The Penguin Who Knew Too Much(2)

“He's on his way,” I said. “Where's the body?”

“This way!” Dad was grinning with obvious delight at showing off the house's exciting new feature.

Not a feature that had been there when my fiancé, Michael, and I bought the place, I suspected. The rambling three-story Victorian house had been so packed with junk by the previous owner that we hadn’t initially realized quite how badly in need of repair it was. But I’d spent several months crawling over every inch of the place, getting rid of decades of clutter, and then several more months supervising the repairs—at least the ones we’d decided we had to do before moving in. For that matter, we’d been living on-site for months—camping out first in the ramshackle house and more recently in the barn while the house was repaired. Surely by now I’d have noticed a body lying around, even in this remote and as-yet unrenovated corner of the basement.

Dad and I emerged from the maze of storage rooms into the larger, dirt-floored open area. A couple of battery-powered Coleman lanterns hung from the ceiling, casting enough light for me to see the room. I didn’t spot any penguins, though I could hear and smell them nearby. And I could see an excavation near the center of the room.

“Oh, wonderful,” I said. “You didn’t just find a body. You dug one up.”





Chapter 2

Gazing at the hole, I felt slightly reassured. Surely, if the body had been buried, it would turn out to be an old one after all. Little more than a skeleton.

“Yes,” Dad said. “And not even buried very deep. It was remarkably easy to uncover—what were they thinking?”

He shook his head solemnly, as if to express his dismay at the shoddy professional habits of the modern criminal class. Or perhaps at Michael's and my shoddy housekeeping skills.

“It's not as if we’re in the habit of tilling the soil down here,” I said. “Did you suspect it was here, or did you have some other good reason for digging a hole in the middle of our basement floor?”

“For the penguins,” Dad said. “I knew they’d be much happier with someplace to swim. So I was going to put in a pond—one of those preformed plastic ones.”

“Of course. A pond,” I said. It made sense coming from Dad, who had always had a fascination with water features. He probably loved having the penguins as an excuse. “But why not outside?”

“They’re penguins,” he exclaimed. “You can’t expect them to stay outside in the heat of a Virginia summer! In here, we can give them some air-conditioning.”

It would be a neat trick, with this end of the basement not even electrified—I could already see the giant industrial extension cords snaking through the house. And I shuddered to think what it would do to our electric bill.

“I started digging yesterday,” he went on. “But then I realized that I didn’t know how big a hole I needed. So I went to Flugle-man's garden store last night and got the precise dimensions. And almost as soon as I started work this morning—voila!”

He pointed to his excavation. I grabbed one of the overhead lanterns, picked my way carefully to the edge of the hole, and peered in. I didn’t exactly see a body—more like a hand sticking up by itself out of the dirt. But even though I had refused to follow in Dad's footsteps, becoming a blacksmith instead of a doctor, I had enough grasp of basic human anatomy to deduce that if the hand wasn’t still attached to a body, it had been at one point. Probably, from the size of it, a full-grown male body.

Though hands could fool you. I glanced down at my own, which were largish for a woman's hands. Of course, at five feet, ten inches, so was the rest of me. And my work as a blacksmith wasn’t exactly conducive to maintaining elegant feminine hands. Mother had long since given up chiding me for ruining them at the forge. Even Michael didn’t pretend to find my hands beautiful, but he had pronounced them capable-looking, and made it sound like a higher compliment. One of his many positive traits.

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.