by Stuart Gibbs
“I promise they’ll be safer then baby birds in their mama’s nest,” J.J. said.
With that, the conversation turned to other topics, and I finished the dinner feeling excited about the idea of investigating the giraffe poisonings and eager to catch the culprit behind them.
I would have been wise to remember that baby birds aren’t always that safe in their mothers’ nests. As usual, things at FunJungle worked out far worse than anyone expected.
5
TRACKS
Since I had eaten dinner at the McCrackens’, my parents hadn’t rushed home from work. None of us was ever in a hurry to get to our home.
FunJungle’s PR department referred to the employee housing area as “Lakeside Estates”—but it was neither lakeside nor estates. Instead, it was a trailer park next to a muddy sinkhole that occasionally had water in it. J.J. had recently come through on a long-delayed promise to replace our old, crummy trailer with a new, deluxe double-wide, but my parents still didn’t like being there much. At certain times of year, it was nice to sit outside, but now we were deep in the midst of mosquito season and the sinkhole was a perfect breeding ground for the horrid little insects. For every few minutes you sat still at Lakeside Estates, you’d lose a pint of blood.
Mosquitoes were far less of a problem inside FunJungle, which was a mystery. J.J. claimed there was a large colony of bats nearby that kept the mosquito population in check, but I had never seen that many bats around the park, nor could I understand why they would eat the mosquitoes at FunJungle but not Lakeside Estates. My parents figured that J.J. was secretly dousing the park in insect-repelling chemicals late at night, but had no proof of this. My parents didn’t complain, though, because while they loved pretty much every single creature alive, insects included, they hated mosquitoes with a passion. When we had lived in the Congo, mosquito-borne diseases were the number one cause of death. Technically, mosquitoes were the most dangerous animals on earth, indirectly killing millions of people a year by transmitting malaria, yellow fever, chikungunya, and other fatal sicknesses.
For their dinner, Mom and Dad had ordered takeout from a park restaurant and picnicked at a lookout over the African section of SafariLand, pretending like they were back in the Masai Mara. J.J. had his driver drop me off at the front of the park. FunJungle was closed when I got there, but I had my ID badge and everyone in security knew me anyhow, so I came in through the nighttime employee entrance, crossed the park, and met up with my parents for the rest of the walk home.
Lakeside Estates was located beyond the rear of the park. Our route home took us out the back employee entrance, and then along the edge of the construction site for the Wilds. Even after dark, lots of people were still at work. J.J. was so determined to have the rides open as fast as possible that he had construction underway until well after nightfall most days. This was another reason that being at home wasn’t so nice; we could hear the heavy machinery from our place. Even my mother, who slept so soundly that she had once napped through an elephant stampede, had resorted to wearing earplugs at night.
On the far perimeter of the construction site, where no tourists ever went, there was only a cheap chain-link fence looping the Wilds. While the project was slated to be beautifully landscaped in the future, at the moment it was a big, barren eyesore. Every living thing over twenty square acres had been scraped off the ground, leaving only dirt and rocks behind. What would eventually be buildings were now only cement slabs and wooden frameworks. The future Black Mamba roller coaster was a jumble of iron beams, while the Falcon Strike ten-story plunge was only three stories so far. The Raging Raft Ride was the closest to being done, but its skeleton of steel bars was still only partially crowned with fake rock.
“You’re really okay with me working for J.J.?” I asked my parents.
“Why would we have a problem with that?” Dad replied.
“Besides the fact that the man’s a sneak, a cheat, and a liar,” Mom said.
“Charlene!” Dad gasped, mock offended. “You’re talking about Teddy’s future father-in-law!”
“That’s not funny,” I said, feeling my face turning red.
“Yes, it is,” Mom teased.
Dad grew serious. “J.J. may have handled your ability to solve cases poorly in the past, but we really appreciated that he called us before he even talked to you this time.”
“We were certainly concerned when he suggested bringing you in to investigate another case,” Mom added. “However, this one sounds different from the others. Far less dangerous. And, to be honest, I think you could really help.”
“You do?” I asked, surprised.
“Of course I do!” Mom exclaimed. “You’re a very smart kid, Teddy. You have a gift for seeing things that other people don’t. And I’m not only saying that because I’m your mother.”
“J.J. obviously sees it too,” Dad said. “That’s why he wants you on this case.”
Mom said, “If you can figure out what’s happening to the giraffes and make some money doing it, then everyone wins. Just don’t take any risks this time. If there really is a criminal, leave catching them to FunJungle Security.”
“Okay,” I agreed, then noticed that my father was no longer walking with us.
He had stopped a few feet back and was staring at the ground.
“Jack?” Mom asked. “Did you drop something?”
Dad looked up at us, seeming startled, as if he had somehow already forgotten we were there. He paused a bit before replying, like he was trying to decide whether or not to tell us the truth about what he’d seen. “Uh . . . no.”
Mom started back toward him, her interest piqued. “What’s going on, then?”
Dad pointed to the ground. “Mountain lion tracks.”
Most people wouldn’t have been able to spot an animal track at night when they weren’t even looking for it, but Dad was a professional wildlife photographer and a master when it came to tracking animals. Even so, this one stood out particularly well. It was right along the chain-link fence, in a patch of whitish limestone clay. The same type of clay Tommy Lopez had suggested the tiny white object at the crime scene might have been made of. The clay was part of a large patch that extended far on the other side of the chain-link fence. With the trees and plants scraped off in the construction site, the topsoil had eroded, leaving only the bare limestone beneath. Being white, it practically glowed in the moonlight, making the track much more obvious than it might have been otherwise. And yet, it wasn’t that obvious. Mom and I had walked right past it without noticing.
Mom was a good tracker herself, and my parents had both taught me enough about tracks over the years so that I could easily tell this one had been made by a large cat, rather than a coyote or even a stray dog. Canines show claw marks in their tracks, while cats retract their claws, and the pads of a cat are bigger and closer together than dogs’ pads are.
There were three clear tracks in the mud. Dad knelt and placed his finger along one of them, crudely measuring it. “Four inches across. That’s an adult. A little dried out, so not too recent. Though it might have been made last night.”
I crouched beside it as well, partly to examine the track—and partly to take a closer look at the clay, which I prodded with a finger. On closer inspection, it was definitely not whatever the white object I had found at Lincoln Stone’s was made of; that had been more crumbly. For a moment, I wondered if the mystery object could have been clay of a different consistency, or clay that had dried out more, but that didn’t seem right. I was now quite sure that the item wasn’t clay at all, but some other substance entirely.
The lion tracks were heading the same way we were, away from the park, following the fence line. Mom moved ahead, scanning the ground carefully. The patch of clay quickly gave way to an area where the topsoil hadn’t eroded yet, which was better environmentally but made finding tracks in the darkness more difficult. Mom switched on the penlight that she kept attached to her key chain. Two dozen fee
t along, she gave a cry of excitement. “I’ve got another one! Only partial, though.”
Dad and I hurried to catch up with her. We both had penlights on our key chains as well; when you lived on the far edge of civilization, you often found yourself wandering around in the dark. The beams from the lights weren’t wide, but they still made a big difference.
If either of my parents was concerned about the lion being close to our home, they didn’t show it. Both had spent much of their lives around wild animals, predators included. Most of the time, the carnivores weren’t nearly as dangerous as the herbivores. In Africa, hippos and Cape buffalo killed far more people every year than lions or leopards did, while in the Americas, you were much more likely to be attacked by a bison in a national park than a bear. My father had obviously been wary about mentioning the tracks to me, but now my mother and I were both caught up in the thrill of tracking the big cat.
My parents leapfrogged ahead of each other, so neither was searching the same section of trail, picking up more partials as they went along. The tracks continued along the fence line, following the trail we used to get to Lakeside Estates, until the trail veered off toward the trailer park. Then, the tracks stayed with the fence, moving through a small meadow of spear grass, until a point fifty feet past the turnoff, where a large oak tree stood. The branches of the oak extended far out over the chain-link fence.
We all stopped to inspect the bark of the tree. Even I could see that there were multiple sets of long, vertical claw marks in it.
“The cat climbed the tree to get into the construction site,” I deduced.
“More than once,” Mom said. “I’d say at least five times, probably more.”
“Why would it want to do that?” I asked. “There’s no food in there for it. And there’s a lot of people.”
“I’ll bet the cat isn’t climbing over when the humans are there,” Dad said. “Mountain lions don’t like humans much. I know everyone’s working late here, but they’re not working around the clock.”
“I think they stop around midnight most nights,” Mom observed. “That’s when the noise dies down. And cats are nocturnal anyhow.”
“As for food,” Dad told me, “there might not be any animals inside the construction site, but there’s thousands in the park, and a cat could smell them from here for sure.”
“Plus, there’s that.” Mom pointed through the fence to the Raging Raft Ride. At the base of the manmade mountain was a large fake lake for the rafts to plunge into. It had been completed only recently, and was now full of water, which shimmered in the moonlight. “First you house all the potential prey at FunJungle. Now J.J. has built the largest freshwater source for miles in every direction. Of course the lion’s going to come sniffing around.”
I stared at the fake lake, wondering where the next-closest water source even was. The “lake” of Lakeside Estates had dried up weeks before, as had many of the seasonal streams in the area. The lion wouldn’t have known the Raging Raft Ride was manmade; all she would know was that, suddenly, there was a lot more water in her territory.
“Do you think the lion can get into the rest of FunJungle?” I asked.
Dad thought about that before answering. “The fence around the park would be tougher to get over than this one, because it has barbed wire strung at the top, but there are probably places where there’s a tree that could be climbed. There wouldn’t be branches hanging over the fence like on this one, because J.J. doesn’t want people climbing over, but a lion could climb trees that people couldn’t.”
“So the animals could be at risk,” I concluded.
“Possibly,” Mom replied thoughtfully. “In the main part of the park, most of them are housed at night, but in SafariLand, it’s a different story. And that’s the closest area of FunJungle to the water supply.”
“We should probably let J.J. know.” Dad turned away from the fence and started through the woods toward our house. As I fell in beside him, he said, “You already knew there was a mountain lion around here?”
“Why do you say that?”
“You didn’t seem very surprised when I pointed out the tracks.”
I thought back to my reaction and realized Dad was right. But then I realized that his own reaction had been a little odd. “Did you know there was a lion around here?”
“Yes,” Dad admitted. “I found some tracks a few days ago, closer to our house.”
“Where?” I asked.
We arrived at Lakeside Estates, rejoining the path from FunJungle. Dad pointed to the far side of the “lake.” “Over there. Heading toward the park.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“We didn’t want to alarm you,” Mom said. “We thought it might be a one-time thing, the cat just crossing through. But now it appears she’s spending more time around here.”
That was why my father had hesitated about mentioning the tracks at first, I now realized. Because he was unsure how Mom would feel if he let me know.
“How did you know about the lion?” Dad asked me.
I considered making up a story, wary about telling them the truth, because that would open up a whole can of worms. But I figured lying would only cause more problems down the road. So I said, “A guy from the Department of Fish and Wildlife told me. His name’s Tommy Lopez.”
We were crossing through the trailer park now. Lakeside Estates was slightly nicer than the original trailer park for employee housing had been, but not much. The trailers were arranged in a more orderly fashion, but no landscaping had been done, so we were forced to wind our way through large patches of prickly pear cactus to get to our home. At other times of year, when it wasn’t as humid and there was less construction noise and fewer mosquitoes, some of our neighbors might have been outside, barbecuing or simply enjoying the night sky. Now they were all inside their trailers. Air conditioners were humming loudly everywhere.
Mom and Dad exchanged a wary glance. “How do you know this Tommy Lopez?” Mom asked.
“He’s a friend of Doc’s daughter, Lily. She introduced me to him today.”
“Lily was here?” Mom asked, surprised. “I thought she was in Antarctica.”
“She’s back. Doc didn’t tell you?”
“Doc doesn’t say much about his daughter,” Mom said.
“But I thought you were friends.”
“I think Doc is embarrassed by Lily,” Mom explained. “She obviously cares a lot about animals, but her recklessness has caused her father a lot of problems. I think he’s had to bail her out of trouble on a regular basis.”
“Why did she come see you?” Dad asked.
“Because Tommy Lopez thinks that a mountain lion didn’t really kill Lincoln Stone’s dog. He thinks someone framed the lion so they’d have an excuse to kill it.”
Dad frowned at the thought of this. “You mean someone’s looking to have the lion declared a nuisance?”
“Yes.”
“That’s crazy,” Dad said.
“And yet, I wouldn’t put it past people.” Mom sighed heavily. “There’s a lot of folks out here who don’t want that lion around. I’m actually kind of shocked that someone’s looking for a legal reason to hunt it rather than just killing it illegally.”
“Really?” I asked.
Mom said, “People do it all the time. Especially with predators. They hunt them, trap them, poison them. Whatever it takes to get rid of them.”
We arrived at our trailer. It wasn’t locked. We lived too far out for thieves to bother us, and we didn’t have anything worth stealing anyhow.
The moment I opened the door, I was hit by a wave of heat. My parents didn’t like leaving the air conditioner on for the large part of the day we weren’t home because it wasted electricity and was expensive. But our first few minutes upon returning home were always miserable.
I flipped on the lights and the AC as my parents followed me inside. The main area of our trailer was a living room–kitchen furnished with a cheap table, c
hairs, and a sofa.
“Teddy,” Dad said gravely. “Did Tommy and Lily come to you for help figuring out who killed the dog?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And what did you say to them?” Mom asked.
“That I’d think about it.”
Dad opened the fridge, grabbing beers for Mom and himself, taking a little extra time to enjoy the cold air before he shut the door again.
“I don’t want you doing that,” Mom told me.
“Why not?” I asked. “You said it was okay for me to help J.J. find whoever was poisoning the giraffes!”
“That’s different,” Mom explained. “J.J. is going through a lot of trouble to make sure that all you are doing is observing the giraffes. That’s the limit of your involvement in that case. But I don’t know this Tommy Lopez one bit, and all I know about Lily Deakin is that she has a knack for getting herself in trouble. If you get mixed up with them, you could end up in trouble too.”
“Or worse.” Dad popped the cap off a beer and handed the bottle to Mom.
“But if no one does anything, that lion will end up dead!” I argued.
“That may be true,” Mom said. “But it doesn’t mean you have to be the one who gets involved. It’s Tommy’s job to investigate this. Not yours.”
“Tommy’s boss doesn’t want him to investigate,” I said defiantly. “And Lincoln Stone doesn’t either. They want the lion dead.”
Dad and Mom looked to each other, saddened by this information. Mom placed the cold beer against her head to cool herself off, while Dad propped himself right in front of the air-conditioner vent.
“Even so,” Dad said, “this still isn’t your fight. When you’ve gotten mixed up in things like this before, you’ve ended up in serious danger.”
“Not as much danger as that lion’s in,” I argued.
“You’ve nearly been killed before,” Mom reminded me. “More than once.”
“This time is different,” I said, hoping that it was true.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I fished it out and found a string of texts from my friends that had suddenly arrived all at once. This was a common occurrence. The cellular reception at Lakeside Estates was terrible, so J.J. McCracken had souped up the Wi-Fi in all our trailers. Almost every time I got home, I was deluged with outdated messages. I scrolled to the last one, which was from Summer: