The Penguin Who Knew Too Much(10)

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?”