The Secret Zoo

Dedication

Prelude

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

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Afterword

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

T
HE
D
ISCOVERY OF A
S
ECRET

JULY
18

M
egan raced across her backyard to the tree fort. The wind snapped her pajamas, and the stiff grass pricked her bare feet. At the tree trunk, she grabbed the ladder and peered up. She could faintly see the wooden planks of the fort and, beyond them, the moon and stars. Somewhere up there, she'd left her glasses—at least, she hoped she had.

She climbed the long ladder and crawled into the fort. A glint of moonlight pulled her attention to a near corner, where she discovered her glasses lying like a big crumpled insect. She scooped them up and put them on.

“Oh! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” she gasped.

A sudden noise broke through the trees. It was a faint crackling sound like a piece of dry wood splintering, and it came from nearby—two or three houses down, maybe. Megan stood still and listened. A minute later, she heard the noise again, but this time it was louder—
crrraaackkk
! Then she heard a grunt, as if someone had been hurt. She ran to the wall of the fort and looked up and down the neighbors' lawns. Nothing. The dark landscape was creepy. She whistled and called her next-door neighbor's dog.

“Patches? Is that you? Are you—?”

She heard the noise again.
Crrraaackkk!
Then a thump, a thud, and another grunt.

Megan and her friends kept binoculars in the fort. She found them and balanced the lenses on her nose. Magnified, her neighborhood looked even darker than before, and the houses seemed to be trembling—until she realized that her hands were shaking.

“The zoo,” she whispered.

She ran to the opposite side of the fort. The only thing separating her neighborhood from the Clarksville City Zoo was a long, winding concrete wall. From Fort Scout, she had a clear view over this wall. In daylight, she could watch the giraffes, bears, seals, and hippos as they ran,
swam, and lazed about. She steadied the binoculars and stared into the zoo. Lampposts illumined the paths, but the exhibits were too dark to see.

She heard the crushing sound again and realized that it wasn't coming from the zoo. She dashed back to the opposite window and scanned the neighbors' yards once more. Nothing. Nothing but grassy lawns, trees, and rooftops.

The grunting echoed between the houses. Megan pushed up the binoculars so suddenly that they clinked against her glasses. Now she was more than creeped out; she was downright scared!

“C'mon, Meg,” she said. “Nothing's out there. Quit freaking yourself—”

She gasped. Something
was
there! Some kind of creature was walking on a gable rooftop, three houses down.

“What is that?” she whispered.

She focused the binoculars and discovered five creatures creeping across the roof. A sixth was climbing the branches of the oak tree beside the house, making the limbs break. That was the sound she'd heard—branches breaking. Suddenly the creature leaped from the shaking tree, flew through the air, and landed on the house with the others. It stomped up to the roof peak and bounded onto the chimney.

The other five creatures were small and hunched over. Their long arms dangled at their sides, and as they walked, their shoulders rocked like a seesaw. Megan continued to watch them until she realized what they were. Monkeys! It seemed impossible. Monkeys had escaped the zoo and were climbing over a house in her neighborhood.

One monkey leaped from the edge of the rooftop. Megan had a clear view of its silhouette in front of the moon. Its feet hit the gutter of the adjacent rooftop with a clang, and the other monkeys followed, effortlessly jumping the distance between the houses.

“No,” she said as she stared in disbelief. “Nunh-unh.”

The monkeys jumped to the next house, and the next, and then disappeared into the shadows. Silence and stillness descended over the neighborhood.

“Noah…”

Megan hurried down the ladder and rushed into the house. Her older brother would know what to do. She flung open his bedroom door, startling him out of his sleep.

“Wha—?” Noah gasped. His hair stood out in all directions, reminding Megan of sunrays in a cartoon.

“Noah—outside!” she blurted out. “Quick!”

“What?”

“Now!”

She ran back through the house. Noah chased her outside. They dashed across the yard and climbed up to Fort Scout.

“What are you—?”

Megan snatched the binoculars and shoved them at her brother. “Here!”

“Here, what?”

“Look through them!” She pointed toward the rooftops. “Over there—I saw monkeys!”

“Megan!”

“I saw monkeys! On the rooftops!”

Her older brother looked her up and down. “You're nuts.”

“Just see for yourself!”

Noah peered through the binoculars. He searched the landscape for more than a minute without saying a word. Then he handed the binoculars back to his sister and said, “Yep! You're nuts.”

“Noah! I saw them. I'm telling you—”

He climbed down the ladder, saying, “What are you doing out here so late, anyway? You'll be
sooo
dead if Mom catches you out here.” He reached the ground and turned to run toward the house, calling, “Come inside!”

Megan watched him run back into the house and close the door on the night. She turned her attention back to the rooftops and her neighbors' yards. She studied
the shadowy landscape for nearly an hour, but nothing unusual happened.

“I know I saw them,” she said, trying to convince herself.

She climbed down from the fort, returned to the house, dropped into bed, and stared at the ceiling.

She couldn't sleep. At two o'clock in the morning, she rolled out of bed and sat at her desk. Nervous, she drummed her fingers on the desktop and shifted her eyes. Her gaze stopped on a single book standing on its edge. A diary. A recent gift from her mother, the diary lacked its first entry. Megan snatched it up and opened to the first page. The binding was so stiff that she had to press the cover down before it would lie flat. She stared at the page. It was ridiculously colorful—red paper with purple lines and blue stars in the corners.

In class, she'd learned about brainstorming—scribbling down ideas as quickly as possible. Her teacher had said it was a way to make sense of something that was difficult to figure out. Megan grabbed a pencil, chewed on the eraser for a moment, and started to write.

 

Date: July 18

Time: 11:00
P.M
.

I went outside because I forgot my stupid glasses in Fort Scout again. When I climbed up…

 

She wrote for an hour. Then she closed the diary, set it aside, turned off the light, and climbed back into bed. An hour later, she fell asleep without knowing that she'd just completed the first pages of a journal that would eventually alter the course of the world.

AFTER THE DISCOVERY OCTOBER
2

Fourteen red-eyed leaf frogs hopped down the long zoo corridor, jumping and tumbling over one another as they scrambled forward.
Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!
The sticky pads of their feet slapped the floor and sounded like exploding miniature firecrackers. A hundred aquariums lined the walls. Occasionally a frog leaped sideways and stuck to the glass for a few seconds.

The fourteen red-eyed leaf frogs hopped into a small exhibit at the end of the corridor—the special exhibit that a young girl had sneaked into just minutes earlier. They found exactly what they feared—nothing! The girl was gone. Three sheets of notebook paper lay on the ground—colorful red pages with purple lines and blue stars in the corners. Torn and crinkled, the pages were still fluttering as they settled on the floor.

The fourteen red-eyed leaf frogs didn't know the pages
were from the diary of a girl named Megan Nowicki, who months earlier had spotted monkeys escaping from the zoo. They stared at the pages. Then, whipping the sheets with their long, sticky tongues, three leaf frogs picked them up.

And so the story began.

OCTOBER
23

M
issing!
Noah scooped up the paper and read the word a second time. He walked the rest of his street with his eyes fixed on the grainy black-and-white photograph of his sister and the word that had haunted him for three weeks:
missing!
Until recently, he'd associated the word with minor misplaced things like his keys or his baseball glove. But now it described his sister. On her way to a piano lesson three weeks earlier, Megan had stepped off the porch, walked down the street, and never been seen again. She'd simply disappeared.

In the first days after her disappearance, she was all
anyone could think about. Her picture was posted on every storefront window and telephone pole within a hundred miles. County residents had united to search for her. They'd walked hand in hand across open fields, scoured deep woods, and walked door-to-door in distant communities, hoping someone had seen her. Their search spanned days, weeks. But after three weeks, there was still no sign of Megan. And though no one said the words, people clearly had given up.

Determined to find his sister, Noah began his own search and called upon his two best friends, Ella and Richie, to help him. For most of their lives, Ella, Richie, Megan, and Noah had been members of a club called the Action Scouts. Their club was like most others. They had a fort, a name, secret passwords, and private meetings. What made the Action Scouts special was that it was
their
club, based on their unique friendship. So powerful was the scouts' friendship that they believed they were inseparable…and Noah, Ella, and Richie hoped this would bring Megan home.

It didn't.

Now, three weeks after Megan's disappearance, Noah found himself gazing at her picture as he walked across his backyard. Minutes ago, he'd found the flyer in the street; it had probably blown off a telephone pole.

“Meg, where are you?” he whispered.

The wind snapped the edges of the flyer. Noah gave it a final look and stuffed it into his pocket. He stopped in front of the big oak tree in his backyard. Nailed to it was a weather-beaten sign with fading paint. He'd made it years ago with Megan, Ella, and Richie. The sign read,
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FORT SCOUT
!
DO NOT ENTER
! It might as well have read,
WELCOME
!
NOW GO AWAY
!

He stared high into the tree. Twenty feet above was Fort Scout, set in a tangle of tree limbs. It was the most elaborate tree fort he had ever seen. It had a roof, two doors, and four windows. It had three points of entry: a ladder, a rope, and a spiral staircase that circled the trunk and ended at a hole in the floor. Long rope bridges connected the fort to far-off trees.

Noah climbed the stairs and stepped into the fort. His footsteps thumped on the wooden planks. The fort was filled with stuff—tables and chairs and games and jackets. A pile of equipment lay on one of the tables: tools, batteries, and strange electrical objects that looked like metal bugs. These belonged to Richie. A whiz with gadgets, he was always working on what he claimed was high-tech spy equipment.

Noah stared out the window at the empty gray sky and heard nothing but the sound of the wind. He headed across one of the rope bridges toward a lookout platform. The bridge creaked and swayed. On the platform, he
looked toward the Clarksville City Zoo. Two elephants, a giraffe, and a tiger were in his view, sleeping in their compounds. But mostly the zoo looked empty—empty and sad.

Looking down on the zoo from the height of the platform made Noah think of the night Megan had insisted she'd spotted monkeys on the rooftops. He remembered standing beside her, scanning the darkness for a sign of anything unusual. He'd seen nothing—certainly no runaway zoo animals.

From that night until the day she'd disappeared, Megan had acted differently. She'd been distant and preoccupied—like a person with a secret. Sometimes Noah had weird thoughts. Sometimes he wondered if the zoo had something to do with her disappearance. Megan, after all, had claimed she'd spotted animals escaping. Maybe she had; worse, maybe she wasn't supposed to. Perhaps she'd put herself in some kind of danger just by seeing them. Could the animals have come for her—kidnapped her—because something bad was going on at the zoo?

These were ridiculous ideas, and Noah knew it. He was stressed, and the stress was making him think crazy things. Still, if these ideas were so crazy, why did they keep coming back?

Noah looked away from the zoo. He wondered where Megan was, if she was okay, and whether she'd ever make
it home. He bumped his toe on the short flagpole that lay on the platform. The flag was red with large white letters:
A
and
S
. He picked it up and held it in the air. “The Action Scouts' distress flag,” he muttered.

Two years earlier, Richie's grandfather, an army veteran, had given the kids the idea of making distress flags. He'd said that if the scouts became separated, they'd need a way to communicate trouble, and the distress flags had been his answer. He talked Richie's grandmother into making one for each of the children and one for Fort Scout.

Noah fitted the pole into a spot in the tree. The flag waved, and the
A
and
S
rippled in the breeze. He looked across his yard and into the street. A part of him hoped Ella or Richie would see the flag and come running. If not Ella or Richie, then someone—anyone—who could help him get back his sister and his old life.

Noah waited almost a half hour. No one came. Finally the cold got the best of him.

He climbed down from Fort Scout, entered the house, and went to bed early. As he lay beneath the covers, he imagined Megan, her warm smile and her sisterly love. Eventually he drifted to sleep.

Shortly before midnight, he woke to a
Tap! Tap! Tap!
on his bedroom window.