Belly Up

by Stuart Gibbs

  So that’s how we ended up having a picnic by the Dumpsters, Summer explaining to me how she’d ditched her bodyguards.

  “I do it all the time,” she said. “Daddy says they’re for my safety, but honestly, how much more conspicuous could they be? Each is like the size of a house. The moment anyone sees them, they know I’m here, and then I have to spend my whole day signing autographs when all I really want to do is see the animals. Fortunately, they’re not too hard for me to shake, ’cause they’re guys . Dad’s still living thirty years ago. He doesn’t think women can protect me. So all I have to do is say I’ve gotta go to the bathroom.”

  “And then what, sneak out the window?”

  “Please. Have you ever seen a public bathroom with a window? No, I just asked some girl if I could buy her hat and T-shirt off her. She was so thrilled, she practically let me have them for free. Then I put them on and walked right out the door. That’s why I wear pink all the time; when I change clothes, my shadows never realize it’s me right away. This time, they didn’t even recognize me till I started running. And by then, they didn’t stand a chance. Those guys might be big, but they’re not fast. They’re probably having a cow right now, thinking they’re gonna be fired when Daddy finds out I got away again.”

  “D’you do this a lot?”

  “I mix it up. If I do it too often, they’ll put me under lockdown at home. So I play the good girl for a couple weeks, let them think I’ve reformed . . . and then, once they drop their guard, I bolt.”

  “Think they’ve called your dad?”

  “Not today. Daddy’s in India on business. It’s the middle of the night there, and the last thing anyone wants to do is wake Daddy to tell him they screwed up. Besides, they know I’ll come back. I always do. So, give me the scoop on the dead hippo.”

  I was caught off guard for a moment. Summer had been talking almost nonstop since we’d sat down to eat, barely letting me get a word in, telling me what she knew about me, rather than asking questions about me. At first, I’d assumed this was because she was conceited and liked to hear herself talk, but I was starting to think that maybe she didn’t get to have normal conversations very often. Summer got interviewed by reporters a lot, but her bodyguards seemed to keep the rest of the world at arm’s length.

  And now, suddenly, she was looking at me expectantly, waiting for me to talk.

  So I told her everything. About finding Henry dead, sneaking into the autopsy, Doc’s murder theory, how I’d called the police to no avail, the heel print outside our trailer . . . Right up to how I’d been scoping out Hippo River. I was nervous at first, worried she’d think I was some loser with an overactive imagination, but she seemed really into what I had to say. Summer didn’t simply listen the way Mom had, though. She interrupted me constantly. And yet, it wasn’t annoying, the way it was when most people interrupted. It was kind of fun, because Summer had some good ideas and asked lots of smart questions. She turned out to not be self-absorbed at all. Instead, she was interested in all sorts of things. She was fascinated by my mother’s work, forcing me to go off on a whole digression about her research, and then she’d been really excited by my life in the jungle, asking me about everything from whether I’d ever seen lions make a kill to how our pit toilet worked. By the time I finally finished my story, over an hour had slid by, and I had to keep reminding myself that this was Summer McCracken I was sitting there talking to. Because she didn’t really seem much like the girl in the pictures of the supermarket checkout magazines. Instead, she seemed like, well . . . a friend. I hadn’t had many friends my age; the kids in Atlanta had thought I was some weird jungle boy from Africa, and we lived too far from any other children in Texas. So making a new friend was a rare experience for me.

  After my story was done, Summer nodded thoughtfully, taking it all in, and then said, “I know how to get into Hippo River.”

  For maybe the two hundredth time since meeting her, I was thrown. “You mean . . . You want to help me find what killed Henry?”

  “Well, it’s either that or go back home and watch TV. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but except for FunJungle, this area is awfully boring.”

  Summer smiled and I couldn’t help but smile back. I couldn’t believe what she was offering. Summer probably had hundreds of friends—and there must have been thousands of people who would have given anything to spend time with her—and yet, here she was, offering to help me investigate. Any concern I’d had about getting into Henry’s pool quickly drained away. I wasn’t alone in this anymore.

  This was going to be fun.

  Hidden in the lush landscaping around Hippo River was a door. It was how the zookeepers and maintenance workers accessed the hippo enclosures. I had known it was there—all the animal exhibits had an entry door tucked away somewhere—but I’d assumed it was impossible to get through. There was high security on all the exhibits at FunJungle, partly to keep the animals in—but more importantly, to keep humans out. Mom had told me plenty of stories about people breaking into zoo exhibits. When she’d worked at the Bronx Zoo, people routinely tried to steal animals, which were worth a lot of money on the exotic pet market. Three idiots had even tried to swipe an adult tiger once; two had ended up in the hospital—and one had ended up in the morgue. Unfortunately, most zoos couldn’t afford very elaborate security, but FunJungle could. The doors were all double-bolted and alarmed.

  In addition, the doors didn’t have keys. Instead, each had a keypad. If you entered the right code, the door would open. The codes were changed every day and sent to authorized employees via encrypted e-mail, but there were still some ways around the system. For example, I wasn’t authorized to have the code for Monkey Mountain, but Mom would just tell me the new one every morning. Then I could go see her whenever I wanted without making her come open the door for me. But for the most part, the security seemed to have worked very well.

  To my surprise, Summer revealed there was a secret code: One that never changed—and that opened every door. Her father’s personal code. J.J. McCracken wanted to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, without having to learn a new code every time. So he’d had his own code built into the system. And he’d shared it with his daughter.

  The door opened with a soft click, leading into a dark corridor that smelled like damp hay. Summer led the way in, not hesitating for a moment. She didn’t seem to have any sense that what we were doing was wrong. Instead, she seemed to regard all of FunJungle as though she owned the place. Which, I realized, she kind of did.

  Still, we’d taken care to do this when none of the keepers were around. It wasn’t hard to arrange; with only one hippo left, there wasn’t much need for keepers at Hippo River. All the keeper schedules were posted outside the administration building. We merely had to check the one for Hippo River before heading over. According to it, the hippo keeper wasn’t due to check on Hildegard again until four thirty. As it was only two p.m., this gave us plenty of time to search Henry’s enclosure.

  My only concern was that the schedule wasn’t rock solid. If any of Hildegard’s keepers felt the need to check on her, for any reason, they could drop by Hippo River—and if they did, they’d certainly notice us swimming in Henry’s pool. So I was still a bit nervous, though I did my best to hide it around Summer.

  I followed her through the tunnel. The pumps that filtered the river and powered the waterfall were so loud, we had to shout over them. The hydraulic system also appeared to be leaking; there were numerous slick spots and puddles on the floor. It was a much more dank and depressing access than Monkey Mountain, which had lots of windows into the exhibits and always smelled like oranges.

  “Does anyone have the secret code except your father and you?” I asked.

  Summer glanced at me over her shoulder, intrigued. “Henry’s killer didn’t need a code. You said he could have just thrown the weapons into Henry’s mouth.”

  “Maybe. I was only wondering . . .”

  “If I killed him?�
��

  I blushed so hard, I could feel my ears turn red. “No. I didn’t mean . . . Uh . . .”

  I might have stammered for another five minutes if Summer hadn’t burst into laughter. “Relax, Teddy. I’m just busting your chops. I don’t know if anyone else has the code. I don’t think my father would have shared it with anyone else, but he might have.”

  “Why’d he tell you ?”

  “’Cause this is my park. You’ve heard my father, right? It was all my idea.”

  “Do you sneak into the exhibits a lot?”

  “Don’t have to. I’ve been around FunJungle for years . Daddy brought me all the time while it was being built. There’s probably no place I haven’t been in it.”

  “So this is the first time you’ve snuck in somewhere?”

  “Of course not.” Summer grinned mischievously, the way a young gorilla would when it had something it knew you wanted. Before I could ask her to elaborate, she ducked through a doorway. “Here were go,” she said.

  I followed her into the dankest room yet. It smelled like mold. There were several large bins inside. Summer was already digging into the first, pulling out what looked like a long, transparent hose.

  “C’mon,” she said. “Time to go swimming.”

  The bins held a variety of equipment to let keepers and maintenance men access the hippos’ water. There were masks and swim fins, but instead of snorkels, there were the hoses, which had a mouthpiece to breathe through and then ran up to the surface. This allowed people to spend as much time as they wanted underwater without needing scuba gear, which J.J. McCracken considered dangerous and expensive. The hoses were heavy and unwieldy, but we eventually lugged all the equipment through the tunnels, up a flight of stairs, and out into Henry’s enclosure.

  It was weird being on the other side of the fence. I had spent countless hours looking into this enclosure, but I’d never had the chance to enter it before. As the viewing areas were all barricaded, no one could see us except for the tourists crowded at Umfundisi Scenic Viewpoint, and their view was so limited, it wasn’t hard to stay out of their line of sight. To be safe, though, we piled the gear in a small, protected cove well-hidden from view.

  I eyeballed the water cautiously, still concerned about hippo poop. But with Henry gone, the water looked significantly cleaner, more blue than brown. And it appeared that after Henry’s body had been removed, someone had dispatched a crew to spruce up the place. Henry’s favorite backwater, which had concerned me the most, didn’t look like a sewage dump any more. The whole area smelled vaguely like bleach.

  “It’s been cleaned,” I said.

  “Thank God,” Summer replied.

  “But if the poop’s gone, then the stuff that was in it might be gone too. . . .”

  “Not necessarily. Hippo poop usually floats on the surface. If the things we’re looking for were heavier, a lot of them might have dropped out.”

  I stared at Summer, impressed. She was right. I’d never met an American girl who knew about hippo poop before. Or anything about hippos, really.

  Summer continued on, scoping out the river. “I think it’d be best to look on the bottom of the deepest parts. It’s probably only ten or twelve feet there.” She selected a diving mask and then, to my astonishment, started to unbutton her shorts.

  I must have done a poor job hiding my surprise, because Summer looked at me and said, “What?”

  “We’re not putting on bathing suits?”

  “Did you bring one?”

  “No, I . . . I thought they had them here or something.”

  Summer laughed. “For kids who want to break in?”

  “I mean for the keepers. I thought we could use them.”

  “No such luck.”

  I could feel myself turning red again. Summer had a talent for embarrassing me, which she seemed to find amusing. “Don’t have a heart attack,” she said. “I’m keeping my undies on.”

  With that, she dropped her shorts and nonchalantly kicked them aside. It seemed wrong to stare, so I averted my eyes and looked at my feet instead.

  “You can keep your shorts on if you want,” Summer told me. “But it’ll be a lot more comfortable if you don’t.”

  I heard her footsteps race away, and then a slight splash as she dove into the pool.

  When I looked back, she was already gone from sight; only her breathing hose was visible as it snaked out of the water.

  I didn’t really feel like taking my shorts off. But I suspected that if I kept them on, Summer would probably tease me about it, which seemed worse than just going swimming in my underwear. So, as quickly as I could, I peeled off my clothes down to my Jockey shorts, grabbed a mask, and slipped into the water.

  As it was a broiling hot day, the water was wonderfully cool. It wasn’t completely clean, though. Apparently, even Hippo River’s high-tech filtration system couldn’t remove every ounce of Henry’s filth from the water. I could see my hands in front of my face and the glimmer of the glass viewing wall not too far in the distance, but that was it. The edges of the enclosure were obscured in a light haze of what I hoped was natural sediment and not leftover hippo poop. Summer had already vanished into the murk.

  The air tasted stale, like water from a garden hose, but it was easy to breathe. I kicked for the bottom and found it closer than I’d expected. It was cement, flecked with the occasional piece of brown gunk. I wasn’t sure what the brown gunk was, but opted not to examine any of it.

  Something metal glinted nearby.

  Excited, I swam over to inspect it, thinking it might be the murder weapon.

  Instead, it turned out to be a metal groove fitted into the bottom of the tank. The edges were steel, with a gap of perhaps half an inch between them. I stuck my fingers into it and felt something metal that moved away when I touched it: something loose, snaking through the groove.

  I’d never noticed the groove before—but for good reason. The metal was practically the color of the cement floor, standing out only in the direct sunlight. It was probably invisible from any of the above-water vantage points, and the glass warped the view too much to make the bottom visible from the underwater viewing areas.

  I had no idea what the groove could be for. My first thought was filtration, but there was a standard filtration grate not far away. I moved my hands along the groove and found a few screws bolting the metal tightly to the floor. I followed the groove a bit, seeing that it passed under the wire mesh fence that marked the beginning of Hildegard’s enclosure and kept on going as far as I could see. It seemed to be following the path of the river itself, as though it ran the entire length of the exhibit.

  In the distance, the massive shape of Hildegard Hippo pranced with surprising grace along the aquarium floor.

  My flesh went cold. You weren’t supposed to swim with hippos. Even the gentlest ones were temperamental, prone to inexplicable attacks. Back in Africa, you didn’t even want to be in a boat when hippos were around. I’d heard plenty of stories of hippos overturning canoes and fishing boats, then assaulting whoever had been in them. And I’d heard the occasional tale of them attacking swimmers as well. So my guard went up, even though the wire mesh was between Hildegard and me. FunJungle claimed the mesh had been designed to withstand the attack of a four-thousand-pound hippopotamus, but then, engineering had been known to fail.

  I held as still as I could, watching Hildegard. It appeared she hadn’t seen me. Instead, she jogged up to one of the underwater viewing windows. . . .

  Suddenly something sharp jabbed me in the rear.

  I yelped and whirled in the water.

  Summer floated behind me, laughter echoing through her breathing hose. She held something out to me. It glinted in the diluted sunlight.

  I gave her as nasty a glare as I could muster, which wasn’t much. Then I held out my hand.

  She dropped the object into it.

  It was a small metal ball with six barbs sticking out of it: north, south, east, west, top, and b
ottom. Some of the barbs had been filed to sharp points; some were rather blunt. It had been done quickly, without much care for quality. One barb still had the remnants of an even smaller ball at the tip. Overall, it was maybe an inch across.

  It was a jack. Or, it had been. Now it was most definitely a murder weapon.

  I tried to ask, “Where’d you find it?” It didn’t come out quite right, given the hose jammed in my mouth, but Summer got the idea.

  She pointed toward the far side of the enclosure, where there was a small dip in the concrete floor. I wondered if there might be more filed jacks in there, enough to prove someone had made a concerted effort to feed them to Henry. I started to swim that way.

  A shadow fell over me. Hildegard had noticed us. She now loomed on the other side of the wire mesh, her eyes narrowed in what looked like anger.

  On second thought, one jack was enough. We kicked for the surface and scrambled out of the water.

  There were showers in the keepers’ locker room at Hippo River. Even though I was worried about getting caught, I was more worried about having hippo poop on me. I took the longest shower of my life, lathering up again and again in order to get every last ounce of anything that might have passed through Henry’s digestive tract out of my hair. Summer teased me about it, but I noticed she spent even longer in the shower than I did.

  After we finally felt clean, it was time to further investigate the murder weapon, so we headed to FunJungle Emporium. The largest store in the park, it sat directly across from Hippo River, right by the main gates.

  There were dozens of other places to buy souvenirs at FunJungle, but most made an attempt to be thematically related to the area in which they were located. For example, Kangaroo Mercantile in the Land Down Under specialized in everything remotely Australian, from stuffed koalas to boomerangs to movies starring Australian actors. In addition, the stores were designed to look like local bazaars or quaint little shops, rather than western businesses. (The official FunJungle map went so far as to declare all of them “Attractions,” as though they were actually fun to visit.) The Emporium, however, was practically a supermarket. It made no attempt to be picturesque or blend into its surroundings. Its purpose was obvious: To grab the attention of everyone entering or exiting the park and make them spend money. Half the store was FunJungle merchandise, aisle after aisle of virtually anything a logo could be slapped on: clothing, posters, toys, glassware, bumper stickers, children’s books, postcards, beach towels, ashtrays, and cheap souvenirs that my dad always referred to as “future landfill.” The other half of the Emporium was filled with things it surprised me anyone would buy at a theme park: jewelry, crystal, gourmet foods, greeting cards, baby pools, bicycles . . . virtually everything, it seemed, except what my family ever truly needed.