One Door From Heaven

expression of affection almost undid Leilani. She tried to cover her inability to speak by quickly taking a swig of her vanilla Coke.
        Geneva saw through the clever vanilla-Coke ruse, and her eyes misted. She seized a cookie as an instrument of distraction, but that didn't work because there wasn't any logical reason for her to hold a cookie in such a way as to block Leilani's view of her teary eyes.
        From Leilani's perspective, the worst thing that could happen would be for the two of them to start sobbing at each other as if this were an episode of Oprah titled "Little Crippled Girls Marked for Murder and the Charming Screwball Shot-in-the-Head Surrogate Aunts Who Love Them." Just as the way of the Ninja was not the way of the Klonk, so the way of the weepy was not the way of the Klonk, either, at least not this Klonk.
        Time for the penguin.
        She fished it out of one pocket of her shorts and put it on the table, among the candleholders that were still arranged as they had been at dinner the previous night. "I was wondering if you could do me a favor and help get this back to the person who should have it."
        "How cute!" Geneva put aside the cookie that she neither wanted to eat nor wanted to plaster over her eyes. She plucked the figurine off the table. "Why, it's adorable, isn't it?"
        The two-inch-tall penguin-sculpted from clay, kiln-fired, and hand-painted-was indeed so adorable that Leilani would have kept it if not for its creepy provenance.
        "It belonged to a girl who died last night."
        Geneva's smile first froze and then melted away.
        Leilani said, "Her name was Tetsy. I don't know her last name. But I think she's local, here in the county."
        "What's this all about, sweetie?"
        "If you'd buy a newspaper tomorrow and Saturday, an obituary should be published one day or the other. It'll have the last name."
        "You're spooking me, dear."
        "Sorry. I don't mean to. Tetsy collected penguins, and this was one of hers. Preston might have asked to have it, but he might have taken it without asking. Anyway, I don't want it."
        They stared across the table at each other because Geneva's eyes were no longer misty and because Leilani was functioning unshakably in the way of the Klonk, no longer in danger of flushing the kitchen furniture out of the back door on a tide of tears.
        Geneva said, "Leilani, should I be calling the police?"
        "Wouldn't do;my good. They pumped a huge dose of digitoxin into her, which caused a massive heart attack. Preston's used this trick before. Digitoxin would show up in an autopsy, so they must have been sure there wouldn't be one. Most likely, she's already cremated."
        Geneva looked at the penguin. She looked at Leilani. She looked at her vanilla Coke. She said, "This is bizarre stuff."
        "Isn't it? Anyway, Preston gave this penguin to me because he said it reminded him of Lukipela."
        Geneva's voice bit with a venom that Leilani had not imagined she contained: "The rotten bastard."
        "It's cute, Luki was cute. It leans to one side, same as Luki. But it doesn't look like Luki because, of course, it's a penguin."
        "I have a sister-in-law who lives out in Hemet."
        Although this seemed to have nothing to do with dead girls and penguins, Leilani leaned forward with interest. "So is this a real sister-in-law or possibly Gwyneth Paltrow?"
        "Real. Her name's Clarissa, and she's a good person-as long as you have some tolerance for parrots."
        "I like parrots. Do hers talk?"
        "Oh, constantly. She has over sixty."
        "I'm pretty much a one-parrot-at-a-time person."
        "I'm thinking, maybe when you disappear, the police would come looking here, but they wouldn't know about Clarissa in Hemet."
        Leilani pretended to consider it. Then: "Out of sixty talking parrots, at least one will be a fink and turn us in."
        "She'd love your companionship, dear. And there's always work to be done, filling seed trays and water cups."
        "Why does this feel like a Hitchcock movie? And I don't just mean The Birds. I suspect somewhere in the situation, there's a guy who dresses up like his mother and has an obsession with big knives. Anyway, if Clarissa went to jail for kidnapping, what would happen to the parrots?"
        Geneva looked around as though assessing the accommodations. "I could take