An hour later, after placating my brat cat with not one, but two tins of tuna, my phone rang.
"Merry." Kelly's voice sounded harried. "Can't talk much. I'm at a PTA meeting. But the girls are out of school for the rest of the week, and Dr. Wulf called asking to meet with them, so I made the meeting for nine, tomorrow morning, at the zoo. The girls will be dropped off there." There was a pause, and I heard her yell, "Coming!" She ended the call.
I was dreading this. Hopefully Lauren wouldn't lose her junior zookeeper status and we could sort things out with the zoo director. Dr. Wulf liked our troop, and we were participating in the fundraiser for the aviary. As I went to bed, I gave a silent prayer for tomorrow to go smoothly.
The next day, at nine in the morning, Kelly and I were sitting with Dr. Wulf in the conference room at Obladi Zoo when the girls came in.
They marched into the room in pairs, in hiking buddy formation, like we'd done on camping trips when they were younger. The only difference was that instead of wearing T-shirts, shorts, and hiking boots, they were all dressed up in business pant suits and thick-framed eyeglasses (which none of them needed). The girls took their places at the long table as the last two came in.
Lauren shuffled in wearing an orange jumpsuit, with her wrists and ankles manacled together. Betty was wearing a black graduation gown and white British wig like the lawyers wear in the UK. She was carrying a leather attaché case, and she took up a position at the other end of the table.
We watched in awe as she set the briefcase on the table and opened it. She pulled out a piece of paper and started to read. "My client, Ms. Lauren, strenuously denies these false charges against her. I am her defense attorney, and I demand the right to be heard!"
Dr. Wulf's mouth hung open. She was used to my girls' quirks and in fact often embraced them. But she didn't seem to be sure how to respond to this.
"Ladies," Kelly said. "No one is on trial here…"
"Objection!" Betty shouted.
"What are you objecting to?" I asked.
"Objection to that too!" Betty shouted again.
"I think there's some sort of misunderstanding?" Dr. Wulf started.
"Objection!" This time Betty pulled out a pink, sparkly gavel I'd seen Ava use at City Council meetings, and she slammed it on the table.
I looked to Ava, who shrugged. "I loaned it to us for good luck."
"Look." Dr. Wulf got to her feet, as if being taller would allow her to take control of the room. Ha! I could've told her that never worked for Kelly and me.
"No one's on trial. No one is in trouble here," the zoo director explained. "I love your troop and everything you do for the zoo."
"Objection on the grounds that this is a kangaroo court!" Betty said.
Lauren brought both hands to her lips and whistled. In bounded a small kangaroo wearing a jacket, necktie, and black-framed glasses. He hopped over to Lauren and began to flex his biceps in our direction.
"Norman!" Dr. Wulf cried. "What is he doing here?"
"He's part of my defense trial," Lauren said simply.
"He's our first witness," Betty explained. "Have a seat, Mr. Norman."
The kangaroo didn't move, but that may have been due to the fact that he couldn't sit comfortably in chairs.
"How did you get him out of his enclosure?" Dr. Wulf wondered. "It's regular hours, and I have five zookeepers in the Australian exhibit!"
Betty pointed the gavel at the director. "He came of his own volition because he wanted to help Lauren."
"You're saying he let himself out on his own and came here by himself?" I asked for clarification.
Norman turned to me and began flexing his impressive muscles, straining the sleeves of his jacket. Kangaroos could be dangerous, but I wasn't too concerned. I'd been threatened before by a pro-Putin kangaroo at the Moscow Zoo. After some menacing flexing on his part, I'd tossed him a banana and everything was fine between us.
Unfortunately, I didn't have any bananas here with me now. But I did have some of Mr. Fancy Pants' favorite shortbread cookies. I shook the box, and he came loping over. I handed him the cookies, and he took them and hopped out of the room.
"That's witness tampering!" Betty shrieked.
Dr. Wulf ran out of the room to, I'm guessing, deal with a large, warlike marsupial rampaging through the administrative building, wielding a package of Girl Scout cookies.
"Look," Kelly warned in her scary leader voice that she mainly reserved for the most serious of offences. "This has gone far enough. While I appreciate the creativity, Dr. Wulf just wanted to have a simple chat with you guys."
I winked. "The kangaroo was a nice touch though."
Kelly glared at me, and my demeanor changed. "I mean, you guys took this too far this time!"
The girls looked at each other but said nothing, just in case this was a trap. It's possible I trained them too well.
Dr. Wulf returned to the room and her seat. She smoothed her mussed hair and sat down. "Girls, I get that you are concerned. But really, I'm not that mad." She looked at the doorway because there was now some alarmed shouting in the hall. "Okay, that was too much, but really, I just wanted to talk to you about this. Lauren will not lose her junior zookeeper status. I consider her a very important part of the team."
"Where did the parrot come from?" came a voice from the hallway.
As if on cue, Dickie, the scarlet macaw, flew in and landed on Lauren's shoulder.
"That's our other witness," Betty explained.
"You can't handle the truth!" Dickie squawked, which was a vast improvement over his usual parroting of his teenage handler's problems with his mother.
Betty looked at us skeptically. "So, Lauren isn't going to jail?"
"Not in the least." Dr. Wulf's lips twitched, as if suppressing a grin. "However, I will need a promise that you will never, ever, ever take an animal out of the zoo again."
"I'll need a moment to talk to my client," Betty said.
The rest of the girls got up and formed a perimeter around the defendant and her lawyer, facing out to provide more privacy.
"Mom!" Dickie squawked from the inner circle. "Don't touch that! You might've summoned Sauron! I've told you how dangerous the things in my room are!"
"I don't know why he does that…" Dr. Wulf shook her head. "We've tried to change his handlers, but the one before Taylor was something called a necromancer, and we heard all sorts of disturbing things."
"Don't they just repeat everything they hear normally?" Kelly asked.
"Not necessarily. But Dickie is really into it. We even banned Taylor from his phone, in hopes that Dickie wouldn't hear these things, but it didn't stop. I'm guessing Taylor talks to himself. That kid has some issues, but he's great with birds."
The girls parted and went back to their seats.
Betty slammed the gavel. "Okay. We'll accept a plea deal."
"Lauren doesn't have to plead guilty," I said. "We already know she's guilty."
"Nonetheless," Betty argued. "Those are our terms."
Kelly pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes but said nothing.
"The agreement," Dr. Wulf cleared her throat, "is that Lauren can continue on with the program as long as she promises never to take out any more animals. But if it happens again after this, I will revoke her status."
Lauren shrugged. "Okay."
Betty slammed the gavel again. "We have a deal! Court adjourned!"
"Maybe instead of a CIA operative," I mused, "Betty will be an attorney?"
"God help us all," Kelly muttered under her breath.
We led the girls to the parking lot and stayed with them until they got picked up. Kelly headed home because Finn had to go to a birthday party. My phone buzzed. I was thinking of turning it off before I saw the message from Randi: Merry! We need your help!
As I ran to the car, I prayed it wasn't anything serious.
"Merry!" Randi embraced me after I ran into Ferguson Taxidermy. "Thank you so much for coming over!"
"I didn't want you here!" Ronni snapped.
"No problem." I looked around the strange showroom. "What's the emergency?"
Randi blushed. "Well, it's no emergency…"
"We don't need your help!" Ronni stamped her foot.
"Is it the babies? Ron and Ivan?" I started to ask.
"No dear." Randi smiled beatifically. "Everything is fine. We just need your help with our new project."
I felt my whole body relax with this news. "Oh! Right! The guys had mentioned you were working on something new." Ron and Ivan had said the twins had a new enterprise going on.
Randi nodded. "We do. It's a new direction with work. It's…a bit different. But we wanted to diversify the business."
"The business isn't in trouble, is it?" That would be bad. The girls were the sole providers for two families that now may or may not include prophet babies.
"Oh no!" Randi said quickly. "It's nothing like that. We just, well, were getting a little bored. And we wanted to try something new. It's turning out to be extremely lucrative and has boosted sales by six hundred percent!"
I wasn't sure what to say to that, so I just opened and closed my mouth like a fish.
"It's important work!" Ronni snapped. "And we don't need your help!"
Randi turned to her twin. "Would you go and get the diorama, please, dear? Thank you!"
Ronni stormed out of the room and, by the heavy, stomping footfall on the stairs, was heading down to the basement.
"It's a bit unusual, I'm afraid," Randi explained quickly. "But we need your voice. We're doing stop action videos, you see, of the dioramas. My voice doesn't register well on video, and Ronni's tone is a bit…off-putting. I thought your voice would be perfect. It's soothing and neutral."
This was starting to sound like an interesting idea! Stop action with narration? I didn't even know I had a good voice for that, but if Randi said so, I must.
I heard Ronni stomping up the stairs as Randi cleared off the kitchen table. Ronni appeared with a cloth-covered board that had animal shapes underneath.
Randi's hand hovered over the cloth, but she didn't remove it. "Before I show you, let me explain. This is a unique project. We just started working on the idea a couple of weeks ago, and when we posted it online, we were overwhelmed by how many people would pay money for this sort of thing."
I thought about their work in anthropomorphic taxidermy, and I could see how it might be popular on YouTube. In the main area of the shop today, I'd passed a couple of otters playing chess while dressed in lederhosen and dirndl, three cats dressed in black suits with guns aiming at each other in a classic Mexican standoff, and a dozen drenched rats reenacting a scene from The Poseidon Adventure. Now they were animating these? I'd pay to see that!
"It's a subscription service," Randi continued. "People pay so much a month to get this kind of content."
"Ah. Like a Patreon subscription," I said. I already paid five dollars a month to see two people cut and paste their cat into major movies. I kept that a secret from Rex, so I could understand why the twins were being secretive.
"Sort of…" Randi's voice trailed off as she made eye contact with her sister.
"Oh for crying out loud!" Ronni barked. "Just show her!"
"It's not Patreon," Randi said as she lifted the cloth. "It's Only Fans."
Before me was a theater with an audience of male mice, watching a nude weasel wearing pasties, splashing in a giant martini glass.
"What?" was all I could manage.
"This is one of the tamer ones." Randi held up her phone and played a stop action video of what appeared to be an eel orgy. It was kind of hard to tell what was going on since eels are normally naked and don't have limbs. Ronni was barking phrases like, "Oooh, love to love ya baby," in a voice that was harsh and distracting.
I could see why they wanted someone else to narrate. But was that person really me?
"I know it's a bit different than what we normally do," Randi blushed. "But we made ten thousand dollars last week, so it's very lucrative."
My jaw dropped. "You made ten thousand dollars with eel porn in one week?" I wondered what my cut might be.
Randi's smile wavered. "We don't like to call it eel porn. More like an eel love story…with many, many eels."
"Uh, that's eel porn." I squinted at the phone. "I think."
"We have others," She scrolled through, and I got to watch various amorous videos with rats, cockroaches, and house sparrows doing erotic things.
All of them were narrated rather harshly and buzz-killingly by Ronni, shouting.
"I don't know if I'm the right person…" I started to say.
"Hilly did one for us," Randi said quickly as she held up the phone for another video.
I didn't know Hilly had it in her. Her voice wasn't bad as she narrated what sounded like it came from a book while two crawfish ran their crablike claws over each other in suggestive ways.
I turned to my sisters-in-law. "She did a good job! Why don't you just use her?"
Randi shook her head. "She said it wasn't enough money."
"We gave her five grand for a four-minute video!" Ronni barked. "But she has standards! You don't!"
I was already fairly well off, due to the settlement I got from the CIA for wrongful termination. I didn't really need the money. Hilly made a government salary, but for all I knew, she could have saved a lot over the years.
"Do you have a script I could look at?" I asked, hoping to stall.
Randi handed me a few sheets of paper with the title Shrimp Lust. I looked it over. It was fairly straightforward with the narrator basically explaining where all the different legs went and what they did while six shrimps frolicked in a hot tub made out of a saucepan. For a moment I worried that this was a snuff film, but the shrimp all survived the hot water, according to the script.
I couldn't figure out how to get out of this. I couldn't do Only Fans. I had a Girl Scout troop! But I wanted to let my sisters-in-law down gently, so I came up with a compromise.
"I'll take this home and look it over while I think about it. I really should run this past Rex. Do you have the video?"
I really didn't want to see the video.
Randi pressed her phone screen. "Sent. Take a few days. Think about it."
"I knew she'd bail!" Ronni groused.
"She can't bail on something she didn't agree with in the first place," Randi told her sister.
I left, wondering how I was going to tell Rex…