“Pointing at the ring?” Frederik asked.
“No. At the elephant.”
“There was an elephant on the train?”
“A big bull elephant. Squeezed into the far end there. But Rasmus had forgotten to close the gate. Nerves, I suppose. And the elephant was marching this way behind him. It didn’t like the shouting. And the closer it came, the more Kamilla shouted. And the more she shouted, the more upset it became.”
“Wait,” said Frederik. He thought for a moment. “Wait, wait.” Another moment. “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What exactly, precisely, to be specific, was an elephant doing inside a train?”
“It was Thursday, dear,” said Edna as though that explained everything.
“And?”
“And then the elephant went a bit berserk.”
“Did it?”
“It did.”
“I see.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t really see,” he explained.
“But you see the result.” Edna turned and opened the giant door leading back to the other cars. The noise was deafening, but she held it open and looked along the carriages, one after another, a trail of destruction through car after car.
“The mayor’s marbles,” Frederik finally understood. “She lost her marbles!”
“Half of them, at least. Smashed to pieces by the elephant. There were heads and arms and fractured torsos all along the train. They had to shovel them into wheelbarrows. Took weeks to unload.” Edna shrugged. “It was her own fault. She shouldn’t have brought them on board. Not on a Thursday. Thursday was elephant day. Rasmus would take them around to Municipal Hall for special events. We had this special car constructed for them. The tourists loved the elephants, and the elephants loved a day trip. Don’t bring those statues on board on a Thursday, I told Kamilla. But did she listen? No. She was all about her career and the national news.”
“Did she get into terrible trouble?”
“No,” Edna said bitterly. “She didn’t.”
“Rasmus did,” Pernille remembered. “She blamed him. She said he tried to kill her.”
“And he was taken away,” said Edna. “Away from here. Away from me. Forever.”
“But why would she lie like that?” Pernille asked. “What could she gain?”
“What could she lose?” Edna said. “That was the question. What might she lose if she took the blame herself?”
“Her reputation?” Frederik said.
“Yes. And reputation was everything to Kamilla. Young, terribly clever, attractive too. Already a star of the borough. Now she wanted national acclaim.”
“But the marbles got smashed,” said Pernille. “On her watch.”
Edna nodded, folded her arms. “And the cover-ups began. The accident was big news for a day or two, but she had the marbles taken away and hidden. She pretended the damage was minor and they’d all be repaired. But that was a lie too. There were questions for years, of course. Churches and castles that wanted their marbles back. But she held out. Never said a word. Her career recovered, she became mayor, and in the end, the whole thing was forgotten. Faded away like it never happened.”
“Covered up just like the earthquake,” Frederik realized.
“She’s been hiding the truth for decades.”
“So she isn’t worried about zombies that don’t exist,” he said. “She’s worried about zombies that do!”
“Exactly. Her greatest humiliation, the secret she has buried all these years. It would destroy her if it got out.”
“It would destroy her,” Frederik murmured. “So, if the Dahl Dalbys tell her that we started the rumors, or if she breaks Venkatamahesh, she’ll come for us.”
Pernille stared at Edna, blinking too often. “Where can we hide?” She grasped Edna’s hands. “Can we stay here? With you?”
Edna chuckled. “That would be lovely. We could ride around in circles forever. No one would ever know.”
A brittle smile stretched from one of Pernille’s ears to the other. “Do you,” she asked, hesitant, “happen, perhaps, Edna, to have any family you haven’t seen for a while? Quite a long while? Relatives? You know?”
Edna smiled and nodded sadly. “Yes, dear. I do.”
Pernille’s mouth fell open in a tiny O.
“No,” said Frederik. “No, Pernille.”
“Are you my mama?” Pernille whispered.
The rattle of the train receded. Edna and Pernille stared at one another in the half-light.
“No,” Edna said gently, kindly, finally. “No, I’m not.”
Pernille’s face sort of folded in on itself. She let go of Edna’s fingers. “No. Of course not. Silly. How could you be?”
“I’d be honored if I were,” Edna said. “You’re a delightful young lady.”
“I’m adopted, you see.” She couldn’t meet Edna’s eye.
“And I never had children. I wish I did.”
“Well then. On with the mystery, I suppose. Can’t dillydally. Places to be. Always someone breathing down our necks, it seems. All go. Rush, rush. Barely time to catch our breath. Where next, muffin? Onward and upward?”
Edna rested a hand on Pernille’s arm. “You’ll find her, dear. I know you will. Be patient.”
Pernille wiped the back of her hand across her face and gave a terrific sniff. “I’m fine. It’s fine. No, really. Dandy. All good. What’s next?”
Frederik gave Pernille a moment to recover, then he turned to Edna. “Those marbles can ruin the mayor. They’re her one weakness.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Then we must find them before she finds us. We must show the world what she’s hiding. It’s the only way to clear our names.”
“You’ll never find the marbles. Nobody knows where they are.”
“Rasmus Rasmussen knows. He said the zombies are in the pipes. He’s been down in the pipes, we know he has. He must have found them!”
Edna scowled. “Don’t bring Rasmus into it. You’ll upset him.”
“But what choice do we have?” He took Pernille’s hand. The train screeched into the gloomy station deep beneath the old elephant house. “We get off here. We’re going to the zoo. We need to talk to the elephant keeper.”
Chapter 8
The Elephant in the Room
“Rasmus?” Frederik called out. “Mr. Rasmussen?”
The whitewashed public hall inside the old, abandoned elephant house echoed. Very different from the last time they were here. No chairs. No crowd. No chaos. An unlocked door led outside to hazy afternoon sunlight, washing the hillside.
Children and parents dangled over railings, watching three enormous elephants amble through the dust, swaying, spraying themselves with dirt, trunks swinging, curling, uncurling. The brand-new elephant house was a short jog away, half-buried in the hill. Darkened glass slid silently aside to let them in, and the temperature rose by twenty degrees. A heavy aroma, dry and fruity. Muted echoes. A ramp bending down to sand and sawdust, hills of it. Sunlight filtered in from a vast, domed skylight. The twitter of birds, trapped somewhere inside, unseen. Everything was misty and golden and wonderfully warm after the chill of underground.
There was a chest-high rail. On the other side was a concrete walkway and a row of pillars of varying heights to keep the animals from the public. There was only one indoors. They had met before.
“Padma!” Pernille said.
The elephant wedged her face between two pillars and reached out with her trunk. She puffed a little cloud of straw and dust into the air. Deep, black eyes in leathery skin, a chaos of wrinkles and lines. She took a step back and then forward. Her feet met the floor with absolute silence. No vibration. None of the thunder she’d made when trapped and upset.
“Where is your keeper?” Pernille asked her.
Padma ga
ve a huff but nothing more.
And then a door clattered open across the enormous hall. A wheelbarrow edged through, and behind it, a slab of a man. Broad-shouldered, big-bellied, hair in every direction save for the ones it ought to be. A bulbous, red nose.
“Mr. Rasmussen!” shouted Frederik. “Over here. It’s us.”
The elephant keeper stopped abruptly and scowled. “What do you want?” He plowed his barrow through sand and poop until he loomed alarmingly close and alarmingly large on the other side of the railing. Green overalls, blotched with dirt and dung and possibly worse. Thick, black hairs curling out of his nostrils and his ears and his moles. A waft of awful breath.
He fished in his pocket and pulled out an enormous ball of something dark brown and misshapen. He sniffed it. Examined it. Smiled. Sank his broken, yellowing teeth deep into it, and tore off a huge, gooey hunk. “Rmm bmm,” he said, with his mouth full.
“What?”
“Rmm bmm!” Little chocolate sprinkles sprayed in the air, narrowly missing them both. The elephant keeper chewed for a while, eyebrows raised, a finger pointed at his mouth as though to explain. He swallowed. Licked a smear of chocolate from the front of his teeth. “Can’t resist them.”
Pernille glanced at the man’s bulging belly. “So I see. Rum balls. That explains a lot.”
“You don’t like cake?”
“As a matter of fact, I love cake. I adore cake. I hanker and yearn for it constantly.”
“We’ve got that in common then, haven’t we?”
“We have,” she said. “We’re like family.” And then a distant light seemed to dawn behind her eyes. She tilted her head and stared at Rasmus very closely indeed.
“Oh no, Pernille,” said Frederik. “Not him.”
“Do you remember the first time we met?” she asked Rasmus. “Did you, by any chance, recognize me?”
Rasmus squinted. “No.” He placed his nose no more than an inch from Pernille’s. Breathed in her face. She recoiled and covered her nose. He stared for what seemed forever, inspecting her mouth and her eyes and her hair. His eyes narrowed to little slits. “Wait a minute. Yes! Yes, I see it now.”
“You do? What? What do you see?”
“Well, smudsig bleskift.”
“What? Tell me!”
“You can’t be,” said Rasmus.
“I can’t be what?”
“It’s impossible.”
“Who am I?”
“The daughter,” he breathed. “Surely you’re not the daughter?”
Everything fell silent. Padma the elephant pivoted slowly and stared.
“Yes,” Pernille said. “I am the daughter. I am! But whose daughter am I?”
An alarm started ringing in Rasmus’s pocket. “Snack time!” he announced, and took another enormous mouthful of cake. Then he tipped his barrow on end and showered the floor with hundreds of pellets. Dark green, each the size of a thumb.
He was shoved slowly aside by Padma’s trunk reaching between the pillars and gathering pellets in a pile. She scooped them high and poured them into her odd, triangular mouth. She chewed slowly, staring at Frederik and Pernille with black, shining eyes.
“Where are you going?” Pernille called. “Mr. Rasmussen?”
Rasmus had slipped away between the pillars and around the back of the elephant. He was heading over the mounds of sand and dirt, whistling out of tune.
“Come back!” Frederik added. “Mr. Rasmussen? We need to ask you something!”
The keeper glanced back at them. “I’m busy.”
“Well,” Pernille said, hands on hips and buzzing with excitement, “where he goes, I shall follow.” She hoisted a leg and clambered over the railing. Onto the staff-only walkway. An elephant just feet away. “Coming?” she asked, and then she was through the pillars, up to her shins in dirt and sand and whatever else the elephants had left behind.
“Pernille! You can’t go up there!” Frederik looked around, desperate.
She waved a dismissive hand and accelerated up the dust hill. “It’s all right. I’m family.”
“You’re not,” he said through gritted teeth. “You’re really probably not.” And now he too was struggling over the railing, heart thumping. He ducked between the pillars, sank knee deep in a mound of dust, recovered, and climbed, slipping, sliding, up the slope. “Pernille!” he shouted. “Wait for me!”
And did she? No. Of course not. When did she ever?
Rasmus disappeared through a door, Pernille in pursuit. Frederik followed into a chilly concrete corridor. No light. A sudden turn. He punched through dangling plastic slats, into another colossal space. Towering concrete walls, hazy glass ceiling.
Three inhabitants: Rasmus Rasmussen, clearly annoyed. Pernille, clearly annoying him. And the largest creature Frederik had ever seen.
It was twice the size of the others—three times—tall and black. A clump of thick hair above the eyes. Tusks like weapons. Great, sweeping arcs of yellow ivory, one of them needle sharp, the other shorter and capped with brass. A full-grown bull elephant, tossing side to side restlessly, rumbling. Frederik couldn’t exactly hear the rumbling, but he could feel it in his belly. A deep vibration. It came in waves.
The room was a concrete box. A trap. High, flat walls. Two giant steel doors in the opposite wall. The elephant turned its colossal weight in a circle and pounded the flat of its forehead into the doors. The whole space shook, the doors, the floor, the walls, the air itself. Back the bull paced, and again it advanced, unflinching. Another deafening crash. What was it doing? Trying to ram its way to freedom. It lifted its trunk and bellowed, and all the hairs stood up along the back of Frederik’s neck.
Pernille and Rasmus behaved as if it simply weren’t there.
“Tell me!” she said to him. “Whose daughter am I? Yours? Am I yours?”
“Mine?” Rasmus screwed up his face like a large, red walnut.
A million tons of elephant swayed toward them.
“Look out!” Frederik grabbed Pernille around the waist and pulled her to the wall. Just microseconds later and the swing of a tusk would have ripped the head from her shoulders. She slapped him about the ears as though he hadn’t just saved her from certain death. And then she was after Rasmus again, running to him across the dust. She tried to embrace him, kind of, but changed her mind when she got up close.
“Mr. Rasmussen!” Frederik shouted. “Can we please address—”
The elephant thundered across the space, livid and snorting. Frederik threw himself sideways and bruised his shoulder on the concrete floor. It was dusty and dirty, and bits of straw went up his nose.
“—the elephant in the room?” he wheezed.
No one was listening. Not Rasmus, not Pernille, and certainly not the elephant. Pernille fizzed about Rasmus like a firework.
“Who is my mama? Please! I need to know. It isn’t Gretchen Grondal, is it? Say it isn’t her.”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Rasmus said. “She’s a miserable old witch, if you ask me.”
“I am asking you!”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because,” Pernille said, and her voice seemed to fracture, “because you are my…” She hesitated, swallowed. “My real papa.”
“What?”
“My real papa,” she said again, this time stronger, more defiant.
Rasmus Rasmussen scratched his head and belched. “No, I’m not. Where did you get that from?”
“You said so,” she said in a kind of squeak.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“No.” His frown softened, and he seemed to choose his words with more care. “No, I’m sorry if I gave you that idea, kid. I don’t always know what I’m saying, see? My mouth runs away with itself sometimes.”
“But you said you lik
e cake.” She mouthed something else, but no sound came.
Frederik dared to leave the wall, watching the elephant very closely indeed. “Pernille? Are you all right?”
“You and Edna,” she said. Her eyes brightened. They brightened a little too much. She grabbed the elephant keeper’s filthy sleeve. “You lied to protect me. Both of you. A little white lie. A kindness.” She opened her hands wide. “Why didn’t I see it sooner? You old lovebirds. You and her.”
“Me and who?” said Rasmus, gruff and uncomfortable.
“You remember! Down in the railway? That day? The ring? You had a ring. You were about to propose.”
Rasmus flushed the color of beetroot. “Who told you about that?”
“Look out!” Frederik yelped, and dragged Pernille aside as the elephant thundered her way.
Rasmus ducked under the oncoming tusk by no more than a hair. He seemed barely to notice.
“What is wrong with that animal?” Frederik yelled.
“Sugar rush,” Rasmus croaked. “Just had his snack. Makes him fidgety.”
“Fidgety?” Frederik repeated, incredulous. “You call that fidgety?”
“Also, he doesn’t like doors. They make him feel trapped.”
Pernille clasped her hands together as though praying. “Who is my mama?”
“I don’t know. I forgot. I don’t remember. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You do!”
The elephant circled the room. It angled toward the doors again and pounded into the metal once more. The ground shuddered.
“I honestly don’t.” Rasmus’s face fell. He coughed. “I’m just an old, confused zookeeper. I understand elephants. But people confuse me. Women confuse me. Don’t ask me about people or women. I’m just like him.” He pointed at the elephant. “A bad-tempered old loner.”
He wandered in the wake of the elephant, cooing at it like it was a kitten or something equally unlikely to trample them flat.
“But you do know something else!” Frederik said, lurching after him. “You must. We need you to. The zombies. You know about the zombies.”
Frederik Sandwich and the Mayor Who Lost Her Marbles Page 6
