“Absolutely not,” Mom told me. “You are not investigating any more crimes.”
“But if I don’t, no one else will,” I protested. “Marge is the law here, and all she wants to do is bust me.”
It was only a few minutes after Marge and the police had driven away. Dad had lied to our neighbors about what Marge had wanted and sent them all home. He’d also lied to Marge: He’d given her a fake address in town where I’d supposedly spent the night, one he’d simply picked at random out of the phone book. We figured it would take half an hour for Marge to discover this and another half hour to get back. In the meantime our trailer would be safe. Dad and I were seated at the kitchen table. Mom was making us breakfast, although I didn’t think I could eat it. My stomach was churning with anxiety.
“Marge will come around,” Mom said, cracking eggs into a bowl. “J.J. McCracken will force her to. He needs her to find that koala as soon as possible, not waste time with you.”
“But Summer says all the evidence points toward me,” I protested. “What if that convinces J.J. McCracken, too? What if everyone really thinks I’m the thief?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Mom said. “We know you didn’t do it.”
“You’re my parents,” I argued. “You’re supposed to think I didn’t do it. I’m going to need more proof than that to get Marge off my case.”
Dad nodded. “I think you’re right.”
“Jack!” Mom snapped at him.
“I mean about Marge,” Dad told her, then turned to me. “Though I agree with your mother that you shouldn’t take this on yourself. . . .”
“Why not?” I pleaded.
“Because the last time you investigated a crime here, you nearly got yourself killed a couple times over,” Dad said.
I sat back in my chair sullenly, aware he had a point.
“In fact,” Dad went on, “this time, I suspect whoever kidnapped Kazoo knows you all too well, Teddy.”
Mom froze in the midst of scrambling the eggs. “What do you mean?”
“It seems Teddy has been framed,” Dad explained. “And to do that, the kidnapper must have been keeping an eye on him.” He turned back to me. “What’s this evidence Marge has on you?”
“Video from the security cameras,” I said. “Summer says they have footage of me entering the koala exhibit and leaving it last night.”
“But no footage of you inside?” Mom asked.
I thought back to my phone conversation. “Summer didn’t mention anything about that.”
Mom started scrambling the eggs again. “Aren’t there cameras inside the koala exhibit?”
“I’d assume so,” Dad replied. “There are cameras everywhere else in this park.”
“Then there ought to be footage from inside the exhibit proving that Teddy didn’t take Kazoo,” Mom said.
“Maybe not.” Dad sipped his coffee thoughtfully. “If that footage existed, Marge would have seen it, wouldn’t she? And more importantly, there should be footage showing who actually did steal Kazoo. Someone else entering and leaving the exhibit besides Teddy. So where is that?”
None of us had an answer. I could only shrug.
Mom began to soak slices of bread in the eggs, then drop them on the griddle. “Do you think someone tampered with the footage?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Dad said. “Sadly, we know from experience that people in FunJungle security can corrupt the cameras when they want to.” (During Henry’s murder investigation, we’d learned his killer knew how to turn off the security systems in some exhibits.) Dad grabbed a pad of paper and a pencil and started to make notes for himself. “I know one of the guys who works with the security system. I’ll see if he can show me what they’ve got. Maybe somewhere in all that footage there’ll be video of the real thief—or something else that proves Teddy’s innocence.”
Mom nodded approval.
“So you think whoever stole Kazoo was watching me last night?” I asked.
“They must have been,” Dad said. “It’s the only way to make the crime work. They saw you go in and out and knew you’d been recorded. Then they went in and took Kazoo.”
“How?” I asked.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Dad admitted. “Either they knew how to get in and out without being recorded—or they were recorded and knew how to erase the footage.”
“I don’t think there’s any way to get in and out of that exhibit without being filmed,” Mom said. “You can’t go anywhere in this park without being filmed.”
“Then that would mean someone in security stole Kazoo, right?” I asked. “Who else knows how to erase the recordings?”
“J.J. McCracken might,” Dad said.
“Why would J.J. steal his own koala?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know,” Dad admitted. “I’m just spitballing here.”
“J.J.’s in Germany,” I informed them. “He couldn’t have done it. But Marge could have. She was already angry at me last night. She slipped in a bunch of puke because of me. Then she followed me to KoalaVille. Maybe she actually saw me inside the exhibit. And then, after I left, she came back and took Kazoo, knowing she could frame me for the crime.”
Mom and Dad chewed on that for a while. “I suppose it makes sense,” Mom said. “Only I have a hard time believing Marge would do all that just to get you in trouble.”
“Why not?” I asked. “She’s said I ought to be shipped off to juvenile hall plenty of times. Now she’s found a way to make it happen.”
Mom and Dad shared a look. “It makes as much sense as anything else we’ve got,” Dad said. “Though it also brings up the main issue we haven’t discussed yet: Why would someone want to steal Kazoo?”
“Marge called it a kidnapping.” Mom slid plates full of French toast in front of us and uncapped a bottle of syrup.
“If it’s a kidnapping, where’s the ransom note?” Dad asked.
“Maybe it hasn’t been delivered yet,” Mom replied. “It’s still awfully early in the morning.”
“I thought kidnappers always left the note at the crime scene,” Dad said.
“Since when are you an expert on kidnapping?” Mom teased.
“I’m not,” Dad told her. “But I know as much about koala-napping as anyone else, seeing as this is probably the first case there’s ever been.”
“There’s also the possibility that there won’t be a ransom note at all,” Mom suggested. “Someone might simply want a koala.”
“You mean, as a pet?” I asked.
“Yes,” Mom said. “You’re not eating your French toast.”
“I want to,” I said. “But my stomach’s all jumpy.”
Mom gave me a sad smile and tousled my hair. “I understand, given the circumstances. If I’d been unfairly accused of a crime, my stomach would be jumpy too.”
“Who would want a pet koala?” I asked.
“Lots of people probably think they do,” Mom said. “Look at the crowds who have come to see Kazoo. To most of those people, koalas probably look like the perfect pet. They’re adorable, and yet they just sleep all day.”
“But they’re not easy to take care of,” I countered.
“Not at all,” Mom agreed. “But not everyone knows that.”
“And even if they do, they still might want one,” Dad put in. “There are far more owners of exotic pets than anyone realizes. Especially around here. Did you know there are more tigers in captivity in Texas than wild tigers in the entire world?”
I looked to him, surprised. “As pets?”
Dad nodded. “And that’s just tigers. People also have lions, leopards, bears, chimps, zebras, and who knows what else. Maybe one of those collectors was dying to have a koala.”
“Is there anyone like that around here?” I asked.
“I think there is,” Mom said thoughtfully.
“I remember hearing that too.” Dad jotted down another note to himself. “I ought to find out the name.”
“Of course, you wouldn’t necessarily have to be a collector to want to steal a koala,” Mom said. “Back when I worked at the Bronx Zoo, regular people occasionally broke in and tried to steal the animals. No one ever succeeded, but they tried. It wasn’t common, but it wasn’t that rare, either. Now, that zoo is right in the middle of New York City. There are a couple million people living around it, so you’d expect that sooner or later a few of them are going to do something stupid. I’d hoped that, being out here in the sticks, we’d have a bit less crime, but we all know that hasn’t been the case so far. The sad fact is, there are probably a lot of people out there dumb enough to try to steal a koala.”
“But the person who did this wasn’t dumb, were they?” I asked. “I mean, they figured out how to get around all the cameras and frame me.”
“True,” Mom admitted. “The person who stole Kazoo was clever. I just meant that the motive itself was dumb.” She shook her head sadly, as she often did when she talked about how badly people could behave. Then she looked at my plate. “Still not hungry?”
I still hadn’t touched my French toast. “Sorry. It smells great, but . . .”
Mom put a comforting hand on mine. “No need to apologize. I get it.”
“No need for it to go to waste.” Dad reached across the table, speared a slab of my French toast with his fork, then moved it to his plate and dug in.
A thought suddenly occurred to me. “What if Kazoo wasn’t stolen at all? Is there any chance he could have just escaped?”
Mom considered that for a moment, then shook her head. “Koalas don’t like the cold, and it was freezing last night. Kazoo’s exhibit is nice and warm, and he had plenty of food and water there. Even if someone left the door to his exhibit wide open, I’d doubt he would have ventured outside.”
“Plus, koalas aren’t exactly the most adventurous creatures,” Dad added. “I’ve never heard of one escaping from anywhere before. And from what I can tell, that exhibit was built pretty well. I don’t think there’s any way Kazoo could have gotten out on his own.”
“You’re sure about that?” I asked.
“Not completely.” Dad made another note on his pad. “I could check it out, though I’m pretty sure it’s a dead end.”
Mom glanced at her watch, trying not to look nervous. “It won’t be long before Marge and the police realize they’ve been had. Then they’ll probably come right back here, and I doubt they’ll be happy.”
Dad turned to me and spoke with his mouth full of French toast. “That means you’d best not be here, kiddo.”
“Well, I’ve got school,” I said.
Mom and Dad shared a look, then both shook their heads. “Not today you don’t,” Dad said. “After here, that’s the next place they’ll look for you.”
I failed to stifle a smile. “Guess there’s one good thing about being framed for a crime.”
“This is only temporary,” Mom told me. “And if I felt we could trust Marge to lay off you and hunt for the real thief, we wouldn’t even be doing it. But Marge has a real bug up her bottom where you’re concerned. So for now you’re going into hiding.”
“Where?” I asked.
“The one place they’ll never think to look for you,” Dad said.