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  Today? She must know something good. Or maybe the chief just wanted to put a stop to the endless phone calls he must have been getting from his ex. And why not throw some work our way? We were gonna be good at this; I was absolutely sure.

  I looked around our little office. Celeste had brought in a lavender and blue oriental rug from one of her spare rooms. She’d also managed to get some computer stuff to make us seem legit: old laptops and cords and all of that.

  “Hey, Charlie,” Marge cooed. “Have you seen Alex lately? I think Alex has a crush on someone in this room! And her initials are CC.”

  She loved nothing more than a good romantic story, but she could cool it any day now with all this talk of Alex Spencer. We’d worked with him on the drug thing. He was undercover for the Springston cops. Well, we haven’t exactly worked with him, it was more that we bumped into each other while trying to solve the case.

  I spun in my new desk chair to see how it would move. “I want nothing to do with Alex,” I said. “Alex is a jerk.” A gorgeous jerk. Hmm. I wondered why I hadn’t seen the guy around.

  Marge took a spin in her chair too, then rolled it close to mine. “Oh, I think you really like him. I’ve seen the way you look at him. And the way he looks at you.”

  No way did I flirt with Alex. I absolutely didn’t.

  “And you’d make the cutest couple,” Marge said. “We should think of an excuse to call him over here. We must need help with something.”

  Great. Now I had Marge – and my mother too – trying to fix my love life. Was I that pathetic?

  “No way. I don’t like Alex. Don’t you remember how he acted? Mr. Know-It-All!” The guy couldn’t stand it when he found out that I was on the case. He’d acted like his royal self was the only one entitled to have official information. Which hadn’t stopped me and my waitress friends from solving the whole thing. Ha! While he and his colleagues were clueless to the max that it was their own chief who was running the drug ring.

  Which meant that the police chief in Springston went to jail and that Bert, Celeste’s ex, was hired to take his place. Which led to my new job. Funny how things work.

  Of course – in addition to pissing me off – Alex had kind of saved me, too. On more than one occasion. He’d even pulled me from an empty grave. It was easy to get in trouble when you were on the run from some criminal in a graveyard who was armed and mad. It didn’t help that I tended to be unlucky…and very, very clumsy. What also didn’t help, was Alex’s dreamy bright blue eyes. He’s six feet of hard muscle, has short, dark-brown hair and looks like a model from the cover of a magazine. Although he annoys me as hell, I’m getting all melty every time I see him.

  I was thinking about those eyes when I was startled by the phone.

  All three of us stared at it in silence, then Celeste jumped to pick it up. “CMC Services. Good morning. You’re speaking to Celeste.” A serious look came across her face as she listened to the caller. “What? When?”

  I whispered to Marge. “Are those fumes that come out of her ears?”

  “Yeah. Must be something really serious.”

  “Have you ever seen Celeste really mad?” I asked.

  Marge pondered for a few seconds. “I really don’t know. She always looks so composed. Oh, but once, someone cut her off and took the parking space she was eyeing. So, she accidentally hit his back fender.” Marge used her fingers as quotation marks as she said the word accidentally.

  I swallowed hard. “But hadn’t she damaged her own car too?”

  “Nah. It helped that he drove a Ferrari and she drove a beat up truck,” Marge grinned.

  I made a mental note to myself to always let Celeste have whichever parking space she wants.

  Celeste continued talking on the phone. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  “Oh, this looks bad,” Marge said and backed away.

  I followed suit.

  “Well, of course we can!” Celeste said. “We’ll solve the crap out of that baby!” She slammed down the phone.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “We got a case.”

  “A case! We’ve got a case!” Marge jumped up and down in anticipation. This was feeling real.

  Celeste stood up and headed toward the door. “Grab your purses, ladies. The team is going out.”

  “Going out to where?” I asked.

  “We’re going to the zoo.”

  “The zoo?” Marge and I asked the question at the same time.

  “Emergency!” said Celeste in a clipped, official voice. “A red panda has escaped.”

  Chapter Two

  A case! I was excited. But Celeste was pissed. I could tell she wasn’t happy when she popped a stick of gum into her mouth. That was never a good sign.

  “Those danged police!” she said as we all squished into Marge’s car. “This is their way of saying we’re not good enough. They don’t think we have the chops to take on a bigger case.”

  A bigger case? But this was Springston! What was she expecting? Our town was quiet, mostly upper middle class. Not the kind of place where serial killings and million-dollar heists were the order of the day. At least, not that we’ve been aware of. Still, I was feeling a little let down too. Surely something else was up that could benefit from the work of three smart sleuths. Perhaps a missing person? Some kind of drug cartel scheme?

  Celeste reached up to tighten the scarf that held down her mass of hair. The shocking bright red color was hidden now in silky folds of beige. She looked less like Celeste than ever.

  “They don’t trust us yet,” she said. “Of course, my ex was very happy to call in with the news that I’d be chasing some dang bear. He said it was the perfect job for the new wonder girls in town. He was having too much fun! And, I have to tell you, the jerk has a lot of nerve. He said he’d be sure to call us anytime a cat got stuck up in a tree – unless the tree was too tall, and he thought we might get hurt.”

  “He didn’t!” Marge cried out in horror. “I’m gonna kill that Bert.”

  Whoops. The ex might be willing to help keep CMC in business, but he wasn’t playing nice.

  “Oh, but I gotta tell you, I love this case,” Marge squeaked as she took a curve too fast. “The pandas are my favorite. With their itty bitty paws and their itty bitty noses and their itty bitty cheeks…”

  Celeste angrily smacked her gum. “We get it, Marge. Just drive.”

  I was glad Celeste had spoken up. Every time Marge thought of another precious, itty bitty part, she sped up a little more. Her driving was pretty scary even when she wasn’t cooing over furry animals. Yet anytime we traveled, she was the designated driver. Why was that? I wondered. Because my car was full off old sweaters and empty grocery bags and used candy wrappers?

  “But we’ll show them,” Celeste said. “We’ll find that panda so fast that they won’t know what hit them. They’ll be begging for the wonder girls to take on their next case. We’ll be the best damn animal rescue service Springston has ever seen. Your cat stuck in a tree? You know who to call.” The sarcasm was not lost on me. She chewed her gum so hard I was afraid she’d break her jaw. “I ought to charge him double the next time that they need us,” she said. “We ought to charge an asshole rate.”

  As we got closer to the zoo, I thought about all the other times I had gone to visit. Something struck me then. “When you think about it,” I said to my friends, “this case is kind of huge. This is important stuff. You know how Springston feels about those two red pandas.”

  Our town did adore its zoo, and especially the bears. There were two of them: twins named Lou and Len. A city treasure had escaped! This was an ordinary town with an extraordinary zoo, built with money from a lifelong resident who’d taught my geology class sophomore year at Springston High. Tim Banyan’s old torn sweaters had never given any hints that he had a lot of money. But he’d left the town a legacy when he died in 2008 with no heirs, a secret fortune and a passion for animals of all kinds.

&n
bsp; There were no bigger stars in this town than the beloved Len and Lou. There was a naming contest and parade in 2012 when the zoo acquired the baby twins. I had a red panda t-shirt and a red panda coffee mug. Most people made a beeline for the pandas on any visit to the zoo. You’d probably catch them sleeping. But sometimes, if you were lucky, they’d peer curiously at you, as if they might be wondering what you were doing there.

  Each year on their birthday, the whole town celebrated at the Panda Festival that went on all over town. Almost every merchant ran a special for patrons who wore red: free fries with a burger, free popcorn at the movies, five percent off for a style and perm…

  “I love the pandas too,” I said. “And if we find him, we’ll be heroes. We’ll be heroes our first week!”

  Celeste turned to look at me in the backseat. “Not if we find the bear, but when.” she said. “We will absolutely find him. And we can’t be heroes, Charlie. Because we’re undercover.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot.”

  “We’ll be secret heroes,” Marge said. “I’ve always loved a secret.” She nodded to herself. “We do it for the safety of the citizens, not for the fame and fortune.” She slammed on her brakes to keep from rear ending a Honda Civic whose driver wasn’t traveling at Marge’s breakneck speed. So much for the safety of Springston citizens.

  It wasn’t that she wanted to get to the zoo as soon as possible to get her hands on that bear. She always stepped hard on the gas as if every situation was an emergency. The next thing that I knew, she’d be begging for a siren for her official spy-mobile. Although that would surely be a tipoff that we weren’t just fixing laptops.

  I thought about the missing panda as we got closer to the zoo. It wouldn’t be an easy case, but I loved a challenge. With a human, after all, you could kind of guess some of the places your target might be hiding. But what would a panda do with an unexpected day to roam about the town? Who could really know? Except, perhaps, a trio of very bright detectives if they put their minds to work.

  And then, that’s when it hit me: this was an emergency, a red panda was running loose in Springston! A panda didn’t know to cross only on a crosswalk. He could knock down the ladder or the cans of bright white paint at Greenway Park where crews were building a gazebo. A panda might attack the little sample cups at the Apple Butter Festival going on downtown. So many things could go wrong. I hoped we’d find him quick.

  But how? They didn’t teach these things in school, or in the self-help section (where I sometimes spent my time, reading up on how to organize my stuff, set goals, be my best and most fit self… None of it seemed to take).

  The zookeepers might have a hint on where a bear might go. They could tell us his likes and dislikes. Leafy areas? Quiet places? Or was he, perhaps, a curious bear who might run straight toward the action? Which this week might just mean the Apple Butter Festival. Or perhaps the new Crestview Crescent Mall that opened just last year.

  Celeste continued to angrily snap her gum, her thoughts still stuck on the chief. “Bert and I are gonna have a little talk when this panda’s safely in its cage. Do you know what the creep had the absolute nerve to come out and say to me? That he’d send more cases our way if he thought they weren’t too much for us to handle. I can tell you one thing right now: he’d better toe the line or else his guys will have a great time hearing all the ways their boss used to…”

  I leaned closer, but all I heard were angered mutterings. Dang. Close, so very close.

  Soon we pulled up to the zoo. Well to be exact, Marge zoomed right past the zoo, then sped into the parking lot of a grocery store to turn her car around. That didn’t make me feel great about our chances of success. How can you find a panda if you can’t find the zoo?

  The parking lot was a little less than half full. It was, after all, a Monday; the older kids were all in school. This was the time for toddlers and mothers pushing strollers, along with retired couples. Nobody in Springston ever grew too old for the zoo.

  We pulled past the lighted sign held up by a metal tiger wearing green sunglasses and by a metal zebra in a safari hat. We’re So Happy that You’ve Come to the Springston Zoo! Celeste tightened up her scarf. Unlike the tiger and the zebra, Celeste did not look happy.

  Marge got out and began loading items into her purse: the knife, the hot pink tape recorder, the binoculars. “Go Team Panda!” she said as she pumped her fist into the air. Then she locked the car door.

  “Quiet!” Celeste hissed. “They might not have made it public yet that the panda’s missing.” She took a deep and calming breath. “Okay, here’s the plan. You girls walk around, act like you’re just visitors, and keep your eyes wide open. I’ll go check in with the director, then I’ll come and find you. Keep your cell phones on.”

  Undercover zoo girl. This might be a kick. It beat writing dull reports. How many speeding tickets had there been in August? How many burglaries in June? Ho hum. Life was way too short. A cool breeze brushed my face and brought the smell of popcorn. In the background, I could hear some kind of tinny music. I’d always loved the zoo. I was starting to feel good about my brand-new life.

  As we walked quickly to the entrance, Celeste continued to fill us in, talking in a low voice. “They’re doing everything they can to find his little guy. Animal Control is on it too. We’re the reinforcements. I’ll just show them my I.D. at the ticket counter, say we’re guests of the director. Bert set that one up, at least, so we won’t have to pay.”

  Marge hurried to keep up. “Do the employees know? That a panda has escaped?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.” Celeste stopped just before the ticket counter to pull her license from her purse. “But let’s assume they don’t know. And whether or not they have that information, we can’t let them know who we are.”

  “Ohhh,” Marge whispered knowingly. “Because we’re undercover.”

  Celeste looked at me and rolled her eyes. “You get an A-plus, Marge. Yes, we’re undercover. That kind of is the point.”

  We left Celeste at the front gate, and Marge took my arm with an air of great excitement. “What should we go see first? I love the elephants! And let’s go find the snakes. Hey, I think they sell cotton candy.”

  The smell of sunscreen filled the air as we made our way through the clumps of visitors and peeked into some cages. Hello, funny otter. Please don’t get me wet. We watched as a girl stood on tiptoes on a wooden box to feed one of three giraffes who bent toward her with its massive neck.

  I turned toward a jingling sound and saw the Tiny Tots Train making its slow way past us. The crowd of children and mothers onboard smiled and waved at us, unware of the ensuing crisis in this place of Animals, Friends and Fun! – the slogan that had been in place since the zoo first opened.

  I heard a tiny redhead in the first train car call out to her mother. “Can we see the pandas next? I want to see the pandas.”

  A toddler behind her smiled. “Me go see the pandas!”

  I noticed he had a t-shirt with the pandas’ picture. I had a similar one at home. Most everybody did. In black letters across the top it said Panda-monium at the Zoo. A wave of sadness hit me. At least one panda was still left for the kids to see. I also felt filled up with a sense of great importance. It felt good to matter on this sunny, breezy day.

  A small boy began to wail beside me when his ice cream scoop landed on the pavement. I stared at the oozing mess. Was that chocolate swirl? It might be nice to have a little something sweet to get the brain cells moving.

  Marge looked very thoughtful. Sometimes I could almost swear that she could read my mind. “You know,” she said, “if we bought some snacks, we might look more like tourists. Because you know that it’s important that we blend in with the crowd.” She looked carefully around her and whispered the last words.

  We headed to the ice cream truck that was parked nearby; we studied the pictures on the side.

  “First decision of the case!” Marge said.

  “Shhh!” I said.
She needed to work a little bit more on her undercover skills.

  She picked a strawberry shortcake bar. I picked a rainbow pop.

  Then we headed toward the panda cage. I didn’t need one of the small green maps that I saw everywhere, abandoned on benches and sticking out of the trash. I loved to visit the pandas almost every chance I got. They were absolutely precious. Not that I’d been home that much in the last few years. I loved my family; they were great. But I’d found that it was easier to love them from a distance.

  The names were still on the cage with one of the happy-looking signs in the shape of brightly colored paws that were attached to all the cages. Meet Zoo Friends: Len and Lou. A small blue and white sign to the side gave fun facts about the pair. I didn’t need to read it; I knew all about Springston’s favorite cuddly duo. I knew that their huge tails (that made them look like red raccoons) helped them balance when they were climbing (or sleeping) in a tree. I knew what their favorite food was: bamboo.

  Now, Len was sleeping soundly on a branch. These two loved to snooze. They seemed to even have less energy than my brother Brad. These were lazy bears. Sleeping and eating all day, it seemed like a nice life. Was Lou napping, too, wherever he had gone?

  An employee passed by with a bucket, most likely making the rounds to see that all the animals were fed. Several others were doing the same, all wearing the trademark bright red shirt with the zoo logo on the back. With a pockmarked face and close-cropped hair, the dude looked like he could be a recent high school grad. If kids here didn’t opt for college, the zoo was often a first choice as a cool place to get a job.

  “Excuse me. Where is Lou?” I asked him, taking care to use my very best, oh-so-nonchalant, undercover voice.

  He looked kind of nervous, or perhaps just in a hurry. “Lou is, unfortunately, not available for viewing.” The answered seemed rehearsed. Had they given them all a script? Then he gave us a quick nod and rushed over to the next cage. There, he busied himself throwing fish to the seals, who thanked him and begged for more with eager, happy barks.