Alan plunged the shovel down into the muck, and there was a weird clang as he struck something hard. A horseshoe, maybe? Or a donkey-shoe? He used the tip of the shovel to scrape the dirty straw away, then gasped. Ziggy, looking down too, whispered, “Holy cow.”
Before the children could see what he had uncovered, Alan quickly booted a bit of straw over it.
“Hey kids,” he said, turning back to them. “We have to do some work, now, or we’ll get into trouble. You’d better go back to your parents.” Both children looked surprised and hurt for a moment, then the boy shrugged.
“When I grow up, I’m going to be a computer scientist,” he said. “I won’t have to get a dumb, stinky job like you have, anyway. C’mon, Lisa.” They turned their backs on the boys and returned to the candle-making area.
“That was smooth,” Ziggy said, but they were both too excited to care much. He flipped the covering straw back, and they both stared at what was there. Unmistakable, which was why Alan had covered it up so quickly. Lying under the dirty straw they’d been shovelling was a very big, very dangerous-looking, no-way-it-was-old-fashioned handgun.
TWO
You’ve been there barely two hours, and there’s trouble already?” Alan’s mother said. “That’s got to be a record.” Her voice came through sounding high and hollow, as if she were speaking down a tube. Alan was using the supervisor’s cell phone, a tiny one like a silver chocolate bar. “Are you okay?” she went on. “Do you want to come home?”
“Mom, we’re fine. Really,” Alan said. “It’s no big deal. Mrs. Tench made me call.”
They were sitting in the staff lounge, up in the park’s main complex. There was a museum there, and a cafeteria, as well as the Pioneer Village offices.
“Is that your mother? Let me speak to her,” the supervisor said, making a “hand-it-over” gesture.
“Mrs. Nearing? Mabel Tench here. I thought Alan should tell you what’s going on before you heard it somewhere else, but it’s really only a tiny spot of bother. No need to worry.”
Alan, Ziggy and Josée looked sideways at each other. There were two police officers in the main office with the door shut right now, talking to the directors, and it sounded like they weren’t agreeing. A tiny spot of bother? Not that tiny.
“Well, yes, they did find an old gun buried in the manure pile, dear, but the police have it now, and I expect that’s the last we’ll hear of it. Someone being careless, I expect. Or teenagers. It’s almost always young people, isn’t it?” There was a pause, then Mrs. Tench laughed and shook her head. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean these three. They’re not the sort of young people I’m talking about. As a matter of fact, they’re doing wonderfully, and I do hope you’ll let them stay. No, no, we’re not closing the park. Heavens, what a thought! The police will be gone shortly, and we’ll all be getting back to normal.” After another minute or so, she handed the phone back to Alan. “She wants a word, dear,” she said and went to listen at the office door.
“So, I take it you want to stay,” Mary-Anne Nearing said. Alan didn’t need to look at the others to see what they thought. It was obvious. This was a brand new case for the unofficial Alan Nearing Detective agency, and they were a team.
“Yes, Mom. It’s great here.”
“But Mrs. Tench said you were shovelling manure as your first assignment. You liked that?”
“Like you always say, a little work won’t hurt us, right?” He heard her sigh—the kind of noise that meant “okay, but watch it”, and he knew he’d won.
“We can stay, Mrs. Tench,” he said, handing the phone back to her. The supervisor had just hurried back over to them, and moments later, the police and the three directors emerged from the office. One of the officers was Constable Mills, of the local Laingford detachment. They knew her already, from the missing violin incident earlier in the summer. She came right over to them.
“Hi, you guys,” she said. “Remember me? This is déjà vu, eh?”
“Yeah, but this time it’s a gun that shows up instead of a violin disappearing,” Alan said.
The officer grinned. “And you’re involved again. Interesting.”
“Pure chance, though,” Ziggy put in. “Like last time. Coincidence.”
Constable Mills gave him a sideways look.
“Right,” she said, “and that last case magically solved itself, I seem to recall. But listen, we don’t want you three messing around with this one. A gun is serious business. If you see anything funny around the park, I want you to call me right away, okay?”
“What do you mean, something funny?” said Alan. “Do you know whose gun it is? Is there a plot to kidnap tourists? Should we look for clues?”
“Whoa! Slow down. Those are our questions, not yours. And we’ll be doing the investigating here, which is our job, understand?” She waited until all three of them nodded and mumbled yes, then she went on, leaning down towards them and talking in a private voice. “The thing is,” she said, “the directors don’t want to close the park, and we don’t want to make them, but we still have to ask questions and figure out where that gun came from. And the first people to interrogate are the ones who found it. That’s you. So, tell me how it happened.”
Again, they described how they’d found the gun in the manure pile, how they’d called Josée over, and then how all three of them had run to find Sheldon, who was working nearby. Alan was getting tired of telling it. First there’d been Sheldon, then Mrs. Tench, then one of the directors, then his mother. It was hard to tell it again without adding stuff. Constable Mills wrote it all down then asked them all to sign it at the bottom.
“That’s the second statement I’ve had to get from you three,” she said. “We’ll be needing to start a file on you guys soon.”
“Excellent. You’ll want our fingerprints, then, yes?” Josée said. That was supposed to happen last time, but then it hadn’t, and they’d been kind of disappointed. Alan particularly wanted to get a look at the inside of the police headquarters, where the lock-up was. For research purposes. If he was going to be a private investigator one day, these were things he should know about.
“Well, you’re not suspects this time, so it won’t be necessary,” Constable Mills said. “But you are all go-fers at the park, right?” They nodded. “So keep your eyes open. You may hear or see something out of the ordinary that others won’t see, because they’re too busy. If you do, call.” They said they would, and she handed Alan a card with her number on it, then joined the other officer who had been talking to Mrs. Tench, and they left.
“How can we see what’s out of the ordinary?” Josée asked the others. “We only just got here. We don’t know what is ordinary, yet.”
“This is sweet,” Alan said. “We’re like, deputy officers.”
“But she said not to mess around with this one, didn’t she?” Ziggy said.
“She probably has to say that,” Alan said. “But she also said to keep our eyes open, right? We won’t need to snoop. Undercover officers just have to be there. We’ll have to be alert.”
“Be a lert,” Ziggy said. “The world needs more lerts.”
“Idiot,” Josée said.
There