The Penguin Who Knew Too Much(38)

Of course, the fact that I was thinking of Rose Noire's bizarre plan as therapy made me even more nervous than did Dr.

Smoot—who was babbling on about how it had felt, leaping out of bushes to scare people all morning. No wonder he hadn’t gone home yet. Odds were most of my family hadn’t minded a bit, and with them around, he probably fit in better here than he had anywhere in his life.

“That's great,” I said. I began backing up in earnest. “Just keep it up and I’m sure you—”

The ground under my feet disappeared.





Chapter 22

“Are you all right?”

I don’t think I lost consciousness, but I was too stunned to speak for a few seconds. Then I looked around. I was in a grave. A hole three feet wide, six feet deep, and—

Okay, maybe not a grave. It was about fifteen feet long. So either it was a grave for, say, two professional basketball players who insisted on going head-to-head in the afterlife, or it was more like a trench.

Still, not someplace I wanted to be lying, gazing up at an anxious, drooling faux vampire hovering solicitously over me.

“Can you give me a hand out?”

He frowned for a moment.

“No,” he said. “I’m not that far along yet. I’ll get thomeone.”

His face disappeared. I stood up and tested all my limbs. Nothing seemed broken, despite the six-foot fall.

So why was there a trench in our side yard? Some utility problem? The gas came in the front, and the septic field was out back, so neither of them was apt to be involved. And the phone and electrical wires weren’t buried. And, last I’d heard, cable didn’t come out this far. What was going on? I began pacing up and down the trench out of sheer impatience.

Dad's head popped over the side of the trench.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“Stay where you are.”

As if I could go anywhere. I was about to start pacing again when the end of a ladder thumped down at the far end of the trench. I ran over and scrambled up and out of the trench.

“There you are,” Dad said, beaming at me. “Randall Shiffley's gone off to fetch some of that yellow caution tape they use around construction sites, which should help a lot, but in the meantime, you’ve got to watch out for the trenches.”

“Trenches? There are more than one of them?”

Evidently there were. Looking out over the side yard I counted ten of them, all neatly parallel, all three feet wide and spaced three feet apart. The area between the house and the barn was more than half filled. In a couple of places, boards had been placed across the trenches to make paths. I noticed that the last four trenches were only half as long as the rest, although they were visibly growing toward regulation size even as I watched.

“What is going on?” I said. “Are we digging in to resist an invasion? Or perhaps we’ve already had the invasion—someone dropped off a batch of giant moles?”

“It's the Sprockets,” Dad said.

“The Sprockets?”

As if on cue, Rutherford Sprocket's head appeared in one of the trenches, gradually rising until I could see that he was pushing a wheelbarrow.

“It's quite ingenious,” Dad said. “They figured out that if they leave a dirt ramp, it eliminates the need for a ladder, and makes it much easier to haul the dirt off.”

Rutherford trundled his wheelbarrow load of dirt across the remaining undisturbed part of the side yard, emptied it onto a giant dirt mound there, and then vanished back into the hole again.

“Who the hell told the Sprockets they could ruin our yard?” I exclaimed.

“They said you did.” “They what?”

“It's for a good cause,” Dad said quickly. “They only want to find their great-uncle Plantagenet's body. They said they told you all about it.”

I strode over to the edge of the first trench, put my hands on my hips, and took a deep breath.

“Stop digging immediately!” I bellowed.

Heads popped up out of the trenches all over the yard, like startled prairie dogs. Several dozen heads, most of them belonging to members of my family. I assumed the few unfamiliar faces were auxiliary Sprockets recruited by Rutherford and Barch-ester, though for all I knew they could be my own relatives— distant ones lured by the promise of a larger-than-usual party this weekend, or perhaps newly acquired relatives by marriage. I noticed at least two Shiffleys, and made a note to triple-check the next few invoices from the Shiffley Construction Company, to make sure we didn’t get billed for their digging services.

“Everybody out of the trenches!” I shouted at the sea of heads. “No more digging!”

Most of the diggers obediently began climbing out of the holes and scuttling away. The two Sprockets didn’t move. I made my way over to the hole they were crouching in, leaping over each of the intervening trenches far more easily than I could have if I weren’t so riled up.