The hall of the aquarium filled with squeals of delight as Mr. Potato Head descended into the octopus tank. I watched as Rich manipulated the toy precisely into place with a pair of long tongs while the octopus concentrated on a plastic bottle containing a piece of squid. Octopuses, in case you don’t know, are very good at unscrewing jar lids, and they love to eat squid. There is no honor among different cephalopods, it seems.
Octopuses are also very good at grabbing the tongs while you’re working in their exhibit—or your arm, or anything else you put in there. Hence the bottle of squid, to distract her. Rich liked to start the Mr. Potato Head game with the toy nicely presented in the foreground of the exhibit. He’d never have time to position the toy so carefully unless the octopus had something else to work on.
Everyone oohed and aahed as they watched her unscrew the lid of the jar and slip a tentacle inside. She pulled out the morsel of food, and it quickly disappeared into the opening at the center of her eight arms.
“That’s where her mouth is,” I said to the crowd. “It’s actually a really sharp beak, so this is not an animal you want to feed by hand.”
Then she started to explore the exhibit for the next diversion. Just in time, Rich had completed his staging and pulled the tongs out of the tank.
I knew that in back, Rich was now closing the tank lid carefully and latching it. Octopuses are skilled escape artists, squeezing through places so tight you’d never imagine it possible. They’re very squishable and very smart. Which means they need a lot of entertainment—enrichment, we call it in the business. The more intelligent the animal, the more likely it is to get into trouble when it’s bored. So you have to try to keep one step ahead. Keeping an octopus is basically like owning a monkey with eight arms.
When I thought of it that way I wondered why I’d wanted an octopus in the collection. It was definitely more work than the usual fish and frogs that were the mainstay of my section of the aquarium. I’d been an assistant curator for only a few months, and I’d decided that my major goal—to start, at least—would be not to get into trouble. If someone left the lid unlatched and the octopus ended up eating the residents of an adjacent tank, I would definitely get in hot water—a metaphor for trouble that makes more sense in an aquarium than in most places.
But then the octopus started to take Mr. Potato Head apart, and I remembered why she was here. This was without question the coolest new animal I could have come up with. Of course I thought fish were interesting—I wouldn’t be here otherwise. But an eight-armed, boneless creature that can disassemble toys without being taught—come on, who wouldn’t ooh and aah?
So right now, watching her take the nose off of Mr. Potato Head, hearing the public exclaim with wonder, I felt great. This acquisition was my big management success so far. I just had to hope that assigning the exhibit to Rich wouldn’t turn the whole thing into my first major debacle.
I know it’s hard to have sympathy when a boss worries. I know it seems like your boss has absolute power over a domain that includes forty long hours a week of your precious existence. So far, though, I hadn’t found that to be the case, now that I was on the other side of the equation. On the other hand, the thing where the boss doesn’t seem to have a clue? Yeah. I certainly hadn’t gotten my promotion because of any particular skills. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and appeared to be the lesser of a number of evils—those evils being my former fellow employees, who now reported to me. Bunny-hugger Janice worked with our education collection, the only place where we had furry, cuddly things and you didn’t need to know how to mix salt water or restart a dying pump. Overachiever Kate’s high standards made her better than everyone else, in her eyes at least. Old-timer Bob thought that if the way we did something twenty years ago was good enough then, it was good enough now. His depth of experience was great to have around; his refusal to try anything new, not so great.
And now we had Rich. I had hired Rich, and I was afraid he was my first error. He looked good on paper and had been full of enthusiasm in his interview. He had a relevant degree, an internship from a better aquarium than this one, and the appropriate nerdy passion for marine life. But none of that guarantees the right attention to detail; he was turning out to be a problem child. He was always late, left jobs half done, never left instructions for the other aquarists when he was off, and—my biggest headache—bumped up against Kate’s perfectionism more than any of his colleagues.
That left me where I had started, in the middle. I wanted to do a good job, but not too good, because I also wanted to go home on time. And that’s what they want in management. Someone average. Someone who’ll do new things as directed, but not push for new things that the administration didn’t think of first. Someone who’ll get along equally well—or equally badly, it’s the same thing really—with both ends of the extreme. And that’s the most important part because, let’s face it, managing the animals is easy compared to handling the people. Despite the job description, I didn’t need a degree in marine biology nearly as much as I needed one in psychology or some kind of conflict resolution.
And speaking of which, as I walked reluctantly away from the octopus exhibit—I had way too much work to do to stand there watching any longer—I saw Kate striding down the hall toward me with that look on her face, calling out, “Sara! We need to talk.”
I tried not to sigh—I knew that was probably one of my own annoying characteristics—and hurried to head her off. I didn’t want to have this conversation in the public area. Before she could launch into a tirade I said, “Let’s go back here,” gesturing to the door to the service area behind the tanks.
Kate nodded, with only the tiniest scowl, and followed me. But she barely waited till the door closed behind us before erupting.
“I just looked at the crickets. Rich didn’t clean them properly again. How many times do I have to explain to him how to do it? He shouldn’t have herps in his area if he’s not willing to help maintain the live food properly.…”
As she ranted on, I nodded, making a sympathetic face, and let my mind wander. She always explained more than she needed to, so you only had to listen to half of what she said. Although in this case, I agreed with her. You should think of caring for your crickets like you’re a farmer—you’re raising food and you want it to be of high quality. And Rich was sloppy about it, like he was with everything else. But what could I do? I couldn’t fire someone for not cleaning the crickets up to Kate’s standards. I wasn’t sure I could even put something so trivial in his performance plan. As long as he made sure they had food and water, it wasn’t a matter of life or death even for the crickets.
“So what are you going to do about it?” Kate demanded.
Already six feet tall, Kate appeared to draw herself even taller, threatening. I was a little shorter than average, so she looked like an Amazon. But Kate was more than just tall. Not a single glossy blond hair was ever out of place. She never seemed to tire. After being on her feet all day she went home and played in a soccer league to relax. You wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley, especially if she’d caught you not cleaning the crickets properly or rolling up her hoses wrong.
“I’ll talk to him again,” I said. Rich only took care of the crickets on Kate’s days off, so it didn’t have much effect in the long run, but there was no point in mentioning that. I’d found that trying to reason with her just made her angrier. She didn’t want to be reassured. She wanted justice.
She made a face, of course. I clearly didn’t measure up to her high standards. But I didn’t expect to, so it didn’t bother me.
“Okay then.” I turned to go.
“Wait,” she said.
I turned back, quickly planting a smile on my face. I was getting good at that.
“And Bob. Not only doesn’t he roll the hoses up right—I come back from my day off and there’s a huge mess in my area—but he’s not following the diet changes I asked for. He’s still feeding the old diets. He’s not even trying to conceal it. He writes it right in the log book.”
“He probably just forgets. You know he’s on automatic pilot after all those years,” I said before I could stop myself, momentarily forgetting that it’s a waste of time trying to explain another point of view to Kate.
“That’s no excuse,” she said. “The rule is to follow the written diets. Mine are up to date in the records, unlike some people I could mention. It’s his job.”
“I’ll bring it up in the weekly meeting. And we can post a reminder in the kitchen.”
I felt like I was possessed, hearing the words come out of my mouth—just the sort of thing I used to hate hearing management say. But now I understood why managers said these things. When you couldn’t solve the problem, you did something ineffectual but visible. That way you couldn’t be accused of doing nothing. It was right there on the whiteboard in the kitchen, see?
“Fine.” She scowled again, turned, and walked away.
As I headed back to my office, I filed the interaction away in my mind as a moderate success. The thing you have to remember is that everyone needs to feel special. Bob had to feel that his years of experience meant something, in the face of all the young whippersnappers with more education and new ways of doing things. Rich did a careful job of setting up Mr. Potato Head more nicely than anyone else would, no doubt believing it was more important than the disheveled state of his behind-the-scenes work area. And Kate, well, she had her high standards for every little thing, standards no one else could possibly live up to.
So I tried to keep conflict to a minimum by letting them all believe they were right. And believe me, there was plenty of opportunity for conflict. For one thing, people don’t get into working with animals because they are good at getting along with members of their own species. And it doesn’t help that we work in such tight quarters, where it’s especially hard not to get on each other’s nerves or step on each other’s toes. From the warm, comfortable, and spacious public side of the aquarium you’d never know that behind the scenes it felt a lot like working in a submarine, and not only because of the proximity to water. Simply tripping over someone’s hose for the ten millionth time could be enough to send you over the edge. But we also had to deal with it being cold all the time. The heat in back hadn’t worked for a while. Because of budget cuts, it was hard to get stuff fixed that we really needed for the animals, so the humans simply put up with the cold, and everyone wore their coats. But it left people irritated. We all had different ways of handling the stress. And my way was to speak in a soothing voice, send out memos to everyone by email, and post reminders in the kitchen. It was my role in the ecosystem, and there was no point in fighting it.
I paused to commune for a moment with the hellbenders, which were out from under their rock hides for a change, but almost immediately they swam back into their little caves, leaving the exhibit apparently empty again as usual. I knew how they felt. Some days I wanted to swim under a rock and hide from everyone too. But right now I had to go write another memo.
* * * *
Most days I get to work before everyone else. It’s a good time to check all the tanks and exhibits from the public side and see what needs attention without everyone thinking I’m checking up on them. Usually the issues are minor, algae on the glass or a sign peeling off. But this morning, even from the far end of the hall, I could see that something was very wrong with the octopus tank.
I broke into a trot. The octopus was my big success. And the exhibit had cost a huge amount of money. This was the last place I needed a problem.
I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing at first. My mind refused to take the patterns and resolve them into a coherent picture. It took me several moments to admit what was in front of me. Rich was floating lifelessly in the water.
Years of yelling at people not to tap on the glass failed me as I gave in to my first impulse and banged on the tank as hard as I could. Did I think maybe Rich was swimming in the fifty-degree water for fun? That he was floating there asleep and I would wake him up? I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. I was panicking.
My pounding had no effect except to make the octopus stir and start to move around the tank. And immediately I realized that I’d just made matters worse. I needed to get Rich out of the tank, and the last thing I needed was competition from the octopus.
I ran around to the service-area door and fumbled with the keys. It seemed to take forever to open the lock, but finally I was inside. I climbed the ladder behind the octopus tank. The tank lid was closed, but not latched. I opened it and propped it up and then started to pull at Rich’s body. He was soaking wet, wearing his coat, and bigger than me. And I couldn’t get any leverage. And now the octopus had gotten interested and was trying to pull him back.
I stopped and stood there, breathing heavily. Nothing in my training had prepared me for this. You have to be able to think on your feet in an emergency if you work with animals. I’d always been good at this before. But now my brain was as sluggish as if it had been in the cold tank all night with Rich’s body.
And body was what it was. I had no doubt. I was used to finding dead things in tanks occasionally, and it turned out that this wasn’t that different. There was no question he was dead. I looked around, trying to calm myself by thinking logically. I was going to have to write a report, I thought, now on the verge of hysterical laughter. That was the boss’s job, to write the report when something went wrong. What would I write?
Rich had been the last one on duty last night, scheduled for the late shift. I knew he usually didn’t do much real work after everyone else left. He surfed the web or puttered around playing with the animals. Which was okay with me. The point of the late shift was to close up after the public left, and to have someone here if there was an animal emergency. It was more or less like being on call. I didn’t demand much else.
But Rich must have been doing some actual work last night, setting up Mr. Potato Head for the octopus to play with—after all, the game was as much for her entertainment as the crowd’s. Mr. Potato Head was lying on the ledge around the tank. So Rich must have climbed the steep ladder to the catwalk with both hands, Mr. Potato Head safely in his coat pocket. Then he’d have rested the toy on the ledge—it would have fallen out of his pocket otherwise—while he crawled out on the catwalk, planning to reach back with tongs to pick the toy up, then place it at the front of the tank—the very best position for visitors to see it. Other people might not have bothered to set the toy up just so, since there was no one there to watch the game, but that’s Rich for you. He probably imagined the octopus liked it that way.
So what had gone wrong? He must have reached back toward Mr. Potato Head with his tongs and hit his head on one of the pipes running along the ceiling. All of us did this once in a while. No matter how often you’d climbed up on top of a particular tank, sometimes you’d make a wrong move and whack yourself. The space was just too tight to avoid it.
Usually the worst result was a headache. But Rich must have been knocked unconscious, if only for a moment. In another tank, there was a chance he might have fallen backward, floated long enough to come to, chilled but otherwise unharmed. But in this tank we had the eight-armed monkey, always looking for something to explore. She must have pulled him down like she pulled down all the objects we put in her tank.
And when he fell in he must have jarred the tank lid so it fell shut. I felt guilty for thinking this, but at least that was one bright side. Even though the lid hadn’t been latched, the octopus had not gotten out. She’d had enough entertainment, I guessed, with Rich’s body. I shuddered, thinking of how she must have explored all the openings she could get her tentacles into, just like she did with the different toys we gave her.
Thinking through it all logically, I was breathing more evenly now. I realized that there was nothing I could do for Rich. I climbed down the ladder and went to make the appropriate phone calls.
* * * *
They closed the aquarium for the day while the police investigated, though they seemed to believe the obvious—this was an accident. The following day we were running around like mad trying to catch up. I was doing a water change on the octopus. Something big and out of the ordinary had fallen in there. You changed the water when that happened. It was a relief to have procedure to follow. A comforting routine.
Mr. Potato Head was missing an ear. I’d noticed it when I put him away before the ambulance came to take the body, out of some odd notion that it was undignified to have the toy sitting there watching. Now I peered into the tank as I siphoned the gravel, hoping to find the missing piece. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to use the toy again—it would be very different now, watching the octopus take apart something with human features. But I didn’t want the ear left in the tank. I doubted she could get hurt or make trouble with it, but I didn’t want to take chances. You can’t trust an octopus. After siphoning the heck out of the gravel without finding the ear, I realized the piece likely was in the pocket of Rich’s coat. It had probably come loose from the head while Rich climbed up the ladder.
I removed the siphon from the tank, turned on the fill valve, and rummaged in my coat pocket for my refractometer. It wasn’t there, and I was too weary to look for it. I stuck my finger in the running water and put it in my mouth. It tasted normal enough. Kate usually mixed the salt water, so it was going to be right 99.9 times out of a hundred. It wasn’t worth worrying about.
I sat down heavily on the catwalk and watched the water spill into the tank. I was thankful for once for the micromanagement of the curators above me. The rule that you couldn’t leave the area while a tank was filling meant that I was going to get a nice long rest sitting here. Or so I thought, but then I heard the door to the service area open and slam shut.
“Have you thought about how we’re going to divide up Rich’s area till we get someone new?”
It was Kate, obviously. I opened my eyes. Of course I hadn’t thought about it. We were all busy trying to catch up. I hadn’t thought more than five minutes in advance all day.
“What would you like to do?” I said, trying to keep the weariness out of my voice. It was good to get input from the staff before making a decision. They had to feel you were listening to their concerns.
“I think I should take all of his herps. I’m not sure how well he was taking care of them. It would be good to have an expert keeping an eye out for any ill effects.”
I nodded. This would be inconvenient because the handful of amphibian and reptile exhibits were scattered around his area. It would be simpler to divide everything up geographically, with each row of tanks going to a different person, instead of an exhibit here or there. But it would be even simpler not to argue with Kate.
“We can talk about it at morning meeting tomorrow,” I said.
“I’m going to train Bob to clean the crickets on my days off,” Kate continued. “Probably that job hasn’t changed much in twenty years. I think he can handle it.”
I nodded again. Let her divide up Rich’s responsibilities. If she wanted to do my work for me, that was fine. Right now, she could have my job if she wanted it, I thought, my eyelids drooping again. I put the listening smile on my face and concentrated on the soothing sound of the water rushing into the tank as she began her next soliloquy.
* * * *
Rich’s death was sad and horrible, but honestly, it was also a huge inconvenience. It meant a lot of extra meetings with upper management, who were demonstrating their usual hysteria in the face of every crisis. Should we have a special protocol for working the octopus, with two people needing to be present at all times, like some places did for venomous snakes? Should we shut down the exhibit and ship the animal to another facility? Should we run around shouting that the sky has fallen?
The meetings wasted a lot of time, but I knew that soon enough the administration would flutter off and take their short attention spans to the next crisis. They’d decide on some minor but visible response instead of the initial frantic and massively inconvenient proposals for major changes. Probably we’d just have to put a warning sign on the tank. For a while, we’d think of Rich every time we looked at it. But eventually, it would become background noise, like all the other labels that no one reads.
The biggest inconvenience was that I had to hire Rich’s replacement. We needed a person with a little more attention to detail, so with any luck we’d get someone who didn’t push all of Kate’s buttons. It seemed cold to be thinking that way, because I had liked Rich despite his flaws, but I was moving on.
In the meantime, the final inconvenience was that here I was, weeks later, about to change the water in the octopus tank again. No one else wanted to work the exhibit, and I didn’t want to force them.
I grabbed a coat from the hooks outside the office and carried it through the warm part of the building to the service area. When I put it on, I realized immediately that it wasn’t mine. The sleeves fell to my knuckles, for one thing. I must have grabbed Kate’s coat by mistake.
I let myself sigh, since there was no one nearby to be bothered by it. Even if I rolled them up, I couldn’t work with those sleeves in my way, and that’s assuming I had the nerve to wear Kate’s jacket without asking permission. But I didn’t feel like trekking all the way back to the office. I’d just put up with the cold. I took off the coat and laid it on a step stool. Then, just as I was about to climb up the ladder, Kate’s voice crackled over the radio.
“I can’t find my keys. Has anyone seen them?”
I waited a moment, but when no one else responded, I reluctantly unclipped my radio from my belt. “Hey, Kate, I’m sorry, I’ve got your coat by accident. Maybe the keys are in it. I’m behind the octopus. Let me check.”
I reached down and put my hand in one of the coat’s pockets and felt something. I pulled it out just as Kate walked in the door. It was Mr. Potato Head’s ear.
I glanced back and forth between Kate and the ear for a moment. Suddenly a very different picture took shape in my mind. Rich is on the ladder looking into the octopus tank, and Kate storms in, screaming at him about crickets or hoses or new diets or any of the thousand other things she found to harangue him about. She climbs up after him and, either intentionally or accidentally, he hits his head. And he falls into the tank or is pushed. And she makes sure he stays there.
Then she goes back down the ladder and gets Mr. Potato Head to set up the appearance of an accident. Because placing his favorite toy in the exhibit was the obvious reason Rich would have been in a position to fall into the tank. So she climbs up the ladder with Mr. Potato Head in her pocket, and she doesn’t notice his ear is missing when she sets him on the ledge of the tank. Even a person like Kate, in that situation, would be in a hurry. Even she might miss such a small detail.
And then she closes the tank lid. But she couldn’t latch it, not if it was going to look like an accident. That must have driven her crazy. She’d always make such a stink when she found that someone else had left a tank cover or door unlatched. But she had no choice.
I had gone home before her that day. She worked late a lot to finish tasks up to her high standards. She could easily have stayed around till the building closed, when only the two of them were there.
I looked at her, probably stupidly gaping. Her expression dared me to say something.
There was no way to prove it. Were her fingerprints on Mr. Potato Head or the lid of the tank? Even if they were, we all had a legitimate excuse to have our fingerprints on any of the tank lids. And even if octopus enrichment wasn’t usually her job, Kate could have tossed the toy in for someone who asked. Or, more in character, picked it up off the floor where some annoyingly sloppy person had let it fall.
Besides, the case was already closed. The autopsy had shown Rich hit his head, and he had drowned. There was no way to tell that he’d had help. It would be Kate’s word against mine.
From the challenging look in her eyes, I knew I was right. But anyone else would think I was crazy. It was obviously a tragic accident. I wasn’t going to convince the world otherwise because I’d found a plastic ear in her coat pocket.
I handed her the jacket without a word and turned to put the ear piece in the box of octopus toys.
So now you see what I mean about how the boss doesn’t really have that much power. There’s nothing I can do. Except that now I am extra-careful to clean Kate’s cricket bin well. And I put the exact instructions in everyone’s performance plan too. They don’t know why I make such a big deal of it, but it’s okay. I’m the boss. I don’t have to explain.
Linda Lombardi is the author of two mysteries featuring small-mammal keeper Hannah Lilly, The Sloth’s Eye and The Lemur’s Cry. She has worked as a zookeeper and as a professor of theoretical linguistics and also writes nonfiction about pets, wildlife, and conservation. Find out more at her website www.lindalombardi.com.