Menagerie

by Kristy Tate

  “H-h-ow?” Lizbet’s thoughts stuttered. She tried to rally them. “The man in the boat that came here this morning. He’s the one who did this. He bashed in my mother’s head and killed my dog.” Lizbet’s voice faltered. “You have to find him.”

  Officer Mayer cleared his throat. “We’ll do our best. In the meantime, let me fill you in on what’s going to happen next. We’ll be moving you to Blueberry Fields. It’s a home for kids in the foster care system. A case worker will be assigned, and will help organize a search for any family.”

  An idea struck Lizbet. “I’m eighteen! I’m an adult.” Although, according to her mom, she was seventeen.

  Suspicion flickered in his eyes.

  “I’m small, like my mom.”

  Their diminutive size was about the only characteristic Lizbet and her mother shared. Rose had fair skin and strawberry blonde hair. Outdoors, she always wore a large floppy straw hat to keep her nose and ears from turning red. She never left the house without sunglasses, claiming that the sun blinded her light blue eyes. Bugs swarmed after Rose, preferring her creamy skin to Lizbet’s swarthiness. Lizbet with her green eyes and skin never worried about the sun or mosquitoes.

  “We’re moon and sun,” Rose liked to say. “It is ourselves. Both and one.”

  “And we don’t have any family,” Lizbet said.

  “You might think that, but it might not necessarily be the case.”

  “I’m positive there isn’t family.”

  Officer Mayer flipped his notebook closed—a clear signal that he disagreed with her.

  “Even if we do have family, don’t you think there would be a reason my mom made a significant effort to avoid them?” Her mom had always said that she and Lizbet were all they needed. Lizbet’s throat tightened as she realized how wrong her mom had been, because without Rose, Lizbet was completely alone.

  “Any ideas on who or what your mom was hiding from?”

  “What makes you think she was hiding?”

  Officer Mayer waved his hand around at the stone cottage with its closed shutters making Lizbet see it from his point of view. The cottage was almost completely overrun by ivy, making it look like a hill in a field. Even the slate roof had a healthy covering of moss. Lizbet wondered if their home would even be distinguishable from the air, or if it would blend in to the wooded countryside.

  “We didn’t always live alone, you know.”

  Officer Mayer raised an eyebrow and waited for her to continue.

  “Daugherty lived here, too.”

  “And what happened to her?”

  “She died years ago.” Lizbet barely remembered Daugherty, but the intense feeling of sadness she’d felt so long ago returned and touched her for just a moment.

  “Was there a proper funeral? Was it reported? Did you get a death certificate?”

  “I was just a child. I don’t remember anything, really. She made and sold blackberry wine. I can show you her shack if you’d like.”

  Officer Mayer twisted his lips and looked unhappy.

  A red-breasted robin flew to the window and pecked at the screen. “Footprints in the cove. Footprints in the cove.”

  Lizbet sat up. “I want to show you the footprints in the cove. A man’s footprints—you’ll want to see them right? So you can know if you’re looking for a big-footed murderer?”

  “This is not yet a murder investigation.”

  “The man killed my dog and nearly my mom!”

  Officer Mayer dipped his head, acknowledging his mistake.

  Fragments of an old murder mystery involving a child witness came back to her. Lizbet climbed to her feet, scooped up the cat, and headed for her mom’s office.

  “Now see here, where you going?” Officer Mayer demanded.

  “I’m getting my mom’s camera. I’m going to take pictures of the footprints in the cove and then I’m going to compare them to the shoes of all your men who, for all I know, have been mucking up a crime scene.” Lizbet paused in the doorway of her mom’s office. “You can’t just haul me off to who-knows-where, and I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t even be talking to me without a lawyer present. We’re done.”

  Righteous indignation carried Lizbet down to the cove, but once she got away from Officer Mayer and his posse of beer-bellied men, tears crowded behind her eyes. The enormity of her situation settled on her shoulders and weighed her down. She didn’t even know how or where her mom developed their film, let alone a million and one other things her mom did to make their isolated life on the island possible. What would she do now? Without her mom, the long winter nights and drizzly gray days would be unbearable.

  “You still have me,” Tennyson said as he trotted through the long grass beside her.

  Lizbet gave the cat a bleak smile, because, as always, Tennyson was as intuitive as a crystal ball. And right now, Lizbet needed a crystal ball.

  “And us,” a crow called.

  “You guys are always good for a bump on the head,” Lizbet muttered, worry turning her mood sour.

  “We saved your life,” Tennyson said.

  Lizbet sniffed as she stalked through the field and down the bank that led to the cove. The police boat was tied to the dock and bumped against the wood pilings with the falling and rising waves. The grass where the gigantic helicopter had landed was smashed and twisted about. Much like her insides.

  She closed her eyes against the memories of her inert mom being carried away on a stretcher and lifted into the noisy grasshopper-like machine. Blood had covered her mom’s face and stained her pale hair. Her eyes had remained mercifully closed. Her hand had dangled from the stretcher like a silent plea for Lizbet to follow.

  Lizbet still couldn’t understand why she’d been left behind.

  “Footprints?” Lizbet asked the bird.

  The robin swooped down and settled on a patch of smashed grass. Sure enough, footprints, but unless she was able to compare them to the police officers’ boots, there wouldn’t be any way to know if they belonged to them or someone else. She snapped a few pictures and followed the footsteps to the beach. In the sand, one print clearly showed an emblem. Knowing it would be gone as soon as the tide came in, Lizbet took a picture.

  “The men! The men! The men!” the gulls cried.

  Lizbet looked up to see Officer Mayer and his band of men approaching. She waved them over. “This is very distinctive.”

  “Wellingtons,” the youngest officer said. He had chocolate-colored hair and eyes, and unlike his portly peers, a swimmer’s build. “Pretty expensive boots.”

  Officer Mayer scratched his chin. “Looks like a size fourteen.”

  “A big guy,” another officer said.

  The officer with the chocolate eyes smiled at Lizbet. “I’m guessing that you nor your mom wear a size fourteen.”

  Officer Mayer nodded at an officer. “Let’s take some pictures.” His voice sounded heavy and drained, as if the thought of doing any actual investigative police work made him tired.

  #

  Later, when the sun had sunk into the Sound and Lizbet was alone with her thoughts, she padded into her mom’s office. This was forbidden territory, but since her mom wasn’t here to stop her, or to answer questions, or to share their evening meal, Lizbet sat at the desk. It felt wrong. But then, everything was wrong. Her mom made everything right. Lizbet couldn’t imagine a life without her. The thought that her mom could disappear, like Daugherty, made Lizbet’s breath catch in her throat.

  She clenched her hands and tried to envision a life off of the island. All her mom’s grim tales flooded her thoughts. Lewd men. Conniving women. Greed. Lust. Coldhearted liars. Lizbet pressed both of her palms to her eyes, trying to shut out the images her mom had painted for so long.

  Not everyone could be bad, could they? Leonard the postman seemed like an okay guy. The police officers had seemed lazy, but not malicious.

  But Lizbet knew one thing for sure, she would rather take her chances in a world full of people, good and bad,
then live alone on the island. For not the first time, she wondered how her mom paid for the utilities—the electricity and water. And did her mom own their house outright? Or was there a mortgage? And why did Officer Mayer say there wasn’t a record of her mom? Could it be that Rose Wood wasn’t her mom’s real name? So, why had she changed it?

  Curiosity mingled with anger and frustration made Lizbet rifle through the desk drawers. She wanted to find answers, but instead she found paperclips, staples, receipts, and a collection of drawings by Lizbet’s younger self.

  Lizbet sat back and spun in her chair. Her eye caught sight of one of the bookshelves that held an assortment of Rose’s agricultural books: Composting 101, Living Off the Land and Loving It, Dirt Farming for Dummies. For all she knew, neither she nor her mom had looked at those books in years, and yet they were dust free. The shelves above and below had books as equally as mind-numbingly dull and they all had a light layer of dust on them—as all boring books should. But one particular shelf wasn’t dusty at all.

  Lizbet sprung from the chair, pulled the dust-free books to the floor, and discovered a hidden safe secured with a thick padlock. She stared at it for a few moments before she started to work at it. The spinning dial clicked, but little else.

  She rested her butt on the desk and drummed her fingers on her thighs, thinking. Something she read in a Sherlock Holmes’s novel came back to her. She quickly jotted down the alphabet and assigned each letter a number, A being one. Eighteen for R, fifteen for O, nineteen for S, five for E. Nothing. Then she did the same thing for Lizbet and the lock fell open.

  Lizbet pulled open the door and discovered a collection of papers.

  Answers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”

  —Charles Darwin

  From Declan’s Research

  Declan sat halfway in on the third pew from the front, on the left. According to Godwin, his family had been occupying this pew for more than three decades. Declan liked it because of the way the sunlight filtered through the stain-glass window of Christ with a flock of sheep. Also, it was not too close to the pastor, who, when excited, tended to spit as he preached. Since the pastor had been excited every time Declan had attended services with his mom and stepfather, Declan appreciated the fact that Godwin’s predecessors had chosen not to sit in the splash zone.

  But there was a boatload of things he didn’t appreciate. Number one, and this was a biggie, it was a pew—in a church. Number two, Nicole Gunner and Jason Norbit sat two rows ahead of him on the right. He liked Nicole almost as much as he disliked Jason.

  While Declan’s mom, Godwin, and about a third of the rest of the congregation picked up their hymnals and followed the direction of the music chorister, Declan folded his arms, leaned back against the pew, and skated a glance at his mom. Until her marriage to Godwin, he wouldn’t have thought she possessed a religious bone. When she’d lived with him and his dad, they’d never practiced or embraced any religion. Their only nods at spirituality had been a Christmas tree and an Easter basket. But now, his mom sang praises to a God that Declan didn’t know and couldn’t understand. Didn’t want to know or understand.

  He glanced around the room, recognizing some of Eastside’s power players—the mayor, the president of the school board, the CEO of Allied Digital. She wouldn’t align herself to a faith for business contacts, would she? The thought was so awful, he immediately dismissed it and replaced it with memories of his mom pushing him on the swings, taking him on the merry-go-round, and reading him Goodnight Moon.

  He leaned forward and put his head in his hands, but not before he caught sight of Jason draping his arm around Nicole’s shoulders and pulling her close. Declan ran his finger beneath his collar and prayed to the God he didn’t believe in that he could be anywhere else but here. If this God was so all-powerful it wouldn’t be such a big deal to transport Declan to a McDonalds or a sports park.

  As expected, his prayer went unanswered.

  #

  Lizbet’s world tipped more and more off balance with each new piece of information. From the receipts and invoices, it seemed that her mom had once owned and operated a successful blackberry wine business with a variety of distributors up and down the west coast.

  A fat manila envelope sat in the back of the safe. She pulled it out and found hundreds of hundred-dollar bills stuffed inside. She wouldn’t need all of it, would she? Would it be safer to leave it in the safe, or take it with her? How much did things cost in Queen Anne? She’d need a place to say, something to eat...what else? What about the medical costs? She took it all out.

  Lizbet sucked in a deep breath, selected a few of the most telling papers, and went to her mom’s room. She towed a dusty suitcase out from underneath her mom’s bed and went to fill it. She had a collection of lightweight cotton skirts, sandals, sweaters, as well as Levi overalls. She wondered how people on the mainland dressed. In some of the books, clothes were described in great detail, but most of those were historical novels. She knew she couldn’t show up looking like Scarlett O’Hara in a hoop skirt. How sad that her only contemporary fashion indicator was Leonard the postman. She hoped that not everyone in Queen Anne wore knee-length shorts and a blue shirt with their names stamped over their breast pockets.

  But how she looked didn’t matter. She needed to find her mom and make sure she was being taken care of. And then she needed to find the man with the size-fourteen shoes and make him pay for what he did to her mom, her dog, and her turned-up-side-down world.

  #

  “She wouldn’t even make you a loan?” Disbelief tinged Declan’s dad’s tone.

  “It’s okay, I wouldn’t have taken it anyway.” Declan tightened his grip on his overnight bag while his dad’s foot grew increasingly heavy on the gas pedal. Speed and recklessness through the Queen Anne traffic was the only sign of the anger Declan knew had to be boiling just beneath his dad’s affable face.

  His dad white-knuckled the steering wheel. “I can’t believe...”

  “Forget it. I don’t want to owe Godwin anything.”

  “But—” his dad sputtered.

  “Mom said they’re both up to their eyeballs in that housing development.”

  “What housing development?”

  Declan knew his dad would no sooner invest in a housing development than take a trip to the moon. “That one.” At that moment, they happened to pass a giant billboard with a picture of a two-story house with a stone façade complete with a turret. The caption read, Dreams really can come true! Live out yours on Royalty Ridge.

  His dad’s normally tanned skin won from his hours spent at the golf course, tennis court, and on his bike turned a shade pink. “She wasn’t always like this, you know,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “She was cute. Bouncy. We were just kids.”

  Declan, of course knew the story. It was a classic teen romance. The high school quarterback marrying the head cheerleader. They had made it last longer than it probably should have. “It’s okay. Really. I got a job walking Mrs. Reilly’s dog.”

  “In addition to everything else...”

  “I know it’s a lot, but it’ll be worth it. Principal Martin said he’d put my name on the tutor list.”

  His dad elbowed him. “Why are you such a brainiac?”

  Declan grinned. “’Cuz I’m your kid.”

  Declan’s grandmother called his dad a full package of beauty, brains, and brawn. His Aunt Gertie, his mom’s sister, called him a thoroughbred racehorse that never left the starting gate. They were both right. And despite, or maybe because of, the beauty, brains, brawn, and divorce, his dad, Declan knew, was basically just what he’d always been: a happy pony. He liked teaching math and coaching football for East End High and playing golf, tennis, soccer, and baseball in the summe
r, and skiing, snow-shoeing, and ice-fishing in the winter. He didn’t want to be up to his eyeballs, of even his toes, in real estate deals. Or deals of any kind.

  And Declan didn’t want to deal with Godwin. He saw it as dealing with the devil.

  #

  When Leonard came the next day, Lizbet was sitting on a big rock in the cove waiting for him. She explained what had happened while he stared at her through his thick glasses. Several emotions flashed across his face while she told her story, but the one that lingered was compassion.

  “I’ll get you to Queen Anne General Hospital,” he said. “But I know for dead certain that they won’t be letting you bring that creature inside.” He pointed at Tennyson curled in a basket on Lizbet’s lap.

  Lizbet gazed down at the orange tabby and panic stuttered her thoughts. Going to Queen Anne would be hard, but going without Tennyson would be impossible.

  We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, Tennyson told her with a flick of his tail.

  Lizbet lifted her chin. “I’ll leave him with...friends while I visit my mom.”

  Leonard’s expression told her he suspected she didn’t have any friends. “So, you got you a place to stay? You’re not going to try sleeping under a bridge, or anything, right? Cuz I can’t have that on my conscience. Queen Anne’s a big city and could swallow whole a little gal like you whole without a hiccough.”

  Lizbet tightened her lips. She didn’t need Leonard to make her any more scared than she already was. “I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I’d appreciate you even more if we could just leave already.”

  Leonard chuckled. “Well, don’t get your panties in bunch. It’ll take us a good long time to complete my route. Probably won’t be getting back to Queen Anne until dinner time.”

  “That’s fine.” Lizbet rummaged through the macramé bag she had hung around her shoulder and pulled out a bottle.

  “What’s this?” Leonard asked.

  “It’s my mom’s blackberry wine—as a thank you.”