Madigan Amos Zoo Mysteries : Books 1 - 5 (Madigan Amos Zoo Mysteries Boxset)

by Ruby Loren

  “Good luck,” Barnaby said, and even Sara gave me a smile, albeit a frosty one. I reflected that the queen of ice persona suited her job very well indeed.

  The crowd was larger than I’d ever anticipated. The organisers had worked out that the barn could hold a couple of hundred people, but once the chairs were all out and everyone was packed in, there were still people cramming in along the edges.

  I scanned the crowd, hoping to see some sign of Tiff, who was supposed to be speaking half an hour after me about her successful Etsy business. We’d even planned that I’d come up and tell everyone how Tiff had suggested I add my comic panels to Etsy and how successfully they’d sold. I assumed that little feature was definitely off.

  I pushed my glasses higher up my nose, reflexively, and stared down at my notes. It will be over before you know it, I promised myself and clicked the remote, pulling my first presentation slide up onto the screen.

  It went better than I’d expected.

  When the time came at the end for me to take any questions, the ones asked were intelligent, and it seemed to me that I must have done a good job and not missed too many things out.

  Then Tiff walked in. My eyes were unable to look anywhere else but at her, whereas hers were firmly glued to the ground. She hunched against a wall near the back and didn’t look up. I was forced to ask the person who’d just asked me a question to repeat it again.

  When the time came for me to draw the seminar to a close, there was a huge round of applause, which somehow made me feel much worse now that Tiff was there. I smiled as best as I could and thanked the audience again for being so wonderful. Then, I left the barn speedily as possible. A glance at my phone told me I’d run over time, which must be why Tiff had been forced to come in whilst I was still talking.

  I shut my eyes and leant up against the outer fence of the play zone. So, now I knew where I stood. Tiff looked like she wanted nothing to do with me.

  “I’m such an idiot,” I said aloud, still with my eyes shut.

  “I thought it was pretty good, the part I heard, anyway.”

  I opened my eyes and found Auryn was standing in front of me.

  “When did you get in?” I asked, I hadn’t seen him there at all.

  “Hmm, right about when they all clapped.” He grinned sideways. “I suppose that doesn't qualify me to judge. They were either clapping because you were really good, or because they were relieved it was over.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” I said, but I managed to smile.

  I opened my mouth and shut it a couple of times, before I realised I didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Now Tiff was giving me the silent treatment, the only person I was especially close to at the zoo was Auryn.

  “Tiff walked in at the end of my presentation. She didn’t even look my way,” I confided.

  Auryn looked troubled. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said, making me feel even worse.

  “None of this is your fault, I want you to know that. I shouldn’t have done what I did. I knew what Tiff felt for you.” I sighed. “If I’d wanted to avoid this, I should have made a different decision a long time ago, but things were different then,” I mused and then hoped Auryn wouldn’t interpret that too favourably. I was walking on ice that could crack at any moment, and I had no idea what lurked beneath in my dark lake of unexplored feelings.

  “Hey, can you do me a favour? I need to grab some stuff from my office and take it across to the new place. The office was actually okay after the fire. I suppose there is some benefit to having ridiculous wood panelling after all.” He pulled a face.

  “You can change it when you remodel the office space,” I told him.

  “With Lawrence firmly back in retirement, there should be a minimised risk of it happening again.”

  I nodded. “Although, he wasn’t the one who set the fire,” I reminded Auryn. The old man may be rude and mean to his own family, but the will was proof enough that he wanted the best for Auryn. There was no way Lawrence would have ever done anything to harm the zoo.

  I still couldn’t help but wonder if Lawrence’s family members all had airtight alibis. Would Claudia have told them they were out of the will? I thought so. The perceived loss of a large inheritance could definitely drive some people to murder.

  I frowned. It still didn’t make sense, unless the family had given up all hope of him ever changing his mind. I tilted my head. Perhaps they had. But if they were willing to kill him, I’d have thought they would be willing to force him to change his will before they did it.

  Maybe they did? I thought as I walked along the path with Auryn. If a second, more recent will turned up, I would re-evaluate my views.

  Auryn opened the door of his office and I walked in, grateful that the smell of burned plastic wasn’t so strong in here. This room smelt the same way it always had, aged and a little musty, but with some hidden warmth that only came with the years.

  Auryn sat down on the chair behind the desk and indicated I should sit, too. My heart jumped a little as I realised this wasn’t the simple grab and carry mission Auryn had claimed. He clearly wanted to talk about something.

  “Madi, I just wanted to say sorry for the position I put you in after the funeral,” he said, far more formally than I’d ever heard him sound. “I shouldn’t have pushed you. And to then say what I did was unforgivable.” His face lined with worry. “Can we still be good friends? I know you don’t feel the same way I do, and that’s okay…”

  “That’s not…” I hesitated. What had I just been about to say? “I don’t not feel the same way about you,” I said slowly, using some truly terrible English to get my point across. “I just need some time, Auryn. I’ve been hurt recently, and now I’m not sure if I trust my own feelings.”

  Our eyes met and his grey pair seemed to sparkle.

  “Are you saying there’s a chance?”

  “Auryn!” I said, exasperated. He had to know that I did have some fairly strong feelings for him. I didn’t let any old person roll around with me in the straw! I wasn’t sure whether to be offended, or not. “I didn’t exactly push you off me, did I?” I settled for saying - and grumpily, too.

  Auryn grinned. “I knew it!” he said, standing up. “I know you haven’t said anything, etcetera, etcetera… but you’ve still made my Christmas.”

  I stood up too, feeling hopeless and, admittedly - a little happy.

  I thought he was about to take the few steps around the desk to close the gap between us.

  I was about to…

  Actually, I didn’t know what I was about to do, which was the most worrying thing of all.

  Fortunately, I never had to find out. We both heard something falling off onto the floor, deeper inside the offices.

  “Is anyone else supposed to be up here?” I asked Auryn.

  He shook his head. “No, it’s dangerous to walk around because of the fumes. Also, the structure where the fire was still hasn’t been fully tested. Although the arson specialists thought it was okay.” He saw my expression and shrugged. “This office is probably fine. Look at it, even poison smoke and fire can’t beat ancient wood panelling.”

  I poked my head out of the office door and looked further inside the stained and damp open plan area.

  Nothing moved.

  “It could have just been something moving by itself,” I muttered, but I didn’t believe it. Something big had fallen, and it sounded like it had come from further inside the building, where the side rooms and other individual offices were.

  Auryn and I crept along the damaged carpet, being as quiet as we could. Every room we passed, we looked in at the window, but there was nothing. After what felt like forever of moving along at a snail’s pace, we stopped outside Jenna’s office. I nodded at Auryn and we both stepped out and looked through the window.

  The man inside the office dropped the laptop he’d been holding.

  “Officer Ernesto, what are you doing here?” I asked, as if I didn’t already have a pretty go
od idea.

  “I was… just going over some more evidence, in case we’d missed something,” he said, entirely unconvincingly.

  “Without your uniform on?” Auryn looked sceptical.

  “What were you looking for?” I asked him, deciding to put Officer Ernesto out of his misery.

  His face crumpled. “It was only after she was gone that I realised I truly loved her. She said she thought I was different and special. We were going to give it a really good go,” he said, and sounded like he actually believed it. With Jenna’s track record, I wasn’t as sure, but who knew? Perhaps fate had been cruel enough to let Jenna find her perfect match right before she was killed.

  I tried to look understanding. “I understand you’re upset, but…”

  “There might have been some videos,” he said, and then immediately turned scarlet.

  I nodded. I’d thought it would be something like that. “They weren’t on her phone?” I asked, knowing that the police still had it.

  “No, we used a camera attachment for her laptop to record it straight onto there.” He looked up, still blushing. “I made sure I was there when they went through it all. I was hoping I could ask them to delete anything of me without looking too closely.” He cleared his throat. “None of the videos were there and we only made them the other…” His bottom lip wobbled a little. “They weren’t there. She said they were special and she’d never get rid of them. They were our memories.”

  I frowned at the laptop lying on the floor. “Where do you think they went?”

  “I thought that maybe there was a folder the police overlooked. Maybe she hid it in an online cloud, or something.” He shook his head. “I’m not the most technical guy ever, but they’ve got to be somewhere.”

  “Can you think of anywhere else she might have saved the videos? Everything we found in her office is here, and I’m sure the police found anything similar in her apartment when they went through that.”

  Ernesto shook his head. “It wasn’t there. They found the camera thing in the apartment, but it just films, it doesn’t save anything. I don’t know where they could be.”

  He looked at the laptop, and I recognised the expression of someone who’s just had a dawning realisation. “Did you find a hard drive?”

  “Hard drive? Like an external one?” I asked.

  “Yes, it’s just come back to me. I think I saw Jenna with a little black thing that looked like a hard drive plugged into her laptop, from time to time. I don’t remember the police going through it. Do you think it’s still here?” he said, rummaging through the boxes again.

  “I’ve been through all of this stuff twice,” I told him. “It’s not here. Are you sure it was a hard drive?” If that was missing, it could be pretty important.

  “Not completely. It might even have just been her phone plugged in to charge.” He screwed up his face. “I can’t remember! It’s crazy how those little every-day details always slip your mind. I never realised it might matter.” His eyes grew misty again.

  “You can’t just come up here and start going through her things. They’re only here because her parents aren’t sure what they’re going to do with her belongings. They’re a bit fire damaged now, too,” Auryn finished, looking pointedly at the soot stains, which had infiltrated this office and the rest of the rooms down the corridor.

  “Are you going to report me?” Officer Ernesto asked, his eyes wide and panicked.

  I looked at Auryn, and he looked back at me.

  “We really should…” he began “…but I do genuinely think you were just here to look for the videos. How about we make a deal? We’ll tell the police that you came by wanting to check something, and I gave you permission to come up here to look. Then you can report to them that there might be a hard drive missing. How does that sound?” Auryn said, surprising me with his diplomacy. How could half a year make such a huge difference to a person?

  “Thank you,” Officer Ernesto said, still looking mortified. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost my job, too,” he said.

  “Okay. Let’s all get back to the jobs we love so much,” I said, not ready to deal with any serious display of emotion. I was still feeling a bit raw from the frank discussion I’d had in Auryn’s office.

  Auryn and I stood for a moment outside of the office, watching Officer Ernesto walk back outside to the car park. It was eerily empty outside the front of the zoo today. All of the artists and crafters had arrived early, so they could make the most of the time allowed for them to complete their pieces, prior to the judging. Even the younger artists competing in the children’s section had arrived early, although that might have been so they would have time to squeeze in the Winter Wonderland, too.

  I glanced at the time on my phone and thought it might be nice to take a stroll around the zoo to see how everyone was getting on, and to also check how the animals were faring.

  “Hey, Auryn, did Jenna ever…?” I trailed off, not knowing how to ask the question I’d wondered about for a long time.

  I wasn’t entirely surprised when Auryn blushed.

  “She, uh, may have said a few things, but I never said yes, so nothing serious happened.”

  I raised my eyebrows at the ‘nothing serious’ part.

  He blushed even more furiously. “It was a couple of years ago,” he said and I decided to let him off the hook without further interrogation. I could hardly single out Auryn for bad behaviour when half the zoo had been involved with Jenna at one time or another. Anyway, Auryn had been young and single. His decisions were his own, as were Jenna’s.

  Even so, I was glad it had been so long ago.

  Uh-oh! I thought in my head, realising that my feelings about Auryn being with anyone but me were surfacing hard. That thin ice I’d been walking on had definitely started to break, dunking me in emotions I wasn’t sure it was smart to feel.

  But we never really have much of a choice when it comes to love, do we?

  I’d thought Auryn’s silence might have been him following my own line of thoughts, but when he spoke, I realised I was wrong.

  “Do you think that was really the reason why he was looking around? Or do you think he was looking for something else?”

  “You think he might be the one who killed her?” I asked.

  Auryn looked thoughtful and shrugged.

  “I hate to say it, but I think it’s far more likely to be someone in the zoo. I don’t know if the police have analysed the rat poison in the storage shed to check if it that’s what poisoned Jenna, but if it is, then it has to be someone who knew about its existence. Someone who’s been here long enough and either knew that it was being stored in the storage sheds, or was able to figure it out.” I said. I hadn’t known for sure that the rat poison had still been around, but it hadn’t taken me a great leap of logic to figure out the first place to look for it - and there it had been.

  “I didn’t see Officer Ernesto at the party,” Auryn confessed.

  “That’s probably a good thing. Jenna was up to her usual tricks,” I said, remembering back.

  “And yet, no one seems to know who she ended up with,” Auryn said with a sigh.

  “I guess not,” I agreed. If the police knew that, then they’d surely have their prime suspect.

  “Do you think the hard drive really exists?” Auryn asked, and I shrugged.

  “Who knows? It hasn’t turned up and Officer Ernesto said it himself - it might have been her phone she had plugged in.” I frowned. “But it is strange if there are some videos that should be there and aren’t. Perhaps there is a drive.” I thought about it. “But then, I wonder why it hasn’t been found?”

  “Hopefully the police will have more ideas about that than we do, when Ernesto reports his findings. We should probably get back to the arts and crafts day. As zoo owner, I’m trying to socialise with all of our guests to build up the idea of the Avery Zoo brand.”

  I blinked at Auryn in confusion. “What?”

  He deflated a
little. “Sara said it was what I should do.”

  “She probably knows best,” I said, thinking that I wasn’t too sure about Auryn suddenly spouting marketing lingo. I liked him most when he was simply his genuine self.

  “I’ll see you later for the judging?” he said and I nodded, gritting my teeth. “It will be okay in the end,” he said, reaching up a hand, as if to touch my cheek, when he said it.

  I looked up at him and he let it fall… for now.

  After the recent flurry of snow and changeable weather, it was nice to have a clear night to look at the stars. The arts and crafts day had been a huge success, and most of the zoo had descended on the pizza place in town to celebrate.

  I’d made noises to suggest I might come along later, but I knew Tiff was going to be there, and I didn’t want to make things any worse than they already were.

  The judging had been rather painful.

  As four judges, we were supposed to have been discussing whose work we thought deserved the various accolades we were handing out. The discussing part had been a little tough when Tiff wouldn’t even look my way, let alone speak directly to me. I’d done my best to patch things up with the other two judges, but I’d felt that they’d been less than pleased by the lack of professionalism they’d experienced.

  In the end, we’d picked our winners, and I thought they’d been good choices. When the restaurant was refurbished, the zoo would exhibit the winning pieces and any further pieces the artists wished to put up for sale. That was a little bonus to go alongside the cash prizes they’d won.

  I smiled up at the stars, hoping that we’d given hope to artists who weren’t sure if they should carry on, or if they could ever make a living doing it. It had been my and Tiff’s idea to add in a few other prizes, as well as the main category winners, which rewarded things like ‘the most interesting subject choice’, and ‘the best use of colour’. I hoped that those artists would also be lifted by our judgement.

  Before everyone had rushed off to claim the pizza place, there had already been talk of the event putting in a reappearance next year, and perhaps even becoming bi-annual, with a summer themed event, too. It all sounded great to me, but I’d done my best to stay in the background, not wanting to share my downhearted mood.