The Penguin Who Knew Too Much(67)

“How is he?” he asked, looking down at Dad and Barchester.

“I think his leg's broken,” Dad said.

“I didn’t realize we’d been digging over there,” Barchester said.

“I think we need to mark the trenches more clearly,” Dad said. “Or we’re going to have more casualties by the end of the evening.”

“No we’re not,” I said. “That's it! Party called on account of darkness!”





Chapter 36

“Meg, be reasonable,” Dad said.

“Darkness and excessive excavation. I am being reasonable. It's too dangerous to have a bunch of people partying in the dark with all these holes and trenches.”

“But, Meg,” Mother said. “Everyone's come so far, and they only want to have a nice time. You can’t just send them home.”

“Okay,” I said. I climbed up on a picnic bench and took a deep breath.

“Party moving to Mother and Dad's farm!” I shouted. “Everyone grab the food and drink and head on over to the farm!”

To my amazement, it worked. People began packing up the dishes of food and the coolers of beverages and swarming, lemminglike, out to the parked cars.

“What a splendid idea!” Dad exclaimed. “I’m heading over to the hospital right now with poor Barchester, but I’ll get over to the farm as soon as I can.”

He trotted off beside the stretcher, looking cheerful, as he always did when someone was obliging enough to break a limb, slice an artery, or provide some other reasonably engrossing medical drama. Mother looked less than thrilled.

“Don’t worry,” I said to her. “If it's still going on when you’re ready for bed, you and Dad are welcome to come back here. You can have your pick of the guest rooms.”

“I suppose,” she said.

“And didn’t you say you had lots of odd jobs that needed doing around the farmhouse?” I asked. “While you’ve got everyone there, you can start recruiting people to do them.”

“Now that's a thought,” Mother said. She turned and walked toward the back door. On her way to the front yard to catch a ride, I hoped. But just as she was reaching for the doorknob, something caught her eye. She turned and stood on the back porch watching as Sheila Flugleman scuttled by with another bucket full of raw material.

“Meg,” Mother said, in what the family called her grand duchess tone of voice. “Who is that...person?”

Oops. “Person” was bad. “Lady” would have meant that she was impressed and wanted a suitably formal introduction. “Woman” would have been neutral. “Person,” with that slight pause, was as close as Mother ever came to using a four-letter word.

“Sheila D. Flugleman,” I said. “Her family owns the Farm and Garden Emporium.”

“Ah, the feed store,” Mother said, nodding. Apparently she was not in a mood to cut Sheila any slack.

“What's she done?” I asked.

“She's been circulating through the crowd passing out flyers,” Mother said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a sheet of paper, holding it by one corner as if it were made of Zooper-Poop! “And . . . collecting at the same time.”

“Well, someone has to clean up after the animals.”

“Not the sort of thing I expect to see at my parties. And not the sort of thing you want at yours, either, I should think,” she added hastily when she remembered that she wasn’t in her own garden.

“You know how hard small business owners have to work to get the word out,” I said. Mother frowned at this. After years of threatening, she was finally launching her own small decorating business. Launching it in both Yorktown and Caerphilly, in all probability. Surely she wouldn’t condemn Sheila Flugleman for what she herself might soon be forced to do?

“Hmph,” she said, pulling something else out of her purse. “If this is true, I hardly think she needs to waste her time bothering my—our guests.”

She handed me a copy of that week's Caerphilly Clarion, folded open to an article about Sheila Flugleman, complete with a smiling picture of her holding a bag of ZooperPoop! next to her ear.

“It's the local rag, and her family's store is probably a big advertiser,” I said.

“Yes, but according to that, she's going to be featured on Martha Stewart's show.”

I winced. Mother had a love-hate relationship with Martha Stewart—not that they’d ever met. Mother admired Martha for doing things “properly”—which as far as I could see meant by hand in as old-fashioned, labor-intensive, nitpicking a manner as possible. But I could tell sometimes that she couldn’t quite understand how Martha had gotten to be such a celebrity simply by doing things properly, when other people of equal taste and fastidiousness languished in obscurity.