Homicidal Holidays

by Donna Andrews

  I stared at him for a moment. “So…”

  He grinned devilishly. “So this is truly the mighty Phyllobates terribilis, often considered the most toxic living animal, with enough poison in its skin to kill a dozen men.”

  “Ooh.”

  “As if it mattered. It’s still just a frog. You call this perilous? I can handle them with my bare hands if I’m sure there’s no broken skin. And as long as I wash my hands before I pick my nose.”

  I made a face, and, satisfied, he continued, “And that would still only be a problem if my nose was bleeding. The poison has to get directly into the bloodstream. That’s why the natives smear the poison on a dart instead of sticking the frog up their prey’s nose.”

  I made another face, just to make him happy. “Yeah, and that would be so much less convenient, too,” I said. “Well, even if that’s all true, if I want a yellow frog, I’ll stick with your Panamanian golden frogs. They’re more interesting. These guys are just fat globs who sit there.”

  “You would just sit there, too, if you could kill anyone who touched you. Well, and then stuck a finger in their bleeding nose.” He shook his head sadly at the lame adaptations of frogs that were trying to be poisonous. “At least snakes inject the venom into the bloodstream where it belongs.”

  “Only you would find it disappointing that an animal’s not as dangerous as it’s supposed to be. Well, you and every little boy who’s ever asked me if something bites,” I admitted.

  No way that Ray would be the least bit insulted to be put in the same category as small children visiting the zoo, but before he could come up with a witty response to that implication, his radio crackled. “Ray, where’s the ice cream scoop?”

  “We’re not supposed to use the radio for that sort of thing,” I said. The radio is only for animal business and emergencies. If you wanted to announce, say, that you’d gotten back from Starbucks with everyone’s coffee, you needed to make up a secret code word so the curators wouldn’t understand you.

  He shrugged. “It’s Christmas. Take your time.” He waved at the roomful of amphibians.

  The door closed behind him, and I crossed the room, squeezing around the big tanks of Japanese giant salamanders. As I watched the much more attractive yellow and black Panamanian golden frogs crawling around—they don’t hop, and are technically toads rather than frogs despite their slender shape and smooth skin—I heard the door open again, and the voices of Greg and Michael.

  “You have to wash your hands,” Greg was saying. “It’s not for you, it’s for the frogs. They’re very delicate.”

  “Fine, fine,” Michael said, as if he were being incredibly indulgent, and I heard the water running in the sink. Michael probably only washes his hands once a day at most. His joke is that he’d spent enough time with wet hands when he worked as an aquarist. Ha-ha. I’m not sure how that’s an excuse for the armpit stains, though.

  “Okay, here you go. Cup your hand around it and hold firmly. Not too hard—that’s good.”

  Obviously Greg was trying to impress Michael with his amphibian skills so he’d have a better chance of being transferred if there were another opening here. Normally I’d be thinking he had a lot of nerve, taking someone else’s animals out of their enclosures. But at least it was better than Michael messing with stuff on his own. He’d have frogs all over the floor in a minute.

  “Now you can say you’ve held one of the world’s most deadly animals,” Greg said. “No one has to know they’re not dangerous in captivity.”

  The radio crackled and someone announced that it was time for dessert. Oh well, holidays, who cares about the rules?

  I waited for the two guys to leave, because dessert is the most important meal of the day, and I didn’t want to get into a conversation with Michael and spoil my appetite with his halitosis. He didn’t stop at the sink to wash his hands on the way out, of course, and I didn’t blame Greg for not saying anything. He’d protected the frogs from Michael’s dirty hands. It wasn’t his obligation to protect Michael from himself.

  As I squeezed around the salamander tank again, I glanced over at the terribilis enclosures, and then paused, struck with a familiar, uneasy feeling. I’d learned not to ignore this instinct, because sometimes it meant I’d forgotten to lock something. But most of the time it was nothing, an inconvenient automatic brain-habit born of hundreds of times of double-checking exhibits to make sure they were properly closed.

  Still, I’d found it was better to get rid of the feeling by taking some pointless action. It beat having a nagging uneasiness dog me once I was home and couldn’t do anything about it.

  I walked over to the tanks and made sure they were closed properly. They were fine, of course. This wasn’t even my building. Maybe I was getting a little too obsessive. Or maybe I didn’t trust anything to be left in order when Michael was around, which was less a sign of incipient mental disability than plain common sense.

  And speaking of Michael, I opened the door to leave the frog room, and nearly walked right into him, standing with Greg looking at one of the frog exhibits from the public side.

  “Hey! Watch out!” Greg snapped.

  “Sorry,” I said a bit peevishly. I hadn’t bumped into him on purpose. How about not standing right in front of doors? We scowled at each other, and he, Michael, and I walked not exactly together back to the food table. Greg seemed to regain his holiday spirit quickly—the first thing he did was pick up the tray of Shelly’s cookies and present it to Michael.

  “You’ve got seniority,” he said. “You go first.”

  Margo was right, the cookies looked absolutely awful. But Shelly was standing there watching, so there was really nothing Michael could do.

  “Thanks.” He looked at the tray till he found the cookie with his name on it, picked it up, and took a big bite.

  “Delicious.” He should work on not grimacing when he lied.

  As I filled my little plate, he started to lick the nasty drippy frosting off his unwashed hands, and I looked away, not wanting to ruin my enjoyment of the holiday treats, most of which looked a lot more tempting than Shelly’s contribution. So I didn’t see how it started, and only turned to look when I heard him hit the floor.

  Michael’s whole body was spasming. Ray ran to him and crouched down, doing some kind of first-aid thing, and someone else ran for the phone.

  “Does he have epilepsy or something?” I whispered to Margo.

  “Not that I’ve ever heard,” she said.

  Everyone who couldn’t help moved away a bit, and we stood around awkwardly, holding plates of sweets that we could no longer appropriately eat, but it didn’t seem right to just leave and go back to work either…until the ambulance crew burst through the front doors of the building and the party was really over.

  * * * *

  An hour or so later, Margo and I were working on our afternoon food pans when the phone rang. Margo picked up. “Small Mammals.”

  After that her side of the conversation was just head-nodding and “Oh! Oh!” and her eyes widening at me.

  “What?” I said when she hung up.

  “Michael,” she said. “He didn’t make it.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “They think it was some kind of poison,” she said. “They won’t know what till they do toxicology tests. The police are over at Reptiles.”

  My eyes grew wide back—and then I looked at the tray of leftover cookies that Shelly had brought back from the party. Margo followed my gaze and looked back at me. Then we both looked toward the keeper lounge off the kitchen, where Shelly was sitting at the computer doing her daily report. Then we both looked back at the tray. To an observer I’m sure it would have seemed funny, how our heads moved in unison, like a couple of meerkats standing on alert.

  “No way,” I whispered. “It had his name on it. She couldn’t be that stupid.”

  “Ha,” Margo whispered back, with forced mirth. “Of course not. The cookies are terrible, but not
bad enough to kill someone.”

  I took my stack of pans and headed up the stairs, thinking, wow, so many things can hurt you at the zoo. Venomous reptiles, lions and tigers, all the tools and dangerous chemicals. Who’d imagine Michael would be done in by a cookie? If it was a cookie, of course. Innocent until proven guilty. Shelly. Wow. It’s always the quiet, mousy types, right?

  I juggled my stack of food pans so I could unlock the door, and as I stepped into the keeper area, I put my foot down on a paper towel that I recognized. I bent down to pick it up and turned it over. As I suspected, it was the note from the door of my chinchilla exhibit, reminding people not to give him a dust bath because he was being treated for an eye infection. Okay, maybe we ought to write these notes on something more sturdy than a paper towel, but this isn’t an office job, it can be really hard to find—

  And suddenly something struck me.

  That moment I’d had when I thought the frog tanks looked odd. I’d dismissed it as nothing but that automatic habit of re-checking everything on the way out of an area. But now I re-examined the image in my mind and realized what might have changed. The sign, USE GLOVES—had it still been posted on the new frog tank?

  I put my pans down and started to walk around the building looking for Greg. I didn’t go very fast, because I was feeling sick to my stomach. Maybe Greg and Michael had knocked the sign on the floor as they left. But what if it had already been missing when they got there? Greg was just a little overconfident. What if he was so sure he knew which were the right frogs that he thought he didn’t need to look for a sign? What if I’m about to tell him that he might have accidentally killed Michael? Who never washes his hands after handling an animal. And who has terrible bleeding gums, a perfect path to let poison right into his bloodstream when he licked the frosting from a horrible holiday cookie.

  I found him outside sweeping leaves out of a drained pool in the lemur exhibit.

  “Um, hey, Greg?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was just wondering. Um. Remember when you were showing Michael that frog?”

  “What frog?”

  “The terribilis. I was on the other side of the room.”

  He glanced over at me. “What about it?”

  “Um. Ray showed them to me before. There was a sign on the tank warning you to use gloves—”

  And suddenly my voice caught in my throat. What if there hadn’t been a sign when Greg took out the frog because I’d knocked it off when I was walking away? What if it was my fault he was dead?

  “Yes?” Greg said, a bit impatiently.

  “There…there was…” I managed to choke out.

  “There was what?” he said, now obviously irritated.

  It all came out in a rush now. “There was a sign on the tank that said to use gloves so you knew which frogs were poisonous, wasn’t there?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Oh.” I gasped, relieved. “Oh. Oh, good.”

  “Why?” he said, clearly peeved at this point.

  “Because I think it wasn’t there when I left. You must have knocked it off. But I’m sure Ray’s put it back by now,” I said giddily.

  He gave me a final sidelong look as I danced back into the building, relieved that I could go back to suspecting Shelly and her cookies.

  * * * *

  Holiday potlucks and unexpected deaths, like weekends and bad weather, do nothing to affect the bodily functions of a collection of small mammals. However, they do take up time that you ought to be using for work. There was also all the time I’d wasted trying to move around the building without running into Shelly. I kept telling myself that of course she wouldn’t poison a cookie with Michael’s name right on it, for Pete’s sake, but it didn’t help, and I wondered if I looked as obvious as she had when she was trying to avoid Michael at the party. Something she wouldn’t have to do anymore, of course.

  I figured everyone else was long gone, celebrating whatever dregs were left of the holiday, but I still had to hose the tamandua holding pen one last time before I left. Until Greg came up with a new diet, the end result of the current one needed to be dealt with three times a day. But when I opened the door to my keeper area, I was surprised to discover that I wasn’t the only one still here after all. Greg was in the tamandua cage.

  I felt a little stab of annoyance. It was one thing if he wanted to mess with other people’s frogs, and yeah, he had helped me put the enclosure together, but that didn’t give him the right—

  “What the…” I sputtered as I ran toward the cage.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He was standing on a stool in the holding cage. He needed the stool to reach the crook in the tree branch where the tamandua was curled up—so that he could comfortably hold his pocket tool, open to the biggest, sharpest blade, to the tamandua’s soft, furry yellow throat.

  “Swear not to tell, or I’ll cut her,” he said.

  “What?” I squealed. “What are you doing? Not to tell what?”

  “Don’t play stupid. They’ll find out what killed Michael when the toxicology comes back. They were supposed to think he was poking around in there on his own.”

  I stared at Greg with a rush of thoughts spinning round in my head. The warning sign that wasn’t on the frogs’ tank. The boss who was always messing around in exhibits without asking. The man responsible for refusing to transfer Greg into the job that, I now realized, he had wanted very, very badly. It would have been the perfect crime, if I hadn’t stuck around, unseen in a corner, looking at some cute harmless frogs.

  “It’s just the sort of thing he does, and they’ll still believe it, because you won’t say anything,” Greg hissed. “Because if you say anything, I’ll cut her.”

  “You will not,” I said. “Then I’ll tell that you did both.”

  “Your word against mine,” he said. “Besides, you won’t risk it. You’re crazy about this animal.”

  “You’re bluffing,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “You’ll get fired if you hurt her, and then how are you going to get transferred next time there’s a job at Reptiles? Besides, what if I swear now so you’ll stop? I can always tell later.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “You won’t tell later because you know I can come back in here any time.”

  He was right. There was nothing I could do to keep him away, to keep the tamandua safe. He had all the same keys that I did to get into the building any time he wanted, when no one was here to see. And there was no way I could prove he’d been with Michael and handed him the wrong frog. It was his word against mine, and his story made so much more sense. Because Michael did do that kind of thing all the time. And who the heck would try to murder someone with a frog?

  As my mind raced for a reply, Greg held my gaze and I realized that whatever else he had done wrong, right now he was breaking the most important rule: when you’re in a cage, never take your eyes off the animal.

  In my peripheral vision, the tamandua started to stir. If it did what I thought it was going to do…

  Greg opened his mouth to speak again but it turned into a yelp of pain as the tamandua, oblivious to the danger it was in, reached up for something to hang from and hooked a sharp claw into the soft skin of his forearm.

  He flailed about, roaring with pain, nearly dislodging her from the branches. And then he lost his balance on the stool and pitched forward onto the floor.

  His head hit the concrete with a sickening thud, and he lay motionless. I stood stunned for a moment myself. What a good thing I had decided not to put mulch on the floor of this cage after all. It was easier to clean this way, and I’d wondered if I was being lazy, but it had turned out to be useful.

  Then I came to my senses and ran over to the cage. The tamandua was climbing down toward me on the branch she’d chosen after Greg’s arm had pulled away. Luckily it was one that wasn’t wired down. I waited for all four claws to be hooked on, then quickly jerked the branch out of place. I dashed out of the
cage with the tamandua on the branch, and locked Greg in.

  I stood, breathing heavily. “Thanks, peabrain.”

  The tamandua peered at me nearsightedly. She wasn’t thinking about what a clever thing she’d just done. She was looking for a place to climb off of this branch, and my shoulders apparently looked promising.

  I heard Greg moan. Quickly I double-checked the lock on the cage door and then started to look around. I knew I needed to call the police. But that would have to wait. First I had to figure out what to do with this anteater.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  As a child, Linda Lombardi played with a basket full of plastic animals instead of dolls. Later she left a tenured job at a university to work as a zookeeper and wrote a column about animals for the Associated Press. Linda’s revenge for what animals have done to her life is the book Animals Behaving Badly: Boozing Bees, Cheating Chimps, Dogs with Guns, and Other Beastly True Tales, and you can read more of the adventures of Hannah and her fellow zookeepers in the mystery The Sloth’s Eye. Follow her on Twitter at @wombatarama and read more at http://www.lindalombardi.com.

  JASMINE, by Debbi Mack

  “No one should get away with murder.”

  Jasmine’s words echo in my head as I walk home. I pull my jacket lapels up around my throat to shield it from the wind. I’m tempted to apply more Chapstick to my raw lips, but delving into my purse will slow me down.

  The cold is biting. An old year will soon die and a new one will be born, but I have little to look forward to. Not even Christmas, just two days off. Other people will be with their families. I haven’t seen mine in years.

  Leaning into the wind, the walk from the bus stop seems interminable, even though my apartment building is only a block away.

  En route, a tattered wreath on a tavern door catches my eye. It looks as old and used up as I feel. A sign, perhaps? Not likely. More like an excuse. I pause, then head inside for a quick one.

  Hustling over and ducking inside as if pursued by ghosts, I shut the door firmly against the elements. A look around tells me I don’t belong here. The room is roughly square, illuminated in sickly yellow. Tables and chairs are placed haphazardly, as if tossed about by a careless decorator. A few are occupied. Men drinking alone. Most of them don’t notice me. A few spare me a curious glance, only to return to whatever private purgatory they’re enduring.