

So judging from the hand, our uninvited visitor was male. And either he worked with his hands, as I did, or he had done something useful with them in his off-hours.

And he probably hadn’t been buried beneath the basement floor all that long, I realized, with a sinking feeling. Now that I was closer, I could smell decay, even over the penguin poop. If he’d been there since the late Mrs. Sprocket owned the house, I
wouldn’t have smelled anything at all. Or seen enough of him to make all these deductions.

“How recently did he die?” I asked. “Or can you tell from just the hand?”

“Longer than a day,” Dad said. “Or decomposition wouldn’t be detectable. And there's no rigor, so presumably it has worn off. But not much longer.”

“So we’re talking days, not months or years, right?”

“Of course,” Dad said. “You could figure that out yourself.”

“I hoped I was wrong,” I said. “It would be so much easier if we could blame him on the previous owner. Anyway—ow!”

Someone—or something—had goosed me. I stumbled forward, barely avoiding the hand. My foot landed on a soft, warm body that squealed and wriggled frantically out from under me, almost toppling me over onto the hand. I glanced around to see a throng of penguins milling about us.

“Oh, dear, they’re loose again,” Dad said. “There really isn’t any place down here that will hold them. Help me take them outside, before they spoil the crime scene.”

“A little too late to worry about that,” I said. The penguins had discovered the hand and were poking and nibbling at it with their beaks, though luckily they hadn’t decided that it was edible.

“Grab a fish and lure them outside,” Dad said, taking a bucket down from an overhead hook and handing it to me.

“Yuck,” I said, but I followed orders. I grabbed something cold and slimy from the bucket and headed for the other end of the room, where concrete steps led to a set of old-fashioned slanted metal doors that provided an outlet to the yard. Behind me, I could hear Dad gently shooing the penguins. I barely had time to swing open one side of the door and scramble out before they caught up, nearly knocking me down in their eagerness to get to the fish.

I threw the fish into the yard, tossed a few more after it, and then looked around for a place to stow the penguins before they wandered off to visit the neighbors.

The duck pen. It wasn’t as if our resident duck and her adopted ducklings spent much time in it. I opened the gate, dumped most of the remaining chum at the far end, then stood waving a fish as a lure until I had all the penguins inside. Dad shut the gate behind them, and I climbed over the fence to freedom, or at least the absence of penguins underfoot.

“Good thinking!” Dad said as he put one foot up on a rail and leaned his elbows on the top of the fence. The veteran penguin wrangler, resting after a successful roundup. “That should take care of them for the time being.”

“For the time being,” I repeated. “At least until you can take them back where they belong. And just where is that, anyway? Not in our basement, I assure you.”

“The Caerphilly Zoo,” Dad said. He had pulled out his handkerchief and was mopping his face and the shiny expanse of his bald head. “Patrick asked me to foster them for a while.”

“Patrick?”

“Patrick Lanahan. The zoo's owner. It's just until he gets through this bad patch he's having.”

“What kind of a bad patch?” I asked. In our family, “bad patch” was a convenient euphemism. It could cover anything from brief cash-flow problems or minor marital discord up to a felony conviction with a sentence of twenty to life.

“Only temporary, of course,” Dad said.

“Of course. What's wrong down at the zoo?”

“The bank was going to put a lien on the property. And if he hadn’t moved the animals out, the bank might have seized them, too.”

“Oh, so these might even be hot penguins,” I said. “Great.”

“Don’t be silly, Meg,” Dad said. “The bank didn’t want to seize the penguins. What on earth would they do with them if they did? They gave Patrick plenty of time to foster out all the animals before they filed the lien.”

“To foster out all the animals? Dad, how many animals did you take, anyway?”

“Only the penguins,” Dad said, as if hurt by my distrust.

“Ah. Only the penguins,” I repeated. Suddenly the throng of black-and-white forms busily exploring the duck pen for escape routes looked small and relatively harmless. I tried to remember what other animals they’d had at the zoo. Nothing particularly dangerous, I hoped. Still, penguins were better than hyenas, weren’t they? And hadn’t the zoo had at least one elderly, ill-tempered bobcat? “So you’re stuck with the penguins until Patrick can pay his bills?”

“Just until he finishes negotiating an agreement with a new sponsor,” Dad said. “Which should be any day now.”

He was looking at the empty fish bucket with a slight frown.

“Remarkable, how much fish they eat,” he said. He glanced at the penguins, then back at the bucket, and sighed.

“Dad, just how long have you had these penguins?”

“Only two weeks.”

“They haven’t been in the basement for two weeks, have they?” I asked. I thought I’d have noticed penguins, but perhaps the preparations for the move had made me less observant than usual.

“Oh, no—I’ve been keeping them over at the farmhouse.” Although he and Mother still lived in Yorktown, about an hour to the south, a few months earlier he’d bought the farm adjacent to our new house, partly to save it from development and partly so they could come up to Caerphilly whenever they felt like meddling.

“Why couldn’t they just stay there?” I asked.

“With your mother coming up today? I didn’t think she’d be pleased.”

“And you thought I would?”

“I knew you’d cope better than your mother.” “You mean you knew I’d complain less.” “Oh, look! There's Chief Burke!”

As the chief's car pulled up, Dad hurried out to meet him, visibly relieved that something had interrupted my line of questioning.

“Glad to see you!” Dad exclaimed, reaching to shake the chief's hand as he stepped out of the patrol car. “Though I’m sorry it had to be under these circumstances.”

“Just what are the circumstances?” the chief asked. His normally cheerful brown face wore a faint frown. “Debbie Anne had some fool story about you finding a body in the basement.”

“Yes—extraordinary, isn’t it?” Dad said. “Let me show you.”

He made a dash toward the side yard, where the battered metal cellar doors were located. The chief and I followed more slowly, and saw Dad's head disappear into the opening just as we turned the corner of the house. The chief looked at me.

“You’ve seen this body?” he asked.

“Yes. Part of it anyway—the hand. The rest's still buried.”

“Lord,” the chief said. “And here I was hoping for a quiet Memorial Day weekend.”

He walked over to the basement doors and frowned at them for a few moments. Since the doors weren’t doing anything to merit disapproval, I suspected that he wasn’t really all that keen on going inside. I glanced down through the doors myself and could see why. Now that my eyes were used to the bright sunlight outside, I could see little more than a few steep steps disappearing into the gloom.

“Chief?” Dad called. “Are you coming?”

“Coming,” the chief called. “I don’t see what he's in such an
all-fired hurry about,” he grumbled to me. “Body's not going anywhere, is it?”

“You know how excited he gets about murders.”

The chief only rolled his eyes. Then he put one foot carefully on the first step, and I watched his head drop lower with each step until it vanished into the basement.

Should I follow, or stay outside to keep an eye on the penguins?

Chapter 3

Before I could decide whether to test the chief's patience by following him, Sammy, the gangling young deputy who’d driven out with the chief, ambled over to my side.

“I guess the family's all over here today to help you move in,” he said.

“A few of them. We’re just making a start today—most of them are coming tomorrow.”

By which time I hoped to have most of the breakable objects locked up safely somewhere. At least the ones that survived Rob's efforts.

Of course, I knew Sammy couldn’t care less about how many of my family were here. He was really wondering about the presence or absence of my twenty-something cousin Rosemary Keenan—or Rose Noire, as she preferred to call herself these days. I took pity on him.

“Let me know if you and the other officers will still be around at lunchtime,” I said. “Mother and Rose Noire are planning lunch for the movers, and I’m sure it would be no trouble to feed a few more people.”

“Thanks!” Sammy said, smiling happily. “I should go see if the chief needs anything. Could you show anyone else who arrives the way?”

“Will do,” I said. Not that the other officers needed directions
from me. They all knew perfectly well how to find their way into the basement of what they still called the old Sprocket house. Michael and I were just the city folks who’d spent a pile of money buying the place and fixing it up. Neither of us had actually grown up in a city, but we weren’t born in Caerphilly, so we’d probably always be city folks to the locals.

Gloomy thoughts. I wondered how soon Michael would return from his trip to our storage bin. Even a body in the basement wouldn’t dim his enthusiasm for our half-renovated Victorian hulk and our future life in it. Right now I could use a little of that enthusiasm.

I was pulling out my cell phone to call him when I saw Dad trudging up the cellar steps, dragging his heels like a grade-school kid on the way to the principal's office. As he stepped out onto the lawn, someone banged the cellar doors shut behind him. Dad looked back reproachfully.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“He asked me to leave,” Dad said, his voice plaintive. “Said he couldn’t have civilians at the scene. Civilians!”

“He was being polite, of course. What he really meant is that he can’t allow any of his suspects to stay at the scene.”

“Oh,” Dad said, brightening. “That's true. I suppose he can’t. After all, the person who reports finding the body does often turn out to be the killer.”

“And someone has to tell the rest of the family that we probably have to halt the move temporarily,” I said. “The chief's not going to want us dragging more stuff into what's suddenly become a possible crime scene. Why don’t you go inside and break the news to Mother and the others?”

“An excellent plan!” he said. And with his good humor restored, he trotted into the house.

I strolled around to the front yard, nodding good morning to
several other officers on their way to the cellar, and sat on the porch, where I could keep a lookout for more new arrivals. I reached into my pocket for the notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe, as I called my humongous to-do list. When faced with a crisis, I clung to the notebook the way a toddler clutches a security blanket. And while finding the body at any time would be a horrible thing, finding it on moving day counted as a real crisis, didn’t it?

Especially when Chief Burke started trying to figure out who had buried the body, focusing on the most logical suspects—me and the ever-growing crew of family members showing up to help with the move.

I used the paper clip that served as a place mark to open the notebook to my list of priorities for the day. I hadn’t yet crossed off many things—after all, it was barely noon—but already the neat clarity of the list I’d made last night had been sullied with half a dozen scribbled additions and annotations. I was used to that happening when real life and one of my lists collided. Especially real life involving my family. But odds were that Dad's discovery would derail the day's agenda entirely. I turned the page to begin an entirely new list.

But before I even started that, I pulled out my cell phone and hit the first speed-dial button. I felt better the moment Michael answered.

“We’re still at the storage bin, loading the truck,” he said. “You were right; I really underestimated how long it would take.”

He didn’t mention the reasons it was taking longer, probably because they were still within earshot—the several cousins and uncles who’d gone with him to help load the pickup and were probably still squabbling amicably about what to load next
or how to balance the load. He didn’t sound annoyed, either. Amazing.

Of course, Michael uncritically adored my family, probably because he’d always felt deprived growing up as an only child, with a widowed mother and two unmarried aunts as his sole relatives. So far prolonged exposure to the Hollingworths, my mother's clan, hadn’t dimmed his enthusiasm for the prospect of marrying into a large, noisy, eccentric extended family. I’d recently realized that was one of my reasons for dragging my heels about marrying the tall, dark, and handsome Michael—the fear that after a year or two with my family as in-laws, he’d suddenly come to his senses and go looking for someone less genealogically encumbered.

I’d finally become convinced that Michael really did enjoy my family—just as Dad, who’d been a foundling, had been overjoyed when, by marrying Mother, he’d gained not only a wife but several hundred aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins. Buoyed by this knowledge, I’d agreed to Michael's plan for eloping in the middle of one of my family's legendary outdoor parties. Specifically, the over-the-top housewarming party we were throwing on Monday, Memorial Day, once our move back into the house was complete. Anyone who didn’t come to the party couldn’t complain about not being invited. We knew that neither of our mothers would be happy that we’d preempted the overe-laborate wedding and reception plans they’d begun to cook up, but at least by eloping now we could prevent either mother from doing anything rash, like making large, nonrefundable deposits on any wedding paraphernalia. And maybe they’d both be so relieved to hear we’d finally tied the knot that they’d forgive us.

Just in case, we were taking off immediately on a two-week honeymoon. Probably not enough time for either my mother or
Mrs. Waterston to get over her disappointment at the lack of a big wedding, but enough time for them to calm down and refo-cus their energies on nagging us about when we were going to provide them with grandchildren. At thirty-six, I wasn’t sure if my own biological clock was prodding me, but I knew Michael's mother soon would be.