Belly Up

by Stuart Gibbs

We lived in the farthest trailer from FunJungle, right on the edge of the wilderness; white-tailed deer wandered past our home every day. A herd of six was grazing by the front steps as I returned, but they scattered at the sight of me.

  I could hear the TV, which was surprising. Mom rarely turned it on. She was so used to living without one after all her time in Africa, she often forgot we even had one. She didn’t like it much, calling it the “idiot box,” preferring that we read or play games to pass the time instead.

  It took a special kind of person to become a field biologist, and my mom was one of the best. I’m not just saying that; she’d won all sorts of awards from conservation organizations and anytime there was a magazine article about her, important scientists lined up to say how great she was. She was really smart, but also tough enough to deal with the hardships of living far from civilization. In the Congo, she’d faced hungry lions, rampaging elephants, blood-sucking leeches, and—most dangerous of all—poachers. She was incredibly patient; when she’d begun her research, she’d watched her gorillas twelve hours a day, every day, for an entire year until they finally began to accept her as one of their own. After spending so long out there, she felt the gorillas were her family. It wasn’t like she was putting them in competition with me though; in fact, I thought it was nice. You couldn’t find another biologist in the whole world who cared more about her subjects.

  Given her adventurous background, it might seem surprising that Mom now enjoyed working at a zoo. But given the war, staying in the Congo wasn’t an option—and besides, FunJungle wasn’t merely a zoo. J.J. McCracken wanted it to be a world-class research facility too. (Dad claimed this wasn’t because J.J. was interested in science, though; there were big tax breaks for research facilities.) J.J. had told Martin del Gato to recruit the best of the best, and where gorillas were concerned, that was Mom. Martin had offered to double what Mom was getting paid in Atlanta, but to his surprise, she wasn’t that interested in money. Field biology doesn’t pay much; she hadn’t gone into it expecting to get rich. Instead, what she cared about was research—and the key to doing good research was an exceptional animal habitat.

  So Mom had begun her work at FunJungle long before we moved there, serving as a technical consultant on the design of Monkey Mountain. Under her supervision, the exhibits were altered from mere viewing areas into dynamic living spaces where the animals could thrive. Mom knew what gorillas and other primates would enjoy in their new homes—and she knew what she and other scientists would need to study them. With her input, Monkey Mountain became the world’s finest man-made habitat for gorillas—as well as chimpanzees, orangutans, gibbons, colobus monkeys, and ring-tailed lemurs.

  J.J. had cut similar deals with other scientists to bring them to FunJungle, allowing them to help design their exhibits as well. Therefore, our trailer park was a who’s who of famous field biologists. One of the world’s greatest elephant researchers lived on one side of us; a polar bear specialist lived on the other.

  FunJungle had found one other incentive to lure Mom there: giving Dad a job too. That was great for all of us, as it meant that, for the first time in my life, Dad was around more often than he wasn’t. And yet Dad still craved an adventure now and then, so his contract allowed him to do an occasional assignment for someone else. That’s why only Mom was waiting for me at home that night. Dad was in China, taking pictures of giant pandas for Outside Magazine.

  I banged through the front door. There was no point in trying to sneak in. Our trailer only had three rooms, and after so much time in the jungle, Mom had a highly attuned sense of hearing. She’d probably heard me crunching across the dry crabgrass from a hundred yards away.

  That was another reason the TV being on was odd. Mom always said it was too noisy; it interfered with her ability to hear the world around her.

  Once I came inside, I understood why it was on. It was tuned to the local news, which was all about Henry.

  This wasn’t much of a surprise. J.J. McCracken’s decision to build FunJungle was the biggest news in that part of Texas since the Battle of the Alamo. The local TV stations had covered it nonstop from the moment it was announced. There were daily reports on how many tourists were coming, how well the park was running and how soon it would be until new attractions were opened or new hotels were built. Anytime a new animal arrived, it was the lead story. I’d seen a newspaper survey that said Henry was the second-most recognized celebrity in the state, just behind J.J. McCracken but ahead of the quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. So his death was huge news.

  They weren’t actually showing Henry when I came in. (That was fine with me. I’d seen plenty of Henry that day, inside and out.) Instead, they were interviewing Summer McCracken, J.J.’s daughter, about how she was handling Henry’s death.

  In the time since she’d given her father the idea for FunJungle, Summer—now thirteen years old—had become quite famous herself. I’d never really understood why. Sure, she was rich and lots of people said she was pretty, but she didn’t really do anything except go to boarding school. And yet, everyone was still fascinated by her. At the supermarket checkout, there was always at least one magazine with her on the cover, claiming to have the latest details on what she was up to and who she was dating. Even the employees of FunJungle were crazy about her; I’d overheard several excitedly discussing rumors that Summer was home from school and might even deign to visit the park. It was ridiculous.

  I watched the end of her interview. Summer had a lot of composure for someone only a year older than me—but maybe, if people had been interviewing me my whole life, I would have been like that too. Despite being obviously upset about Henry, Summer managed to be very well-spoken. “I think we’re all really shocked by this,” she told the reporter. “Not just my family, but all the people who work at FunJungle—and everyone who’s ever come to see Henry here.”

  I wondered if Summer didn’t know what Henry was really like—or if she was just faking the heartfelt stuff. If she was, she could have given Pete Thwacker a run for his money in the PR department.

  “It’s a terrible shame,” Summer went on, “but I think it’s important to note that the last months of Henry’s life were happy ones. . . .”

  “You were with Henry, weren’t you?”

  It always surprised me how Mom could sneak up on me so quietly, even within the confines of the trailer. She’d mastered moving silently during her years with the gorillas. I wheeled around to find her standing right behind me, arms crossed. She was wearing her standard work outfit: a khaki shirt and shorts.

  I hesitated, trying to determine if it was worth lying, but finally decided it would be pointless. Mom could always see right through me. “How’d you know?”

  “You smell like a dead hippo.”

  Of course. Mom had also honed her sense of smell in the Congo. When you spent a lot of time in the jungle, it paid to know when something dangerous was creeping up on you. The way most humans sensed danger was through sight—but the way most animals did was through hearing or smell, which were much more effective over long distances, especially at night. Dad said Mom could smell a lion from half a mile away—and even tell if it was male or female. He always claimed to be joking about this last part, but I think it might have been true.

  I hadn’t even been that close to the hippo. At the nearest, I’d still been ten feet away. But I guess the stench had stuck with me.

  “Your dinner was ready an hour and a half ago,” Mom said. “I was worried sick about you. Why didn’t you call?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “That’s no excuse, Theodore. I was almost ready to call park security. . . .”

  “I was watching the autopsy. Henry was murdered!”

  That surprised Mom enough to silence her for a moment. She turned off the TV so as to give me her full attention, then asked, “What are you talking about?”

  I told her the whole story. She listened straight through without interrupting. I’ll bet most othe
r mothers would have punished me the moment they heard I’d snuck into the autopsy, but Mom was different. She was naturally curious—and she loved animals even more than I did. If someone had done something to harm Henry, she wanted to know about it.

  While she listened, she reheated my dinner and set it before me. I was so hungry, I dug right in. It took the whole meal for me to finish telling everything that happened.

  Once I was done, Mom sat silently for a while. Finally, she said, “That’s very interesting, but technically, you don’t have any proof Henry was murdered.”

  “Doc said he was.”

  “Did he really? Or did he just suspect it?”

  I had to think about that, going over the whole autopsy again in my mind. Finally, I admitted, “He just suspected it, I guess. But something had to make all those holes in Henry’s intestine. . . .”

  “True. But you have no way of knowing if someone fed it to Henry on purpose or not.”

  I frowned; this wasn’t exactly the response I’d been hoping for. “I guess not.”

  Mom glanced at my empty plate, then nodded to the sink. I took all my dirty things over and cleaned them.

  While I did, Mom cut me a slice of chocolate cake and poured a glass of milk. “Murder is a very serious charge,” she said. “When you say that, you’re insinuating that someone purposefully planned to kill Henry. Now, can you think of a reason anyone would want to do that?”

  “Doc said he could.”

  Mom paused, ever so slightly, while putting the milk back in the fridge. I could tell she was surprised by this, but she didn’t want me to know. “Did he say what that was?”

  “No. But Martin seemed to know what he was talking about.”

  Mom set the cake on the table. “I think you must have misunderstood them. I can’t think of any reason someone would want to murder an animal.”

  “People do it all the time. It’s called hunting.”

  “I mean in a zoo.”

  “A lot of people here didn’t like Henry.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’d want to kill him.”

  I shrugged, but I knew Mom was right. I couldn’t imagine anyone hating Henry so much that they’d murder him. But then, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to kill an animal with a gun, either. I’d seen what poachers could do in Africa, shooting an elephant just for its tusks, or a rhino for its horn. It was always unbelievably horrible and cruel. How could anyone think an elephant’s tooth was beautiful, but not the elephant itself? And though I’d never seen the results of the war in the Congo, I’d heard more than enough about them. All I could figure was, adults were capable of a lot of bad behavior for reasons that were far beyond me.

  So even though it didn’t make sense that someone would murder Henry, I still didn’t doubt someone would do it. I tried to think of a way to explain this to Mom, but I couldn’t. Besides, something in her demeanor told me she didn’t want to hear it anyhow.

  Finally I asked, “So you think it was just an accident?”

  “I’m not saying someone didn’t purposefully feed Henry something they shouldn’t have,” she told me. “People do lots of cruel and stupid things. When I was studying at the Bronx Zoo, there was a sea lion pool. People would throw coins into it all the time. The sea lions kept eating the coins and getting sick. So the zoo put up signs warning everyone not to do it. And people kept doing it anyhow. This wasn’t garbage. This was money . Money they could use. There was no point to it, but they kept doing it, and eventually one of the sea lions got sick and died. The zoo ultimately had to post security guards to keep people from throwing their money away.”

  I’d eaten my cake quickly. Mom took my plate to the sink. She seemed saddened by the whole conversation. “So, yes, maybe someone killed Henry,” she said. “But I don’t think its murder. It’s just what humans have always done to animals.”

  Before I could argue the point, she turned me toward the bathroom and said, “Now go take a shower. You’re making the whole trailer smell like dead hippo.”

  Mom always went to sleep early and got up early. That was another habit left over from living in the Congo; there hadn’t been much to do at night there and the gorillas were usually up an hour before dawn.

  I lay in bed reading until I saw the light go out under her door. I waited another fifteen minutes to make sure she was asleep, then slipped out of bed, called the San Antonio police, and asked to talk to the homicide division.

  I felt bad for sneaking around behind my mom’s back, but I felt I had to do something. Mom hadn’t been there for the whole autopsy. She hadn’t heard the concern in Doc’s voice when he told Martin about the holes in Henry’s intestine. I had.

  “Sergeant Tustin. How may I help you?”

  “I’d like to report a murder,” I said.

  “Did you witness it, perform it, or simply find a body?” Sergeant Tustin sounded surprisingly bored.

  “Um, the last one. Sort of.”

  “You sort of found a body? You mean you only found part of one?”

  “No. I didn’t find it. Someone else did. But I heard that the victim might have been murdered.”

  “How did you come by this information?”

  “From the doctor who performed the autopsy.”

  “The coroner? If the coroner found evidence of a murder, he would have already reported it. . . .”

  “No. It wasn’t a coroner who did this.”

  “Then what kind of doctor did?”

  “A veterinarian.”

  There was a pause at the other end. “Wait,” Sergeant Tustin said, sounding annoyed. “This is about an animal ?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re calling the homicide division about an animal.”

  “Because homicide’s murder, right?”

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  I hesitated; this wasn’t going the way I’d expected. “I’d rather not say.”

  “You wouldn’t? Okay, then.” There was some typing at the other end of the line; Tustin was using a computer. “You’re calling from 512-555-2647?”

  I gulped. “Uh . . .”

  “Fitzroy residence,” Tustin continued. “555 means you’re out by FunJungle, so . . . Oh, no.”

  “What?”

  “This isn’t about that hippo? What’s his name? Harry?”

  “Henry. Yes. The vet thinks he might have been—”

  “Listen, kid. We’ve got our hands full here investigating the murders of people . We don’t investigate dead animals. I mean, animals kill each other all the time. That’s what they do. That’s why they’re animals. Somebody finds their cat chewed in half by a dog, we don’t go out and arrest the dog, you know.”

  “But this is different. Henry was famous.”

  “Really? Here’s what I recommend. Drop by the lion cage. I understand, nine times out of ten, when a hippopotamus is murdered, it’s the lions who have done it.”

  “I’m serious. . . .”

  “Yeah, sure you are. This isn’t funny any more. Keep it up, and I’ll send a team of police over there . . .”

  “Good!”

  “. . . for you .”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say except “Sorry. I didn’t mean any trouble. . . .”

  “Good-bye, Fitzroy.” Sergeant Tustin hung up.

  I put down the phone and realized my hand was trembling. My heart was hammering in my chest.

  How had that happened?

  I’d always thought calling the police to report a crime was the right thing to do. I’d assumed they would be eager to investigate crimes, like the policemen I’d seen in the movies. But Sergeant Tustin had seemed more interested in arresting me.

  Outside the trailer, someone sneezed.

  It wasn’t that loud. If it had happened in the middle of the day at FunJungle, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it. But in the stillness of the night, it might as well have been a gunshot.

  I quickly lifted the window shade, peering into
the darkness.

  No one was there.

  I listened carefully, picking up the faint sound of what might have been footsteps hurrying away.

  Part of me wanted to run outside to see who’d been there—but a bigger part of me thought this was a bad idea. If someone was spying on me, chasing after them could be dangerous.

  Had someone been spying on me, though? I wondered if I was being paranoid after my unsettling call with Sergeant Tustin. There were other reasons someone might have been outside our home, even though it was on the farthest edge of the trailer park. We had plenty of neighbors, many of whom worked odd hours and were comfortable in the outdoors. Any one of them might have been taking a circuitous route home to their trailer. Or someone might have stepped outside to do some stargazing. Or maybe someone was actually heading to the hot tub for once, but had been distracted by a possum or a deer.

  Heck, maybe it had even been a possum or a deer. Animals sneezed on occasion. And they didn’t sound any different from humans.

  I made sure the trailer door was locked tight, just in case.

  Then I slipped back into bed, trying to calm myself, thinking everything through.

  I seemed to be the only person who wanted to know who’d killed Henry. Doc had hidden the proof. My own mother hadn’t believed me. And the police thought I was just a prank caller.

  But it seemed to me that, if someone really had murdered Henry, that was important. If the killer got away with the crime once, why wouldn’t they do it again? What if more animals ended up dead because no one was doing anything to help them?

  If there was a murderer, people needed to know. And if I couldn’t convince anyone of that, then I’d have to find evidence that would.

  I was going to have to investigate Henry’s murder myself.

  There was a fresh heel print in the ground near our trailer.

  I found it in the morning. It was ten feet from our door, but I could clearly hear our radio through the trailer’s flimsy walls. Whoever had stood there might have been able to hear me on the phone with the police; I thought I’d kept my voice down, but maybe, as I’d grown more upset, I’d gotten louder.