I think about it a minute, then nod. “Unless he’s dumber than we think he is.”
She smirks. “That would be tough.”
Casey pulls up a chair across the table from me and says, “So catch me up—what’s going on?”
Cricket jumps in with, “Well, the good news is that Marvin is doing much better. They did surgery on him and took out all the snake shot—”
“Snake shot?” I ask. “What’s that?”
“It’s used for shooting snakes,” Cricket says. Then she adds, “Robin told me that the pellets are smaller than birdshot and that hunters will sometimes keep a handgun loaded with snake shot because snakes are easy to miss with regular bullets.”
“So you’d carry both?” I ask. “Like a rifle with bullets and a pistol loaded with snake shot?”
She shrugs. “Or maybe it was two different people.” Then, like it’s no big deal that her little throwaway comment might chuck any half-baked theory of mine right out the window, she goes on, saying, “But anyway, they got all the shot out and repaired the damage, and Robin says he’s doing great.” Her face clouds over a little. “But even after he’s better, they won’t release him until they find a mentor bird for him to live with.”
“Is that like a foster parent?” Casey asks.
Cricket says, “Yes. Exactly.”
I’m still stuck on the gun thing, though, so I ask, “When you shoot off snake shot, does it make a big noise?”
Cricket shrugs, but Gary says, “It’s not loud like a rifle. It’s more a big pop.”
“So you wouldn’t hear it up the canyon?”
He shakes his head. “No way.”
Everyone’s quiet a second, then Casey asks, “So where are we on Marvin’s mom? Is it possible she’s still alive?”
So we bring him up to speed on the information we’ve dug up, and when we’re all done talking, he says, “Look. If some guy just wanted the condor dead, he’d kill it and leave it. Or bury it, so no one would know what happened to it. But if he wanted it for a trophy, he’d have to preserve it.”
Cricket nods. “Like they do with the animals at the Natural History Museum.”
“That’s called taxidermy,” Gary says.
I sit back a little. “That Janey girl works there, right?” Cricket nods again.
“And it said on the Web site that Quinn was their archive manager or something, right?”
“It’s not a paying job,” Cricket says. “Mostly he set up the condor display.”
“But wait—if someone wanted a stuffed condor, they could just break in and steal it, right? They wouldn’t have to go through all the trouble of going out in the woods and shooting one.”
Cricket shakes her head. “That would not be easy, Sammy. That would actually be really hard.”
Then Casey adds, “And they might not know there was one at the museum.”
“Okay. So if someone didn’t know, they’d need to go to a taxidermy . . . ologist? Or could you do that yourself?”
Gary laughs. “It’s a taxidermist, and there’s no way you could do it yourself. It takes a lot of experience to make it look right.”
Cricket lets out a puffy-cheeked breath. “Why are we even going down this road?” She looks at me. “I know you’re good at figuring stuff out, but this all seems so far-fetched. The developer theory makes a lot more sense to me.”
I eye her. “I’d agree with you, but who at Luxton Enterprises knows Vargus Mayfield?”
She stares at me a second, then holds the sides of her head like she’s trying to keep it from exploding. “This is so confusing!”
I chuckle and say, “Exactly, but I think that’s because we don’t have enough information. Maybe it would help to find out about taxidermists. Like, who around here does that? I’ve never seen a taxidermy shop, have you?”
Casey looks through the phone book but finally says, “There’s nothing listed.”
So Gary tells him, “Look up the Natural History Museum,” then he hands me the phone. “They would know.”
So Casey tells me the number, I dial, and a lady answers, “Natural History Museum, Janey speaking.”
All of a sudden my heart is hammering in my chest. But I take a deep breath and try to disguise my voice by keeping it low and calm. “Yes, I’m wondering who you use as a taxidermist. They do such an amazing job. . . .”
“That’s a man named Lester Blunt. He’s located in Santa Martina.”
“Could I get his number? And his address?”
“Hang on, I’ve got it right here.”
A minute later I’m off the phone with the digits on one Lester Blunt, taxidermist. “He’s across town on Blosser Road.”
“What are you going to say to him?” Cricket asks, and her voice is kinda breathy. Like she can’t believe I’m abusing her phone line this way.
“Actually, I don’t think this is something we should do over the phone.” I look around at the others. “Anyone up for a little snoop around?”
Gary breaks into a smile. “I’m game.”
Cricket looks worried. “What if he comes at us with big needles full of formaldehyde? What if he—”
I laugh. “It can’t be any more dangerous than hiking through a forest with ticks and scorpions and rattlesnakes and killer trees. It’s just one guy.” I give her a wicked grin. “With big needles. And formaldehyde. And rusty saws. And a foaming mouth. And—”
“Stop!” Cricket squeals.
Casey smirks as he scoots back from the table. “No wonder my sister doesn’t stand a chance around you.”
And with that we’re all off to the taxidermist.
TWENTY
Gary’s truck took a few tries to fire up, and when it did, it made a tough rumbling sound that was loud.
“Sorry!” he said over his shoulder to Casey and me. “Exhaust manifold leak. They want three hundred and fifty bucks to fix it!”
Casey and I were crammed in the small back compartment, sitting in little fold-down jump seats that faced each other. It felt like we were on some sort of military mission as we thundered down the road.
After a minute, Casey leaned forward to talk to me, and I did the same so I could hear him over the racket.
“I’ve been trying to figure out why you hung up on me.”
I’d kinda shoved that little incident out of my mind, but now there I was, trapped in the back of a bomber on wheels having to face him. Face it.
I looked away and mumbled, “Sorry.”
“But there’s got to be a reason you freaked out. I don’t get what the big deal is.”
I pulled a face. “Can we just forget about it?”
He leaned a little closer. “It’s like you and this condor thing—I just want to figure it out.”
My eyes got wide as it hit me that this was Cosmic Payback Phase Two.
Why was this happening?
How many phases were there going to be?
Was being around me really this much torture?
Casey laughed. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
I shook my head a little. “It’s like everything I do to other people is coming back around to me!”
He laughed again. “That’s called karma.”
“I must have terrible karma!”
“No, you don’t. I think you’re just paranoid about something you don’t need to be paranoid about.”
“Like . . . ?”
His mouth scrunched to one side, then the other. His eyebrow went up, then down, and finally he said, “Like the fact that the phone number I have for you is not the same as the phone number my dad has for your mom.”
“He has her phone number?”
Casey nodded. “And even if it’s her cell, it’s a different area code.”
I slumped back against the hard plastic of my little jump seat. “What an airhead she is! What a complete moron!”
“But what’s the big deal? So you live with . . . your dad? Your grandparents? Your aunt? So what? Why all t
he secrecy?”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and for the first time since I moved into the Senior Highrise, I wondered exactly why I was so uptight about it. Why wasn’t I just, you know, casually secretive? Why was I always on high alert? Why didn’t I just tell people I lived with Grams? I didn’t have to say where, just that I lived with her. It’s not like it’s a crime to live with your grandmother. Who cares?
Maybe it’s because when this all started, I was in elementary school and Grams was super-worried that I would spill the beans to someone who shouldn’t know. But now I was going into the eighth grade—I wasn’t a little kid anymore! Even if I got busted, I could just leave the apartment. I was old enough to live with Holly or Marissa or even Hudson for a while. Grams probably wouldn’t be evicted. Everything would be fine!
All of a sudden I felt suffocated by the huge tangled web of lies. I wanted to bust out. To break free. To tell Casey everything!
So I leaned forward, looked him right in the eye, and said, “I live with my grandmother in that seniors building on Broadway. Kids are not supposed to even be in the building, let alone live there. And since the apartments are government-subsidized for low-income seniors and there’s a waiting list to get in, my grams will get evicted if people find out. And since she can’t exactly afford to live anywhere else, it’s a big deal that I don’t blow it. I use the fire escape to sneak in and out of the apartment without being seen. I sleep on the couch, and everything I own fits in my grams’ bottom dresser drawer. It’s not easy, but my grandmother is great and my mom’s a ditz, so I’d rather live this way than move to Hollywood.” I took a deep breath and said, “There. Now you know.”
He let out a low, kind of airy whistle. “Now that makes total sense.”
“And besides you, only Marissa, Dot, and Holly know.” “I promise—I swear—I won’t tell a soul.”
I nodded. “Thanks.” Then I added, “Your dad’s the one I’m worried about.”
“I’ll make sure it’s cool.” Then he asked, “So where’s your dad in all this?”
I rolled my eyes. “Who knows? For some reason my mom is embarrassed by him. I don’t even know who he is.” His eyebrows went up. “She won’t tell you?”
I shook my head. “And believe me, I’ve asked.”
He frowned. “I wouldn’t put up with that.”
“I know. And I am planning to figure it out. Eventually. Right now I’m just taking things one little crisis at a time.”
We just sat there for a minute, surrounded by the thunder of Gary’s truck. Then Casey leaned forward again and said, “Don’t stress. Your secret’s safe with me.”
I nodded, and deep down inside I believed that it was.
The address on Blosser Road turned out to be an old clapboard house set back about fifty feet from the street. A short, dilapidated picket fence marked off the property from farm fields on the right and a big electrical supply stockyard on the left. It was like the house had been uprooted from a West Side neighborhood and wedged there as a buffer between industry and agriculture.
Gary pulled into the dirt driveway and cut the motor. And for a minute we all sort of looked at the house, wondering what it was doing there. Then we piled out and stood around wondering what we were doing there.
“So?” Gary asked me. “What’s the plan?”
I shrugged and started for the front door. “See what we see?”
“But . . . are we looking for a condor?” Cricket asked. “Are we splitting into teams? Do we have some sort of escape strategy?”
I grinned. “Sorry, troops. We’re just wingin’ it.”
We went up the creaky steps, rang the bell, and then knocked, but no one answered.
I checked inside the little flip-up mailbox that was mounted near the front door.
Empty.
The curtains were open, so we shielded the light from our eyes and looked inside. There was one overstuffed chair in front of a television and one chair by a table in the kitchen, but the whole rest of the house was taken up by workbenches that were loaded with junk. Newspapers, cardboard boxes, big spools of string, scissors and hammers and knives, metal tubs in a bunch of different sizes, cans of turpentine, jugs of rubbing alcohol and ammonia . . .
There were also hooks and bars with deflated animal heads hanging upside down from the ceiling. A deer. A lynx. A coyote. A ram. The eyes were missing in all of them. They were like the creepiest Halloween masks ever.
“May I help you?”
We all jumped about ten feet in the air, then turned and saw a man with slicked-back hair. He was wearing a dirty white apron and had his left hand inside a mallard duck. It looked like he was ready to put on a puppet show, but the duck’s head was all dangly, and it didn’t have eyes.
The man himself was pretty normal-looking, except for his eyes. One went to the left, one went to the right. It seemed like he was looking behind the house and out to the street at the same time. He cleared his throat. “I said, may I help you?”
Cricket, Casey, and Gary all turned to me.
“Uh, yeah. Hi. Are you Lester Blunt?”
“That I am.”
“The Natural History Museum told us—”
“Oh, you’re here to pick up the bird?” We all sorta looked at each other and nodded, which I guess was good enough for him. He beat his dead ducky puppet with his free hand, sending up a dusty white cloud. “Well, come on back.”
We followed him around to the back of the house. “So I guess you’ve been doing this a long time, huh?” I asked, catching up to him.
He looked at me.
I think.
“My whole life,” he said. “Passed down from my dad. And his dad before him.” He beat the duck some more, making a white dust cloud around his hand. “Takes years to master the art, which is why I’m the only taximan left in the area. Could take shortcuts, but I believe in a quality job. I don’t even buy them prefab bodies. I can always spot a prefab body. They’re unnatural lookin’. I make mine from scratch.”
“Prefab bodies? What happens to their real bodies?”
“We don’t embalm them, if that’s what you thought. We just save the skins, then build a body to stretch them over.”
“Really? I didn’t know that. . . .”
“Mm-hmm.”
“So there’s no bones or eyeballs or guts?”
He laughed. “Nah. Just skins.”
“And feathers?”
“Oh, yeah. Nothing fake about the feathers.”
We were at the back steps now. There was a giant freezer purring away off to the side. It had a heavy chain padlocked around it.
“So, uh, what happens to the bodies?”
“Well, for the trophy heads, the hunters usually keep the meat.” He opened the back screen door. “For the rest?” He grinned. “It’s one of the perks of the job.”
“So that duck you’ve got there . . . ?”
He shrugged. “If it’s good meat, why waste it?”
We followed him inside, zigzagging through small rooms with decaying cardboard boxes and dusty animal heads everywhere. It smelled like mothballs and ammonia and turpentine and . . . dust. I looked around for oversized black feathers but didn’t see a thing.
“What’s the biggest bird you’ve ever done?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation going.
“Oh, that con—” He stopped, then peered at me with his right eye before turning it on Gary. “You’re not the one that called about doing a condor, are you? Because if you are, I told you—you have to have legal papers. I don’t do black market.”
“Someone called about doing a condor?” I asked. This was not good. “When?”
“Yesterday.” His eye focused back on me. “So it wasn’t you people?”
“No!” Gary said. “We’re just here to, uh, to deliver that bird to the museum.”
He gave a little snort and shook his head. “Of course. I’m sorry.” Then he muttered to himself, “You’re losing touch, Lester. What
would kids want with a condor?”
He put down the duck puppet and handed Gary a tiny sandpiper that was mounted on a driftwood base. “Here she is. Beaut, isn’t she?”
Gary turned it from side to side, showing it to the rest of us.
“It looks so real,” Cricket said.
“Thanks, miss.”
Now, for a guy who skinned and stuffed animals, who lived in a no-man’s-land between farm fields and spools of electrical wire and had eyes that shot off like billiard balls on a split, I thought Lester Blunt was pretty nice. Pretty normal.
But the minute we’re piled back into Gary’s truck, Cricket turns to face me from the front seat and says, “That’s why you would wear sunglasses and a cowboy hat!”
I look at her. “Huh?”
“To cover those eyes!” She shivers. “Ooooh. He is so freaky!”
“He seemed pretty normal to me. . . .”
They all three turn to stare at me. “Normal?”
I shrug. “Well, you know—in a freaky sort of taxidermy way . . .”
They all snigger and then Casey says, “I think a condor could fit in that freezer, easy.”
“And did you see how it was locked?” Cricket whispers. “It’s chained up like a vault!”
I shake my head. “But somebody did call about a condor yesterday. He wouldn’t admit that if he actually had one.”
Gary says, “Maybe he was just trying to throw us off?” He fires up the truck and grinds it into reverse. “So where to?” He eyes the sandpiper and says, “I take it I’m on the hook to deliver that wannabe condor to the museum?”
I pull a face. “Do you mind?”
“No problem,” he says, backing into the street. And the funny thing is, from the grin on his face I can tell that he’s having fun.
More fun than he’s had in a long, long time.
TWENTY-ONE
The Natural History Museum charges five bucks for parking, if you can believe that. And they charge seven more to get inside. And I don’t care how much they try to describe it as something interesting—a “still-life zoo,” “nature’s landscape,” a “tour of habitats”—the fact is, it’s still seven bucks to see a bunch of stuffed dead stuff.