The Wolf Keepers

by Elise Broach

  Inside her head, she whispered good-bye.

  The woman was standing next to her now. “Do you see him?”

  “No,” Lizzie said. “I think he’s gone.”

  She turned back to the group and they continued along the shore together, on their way to civilization.

  Chapter 32

  HOME

  AT THE RANGER Station in Yosemite Village, Lizzie and Tyler sat next to each other on a hard wooden bench, waiting for the arrival of Mike and Tyler’s foster mother. There had been much commotion as soon as they told the ranger their names. The local police departments had received an all-points-bulletin about Lizzie’s disappearance two nights ago, and they’d been looking for Tyler for weeks, ever since he ran away from his foster home. The ranger had put Lizzie on the phone with Mike briefly, and she had heard such a flood of worry and relief in his voice that she promptly burst into tears.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” she’d mumbled between sobs. “I’m fine, really.” But inside her stomach, a cold knot formed. She felt like she had betrayed Mike by running away, and now she was betraying Tyler by going home. Tyler’s hands were clenched on his lap, and she could feel his leg jiggling next to her. He’d withdrawn into silence as soon as the ranger telephoned his foster family, an hour ago.

  She wanted to say something to reassure him. She wanted desperately to tell him that nothing would change—he could come to the zoo, stay at her house, still be her friend. But she knew he wouldn’t believe that. She wasn’t sure she believed it herself.

  “You kids thirsty?” The ranger was just handing each of them a can of soda when a blustery red-haired woman burst into the room.

  “Tyler! Tyler!” she shrieked, grabbing him from the bench and engulfing him in her arms. “Honey, we were so worried about you!” She held him back to look at him, then hugged him again. “I prayed to God you were all right, and look, my prayers have been answered. Oh my goodness. Tyler, honey.”

  Lizzie stared at her in shock. Somehow, she’d imagined that Tyler’s foster mother would be cold and hard. But this woman was all emotion, and acting just like a real mother. She pressed Tyler’s head against her bosom and covered his dark curls with kisses. Tyler looked at the floor and didn’t say anything.

  “Thank you, Officer,” the red-haired woman gushed, blinking back tears. “Thank you for finding him!”

  “I’m a ranger, ma’am, not a police officer,” the park ranger said. “But we have notified the local law enforcement agencies.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Tyler’s foster mother repeated. “We’re just so grateful. We thought we might never see him again. Tyler, honey, come on, let’s get in the car. You must be starving, and I know you need a shower.”

  As she hustled Tyler out of the ranger’s office, he glanced back once at Lizzie. She instinctively leaned toward him, but before they could say anything to each other, he was gone.

  The door closed with a bang.

  Lizzie sat in stunned silence on the bench. Was that it? After all they’d been through? She hadn’t even had a chance to tell him good-bye.

  And then the door swung open and it was Mike. She leapt from the bench into his arms. The feel of his shoulder against her face, the warm, familiar smell of him, the tight, hard band of his arms around her back—she felt suddenly, irrevocably safe. She clung to him, trying to stop the shudders that rippled through her body.

  “Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie,” he was saying into her hair. “You have to promise me you will never do that again.”

  “I won’t,” she cried. “I promise. I’m so sorry, Dad.”

  * * *

  On the ride back to the zoo, she tried to stick to the story she and Tyler had discussed.

  “I blame myself,” Mike said, shaking his head angrily. “You’re alone too much. You’re always so responsible, I’ve come to count on that … and I forget you’re just a kid.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Lizzie said, horrified. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It was just—Tyler—”

  “But who is this kid? Why would you run away with him? And to Yosemite? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I met him at the zoo,” Lizzie explained. “It turns out he’s been living there, behind the elephant house, for a couple of weeks.”

  “What?” Mike gripped the steering wheel. “And nobody saw him?”

  “No. And I couldn’t tell you, I really couldn’t, because he didn’t want to go back to his foster family. His real mom, well, she’s been on drugs and she was sent away, and he doesn’t know where his dad is, and he’s been in a bunch of foster homes—”

  “But that doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Mike protested.

  “Yes, it does,” Lizzie contradicted. “He’s my friend.”

  “You just met him.”

  “I know. But now we’re friends.” She turned to Mike urgently. “And I have to see him again. I have to. I told him I would.”

  Mike’s mouth clamped into a thin line. “Lizzie, you ran away with him! I’m not sure he’s the best kid for you to spend time with.”

  “He is! He is the best kid,” Lizzie protested.

  “You could have been hurt, or worse,” Mike said. “And what were you doing in the apartment? I saw the groceries, the bed. How long was he staying there? I still don’t understand why you ran away to Yosemite. I mean, I know you were upset about the wolves dying. I figured you found out about Lobo and just took off.”

  He shot her a glance and Lizzie didn’t say anything. The story he was telling made more sense than her own.

  “I know how much Lobo meant to you,” he continued. “But Lizzie, there was nothing I could do.”

  She heard the pain in his voice and reached over to touch his arm. It was so hard not to tell him! She would have to, at some point, she realized. She’d have to figure out a way to let him know the wolves were all right. But she couldn’t risk that they’d be recaptured … and what if something she said meant that Karen went to jail?

  Lizzie leaned back against the soft car seat and stared out the window, watching the wooded hills give way to dusty fields. They were already out of the mountains. She thought about Tyler at home with his foster family.

  She said quietly, “We shouldn’t have run away like that.”

  Mike glanced over at her, his brow furrowed. “Lizzie … you’re all I have in this world. Do you understand that? The only thing that matters. If anything happened to you—”

  “I know.”

  She could feel the cold depth of her betrayal. She and Mike were a team. They had been since before she could remember. He needed to know he could rely on her, the way she needed to be able to rely on him. But what about Tyler? Tyler needed someone he could rely on, too.

  “Tyler doesn’t have anybody,” she said in a small voice.

  “He has his foster family,” Mike countered.

  “He ran away from them,” Lizzie said. “It’s not the same.”

  They rode in silence then, and Lizzie watched the dry, grassy fields roll past. “How are the rest of the wolves doing?” she asked suddenly.

  “Better,” Mike said. “None of the others have gotten sick. But…” He hesitated. “I had to fire Karen.”

  Lizzie stared at him. “What? Why?” she asked carefully.

  “Well, she knew what we had to do when Lobo and Tamarack died. I’d scheduled autopsies. It was important. I’ve had the board breathing down my neck ever since Athena died. And instead, well, she destroyed the bodies. She said she did it to prevent the disease from spreading, but something isn’t adding up.”

  “You fired her?” Lizzie was shocked.

  “Well, I let her go,” Mike corrected. “Something’s going on with her. She’s not thinking clearly, and I feel like she was lying to me.” He seemed to be talking to himself now.

  “Did you ask her about it?” Lizzie said, watching his profile.

  “I tried to, but she wouldn’t tell me anything.” He paused. “And truthfully, I think I
’d rather not know. It’ll change the way I feel about her. Anyway, I can’t have her making bad decisions when it comes to the animals. There’s too much at stake. Now we’ll never know what was wrong with the wolves.”

  Lizzie was silent, relieved that even her father didn’t always want to know the truth. “Is there a new pack leader?” she asked, wanting to change the subject. She was afraid if they kept talking about Karen, she would give too much away.

  He glanced at her again. “Well, they’re trying to figure things out. There’s been a lot of fighting since we lost Lobo.” Lizzie knew that wolf packs were so firmly structured around hierarchy that as soon as a member was lost—or in the zoo, even just absent for a few days, for medical reasons or breeding purposes—the entire pack rearranged its power dynamic. Since Lobo was the pack leader, his absence must have created even bigger shock waves.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “We’ve gone from seven to four,” Mike said. “I’d call it a failed experiment. It’s the nicest exhibit space we’ve got, and people love watching them, that’s for sure … but it’s not working out. I’ve been talking to a wolf rehabilitation center in Oregon.”

  Lizzie turned to him. “You have?”

  “Yeah. I have a board meeting on Tuesday night and I’m going to suggest we relocate the wolves and use that space for the Siberian tiger instead.”

  “It would be great,” Lizzie said fervently, “to move him from that awful cage.”

  Mike nodded. “I think it’s a good solution. We can get a female on loan from the San Diego Zoo, and if we have a good facility, big enough, with the right features, we might be able to start a breeding program. Maybe that would make up for the disaster with the wolves.”

  Lizzie pressed her sneakers against the dashboard, picturing the big male tiger in Wolf Woods, with so much more space, and the cover of trees and bushes, and rocky ledges to climb on. “I think that would be amazing,” she said happily. “And for the wolves, too! Could they release them in the wild?”

  “Well, that’s a process. It has to be done carefully,” Mike said. “But eventually, yes.” He was looking at her in surprise. “I thought you’d be disappointed. You’ve spent so much time over there.”

  Lizzie sighed. “Lobo was the only one I really got to know. And he’s … he’s gone now.” She was quiet for a minute. “I want the wolves to be free, out in the wild. Where they belong.”

  “Yeah,” Mike agreed. “Me too.”

  * * *

  Finally, they pulled up to the back gate of the zoo and rattled down the long drive to the yellow house, with its big, welcoming front porch. Lizzie felt a flood of happiness at the sight of it, and then a pang when she thought of Tyler. She glanced up at the apartment over the garage and turned to her father with a start.

  “How come the apartment windows are all open?”

  But before he could answer, the side door to the garage swung wide and out came Grandma May.

  Lizzie gasped, flinging herself from the car before it had even stopped moving. “Grandma May! You’re here!”

  Grandma May hurried across the driveway. She pulled Lizzie into her arms. “Of course I am! When your father told me you were gone, I came right away. I told him, we can’t lose our girl. We can’t ever lose our girl.”

  She hugged Lizzie tightly against her, and the only thing Lizzie could think, with a long, wondering sigh, was how happy and lucky she was to be home.

  Chapter 33

  A VISITOR

  LIZZIE COULD BARELY contain her excitement. She was sitting on the front porch steps, tapping her sneakers impatiently against the boards, looking down the driveway. Grandma May had been there a week—the most wonderful week—full of quiet, early-morning walks through the zoo, with the dew sparkling on the flowers and the animals restless and alert; then card games or movies during the hot afternoons; and finally, long evenings spent at the kitchen table, talking and laughing over bountiful dinners. Mike remarked that he had never eaten so well in his life, which Lizzie thought an exaggeration, and slightly resented, since they cooked good meals on their own, in her opinion. But she had to admit, it was nice to be fed and cared for. Grandma May made pork chops, roast chicken, salmon fillets, lasagna, and endless soups and casseroles, each more delicious than the last. Just this morning she had baked a three-layer carrot-coconut cake with cream cheese frosting, and now it sat on the edge of the kitchen counter, waiting for their guest to arrive.

  Tyler was coming this afternoon! Lizzie could hardly wait. She had talked to him twice on the phone since Yosemite, and truth be told, both times had felt strained and awkward. She’d called him at night, and she could always hear a lot of commotion in the background, the sounds of people moving around and talking, laughter, interruptions. Tyler had seemed quiet and subdued.

  “How is it?” she’d asked.

  “Okay,” he’d said.

  “Do you miss Jesse?”

  “Yeah.”

  What she really wondered was whether he missed her, but she knew he couldn’t answer, and then she’d feel foolish for asking.

  Now, though, he was coming over. To spend the night! All week, Lizzie had been telling Mike and Grandma May about Tyler, how smart and funny he was, how brave he’d been at Yosemite, how he’d pulled her out of the creek and saved her life. After that, it hadn’t taken much begging on Lizzie’s part for Mike to agree that Tyler could come for a sleepover. But because he had so recently run away, Mike thought that proposition had to be handled cautiously. He’d told Lizzie he wanted to meet with Tyler’s foster mother first and make sure she was comfortable with the plan. So Mike had gone after lunch to get Tyler, and Lizzie had stayed behind with Grandma May, helping to frost the carrot-coconut cake. Now she sat on the porch steps waiting for the car to pull into the driveway, nervously jiggling her toes against the boards.

  Grandma May came out to join her, settling into the white wicker porch swing and drifting gently back and forth. She plumped the floral cushions and beckoned to Lizzie, saying, “I am looking forward to meeting this Tyler. He sounds like a very interesting young man.”

  “Oh, he is!” Lizzie exclaimed. “He figured out how to live here at the zoo on his own.”

  “Yes, that’s what you told us. Behind the elephant house! Which sounds quite uncomfortable to me, but I suppose at his age, I would have been more adventurous.”

  “Well, he was really happy when he got to stay in the apartment,” Lizzie said, remembering Tyler’s joy at the pleasures of a hot shower and her grandmother’s comfy bed. “He acted like it was a luxury hotel or something.”

  Grandma May sighed. “I almost feel bad that he can’t stay there tonight.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Lizzie said. “We made up the spare bed for him in the house. And he’ll be excited to meet you! I told him so much about you when we were looking at all those old pictures of Yosemite.”

  Grandma May shook her head. “I still can’t believe you were in Yosemite all by yourself, for two nights, with no tent or sleeping bags, and wild animals all around.” Her eyes widened in amazement. “You are the zookeeper’s daughter, through and through.”

  Lizzie smiled. “Does that seem like something my dad would do?”

  Grandma May laughed. “Not your dad, Lizzie. Your mom.”

  Lizzie stared at her. Whenever people called her the zookeeper’s daughter, she always thought they meant her dad. And probably they did. But of course her mother had been a zookeeper, too.

  “We have so many fearless women in our family,” Grandma May continued. “Bold, strong women. I certainly don’t want you running away again, but I am glad to see you’re carrying on the tradition.”

  “I don’t think I would have been so brave without Tyler,” Lizzie said.

  “Maybe not,” Grandma May said. “But I doubt he would have been so brave without you.”

  That was true, Lizzie decided. When they were most afraid, they’d helped each other to be str
ong.

  Just then, Mike’s car rolled down the driveway, and Lizzie leapt up and ran to meet it. Tyler opened the door on the passenger side and climbed out, the old familiar backpack dangling from one hand. As Lizzie raced toward him, he hung back, seeming shy. But she couldn’t stop herself. She threw her arms around him, hugging his bony shoulders.

  “I can’t believe you’re here! Come on, come with me; you have to meet Grandma May.” She grabbed his wrist and dragged him toward the porch, where Grandma May had risen to greet him.

  “Tyler, I’m so happy to finally meet you,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers. “Lizzie hasn’t stopped talking about you.”

  Tyler smiled sheepishly. “I’m glad to meet you, too. I like all those old pictures you have.” He gestured toward the upper windows of the garage apartment.

  “Well, why don’t we have a snack, and then we’ll walk over there and look at them together?”

  Grandma May led him into the kitchen as Mike parked the car.

  Lizzie hesitated on the porch, waiting for her father. “So he can really spend the night? He doesn’t have to go back till tomorrow?” she asked anxiously.

  Mike grinned at her. “Better than that. If everything goes okay, he can spend the whole weekend.”

  “Seriously?”

  Mike nodded. “They have their hands full over there, and it’s fine with them. We’ll see how it goes, but I don’t have any problem with him spending weekends here if you guys would like that. We have plenty of room.”

  “Really, Dad?” Lizzie thought she was going to burst. “That would be awesome!”

  “Don’t say anything yet,” Mike told her. “Let Tyler get settled and then we’ll see if that’s something he wants. But honestly, I’d rather have you both here, where I can keep an eye on you.”

  “Okay,” Lizzie said, but she was sure it was something Tyler would want.

  In the kitchen, Grandma May was slicing thick wedges of carrot-coconut cake and putting them on plates.

  Tyler looked at the cake skeptically. “Carrot?” he asked.