“Well, I hope they’ve got an Internet café at Baboons ‘R’ Us, because we need her now! What’s she doing there for so long, anyway? How hard can it be to mail a baboon to Long Island?”
They heard the squeak of a heavy door and Savannah whispered urgently, “Hide!”
Griffin locked himself into a stall and stood up on the toilet seat to keep his shoes out of view.
Savannah commenced washing her hands. “Hi, Monica.”
“Guess what was on the news this morning!” The newcomer was agog. “Remember that zoo boat from the field trip? Somebody broke in last night and stole all the animals!”
Griffin very nearly fell into the toilet.
“Wow,” Savannah managed faintly. “That’s unbelievable.”
“Totally!” Monica agreed. “The crooks loaded all the animals onto a lifeboat and took them to Connecticut! You know what beats me? Why they’d even bother. That was the lousiest zoo in the world.”
As soon as Monica was gone, Griffin emerged, looking even paler than before.
“You see, Griffin?” Savannah’s agitation was rising. “We’re in trouble — and the one person who can save us is out of the country!”
“They think we went to Connecticut,” Griffin reflected hopefully.
“They won’t think it for long if all the missing animals turn up in Cedarville,” Savannah persisted. “You’ve got to help me!”
“You asked for help last time,” he reminded her. “And I came up with a great plan to get your monkey back. Everything would have been fine if we’d just stuck to that. But no. One animal wasn’t enough. We had to take forty!”
Savannah was stubborn. “We did the right thing. Those animals are better off in my shed than under Mr. Nasty’s thumb.”
“For two weeks?” Griffin challenged.
Even Savannah had no answer for that. “No, not for two weeks. It wouldn’t be safe, it wouldn’t be sanitary, and I definitely couldn’t keep it a secret from my parents. Especially not if my dad ever wants to cut the grass.”
Griffin ran nervous fingers through his unruly hair. “Okay, let me think.”
His mind raced. A big operation always seemed impossible until you broke it down into its many parts. Taken one by one, if all those tiny parts were possible, then the whole plan had to be possible, too.
Maybe that was the approach he needed here. He could never wrap his mind around hiding forty animals. But could they hide one animal — and then do it thirty-nine more times?
Aloud, he said, “Logan’s house has a leaky basement. That sounds like a pretty good place for a beaver to hang out for a couple of weeks….”
19
OPERATION HOUSEGUEST
The GUEST LIST:
> Kellerman Underground Wetlands — beaver, frogs, salamanders, turtles
> Dukakis Split-Level Prairie — hen, piglet, prairie dog
> Benson Temperate Forest — garter snakes, chipmunks, squirrels
> Drysdale Custom Habitat — capuchin monkey, rabbits, white rats, duck, loon
> Slovak Suburban Desert — chuckwalla, ferret
> Bing Rodent House — hamsters, gerbils, mice, meerkat
“Meerkats are not rodents,” Savannah lectured at the emergency meeting. “They’re actually related to the mongoose family.”
“Yeah, well, now we know who to call if there’s a cobra infestation,” Ben lamented. “I can’t believe there’s another operation. It isn’t even a whole day since the last operation. I went from zoobreaker to zookeeper in just a few hours.”
The team was gathered in Savannah’s yard after school that day for the beginning of Operation Houseguest. Melissa had the wagon she used to deliver the weekly Pennysaver. This would serve as transport to distribute the fugitive animals to their temporary safe houses. Luckily, it had been raining off and on all day, so no one in Cedarville would question Melissa’s use of the cart’s waterproof covering.
“It’s only for a couple of weeks,” Griffin told the grumbling team. “It’ll fly by.”
“Yeah, like the Cretaceous period,” Ben muttered.
“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Savannah admitted, “but look at the results of what we’ve done already.” She indicated her huge dog, Luthor, who was carrying Cleopatra on the back of his neck again. If a pair of animals ever looked drenched in joy and contentment, it was those two.
Ben was nervous. “Aren’t you afraid that your folks will get suspicious about Cleopatra turning up today of all days?”
Savannah shook her head. “It makes perfect sense. Cleo got loose in the breakout and made her way home. Most animals have an excellent homing instinct.”
Pitch ran onto the scene. “Sorry I’m late, you guys. I was glued to the TV. All Aboard Animals made CNN.”
“But they still think the crooks went to Connecticut, right?” Griffin asked breathlessly.
She nodded. “That’s the good news. The bad news is the cops have figured out the zoobreak was done by kids.”
“How could they know that?” Savannah demanded.
“Klaus told them,” Pitch replied. “They had to free him from the ceiling with the Jaws of Life, that thing they use to cut people out of car wrecks. They’ve even got a prime suspect — Ferris Atwater, Jr.”
Logan was disgusted. “Wouldn’t you know it! I’ve spent my whole life trying to get on TV, and now I am, but nobody knows it’s me! How can I put something like this in a press packet?”
“Maybe they’ll print up wanted posters,” Ben suggested sarcastically.
“Exactly how much trouble are we in?” asked Melissa, the practical one.
“Absolutely none,” Griffin assured her, “so long as we don’t get caught.”
“And if we do?” asked Logan.
“Use your imagination,” Pitch suggested sourly. “The cattle rustlers stole animals, too, and they got strung up from the nearest tree.”
There was a sober silence as this sunk in. Savannah ended it by opening the door of the shed with a metallic click.
A furry blur jumped from the webbing of a lacrosse stick. It struck Ben full in the chest and clung there, claws gripping the fabric of his sweatshirt.
“Get it off! Get it off!”
“It’s just the ferret,” Savannah soothed. “Look — he likes you.”
“No, he doesn’t! He’s clawing me to death!”
“Ferrets are carnivores,” Savannah lectured. “If he wanted to claw you or bite you, he’d at least break the skin. In a high-stress situation, with all these people around, a very young juvenile felt comfortable coming to you. That’s genuine affection and trust.”
“Besides,” Griffin added, consulting the Operation Houseguest plan, “he’s on your list. Him and — let’s see — the chuckwalla.”
Ben was genuinely dismayed. “What’s a chuckwalla?”
“A small desert lizard,” Savannah explained. “You have the only house with a sauna, so it has to go to you. They do best in hot, dry air.”
She reached into the shed, pulled out a fluorescent yellow pouch that had once held signal flares from the life raft, and unzipped it slightly. “Rise and shine, you guys.” To the others, she reported, “The mice are hungry.”
Griffin checked the paper. “They’re coming home with me. What do they eat?”
“Rodent chow,” Savannah replied, re-zipping the pack and placing it in Melissa’s cart. “In block or pellet form. Your choice.”
“They’re getting cheese,” Griffin decided. “If it works on Tom and Jerry, it’ll work in my room.”
“And plenty of water,” Savannah added. “That goes for all the animals. But don’t feed them until you place them in their new surroundings. Getting food will make them feel at home so they’ll be less likely to try to run away.”
The first stop was Logan’s house. They lowered the reptile suitcase, minus the garter snakes, in through a basement window, and then dropped the beaver in loose. Everyone heard the splashes.
“H
ow much water do you have down there?” Griffin asked in amazement.
Logan shrugged. “Depends on how rainy it’s been. Lucky for us we did the zoobreak before they installed our new sump pump.”
“Aren’t you worried that your mom is going to go down there?” Pitch wondered.
“Not a chance,” Logan scoffed. “There are spiders the size of Mini Coopers in that basement. She’s got towels stuffed under the door to make sure they can’t come up into the house.”
“Spiders — great,” Savannah enthused. “That’ll take care of the food needs of the frogs and salamanders.”
“Don’t worry,” Logan promised. “This is the safest place in town.” And he went into the house to see about making his new boarders comfortable.
Melissa’s parents weren’t home, so it was simple enough to carry the hen, piglet, and prairie dog up to her bedroom closet. Pitch, who had a full house with two older siblings, had to climb the drainpipe to smuggle the squirrels, chipmunks, and garter snakes inside. Ben kept the ferret in his shirt and the chuckwalla in his jacket pocket and walked straight past his parents at the kitchen counter.
The Drysdale house was so filled with animals anyway that no one was going to notice the three extra rabbits in Savannah’s warren, or the two white rats in one of the many pet carriers stacked in the garage. The duck and the loon she finessed into the waterfowl pond in the public park next door.
Griffin’s house was the last stop. As he established the four mice, three hamsters, and three gerbils in the sturdy plastic chest of drawers that contained his lifetime supply of Lego, the meerkat peered down at him from its perch on the dresser.
“Just sit tight,” he told it.
Sitting tight turned out to be one of its strengths. It didn’t budge, following Griffin’s every move with dark-rimmed eyes.
As he closed the rodents into their hiding place, promising to return with dinner, he felt a wave of emotion that was almost as strong as his fatigue. Operation Houseguest had sapped his very last ounce of strength. He had nothing left to give to this plan.
But was it a real plan? It had been hatched in two seconds in the girls’ bathroom at school. There had been no time to think it through, refine it, or pay attention to the details.
Yes, they had gotten the animals safely hidden before anyone noticed the menagerie in the Drysdales’ shed. But there were so many things that could go wrong. It would only take one escaped meerkat, or prairie dog, or chuckwalla for the authorities to stop looking in Connecticut and start looking here. He remembered from the baseball card heist that cops were very good at their jobs. It would be impossible to cover the tracks of forty animals if the police were nosing around. And then who knew how much trouble they’d be in? Mr. Nasty didn’t look like the forgiving type. And as for Klaus …
He wished he could feel more in control. Like he was running the plan instead of the other way around.
Get a grip!
Well, the first way to do that was to find a good spot for the meerkat.
Out the window, the sun glinted off the glass panes of his mother’s small backyard greenhouse. It was a makeshift affair — a rectangular foundation of cinder blocks for the walls, with an old window resting on top. But it was warm, roomy, subtropical — and best of all, Mom only used it in March to get a head start on her flower garden. This place had meerkat written all over it.
Mom was out, and Dad was in the garage, working on the Rollo-Bushel. So Griffin hustled the little animal out to the yard and stuffed him under the glass of the greenhouse. It was twenty degrees warmer in there, and the meerkat perked up immediately.
Savannah had told him all about the meerkat diet, but he’d forgotten every word of it. So he brought a bowl of water and a handful of Ritz crackers.
The meerkat chowed down happily, and Griffin, encouraged, had a couple of crackers himself.
Maybe a plan didn’t have to be flawless to have a chance of working.
20
Ben was sleeping so deeply, so soundly, that when the nip came, it was like being shot from a cannon through six levels of dreamscape into harsh reality.
“Ow! Cut it out, Mom!”
It wasn’t Mom. When his eyes focused, he was staring into the snout of a huge, ravening beast with a slavering mouth full of jagged, razor-sharp teeth. At the last second, he managed to swallow the cry of terror that surely would have brought his parents — and everybody within a three-block radius — running.
It was the ferret, poised on his chest, propping itself up on two tiny front paws that pushed against Ben’s chin. The feral eyes peered anxiously down at him.
Shocked, Ben jumped up, sending the animal flying. It landed in mid-scurry and disappeared under the bed.
There was a knock at the door and Mr. Slovak poked his head inside. “Time to get up for school,” he called.
“Thanks, Dad,” Ben replied, then added, “You don’t have to wake me anymore. I’ll use my clock radio from now on.”
“Sure, Ben. I’m glad to see you taking responsibility. This kind of independence is really going to help you at the academy.”
His father’s comment brought him up short. The academy. It was a reminder that there were worse things than having a ferret under your bed.
He dressed quickly and ran down to breakfast, careful to close his bedroom door behind him. En route to the kitchen, he made a detour to the basement, where the sauna was located next to the Jacuzzi. The chuckwalla looked all right, he supposed, stretched out on the bench close to the coals. How could you tell if a lizard wasn’t doing well? Would it get pale? What color is pale when you’re already gray?
And what was that on the bench? BBs?
He stared in horror. Poop! It pooped in our sauna!
He picked up the droppings with a tissue and flushed them, trying to keep his mind in neutral. Then he turned on the heat, twisting the timer all the way to the maximum.
“You’ve got thirty minutes of desert,” he whispered. “After that, you’ve got to chill out till I get home from school.”
At breakfast, he was positive his parents would be able to read the guilt on his face. But they seemed not to notice how stressed he was. He hoped neither of them was looking forward to a nice relaxing sauna in the next two weeks.
Back in his room, he found the ferret up on the bed again. From his pocket he produced a napkin-wrapped sausage patty smuggled off the breakfast table.
Ferrets are carnivores, Savannah had said. She was right. The patty was devoured eagerly.
“Now we just have to find someplace to put you while I’m at school,” Ben mused aloud. He was pleasantly surprised that the creature allowed itself to be picked up. “Good ferret,” he approved.
He opened his sock drawer and dropped his roommate inside. But before he could shut it again, the ferret sprang back onto his arm. He tried it three more times with the identical result. On the third effort, the animal crawled down his collar and buried itself under his shirt.
“Ben —” came a call from the front hall. “You’re going to be late.”
He looked down his shirt to see the black eyes staring stubbornly up at him.
“All right, Ferret Face, looks like you’re coming with me.”
Griffin met Ben at the halfway point of their walk to school. The two friends were exhaustion twins. Each could see his own dark circles around the other’s eyes.
“How’s it going?” Griffin asked, even though he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.
Ben bristled. “I’ve got a chuckwalla in my sauna and a ferret in my shirt. How do you think it’s going?”
“In your shirt? You mean now?” He scrutinized Ben’s upper body. “That wasn’t part of the plan! What if a teacher sees him?”
“He wouldn’t let me leave without him,” Ben explained. “Maybe Savannah’s right. He likes me.”
“Just be careful,” Griffin urged. “We’ve already had one close call. Pitch’s mom almost found the garter snakes in the
French-press coffeemaker.”
Ben shook his head miserably. “I wish there was some way we could click our heels together, blink three times, and fast forward two weeks to when the zoo lady will be here to take these lousy animals off our hands.”
At school, the buzz of conversation was all about the mass breakout at the floating zoo. Mr. Nastase had already appeared on several local morning shows, pretending to care about the safety of his former exhibits.
Savannah was outraged. “Can you believe that criminal? He was crying on the interviewer! Sobbing! That jerk never looked away from his cash box long enough to notice his animals until they were gone!”
“You can’t blame people for being interested,” Pitch put in. “Every science and biology class took a field trip to Rutherford Point for that exhibit. That’s half the school. And the fact that the suspects are kids, too, only makes it juicier. The way people talk about Ferris Atwater, Jr., he’s like a folk hero — a cross between Robin Hood and Doctor Dolittle.”
“I hate him,” Logan said bitterly. “How come he gets to be famous, and I get cut out of a stupid orange juice commercial?”
“You can’t hate him,” Melissa pointed out. “He’s you.”
“Never mind Ferris Atwater, Jr.,” Savannah interrupted. “How are the animals doing? How’s the beaver?”
“It’s not as much of a no-brainer as I thought it was going to be,” Logan admitted. “Every time I go down to feed the turtles, he slaps the water with his tail. It’s scaring the salamanders.”
“At least a beaver doesn’t cluck,” put in Melissa, hostess to the chicken.
“Or scurry,” added Pitch, who was in charge of the squirrel and chipmunk contingent.
Ben was not to be outdone. “You’ve got troubles with your animals. Big deal. I have a relationship with mine.” He flipped up his shirt and gave everyone a quick peek at Ferret Face, clinging to the cotton weave. “Lucky me.”
Melissa shook her curtain of hair aside and peered at them earnestly. “I don’t want to make things worse, but my dad was talking about an incident that was reported to the town last night. Some lady’s Chihuahua got ambushed from the air and barely escaped in one piece. Based on the description, they’re pretty sure the attacker was an owl.”