“And curious about what your zoo is like,” I said.
“You give her back her money,” he said to the ticket seller, in a tone that implied that she should have known better than to charge me in the first place. The girl rolled her eyes and then glued them back on her magazine while she opened her cash box and extracted my five-dollar bill.
“There's no need—” I began.
“Nonsense,” he said. “Professional courtesy—one zookeeper to another, right?”
He wheezed with laughter at this, and I chuckled politely.
“Let me show you around,” he said.
“Sid wants to see you over at the range,” the ticket seller said.
Range? I tried not to show how interesting I found the word.
“Right, right,” Hamlin said. “If he calls again, tell him I’ll drop by later. My brother, Sid,” he said to me. “You see the shooting range on your way in? Sid runs it.”
I nodded, and followed him into the zoo. Interesting. Maybe I hadn’t kept my face as deadpan as I’d thought when I heard the word “range.” Or maybe, if he was as much of an animal lover as he claimed, he was sensitive about any kind of association with the gun-toting hunters who probably did their out-of-season target practice at the range. Or just maybe, if he was one of the few people who knew how Lanahan had died, his tie to the archery range, not the gun range, made him anxious. I’d have to keep my eye on Ray.
But for now, I concentrated on seeing the sights at the Clay County Zoo. What few there were. Sheila Flugleman had been right—it wasn’t much more than a petting zoo. Hamlin had a scattering of native animals that most of us could spot in our backyards for free—half a dozen Virginia white-tailed deer, some opossums, and a mixed collection of pheasant, wild turkeys, and grouse. But most of the inhabitants were familiar barnyard creatures, housed in easily accessible pens just inside the gate. Hamlin grabbed a small container of gray-brown pellets and handed another to me, and we strolled up and down the pens dispensing handfuls to the animals. Generic zoo kibble of some kind. The stuff didn’t look particularly appetizing, but it must have tasted all right. When they saw us, the animals all crowded against the fence, sticking their heads over it if they were tall enough, and baahed, bleated, oinked, mooed, or whatevered for a taste of the stuff.
“Like I said, we don’t have the range of animals Patrick had,” Hamlin said, rattling his kibble container at a Shetland pony.
“Still interesting for city kids,” I said. I held out a handful of kibble to the pony, which snuffled it up with velvety lips and then turned to Hamlin and whickered softly.
“Yeah,” Hamlin said as he fed the pony. “Too bad there's a shortage of those in Clay County. Most of the kids here raise some kind of animals for 4-H.”
“So Patrick's zoo was probably pretty tough competition,” I said as we moved on to the next pen. The llamas who occupied it seemed just as eager for kibble as the pony.
“Not really,” Hamlin said as we fed the llamas. “We get most of our business off tourists who follow the signs to the antique mart. Mom shops, Dad brings the kids here to keep them busy. Caerphilly's too far away to be competition for that.”
“But if you had more exotic animals, you might get some people coming here primarily for the zoo,” I suggested. “And—yikes!”
The smaller of the two llamas, not contented with his handful of kibble, had grabbed my purse strap with his teeth and was trying to drag me back. Hamlin had to distract him with a heaping handful of kibble to get him to let go.
“Sorry about that,” he said when we’d gotten safely out of range. “Sneaky, those llamas. Try the goats.”
The goats were evidently too eager to be sneaky. There were about a dozen of them, in various sizes and colors, and most of them were standing on their hind legs, their front feet propped up on the fence of their pen, bleating. They reminded me oddly of a painting by Manet, the one in which a sad-faced barmaid leans on the bar with both arms, her pose reflected by the mirror behind her. The goats, with their oddly glum faces, could have been competing to see who got to pose for a new, more rural version. By contrast, the few too short to follow their example were wriggling through the forest of legs to stick their heads out between the top and second rails.
“If I did start taking on Patrick's more exotic animals on a permanent basis, we’d probably sell the range,” Hamlin said.
We? So he wasn’t just related to the owner. He was the owner. Or at least the co-owner.
He chucked a handful of kibble into the goats’ pen and watched most of them abandon the fence to fight over it.