Chapter Eight
One good thingabout living on the coast of Oregon: we knew how to weather thestorms.
Things didn’t usually get sketchy in our sturdy little town until the winds reached somewhere above an hundred-mile-an-hour.
But there were always little damages from high wind gusts. A fence, a store sign, garbage cans in the wrongyard.
Mrs. Yates’s penguin gettingstolen.
Not that the wind had taken it, but apparently a storm was the perfect cover for the pranksters who liked to abscond with her concrete yardpenguin.
“It’s Christmas for goodness sakes,” Mrs. Yates said for the tenth time as I stood there on her twinkling light-draped porch taking her complaint. “I always decorate theyard.”
“It looksnice.”
“And thehouse.”
“That looks nicetoo.”
“And the penguin. Really, he’s the star of the wholething.”
“Iunderstand.”
“He has a blog, youknow.”
I did know. The penguin’s frequent kidnappings, creative hiding places, and hostage photos had taken a small corner of the internet bystorm.
That penguin was pretty much our most famous citizen. And Mrs. Yates ate up the stardom-by-proxy with aspoon.
I’d always suspected that most of the kidnappings had been orchestrated by the high school kids, but lately, the kidnappings and photos seemed moreprofessional.
Almost as if the kidnappers were a well-oiled, well-coordinatedmachine.
It wasn’t just Mrs. Yates who liked the limelight. Most of the town was totally into our adorable concrete claim tofame.
“He deserves to be home for Christmas,” she said. “We all need him home for Christmas, Delaney. It would mean so much to thetown.”
And that’s when I knew I wasn’t going to get out of penguin search and rescueduty.
“I’ll do what I can to find him before the night’sover.”
“Yes,” she said, finally happy. “People drive by to take pictures of him in the yard, you know. Tourists too. Especially tourists. We wouldn’t want to disappointthem.”
She fluffed her hair and stared past me at the road, looking for drive-by photoops.
“No,” I said. “I’m sure wewouldn’t.”
