With that, he stomped off.
“He means me, of course,” Blake said. “Won’t be the first time I’ve been persecuted for my beliefs.” He strode off, head high.
“Pretentious old goat,” I muttered. Unfortunately, I didn’t mutter softly enough.
“Meg!” Dad exclaimed.
“Sorry,” I said. “But Blake really gets on my nerves for some reason.”
“He does good work,” Dad said. “Really he does.”
But his tone sounded ambivalent. Was he still worrying about whether Blake was a fake? Or was I, perhaps, not the only member of the family who was starting to find Blake hard to take?
I strolled outside. It occurred to me that now might be a good time to talk to Blake—while he was still worked up about the canned hunts, and perhaps not as much on his guard as usual.
But I lost him in the crowd—how many relatives had we invited, anyway, and were they all going to show up a day early? I made my way to the side yard, where, thanks to the trenches, it was a lot quieter. I ducked under the yellow tape and stepped over half a dozen of the trenches until I stood in the middle of the side yard. I decided I liked the vantage point. I could see more newly arriving cousins trotting up the road from their increasingly distant parked cars. I could see the growing swarm who had already arrived setting up food and drink in the backyard. And they could see me, and we could wave back and forth at each other, but it was peaceful out here in the trenches, and if anyone tried to sneak up on me, I’d see him a long way off.
Luckily no one did except Michael, who appeared at the edge of the yard and, after glancing curiously at the trenches, began making his way across them to where I stood.
“Giant moles?” he asked.
“Close,” I said. “Sprockets. Searching for their long-lost and presumed suspiciously dead great-uncle Plantagenet.”
“Edwina's late husband, the botany professor? I thought he’d disappeared while on an orchid-collecting expedition to the Amazon.”
“That's the Sprocket party line, but apparently a dissident minority think he's buried in our basement.”
“Then why are they digging out here?” Michael asked, studying the excavations.
“Police won’t let them in the basement,” I said. “I assume they’re warming up for an attempt to tunnel in. So how's the unpacking going? You’re not overdoing it, are you? Do you need my help?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We have more than enough help. We’ll have everything unpacked, assembled, and put away long before nightfall.”
“And we’ll be six months finding our stuff,” I said. “But never mind.”
“By midday tomorrow they’ll all be having so much fun they won’t notice when we sneak away.”
“By midday tomorrow they wouldn’t even notice if the house got up and walked away,” I said. “If you don’t need me, I’m going to find Mother and put her in charge of organizing a work detail to fill in the trenches. Though Rob suggested maybe we should just dig some more and plan to put in a pool.”
“A pool,” Michael said. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and looked around at the trenches with greater interest. “That's an interesting idea.”
“Just tell the relatives what you want,” I said. “Meanwhile, after I talk to Mother, I’m going back to the zoo.”
“Is this a detective mission or an animal-welfare mission?”
“It's a saving-Meg's-sanity mission,” I said, giving him a quick kiss. “Later.”
I found Mother with Rob and Eric, down at the penguin pond. Eric was plastered against the chicken-wire fence, avidly absorbing every detail of the penguins’ behavior. Mother was standing upwind, holding a sun parasol over her head and a small linen bag of Rose Noire's potpourri to her nose. Rob was sprawled in Dad's lawn chair, sipping lemonade.
“I’m sorry, Eric,” Mother was saying. “But the penguins can’t stay forever.”
“But see how happy they are here,” Eric said.
“I can’t imagine anything would be happy living in a stench like that,” Mother said, shuddering. “Meg, isn’t there something you can do? Bathe them, perhaps?”
“Mother, they spend all day swimming,” I said. “They don’t need bathing.”
“Perhaps if the water were cleaner,” Mother said.
“It's a pond,” I said. “How are we supposed to clean it?”
“I think they like the smell,” Rob said, strolling up. “Just stay upwind and it's fine.”
“That's a matter of opinion,” Mother said, inhaling her potpourri.