The Penguin Who Knew Too Much(8)

Rights? Dad had bought the farm adjacent to our lot from Fred Shiffley, Randall's uncle. Was there some problem with the purchase?

My face must have revealed my puzzlement.

“The hunting rights,” he said. “I went over to the farm the other day to make sure we had everything straight on that, and I got the idea he was trying to avoid talking about it.”

“Was my mother there?” I asked.

“Think so.”

“That explains it, then. Mother's not all that keen on hunting.”

“Ah.” He frowned and considered this for a few moments. “How not keen is she?”

“She won’t let him use poison on mice. Only humane traps. So he could exile them across the York River. For a couple of years, every time I went home, Dad was trying another brand of humane traps.”

“He finally find one that worked?”

“No, most of them should have been marketed as mouse toys. But someone gave them a cat, and he turned out to be a natural mouser. Mother doesn’t seem to mind Boomer killing and eating mice—it's his nature.”

“I don’t suppose she feels differently about deer.”

“She shows Bambi to all my nieces and nephews every Christmas.”

Randall digested this news in silence. He didn’t utter the dreaded words “city folks!” in that familiar condescending tone, but he didn’t really have to.

“She loathes insects,” I said, trying to be helpful. “So if you could convince her that deer aren’t actually mammals but large, furry insects... “

Randall snorted at that.

“Doesn’t seem likely,” he said. “And I don’t suppose there's any chance you and your dad could convince her that we’re actually large, partly bald cats?”

I decided to assume this was a rhetorical question.

“You don’t keep after the deer and you’ll be kicking them off your doorstep in the morning,” Vern added.

I had to admit, I was torn. I didn’t share Mother's—and Rose Noire's—sentimental fondness for the deer. I’d seen too much of them since moving out into the country—the deer, that is. Though come to think of it, lately I’d also seen Mother and Rose Noire rather too often. Anyway, I’d gotten better at spotting deer droppings before I stepped in them, and was learning how to minimize the number of deer-borne ticks I had to pick off myself. I hadn’t had much time to think about landscaping our yard, so I didn’t yet have the typical gardener's grudge against the deer, but I understood the problem the local farmers had, protecting their crops from what they referred to as long-legged rats. So I wouldn’t mourn if the deer population took a steep drop—for example, if they all decided that Caerphilly was growing too civilized and migrated, en masse, out to West Virginia.

But the idea of someone shooting and killing deer practically in my backyard made me squeamish. So did the prospect of eating venison, though I had no problem wolfing down a juicy steak or a barbecued chicken leg. In some ways, I was still very much city folk after all. I decided to duck the whole issue.

“You should probably talk to Dad when Mother isn’t around,” I said. “And make sure Rose Noire's not there either. Or anyone else in the family, for that matter.”

“That include you?” Randall said, raising an eyebrow curiously.

“Especially me. I hate trying to lie to Mother, probably because she always sees through me.”

Randall nodded. And then frowned and pursed his lips as if trying to decide whether or not to say something.

“Everything else okay?” he asked.

“Just fine.”

He and Vern waited for a few moments. I saw Vern glance toward the street, where Chief Burke's car was parked. “So why's the chief here?” Randall asked finally. “Oh, Dad found a body in the basement.”

“Body?” Randall said. He sounded strangely agitated. “What kind of body?”





Chapter 5

“A human body,” I said. “Beyond that, I couldn’t say.”

“You didn’t see it?” Randall asked. He looked relieved. That was curious.

“They haven’t finished digging it up yet,” I said.

“Bet he found it while working on his penguin pond, then.”

Randall and Vern snickered.

“You’ve heard about the pond?” I asked.

“We were down at the feed store last night when he came in,” Vern said.

“Sounds like he’d already dug a hole ten times bigger than he needed,” Randall said with a chuckle. “Those preformed ponds don’t come more than two, three feet deep.”

“We could have told him that,” Vern said, shaking his head.