KoalaVille came down even faster than it had gone up.
Doc Deakin, the head vet at FunJungle, had done a miraculous job of quickly nursing Kazoo back to health, but that was of little comfort to the Australians. They had already been furious about the koala’s theft. When the entire story was revealed—that FunJungle hadn’t properly installed the security cameras in the exhibit, that a keeper hadn’t locked the door, and worst of all that no one had noticed the koala’s disappearance for more than a day—FunJungle’s contract to display Kazoo was immediately revoked. Within twenty-four hours a team of official “koala ambassadors” arrived to take Kazoo back home to Australia. To J.J. McCracken’s dismay, they still charged him the full five million dollars he’d agreed to for six months of koala rental.
And so, on a chilly, slate-gray day only a week after Kazoo had been recovered, my parents and I stood on the hill above KoalaVille, watching a demolition crew flatten the koala exhibit as quickly as possible.
“It’s not a bad exhibit space,” I said as the bulldozers churned toward it. “Couldn’t they have put another animal in it?”
“Of course,” Mom said. “But everyone would still think of it as Kazoo’s old home—for a while, at least. And J.J. McCracken doesn’t want that.”
“The longer KoalaVille stands, the longer it reminds people of Kazoo,” Dad added. “And Kazoo is a pretty big failure for FunJungle.”
I nodded understanding. Under Pete Thwacker’s direction, anything with Kazoo on it had been removed from FunJungle as quickly as possible. Banners had been taken down. Park maps were reprinted. The bazaar was packed up and, under the auspices of charity, thousands of Kazoo dolls, T-shirts, and other merchandise were shipped off to the developing world and distributed to poor people who didn’t have enough toys, clothes, or koala-themed snow globes.
Luckily for FunJungle, at least the Kazoo story had a happy ending: The koala hadn’t died. And while the press had a field day with the theft, they—and the public—never learned about the real disaster that had occurred that week: the sabotage of Shark Odyssey. Pete Thwacker had done an incredible job keeping a lid on the story, and perhaps more importantly, not a single shark had been hurt. However, it would be months before the tank could open again. All the sharks had been moved to a different facility while the tank was drained and the glass tube was rebuilt. Meanwhile, park engineers were dreaming up a few new bells and whistles that could be added to bolster the story that Shark Odyssey was merely closed “to enhance the viewing experience.”
In the meantime, Hank the Tank was in custody—as was Freddie Malloy, who the police had caught at the San Antonio airport, trying to board a plane to Mexico. J.J. McCracken was now quietly pressing charges against Walter Ogilvy and the Nautilus Corporation. Ogilvy was actually suing back, claiming that placing Hank in a room with an angry, poo-throwing chimpanzee was illegal coercion, and therefore his confession had been given under duress. Since no one had apparently ever used a chimpanzee to extract a confession before, it was probably going to be a long time before the case was settled. “It might even go all the way to the Supreme Court,” Dad had joked. “Hank the Tank versus Furious George and his flying feces.”
As my parents and I watched, KoalaVille collapsed like a house of cards under the bulldozer. Within seconds, Kazoo’s home was gone.
Seeing this bothered me more than I’d thought it would. I turned away—and noticed someone else had come to watch the demolition.
Kristi Sullivan stood by herself uphill from us. The view was much better where we were, but Kristi had been avoiding my family. Or maybe it was just me. Mom said Kristi was still terribly embarrassed about her role in Kazoo’s theft—and how all her mistakes had ended up implicating me. Now she seemed like she was on the verge of tears.
“Is Kristi going to be fired?” I asked.
“No.” Mom sounded annoyed. “Though, thankfully, she’s not going to be a keeper anymore. Instead Pete Thwacker transferred her to public relations. He claims she has some attributes that would make her a strong asset in dealing with the press.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“That she’s pretty,” Dad explained.
Mom frowned at the very thought of this. “If that girl had been doing her job, Kazoo would never have been stolen in the first place. If that koala had died, it would have been her fault as much as Vance’s. Any other zoo would have sacked her. But here they give her a promotion.”
I looked toward Kristi again and caught her watching me. She quickly turned away, not wanting to meet my gaze. Then she pulled the hood of her parka over her head and hurried away.
Although Mom was obviously angry at Kristi, I didn’t feel that way toward her. Yes, she’d messed up, but she hadn’t done anything wrong on purpose. I was still more upset with Marge, who’d been so determined to arrest me that she’d never bothered looking for the real thief. To my relief, Tracey Boyd also shared this opinion. In fact she was livid at Marge for botching the investigation. Marge wasn’t going to be fired either, but she was getting demoted to shoplifting patrol while someone with actual crime-fighting experience was brought in to run park security.
Meanwhile Arthur Koenig had been fired. I’d been right: He was the one who had stolen—and then sold—the photos of the tiger cubs. This was a violation of his contract, and so FunJungle didn’t even have to give him two weeks’ notice. Security just showed up at his office and forcibly removed him from the park.
Most importantly, Vance Jessup had also gotten the punishment he deserved: twelve months in a juvenile detention facility. Which meant he wouldn’t be bothering me again for a long time.
With Vance gone, TimJim had stopped bullying me—and everyone else—as well. Maybe they were just nicer without Vance around. Or maybe they’d been shamed after getting trounced by Dashiell and Ethan. Or maybe they were simply trying to be on their best behavior; Bubba Stackhouse was still figuring out if he could arrest them as accomplices in the koala theft, since they hadn’t told the police about it.
All in all, school had become significantly better since I’d solved the crime and helped catch Vance Jessup. Maybe that was why I wasn’t angry at Kristi Sullivan; while she’d unwittingly gotten me tangled up in the whole Kazoo business, I’d ultimately benefited from it. Lots of kids wanted to be friends with me now—and since Xavier was my friend, they wanted to hang out with him, too. Dashiell and Ethan were encouraging me to try out for the school soccer team in the spring. And Violet Grace now seemed to be interested in me, rather than just my connection to Summer McCracken.
At Dad’s urging, I’d called Violet. (“When the head cheerleader asks you to call her, you call her,” he’d advised.) But I didn’t just do it because she was cute and popular. She was also really nice and turned out to be much less superficial than I’d originally thought. I’d been nervous on the call at first, but it had gone pretty well. At one point I’d mentioned that I could give her a private tour of FunJungle, and she’d jumped at the chance. She was going to come do it the next Sunday. I didn’t really think of it as a date, but Xavier did. I think he was more excited than I was.
Truthfully, even though I liked Violet, the idea of a date with her—or whatever it was—felt a little bit wrong. Like I was cheating on Summer, somehow. Which was crazy, of course. Summer and I were only friends, she was going to school two thousand miles away, and she could be annoyingly distant at times. She hadn’t even called me after Kazoo had been recovered. She’d only sent texts. A lot of texts, but still, it wasn’t a substitute for talking. Plus, her own father didn’t seem to care much for me. Yes, he acted friendly to my face, but over the past few weeks he’d threatened my parents’ jobs and allowed me to be arrested—and yet, once I’d been proved innocent, he hadn’t even thanked me for my help, let alone apologized. I’d come to realize that J.J. McCracken was far more slippery than I’d thought, and sometimes I even caught myself wondering how much Summer was like him.
While I was standing there, watching the bulldozers with my parents, my phone rang. It was Summer. Any doubts I’d had about her immediately melted away. I answered as quickly as I could. “Hey! How are you?”
“I should be asking you that,” she said. “You’ve been through a lot more than me lately.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Want to video chat?”
“Nah,” she replied. “I’ve got a better idea. Turn around.”
I did. To my surprise, Summer was standing only twenty feet behind me. She was wearing a pink parka and a big smile. Her usual bodyguards stood a few steps behind her.
I couldn’t believe she was actually there. I kept staring dumbly, as though maybe she were simply a mirage.
Dad gave me a nudge with his arm. “What are you still hanging around here with us for?” he asked. “Go say hi.”
I tucked my phone in my pocket and trotted over to Summer. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” Summer teased. “Did you forget already?”
“I mean, why aren’t you still at boarding school? Isn’t there still a week until winter break?”
“I took all my exams early,” Summer said, like this was no big deal. “I wanted to come home sooner. I wasn’t enjoying school all that much.”
“Really?” I asked. “I thought you liked it there.”
Summer shrugged. “It’s nice and all, but it’s kind of dull. This place is a lot more exciting. Hippo murders. Koala kidnappings. Who knows what will happen next?” Summer lowered her eyes. “Plus, there were some things I missed here.”
I wasn’t sure, but it looked like behind her curtain of blond hair Summer was blushing. Before I even knew I was doing it, I said, “I missed you, too.”
Summer turned even redder, but she looked up and smiled again. “My dad will probably flip, but . . . I was thinking of asking him if I could go to school here next semester.”
Despite all the excitement I’d had lately—being framed for the koala theft and getting caught in the shark tube and punching out Vance Jessup—my heart now beat faster than it had for anything else the previous week. Suddenly I understood Dad’s comment from a few days before—about how someday there’d be a girl I’d do anything to get the attention of, no matter how stupid it was.
“That’d be awesome,” I said.