by Betty Webb
Jeanette had always enjoyed her days at the zoo. Three times a week she and her husband walked the zoo’s trails, assuring themselves of each animal’s comfort and condition of its enclosure. He always hung back, as if afraid something might escape and bite him, but she, the recipient of old Edwin Gunn’s genes, was fearless. Sometimes she even helped the vet with an animal. She was the one who’d demanded Grayson take over her duties when migraines rendered her helpless. For his part, he could have refused, but didn’t.
Something occurred to me. “On one of his walks through here, did he see something he shouldn’t have?”
The anteater didn’t answer.
A few minutes later, having finished her treat, a calmer Lucy moved away from the fence and ambled over to a faux log, snuffling for termites. Since she hadn’t allowed me into her enclosure yet, she found none. Whimpering, she returned to the holding pen gate.
“Whumph?”
I felt bad for her, but couldn’t enter the enclosure without having her stashed safely in the holding pen. Once again I cursed the ignorant Barry. The anteater needed to be fed, and just tossing a bucket of termites over the fence wouldn’t do it. To best accommodate her long nose, the insects should be stuffed into the logs.
I decided to give it another try. After mashing the other half of the banana, I crammed it inside her Wellington boot and threw it in the holding pen. Then, hefting my safety board up, I inched open the gate.
“Teddy’s going to try to feed you again, so please cooperate this time.”
Smelling the banana inside the boot, she rushed into the holding pen and I slammed the gate shut behind her. After casting me a betrayed glance, she licked the boot.
Problem solved, I got busy in the enclosure. I dumped an extra helping of termites into the various logs, and as quickly as possible, swept the area clean. As I worked, I forgot about Lucy’s behavior and began thinking about the murder again.
Since I couldn’t seem to find any actual clues, the solution to the mystery might be found in behavior. For all their purported brainpower, people are still animals. Deny them food, exercise, or sex, and they get cranky. Threaten them and they become downright dangerous.
Had anyone been behaving as if he—or she—felt threatened? Or at the very least, more wary than usual?
Zorah, of course. But since I knew she had to be innocent, I moved onto someone else.
How about Dr. Kate? Usually the soul of openness and geniality, the vet had seemed edgy lately. As an example, whenever I had tried to ask her about the independent vet study, she gave me short shrift, and I didn’t think it was because the study was confidential.
How much did I really know about her? She and her husband, Lowell, had moved from the Kansas City area several years earlier when he’d been offered a job with a Silicon Valley dot-com. Shortly thereafter, he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and as his health declined, was forced to leave his job. Dr. Kate, who’d given up her own associate vet position at the Kansas City Zoo to follow him to California, found a job here, where her salary took up some of the financial slack. Selling their large home in San Jose and moving into the smaller, on-site house the zoo furnished had helped, too.
Which brought me right back to the independent vet study.
A few hours before the murder, Barry had given Grayson a copy of the preliminary report without reading it. I was certain Grayson had read it, though, and if serious flaws had been discovered in the zoo’s treatment of its animals, he would have held Dr. Kate accountable.
Her continued evasiveness troubled me. The zoo hadn’t escaped its own health dramas. No zoo does. Barely a month earlier, one of our lemurs died while undergoing a routine checkup. Granted, the ensuing necropsy revealed a cancs lesion on its left lung, but questions had been asked in a staff meeting. Had Dr. Kate been too slow in noticing the animal’s declining health? And had Grayson demanded her resignation over it?
Talk about a motive for murder.
A wave of guilt washed over me. What was I doing, suspecting a sick man’s wife, the mother of three children, of murder? But Zorah hadn’t killed Grayson, and since Joe was so firmly convinced of her guilt, I had to do something about it no matter how much my actions displeased him. Or even myself.
After stuffing termites into the enclosure’s last log, I walked back to the holding pen where the anteater, having finished her banana, waited anxiously.
“I need to talk to Dr. Kate again, Lucy.”
“Grunt!”
Holding the safety board carefully between us, I released her back into the enclosure. Then I blew her a goodbye kiss, and exited through the pen’s back gate.
***
Late in the afternoon, I stopped my cart in front of the Andean spectacled bear exhibit, where a boisterous crowd had gathered. In the bear pit fifteen feet below, Willy, the smaller of the two bears and who’d been at the zoo for less than a month, had backed himself into a clump of bamboo. Despite keeper Jack Spence’s urgings, he refused to emerge. The reason for Willy’s timidity soon became apparent. Francine, the large female we hoped he’d eventually mate with, paced back and forth along the bamboo’s perimeter, growling threats. She obviously resented having to share her enclosure with a relative stranger.
Despite the cute white-outlined black patches across their eyes that gave the species its name, the bears were more dangerous than they appeared. Topping out at almost four hundred pounds, a female could remove a male’s eye with a casual swipe from her paw. Given the chance, a male would return the favor.
I climbed out of the cart and stood next to Jack at the fence. The fence’s security was increased by a steep-sided drop into the bear’s island-like enclosure that was surrounded by a deep, twenty feet-wide moat. Spectacled bears can swim, but unlike polar bears, prefer not to.
“Has he tried to mate with her yet?” I asked Jack. May was breeding time at the zoo and most of the animals were getting it on with enthusiasm. Except for the bears.
A rangy six-plus feet in height, Jack towered above me, but his expression was that of an anxious mother at an inner city playground. “Are you kidding? At this point he’s just trying to survive. Francine’s mean as a grizzly.”
Spectacled bears are on the Vulnerable Species list and few zoos own a breeding pair. Since Willy’s introduction to the exhibit wasn’t going as well as we’d wished, I worried that the zoo might have to resort to a sperm bank, a risky proposition since animals needed to be anesthetized during artificial insemination. The anteater had undergone the procedure with great success, but spectacled bears didn’t have a good track record with anesthesia. Sometimes they simply forgot to breathe.
Jack knew this, which probably accounted for his strained expression. After I’d commiserated with him a while, he said, “Say, could you stick around for a few minutes? I haven’t had my lunch yet, and my stomach’s about to gnaw through my spine. But I’ve been afraid to leave them alone together. As long as Francine’s acting this way, someone should keep an eye on her.” He lowered his voice. “That noisy crowd’s not helping.”
Zoos do get people excited, so crowd control is always an issue. Today, parents and their laughing, shrieking children strained against the fence around the bear’s enclosure, but I wasn’t too worried. The four-foot high fence, built of reinforced concrete painted to look like thick wood logs, could hold back an elephant. A clear Plexiglas barrier between the “logs” ensured that no one could slip through and fall into the moat below.
I looked at my watch. Three o’clock and Jack hadn’t eaten yet. No wonder he was so thin. “Go ahead. I’ll watch them until you get back.”
“I’m already gone.” He climbed into his cart and took off.
Just as he disappeared around the bend toward the snack bar, a mother with more enthusiasm than sense lifted her kindergarten-age son and sat him on the top rail of the fence, right above a sign that warned Do Not Sit Or Lean On Fence.
“Hey! That’s a fifteen-foot drop!” I cal
led, hurrying toward her.
The woman looked annoyed. “I have a good grip on him.”
Not good enough, apparently. Before I could reach her and snatch the child back, he twisted forward to get a better look at the bears. And he twisted right out of his mother’s “good grip.”
The boy fell.
Fifteen feet.
Straight into the moat.
He landed with a screech and a splash, then disappeared briefly underneath the scummy water. A couple of seconds later his head broke surface and he began to dog-paddle. Unfortunately, he aimed toward the bear’s “island,” the shore of which sloped down to the moat.
Both Francine and Willy—who had emerged from the bamboo—waddled to the edge of the moat and watched him, noses twitching. The male appeared merely curious, but I didn’t like the look on the female’s face, nor the way her ears flattened against her enormous head. Jack was right; she was one mean bear.
The crowd’s screams dwarfed the mother’s, who tried to struggle over the rail after her son. Two Hispanic men hauled her back.
“Bears in there, miss!” one cried, while the other studied the moat carefully, as if preparing to dive in after the child.
“No!” I shouted to him, then took one precious second to grab my radio and scream a “Child in spectacled bear pit!” -warning to the park rangers. Before the Hispanic man could act and perhaps get himself killed, I took a deep breath and vaulted over the fence.
Like the boy, I landed in the middle of the moat and sank below the surface. For a moment I continued plunging straight down through the dark green nothingness, bt my descent was stopped by the moat’s concrete bottom. A shiver of pain shot through my heel as it touched down, but I ignored it and headed back toward the surface. As my head entered the sunlight, I shook the water and offal out of my eyes. Immediately I saw the boy, swimming in the wrong direction for all he was worth. Within seconds, he would reach the bears.
As if eager to embrace him, Francine reared up on her hind legs, arms open wide. Her teeth flashed a murderous smile.
Spitting out moat water, I struggled toward the child. “Stop! Don’t go near her! Swim to me!”
He either didn’t hear or was so eager to get out of the filthy water that he ignored me. Like so many zoo visitors—including his foolish mother—he probably thought Francine was no more dangerous than an overgrown teddy bear. But I knew better. That two-legged stance of hers meant only thing. If the child reached shore, he was dinner.
The realization lengthened my stroke and I surged forward. Mere inches before the boy reached Francine’s welcoming claws, I caught him by the collar and dragged him away. Enraged, Francine lunged. She was so close that I could feel the air move as her horrible claws swept by. Finally aware of his danger, the child screamed. This only enraged Francine further, and for a moment it appeared she would jump into the moat after us.
But then Willy, darling little Willy who had retreated all the way into the bamboo again, began to bawl in distress. Francine turned to see what was wrong.
Suddenly debris rained down on the bears and I took a moment to look up. The two Hispanic men were bombarding the bear pit with rocks and soft drink cans. Their aim was so good that a Diet Coke bounced off the female’s nose. The boy momentarily forgotten, Francine snapped at the air.
Breathing a prayer of thanks for the distraction the men were providing, I tucked the boy’s head into the crook of my left arm in classic lifeguard fashion and back-stroked toward the steep enclosure wall.
“Let go!” the child screamed, and bit my arm. “Want Mommy!”
My arm, now imprinted with two rows of tiny teeth, began to bleed, but I didn’t release my grip although my arm now hurt as badly as my heel.
“Stay calm,” I urged. “I’ll get you back to her.” I’d read stories where lifeguards had to knock flailing swimmers unconscious in order to rescue them, but I didn’t have the heart for that.
So he bit me again.
“Stop biting!” I snapped, hoping I sounded parental.
Apparently I didn’t, because his teeth clamped down on me once more. “Mom!” he screamed.
As he opened his jaws for another munch, Jack Spence leaned over the fence, dangling a rope. “Grab on!”
I did.
Aided by the two other men, Jack hauled us up, the child first, me a soggy second. As I floundered onto the asphalt like a landed trout, Zorah and three park rangers brandishing rifles came tearing up the patha zoo cart that was trying its best to speed.
“Is the kid okay?” Zorah called, jumping out of the cart and running toward us.
I was too busy vomiting up dirty moat water to answer, so Jack did. “He’s fine. But do me a favor and shoot his idiot mother.”
Zorah bent down and brushed a lily pad away from my face in order that I could vomit better. “You all right, Teddy?”
“Just peachy.” I heaved again. Throwing up at the zoo was becoming a habit.
Within minutes the boy was whisked away by ambulance, trailed by his lawsuit-threatening mother. The two Hispanic men disappeared into the crowd. The rangers drove me to the First Aid station, where they patched up my bleeding arm and pronounced my heel merely bruised. They gave me a tetanus booster (forget the moat water; human bites are really nasty) while Barry, summoned from the administration building, hovered nearby.
“Are you sure you’re okay? That moat, God knows what’s floating around in there! I’ve given the order to have it cleaned more often.”
I waved his concern away. “How’re the bears?”
He scowled. “As if I care. The legal ramifications...”
Jack, who with Zorah had followed me to First Aid, interrupted. “The bears are fine. Willy’s hiding in the bamboo again and Francine’s enjoying a snack of strawberries and beetles.”
He’d said the wrong thing.
I leaned over and vomited up more scummy water.
***
As I stepped out of the shower in the zookeeper’s locker room, my cell phone rang. A glance at the display revealed my mother’s number. She seldom called me at work, so I guessed that word of my afternoon’s adventures had already gossiped its way to Old Town.
Not yet ready for that kind of trouble, I turned the cell off. Then I changed into a clean uniform and returned to my duties.
***
By the time the zoo closed for the day, I was sore and exhausted. I hungered for the comfort of the Merilee, but determined to find out more about that independent vet study, I summoned enough energy to visit Gunn Castle. Aware of my bedraggled state, I drove around the back to the castle’s more secluded rear entrance. As it so frequently had been during my teenage years, the heavy oak door leading to the stables and other outbuildings was unlocked. I slipped in, relieved that no servants lurked nearby.
I found Jeanette dressed in the same tatty old peignoir, lying on the bed with one of Grayson’s suits laid out next to her. Her face almost as gray as the suit, she stroked and murmured to it as if her husband remained inside. Uncomfortable with the intimacy of the scene, I froze in the doorway.
Seemingly oblivious to my battered condition, she threw me an imploring look through tangled strands of greasy blond hair. “His suit still smells like him, Teddy. Do you know how long that will last?”
“I don’t know,” I answered softly, not getting too close, so that any residual whiff of moat scum wouldn’t reach her.
She pressed her nose against the suit’s shoulder. “I had his cologne blended especially for him at one of those San Francisco scent shops. Maybe I’ll order a few more bottles, make sure I don’t run out.”
Although there was no alcohol on her breath, she smelled pretty much like I had after emerging from the bear’s moat. When had she last bathed?
“You need to start taking care of yourself. Shower. Get out of the house.”
She shook her head. “Why?”
“It might help take your mind off things.” My advice was inadequate, but it w
as the best I could do.
“That’s what Aster Edwina keeps telling me.”
For once I found myself agreeing with the old harridan. Although Jeanette and I had never been close after that Monopoly slap-down, it hurt to see her like this. For her sake, I summoned up some enthusiasm. “Listen, tomorrow’s Sunday and I have the whole day free. Let’s do lunch somewhere!”
“There’s food here.”
I tried again. “We could drive down to Carmel and troll the boutiques! A new pair of shoes might lift your spirits.”
“I don’t want my spirits lifted. All I want is to stay here with my husband.” She began caressing the suit again, this time south of the waistline.
I felt like a voyeur. She needed professional help, not my clumsy words of comfort. Before I left, I’d suggest a round of therapy, but first I needed to ask a question that had been preying upon my mind.