by Stuart Gibbs
Hondo shrieked in fear. “She ate his hand!”
“She didn’t,” I told him. I’d actually been startled by Rhonda’s sudden movement—it’s always disconcerting to find your hand in a rhino’s mouth—but I did my best to remain calm so Hondo wouldn’t freak out. “Look. I’m okay.” I held up my hand to show him. It was slimed with rhino drool, but it was still there.
The pink blob was gone, though. Rhonda had eaten my evidence.
“Is there something I can dry my hand on?” I asked.
“Come anywhere near my dress with that slobber and I’ll kill you,” Summer warned.
“I always use my shirt,” Athmani said.
There didn’t seem to be any other option. While I was wiping my hand clean, Vicky Benbow entered the rhino house. Vicky was one of the evening keepers, responsible for making sure all the animals were housed and fed for the night. While she was great with the animals, she tended to be reserved and quiet around humans. She seemed startled to find so many people in the rhino house. “Um,” she said, sounding embarrassed, “I need to get Rhonda settled for the night.”
“I guess we should clear out of here, then,” Athmani said graciously. He looked to Summer and me. “Teddy, if you’d like, I can give you a ride home. And then take you back to your father, Summer.”
“That’d be great,” Summer said.
On a warm summer night, I usually would have opted to walk home through the zoo myself, but the temperature had plummeted with the darkness. “Sure,” I said.
We all headed for the door, except Chief Hoenekker, who hung back with Vicky. “I’d like to discuss the new rhino security protocols with you,” he told her.
Vicky looked like this was pretty much the last thing in the world she wanted to do, but she nodded acceptance. “Okay. I guess.”
I waved good-bye to them as we left the building. Vicky gave a meek little wave back. Hoenekker ignored me completely. “I don’t expect we’ll have any more trouble with this hunter,” I heard him tell her. “But just in case, I’m going to have two armed guards patrolling the park tonight.”
Athmani’s safari rover was parked close to the rhino house. Hondo pointed both Summer and me to the backseat, then climbed into the front, where he could keep a better eye out for threats. Once we were buckled in, Athmani slowly drove through the Asian Plains. It was now dark, and he didn’t want to run over any antelope.
As we jounced along, I asked Athmani, “Do you have any idea why the bad guy shot at Rhonda?”
Athmani met my gaze in the rearview mirror. “Based on my experience in Africa, I’d say they were after her horn. Right now Rhonda’s would be worth around half a million dollars on the black market.”
“Half a million?” Summer gasped, stunned. “Holy cow.”
“But Rhonda was locked inside her house,” I pointed out. “So the hunter wouldn’t be able to get her horn.”
“Unless whoever shot at her knew the entry code,” Summer suggested. “We already know they could get into FunJungle. So why not the rhino house, too?”
“Then why didn’t they enter the house to shoot Rhonda?” I asked. “Why shoot from way over by the monorail station instead of doing it from close by?”
“Or why’d they go after Rhonda at all?” Summer added thoughtfully. “Why not one of the other rhinos that wasn’t locked up last night?”
Athmani sighed. “Those are good questions,” he admitted. “I don’t know the answers.”
I looked from the monorail station to Rhonda’s house. The distance between them was almost the length of a football field. The shot wouldn’t have been easy.
“Do you think Hoenekker’s right?” I asked Athmani. “That we won’t have any more trouble from the hunter?”
“No,” Athmani replied. “I don’t think Hoenekker believes that himself. If someone took a shot at Rhonda once, there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t do it again. And you’re right about our other rhinos. They need to be protected too. I’ve arranged for all of them to be housed indoors this evening. . . .”
“Where?” Summer asked.
“There are several other facilities like Rhonda’s house in SafariLand. The other rhinos are all locked up safely inside them.”
“But the hunter shot at Rhonda while she was inside last night,” I pointed out.
“And they missed.” Athmani pulled up to the gate for vehicles to leave SafariLand. A sensor triggered it to open automatically. “Unfortunately, we don’t have any better place to put the rhinos. The best I can say is, it’d be a very difficult shot to hit them through one of the windows—as we saw last night. They’re certainly much safer indoors than outside. And the extra guards will hopefully frighten off our poacher.”
There was a large space to pull into beyond the auto gate with another gate on the other side. This was to ensure that, should one of the animals slip through the first gate along with the rover, it wouldn’t be able to get past the second gate and escape into the park.
Athmani pulled into the space and waited for the first gate to close behind us.
“So all the rhinos now have as many guards as Rhonda?” Summer asked.
“Er . . . no,” Athmani admitted. “FunJungle doesn’t have the staff to handle that. Your father is trying to hire more men, but it’s not easy to find people we trust with weapons around the animals on short notice.”
The first gate clicked shut and a green light came on ahead of us to tell us it was safe to activate the second. Athmani pulled forward, and that gate began to open.
I asked, “You mean, you’re worried the guards themselves might go after the animals?”
“If they’re not carefully selected,” Athmani said. “Though I believe we can trust the men we have here tonight.”
The second gate opened fully, allowing us to drive into the employee area of the park. Hondo relaxed visibly now that we were away from the animals and surrounded by things he seemed more familiar with, like people and cement. Instead of staying in the employee area, Athmani veered through another gate, ending up on Adventure Road.
Although this was the main pedestrian route around the park, cars could drive on it after visiting hours. And they did. It was the best way to transport the enormous amount of food the animals needed each day—or to remove the enormous amount of garbage the visitors generated. At times it could be as crowded as a highway. Athmani weaved around a flatbed truck full of hay bales and headed for the employee housing area, where I lived.
“Will these new guards be permanent?” Summer asked.
“I’m not sure,” Athmani replied. “Why?”
“Because if they’re only here for a few days, or weeks, maybe the poacher will just wait for them to stop working and then come back,” Summer explained. “And what protects the rhinos then?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We can’t keep them inside forever, can we?”
“You’re right,” Athmani said. “Ideally, the best scenario would be to catch this poacher quickly, but if we don’t . . . I’ve suggested an alternative way to protect the rhinos, but I can tell you, it will be an uphill battle.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“We cut the horns off,” Athmani said.
Summer and I both gasped at the idea. My own reaction surprised me. After all, a rhino in the zoo didn’t need its horn, but the idea of removing it seemed like a horrible act.
“That’d be like wiping the smile off the Mona Lisa,” Summer said.
“The difference is, no one is going to kill the Mona Lisa for her smile,” Athmani countered. “I didn’t say it was a great solution, but it’s a solution. It has been done many places in Africa. If you get rid of the horn, there’s no reason for anyone to poach the rhinos.”
“Unless someone’s going after Rhonda for some other reason,” I said.
“Like what?” Athmani asked.
“Wanting a dead rhino head to put on their wall,” I replied.
Athmani sighed. “I suppose that�
�s possible, but I think someone wanting the horn is more likely. It’d be easier to steal the horn than a whole head.”
“Would taking the horn off hurt the rhino?” Summer asked.
“No,” Athmani replied. “There are no nerves in the horn itself. But it is still not an easy job. A veterinarian would have to do it.” Athmani pulled over by the rear employee exit from FunJungle. “Here you go, Teddy.”
“See you tomorrow?” Summer asked me.
“Sure,” I said. Normally, the idea of Summer asking to spend time with me would have been thrilling, but everything about the rhino was wearing me down. I climbed out of the rover and waved good-bye.
Summer waved back as Athmani drove away.
I left FunJungle and headed into the trailer park that served as employee housing, my mind full of questions. Was the hunter going after the horn, or another trophy from Rhonda—or, as my friends had suggested, were they looking to kill only for fun? But if it was for fun, why go after a rhino rather than any other animal? And if it was for the horn, why had the hunter gone after the one rhino that was locked up rather than any of the others that weren’t? Was this tied to the candy store theft in any way—or was that an entirely separate crime?
As I wove through the trailers toward home, a thought nagged at me. I had the feeling there was something strange about the attempt on Rhonda that I’d missed, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
I rounded the final trailer and froze in astonishment. In addition to all the other mysteries of the day, there was now one more.
My entire house had disappeared.
HOMELESS
At first, I thought I’d made a mistake. It didn’t seem possible that an entire house—even if it was only a trailer home—could vanish. I looked around, wondering if maybe I’d wandered the wrong way through the trailer park. I’d walked this way hundreds of times before, but that night I’d been distracted.
I hadn’t made a mistake, though. Everything else was exactly where it should have been. All the neighbors’ trailers were there. But where ours had been that morning, there was only a bare rectangular cement slab.
I immediately called Mom at her office at Monkey Mountain. She answered on the fourth ring. “Hey, kiddo. . . .”
“Mom, our house is gone!”
“Theodore, that isn’t funny.”
“I know it’s not. It’s true.”
Mom sighed, still not believing me. “I don’t have time for any pranks right now. One of the apes is sick, and Doc’s here to check on her. . . .”
“I’m not joking!” I yelled. “I promise! I’m standing right where our house is supposed to be, and it’s not here!”
My tone convinced my mother I wasn’t messing around. “Teddy, how could a whole house disappear?”
“I don’t know, but it did.”
“Stay where you are. I’ll be right there,” Mom said, then hung up.
I tried calling Dad, but it went straight to voice mail. I figured leaving a message that our house had vanished might panic him, so I just asked him to call me when he could.
It was now very cold. I hadn’t worn my warmest jacket or my gloves that day; both were in my bedroom, which was in my missing house. So I looked for a warm place to wait. Unfortunately, none of our neighbors were home. This wasn’t rare. None of them had kids and most had offices that were far cozier and more comfortable than the cheap trailers FunJungle had given us. I had to settle for trying to move as much as possible. I jogged in place and waved my arms around, trying to get my blood flowing, then searched the area for clues as to where the house could have gone.
It was a moonless night, and we lived far from civilization and the light pollution that came with it, so it was very dark outside. Using the light from my phone, I tried to scan the ground around the cement slab for tire tracks or drag marks but couldn’t find any. None close by, at least. So I widened my search, spiraling out around the slab. I’d done only two circles before Mom arrived. She raced up, then froze the same way I had and gasped, “It’s gone.”
“I told you,” I said.
Mom shook her head, trying to make sense of everything. “This isn’t possible. The house was right here this morning. Homes don’t just get up and walk away.”
“Mobile homes can be moved. Maybe someone stole it.”
“Out of all the mobile homes in the world, why would someone steal ours?” Mom asked. “It’s not even the nicest one here.”
I shrugged. “I tried calling Dad.”
“So did I,” Mom said. “Let’s try again.”
She pulled out her phone, but before she could start dialing, a pair of high-beam headlights lit us up. I’d been in the dark so long, they were blinding. I had to shield my eyes as the approaching vehicle thumped along the trailer park’s dirt access road.
As it got closer, I realized it wasn’t a car at all. It was a souped-up golf cart. It was also tilting sharply to one side due to the weight of the driver. Marge.
To my surprise, Mom sighed with relief. “Thank goodness. Security’s here to help us.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I said under my breath.
There was only one bush anywhere near the cement slab, but somehow Marge still managed to hit it. She plowed right into the poor plant, then clambered out and glared at it angrily, as if somehow it were at fault. “You ought to have that bush removed,” Marge told us. “It’s a driving hazard.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It jumped right in your path, didn’t it?”
Mom signaled me to not start anything. “Marjorie, thanks for coming so quickly. . . .”
“I need to talk to your son,” Marge interrupted rudely, then turned on me. “I didn’t get the chance to finish my interrogation this afternoon.”
“Interrogation?” Mom asked. “Wait. Why are you here?”
Marge proudly removed a piece of paper from her jacket and dramatically unfolded it. “This is an official warrant to search your home for stolen candy.”
“What are you talking about?” Mom demanded.
“Teddy here is the number one suspect in a heist perpetrated this morning at Carly Cougar’s Candy Corner. I suspect the stolen items may have been concealed within your domicile.”
“Be our guest,” I said. “Feel free to search the house.”
“Oh, I will,” Marge sneered. She turned toward the previous location of our front door—and only then did it occur to her that something was seriously wrong. Her expression went blank. “Where’s your house?”
“That’s what we were wondering,” Mom said.
Marge scowled and wheeled on me. “You think you’re so clever, don’t you? Hiding your whole house so that I can’t search it?”
“You actually think I did that?” I asked. “Moved an entire house?”
“It’s a mobile home,” Marge pointed out. “ ‘Mobile’ means you can move it.”
“Why would I hide the candy in my house and then move the house?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t I simply move the candy?”
Marge screwed up her face as she tried to make sense of that. “How am I supposed to know how a little deviant like yourself thinks?”
“Teddy isn’t a deviant,” Mom said sternly. “And he didn’t move our house. Someone else did. It’s been stolen!”
Marge looked to Mom. Understanding slowly seeped through her thick skull, and she finally seemed to comprehend what was going on. “Hold on. Someone stole your whole house?”
“Yes!” Mom yelled, exasperated. “That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you!”
Marge burst into laughter. “And you don’t know where it is? There’s finally a crime that Teddy the genius can’t solve?”
“You think this is funny?” Mom asked, nearing her wit’s end. “Everything we own is in that house!”
Marge held up both hands, signaling Mom to calm down. “Keep your britches on, Charlene. I’m on the job.” She snapped her radio from its holster on her belt and called in. “HQ, this is O’Ma
lley. I’m out in the employee housing area, and the Fitzroy family trailer appears to be missing. Thieves suspected. Backup requested.”
There was a moment’s pause on the other end. Then the dispatcher replied, “Uh, Marge . . . Today was the first day of the employee housing relo project.”
“It was?”
“Yes. I’m looking at the schedule right here.”
“Gotcha. Cancel that request for backup, then.” Marge reholstered her radio, then turned back to us, grinning proudly. “Good news. I’ve solved the case. Your home wasn’t stolen. It was moved.”
This didn’t make me feel any better. Mom still seemed upset as well. “Where?” she demanded. “And why?”
The smile quickly faded from Marge’s face. “No one told you anything about this?”
“No,” Mom said. “What’s the employee housing relo project?”
“Um,” Marge replied, “I think you should talk to J.J. McCracken about that.”
NEW PLANS
A half hour later, I was back in J.J.’s office. This time both my parents were there with me. Dad had been at Carnivore Canyon, installing some cameras in the tiger exhibit. Much of the Canyon was carved into solid rock, so cell phone service was nonexistent there. After being around tigers all afternoon, Dad smelled like them, a combination of musk and cat pee. Because of this, Mom was keeping her distance from him, sitting at the opposite end of the couch.
Summer was in J.J.’s office as well. She and her father had been about to head home when word of our misplaced trailer came through. Now she was sitting at his enormous desk, doing her homework while he paced the room.
For the first time since I’d met him, J.J. seemed embarrassed. Normally, J.J. was full of confidence, but at that moment, he looked as uneasy as a man in a rattlesnake nest. “I want you all to know how dreadfully sorry I am about this,” he said. “I’m going to find out what went wrong and fire whoever was responsible.”
“You mean our house wasn’t supposed to be moved?” Mom asked.