by Clea Simon
“Thanks, but really, you don’t have to.” I took his hand. If he sensed the sadness in me, he could attribute it to the squirrel. Or, hell, to the drinking. “I’ll take some aspirin for the headache, but I’m fine now. Really.” I hefted my mug. “See? Steady as a rock. Ready to climb ladders.”
More than forty minutes had passed since I’d first banged on his car window. I did feel better now, the caffeine and the extra time working their magic. Creighton still looked uncertain, and I did my best to meet his gaze.
“I’m sober, Jim,” I said again.
“I believe you,” he said, finally. “I just wish…” He withdrew his hand to rub his face, and I saw what the night had cost him.
“It’s not you, Jim.” I reached out, took that hand between my own. “Some things are just not meant to be.”
“You talk as if you believed in a higher power.” The half-smile again, mirthless and grim. “And here I am, thinking that we’re adults and we have choices.” He stood up before I could respond, pushing the chair back with a rough scrape. “Look, thanks for the coffee, Pru. And thanks for not killing yourself last night. Or anybody else.”
“Creighton, I—”
“Go save a squirrel, Pru.” He was halfway to the door. “Who am I to say what your priorities should be?”
“Territorial.” Wallis’ voice, sounding in my ear, made me jump. The tabby herself came up beside me and jumped to the windowsill. “I once knew a tom like that.”
“He’s not being territorial, or not entirely.” We watched as the tired man stalked back down the driveway to his car. “He cares. He was worried about me.”
“Really now.” Her tail lashed back and forth. The early morning air full of life. “Hasn’t he heard that the female is the deadliest of the species?”
Chapter Thirty-four
I wasn’t sure if Wallis was simply showing off, but Creighton had a point. Alone in my car, I could admit that. My hands were steadier, my mind more clear than an hour before, and I felt grateful for the enforced respite that made me confident on the road—on the ladder, too, I realized, as I shimmied up as fast as any squirrel. I’d even formulated an excuse, should the lawyer stick his head out and see me. Next day follow-up, I was prepared to say. All part of the service package.
My plan was to remove the one-way gate, replace it with a loose piece of mesh. That would look good, in case Wilkins bothered to check. It wouldn’t stop a determined mother, however. As I worked with the claw end of my hammer, rocking out the nails I’d placed so carefully only a day before, I could hear voices in the lawyer’s office. Or not voices—the tinny sound of a speaker phone, the caller growing more agitated as the call went on.
“Hang on.” Laurence Wilkins voice broke in, his voice loud and live. “I’ve already told everyone. Everyone knows.”
I got the second nail out as the caller kept talking, the voice too low for me to make out the words.
“Jackie, please. You don’t know what you’re asking.” That caught my ear, and I paused. But when the caller—Jackie Canaday?—kept on at the same volume, I went back to the task at hand.
“No, I can’t. Until it’s official, we can’t do anything.” Wilkins again. I had the wire door off, and positioned the new mesh in its place. “I know what you’re saying, but my hands are tied.”
Women. These sisters, at any rate. Jackie was worse than any magpie I’d ever heard, and Canaday was saying just the wrong thing to calm her. She must have called about the will. With a quick tap I tacked one corner of the mesh to the soffit. And then I stopped.
I’d let myself be distracted. My lawyer and his feuding clients were diverting, but they weren’t why I was here. What I needed to do was tune them out and focus on the squirrels I had come to rescue. That was what had woken me in a panic last night. That might even have explained some of my despair the night before.
I’m a realist, no matter what Wallis might think. I knew that there was a chance—a good chance—that whatever baby had been separated from its mother had died overnight. I had no idea how old the infant was, though the image I had gotten was of a nursling, still blind and helpless. I also knew that wasn’t a tragedy. There’s a reason rodents reproduce so prolifically: Even in the kindest of worlds, fewer than half of that female’s offspring would live to their own sexual maturity. No, what I was doing was for my own peace of mind. Trapped between my own species’ selfish nonchalance and my secret sensitivity, I needed to tread a fine line. If the baby hadn’t survived, so be it. I simply didn’t want to be in the middle. I had to try to undo what I had done.
With that thought in mind, I braced myself, holding onto the edge of the gutter, I focused all my thoughts on hearing something—anything—from inside that hole.
And got nothing.
I shook my head, hoping to clear the last of the hangover from my brain. Closed my eyes, and leaned forward. Waiting to hear an echo, or the tiniest peep.
“Baby?” I startled, and had to grab the gutter to keep myself from falling backward. “My baby?” The cry, barely an audible sound, wasn’t coming from the hole in the rotted wood. What I was hearing was the mother in a tree somewhere behind me. It was a seeking cry, the sound of a parent desperate to find a lost child.
Clearly, I was in the way. I pulled the mesh out, glad that I had only started to tack it in place. Mesh in hand, I started down the ladder. Maybe that infant was still alive— probably not, but if I was going to have any peace, I needed to let that mother squirrel have something like closure. I had to let her return, to see what my ill-considered actions had done.
“But what if I could have done something?” The speaker phone again, but the content stopped me in my tracks. Had my two worlds overlapped?
“Jackie, please.” Wilkins again, and I realized I’d been holding my breath. Of course the people inside the office were not talking about my sins.
“My baby!” I was hit with the loss, the confusion. The despair. “Where are you?”
I had to think. Rather, to stop myself from thinking. Hearing animals as I do, it’s too easy to anthropomorphize, to attribute human emotions where they don’t exist. I wasn’t hearing despair, not the way I would feel it. Not even as my poor mother, tough as she was, must have. Animals don’t believe in fate like we do. They don’t strain to see beyond the horizon. What I was getting was the instinctive panic of a mother who has lost her young. Within a certain window, an infant that has gone astray may be redeemed, and a mother, at least if she’s a mammal, is programmed to find her child, rather than let all that gestation go to waste. What I was hearing—feeling, rather, as a high keen inside my head—was nature’s way of telling me that this window was still open. Might still be open, I corrected myself. If the mother and her infant could be reunited.
I looked up at the opening. “Baby!”
I looked at the neat work I had done the day before, the heavy wire mesh covering the soft wood. From the open window, voices reached me.
“Breaking a will is a difficult matter, and I cannot in good conscience advise you to pursue this.”
Lawyer speak. Wilkins. My client.
“Baby!”
I climbed back up, pulling my hammer from my belt. Using the claw, I started ripping out the nails. When the mesh was free, I let it fall and cocked my head, listening for a whimper. For the sound of life. Instead, I heard the lawyer. “This is your sister you’re talking about.”
Forget my client. My obligations concerned a lot more than money. I continued to work. The soffit, the gutter, a bit of the clapboard. The wood was rotten and came off easily, as that squirrel had known. I didn’t care. Wilkins was going to have to replace this anyway. I was doing him a favor.
The morning had grown warm, and I was sweating by the time I stopped, having made a hole big enough for me to stick my head into.
“Hello?” I did just that, speaking so
ftly into the dark, damp space. “Anyone there?”
I didn’t know if a squirrel could read my mind like Wallis could. I didn’t know if I would simply scare a truly wild animal. I wanted a response, any response. Just to hear if there was any reason to continue.
“What the hell are you doing?” It wasn’t the response I expected, and I bumped my head pulling it out. Down below me, Laurence Wilkins was leaning out of his office window, a mix of anger and disbelief on his face. He was looking up at me, but he quickly followed my gaze down, to see the shreds of his new addition lying on the ground. “What the…?”
I couldn’t blame him. Listening to Jackie rant would try anyone’s patience. That didn’t mean I didn’t have to come up with an excuse, and the one I had prepared seemed insufficient to explain the damage.
“I should have alerted you.” I was stalling. I even cleared my throat. “I realized I needed to get complete access to the area under your roof, in order to assess the state of the infestation.” It was as many big words as I could throw together. “Better to be safe than sorry,” I threw in.
His eyes narrowed, and I waited for the angry dismissal to come. If I were lucky, he would stop short of suing. But just as I was gathering my breath for another try, he ducked back into his office, slamming the window shut behind him.
I took a deep breath and looked around. The mother squirrel, the one who had been crying, had taken off. The slam, if not the shouting, had driven her away. I looked at the hole, taking in the quiet, the immensity of that quiet, and what it meant. And then I retrieved the wire mesh, torn and bent as it was, and nailed it back over the hole, using the one-way gate to help plug the opening. Knowing full well that nothing was going to come out from under that roof alive, no matter how long I waited.
Chapter Thirty-five
“Late night?” Tracy Horlick asked like the question was rhetorical, but I chose to ignore her insinuating tone.
“Animal emergency,” I said, with as little emotion as possible. “Sorry.”
Between oversleeping and going to Wilkins’ house, I’d rung the old lady’s doorbell about an hour after my usual time. Anyone else might have already taken their dog for a walk, but when I’d checked my messages, I hadn’t seen one from Tracy Horlick. I figured that she preferred to pay me—and to see what she could squeeze out of me.
“That’s a new term.” Arms crossed over her faded housedress, the old lady eyed me. Clearly, I was going to have to do better if I expected to free Growler from her clutches.
“Would you rather we skipped today?” I was in no mood to play.
“I could get the Canaday girl, you know.” Her eyes narrowed, waiting for a response. “At least, if she doesn’t go to jail.”
“Where do you get your information?” At this point, I was honestly curious. I knew Tracy Horlick had several sources of gossip. I suspected she picked some up with her unfiltered Marlboros as well as from the hair salon where she got her dated ’do lacquered every week.
“You’re not the only one with bad habits.” She smiled and drew a battered pack of cigarettes out of a pocket. Shaking one out, she stuck it between her lips and still managed to mutter, “that’s how.”
“You should quit, you know.” I’d lost all patience. “It’s bad for Growl—Bitsy, and he doesn’t have a choice.”
“Huh.” She turned and retreated to get the dog she called hers. “I’ll look into that.”
“You never learn.” Growler and I were halfway around the block before the little white dog would even address me. “Maybe if you listened…”
“I’m sorry, Growler. Truly I am.” Despite the harsh terms of his captivity the bichon was well trained. Between his person’s insensitivity and my tardiness, that meant the poor dog was near to bursting by the time I got him outdoors. “But old smoke-teeth wasn’t the reason I was late today.”
I wanted to tell him about the squirrel, though I didn’t know how he’d react. Wallis would have snorted in the feline equivalent of a laugh if she’d heard how badly I wanted to save a mere rodent. Jill Canaday, though, she might have understood.
Then again, she might have found reason to blame me. Reason to poach my clients. Maybe, I thought, these were all the same struggle. We do what we need to in order to survive. A safe place to live. A livelihood.
There was something off with the Canadays, though. Something the delayed death certificate didn’t quite explain. The medical examiner’s office was backed up. Everyone knew that. It didn’t mean anything. Unless, of course, someone knew that it did—and was desperate to divert suspicion. Jackie had been the first to make accusations, crazy as they were, and it seemed like she was still at it, trying to enlist the lawyer to her side. There was an edge to her I couldn’t figure. Nerves and something more—could it be guilt? Nerve was what Judith had in spades, though it hadn’t helped her bluff her way back into her father’s good graces before he died. And there was something about the way she had left town. Something Jill had been willing to hint at, maybe for reasons of her own?
Not that any of them had a case. It was all backbiting and gossip. Besides, they weren’t my concern. That mother squirrel—thoughts of her were preying on me.
“If you’d only pay attention.” Growler was grumbling, a low growl starting in his chest.
“You’re right,” I admitted. “This whole thing started because I didn’t let myself hear what that mother squirrel was telling me. It’s all my fault.”
“Deaf as a white cat,” Growler was going on. “And just as dumb.”
***
My phone was buzzing as I got back to my car.
“Oh, hi, Pru.” Jill Canaday, sounding all girlish and eager. “Are we still on for today?”
“Are we—” I caught myself. I had said I’d meet with her today. Running into her at County only set the groundwork. “Sure.”
“I can come to you.” Her eagerness made me think of a puppy. If only I hadn’t met her sisters, I might have bought into it.
“Look,” I needed to make myself clear. “I don’t know exactly what you’re expecting from me. There isn’t much I can teach you that you can’t get from a reputable animal behavior program and working with me won’t count as a practicum for any degree program. I’m not qualified.” That was all true, as far as it went. Whatever special skills I did have, I neither could share nor would want to.
“Oh, I’ve taken a bunch of pre-vet courses.” She jumped right in. “But that’s all theory and memorization, at least at this point. I want to spend time with you. See if I can handle the work and, well, if I have a gift for it. Like you do.”
I felt my own low growl starting, and was grateful for the electronic distance of the phone. “A gift?” I had to find out what she knew.
“I can pay you.” She misunderstood me. At least, I thought she did. “For your time, that is. If I can shadow you, spend some time with you. The career counselor at school recommended I do that before I commit to a degree program. And you’re, like, the best at what you do. Dr. Sharpe was going on about how good you are with all different kinds of animals.”
“What I do isn’t very exciting.” I was wavering, the mention of money, more than the blatant flattery getting to me. Not that I dislike a compliment, and name-dropping Doc Sharpe did serve to remind me of his preferences in the matter. All in all, I felt myself being manipulated into assenting. Jill Canaday was either very lucky or very skilled. “And some of my clients might prefer their privacy.”
“I understand.” Smart, I was thinking. She knew she’d won, and she was giving me my own small victory. “You just tell me when to get lost.”
I thought I had already tried that, and held my tongue. Then it hit me. If she came to my house, I’d get to see her interact with the kitten. You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat animals in their care. Besides, I wanted Wallis’ take. I might be, as Growl
er pointed out, clueless and deaf as a white cat. Wallis was a tabby, though, and she had earned those stripes.
***
When I pulled up, I saw her, leaning against the sporty little Mini.
“Cute car.” Not my type, but it was.
“Thanks.” She stood at my approach, fumbling, one hand behind her back. “It was a gift. You know, for driving back and forth.”
I nodded. Her father really had been indulgent. Then I saw what she was hiding—a lit cigarette.
“You can’t do that.” I tried to keep my glee from my voice. Here was my answer. “You can’t work around animals and smoke.”
“Oh, I don’t,” she said. “Not anymore.”
I stared at her cupped hand, unconvinced.
“It’s an e-cig.” She held it out to me, and I took it. Long and slender, with a glowing tip, it resembled one of those fancy European brands that used to be targeted at pretentious college students. I sniffed it. Sure enough, the “smoke” was steam.
“This works for you?” I handed it back.
She nodded and pocketed the device. “I hardly ever use it anymore.” An awkward shrug. “I guess I’m a little nervous.”
“Well, you don’t have to be.” My words, if not my tone, were welcoming—as welcoming as I could manage, anyway. For a moment, I’d thought I’d seen an out. Now I was back to square one, with an acolyte I didn’t want. Or necessarily trust.
“Well, come on in.” I led the way to my door.
“So how many animals do you live with?” I’d automatically headed toward the kitchen and now found myself making coffee. My mother would have been proud.
“One.” At least she hadn’t asked if I had any pets. “Wallis. She’s a tabby.”
As if on cue, Wallis entered. “A female.” She brushed up against Jill’s legs. “How interesting.”
“How pretty she is.” Jill bent to stroke Wallis’ back. “May I pick her up?”
“Ask her yourself.” I tried to catch my cat’s eyes, but she was too busy nuzzling up to the visitor. “She seems quite interested in you,” I noted.