The Penguin Who Knew Too Much(3)

“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.