Excerpt: Stickpin and Waddle

Thorley Stickpin glared down at his report and crossed out his words with an inky flourish. He hated writing case reports, especially when he kept having to write out the facts again and again to get them right. Even after all that, he often had to start over again on a clean form. City hall liked things neat. This extended itself down to his private investigator's office down on Prickly & Pine, far from the garish shining lights of Commonworth & Main.

Things had gone wrong for his friend Eggbert Waddle before the nighttime holdup by a horde of overdressed birds. Thorley had to trace things back to the root of the problem so he needed to go back before the events that catapulted his close acquaintance beyond the attentions usually reserved for dutiful, if somewhat unimaginative, mail clerks. Even Eggbert's stunned apprehension of the Shell Museum Bucket Thief wasn't long enough ago to foster the sort of attention only penguins could give. His rescue of a bag of lost mail from the hidden compartment in Donald O'Poole's old mail truck a month previous might not even be the start.

No, Eggbert's rise to local fame had started back before the tediously unwelcome influx of penguin immigration to Wallington Square. It had begun with the rescue of a pudgy baby possum and the impetuous European hedgehog in charge of him.

Sighing, Thorley reached out for a clean case report form. Using utmost care with his curved claws, Thorley queued the sheet to the correct place on his typewriter. When he came to the assigned spot for contributing factors, Thorley took a swig of his nettle wine from the burgundy colored flask in his trench coat pocket. There was no other explanation in his mind for the start of the case. It was the same lady who'd crossed paths with his investigation a dozen times in the last year. He'd have to bring her in for questioning. This would only result in long, drawn out sessions where interrogation gained him nothing other than a headache and a half dozen nicknames he'd rather not anyone use.

In short, he had his cousin to blame.