Menagerie

by Kristy Tate

  “Herbology?”

  She shot him a dark glance. “Don’t tell me you don’t believe in herbology.”

  “I’ve just never heard it called that.”

  “Well, now you have,” she said, aware that her words sounded clipped and defensive.

  She found the books she wanted and piled them in her arms. When Declan moved to take them from her, she shrugged away from him. Maybe it was dumb, but she felt like he didn’t deserve to hold them as long as he was skeptical.

  They met Elizabeth on the porch, made sure all the doors and windows were still locked, and headed for the boat. Along the way, Elizabeth prattled on about her discussion with the police. They didn’t have any leads, but if they still suspected Lizbet, Elizabeth didn’t mention it.

  Declan let out a moan when they reached the boat. “The keys.”

  “What?” Lizbet asked.

  “They’re gone.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.”

  —Charles Darwin

  From Declan’s Research

  “Gone?” Elizabeth and Lizbet asked at the same time.

  “They must have fallen out of my pocket.”

  “Maybe when you climbed into the root cellar?” Lizbet asked.

  He cocked his head, considering. “Seems the most likely.”

  “Come on, let’s go,” Lizbet said, resigned to retracing their steps.

  “Do you two youngsters mind if I wait here?” Elizabeth asked, looking hot and tired.

  Concern flitted through Lizbet as she placed the books down on a boat seat and carefully draped a tarp over them, making sure they were well tucked in and would stay dry on the drive home. “Maybe you should wait in the house. This may take us a while.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather rest on the boat,” Elizabeth said.

  Declan’s shoulders slumped, but he followed Lizbet up the hill, and pulled open the root cellar doors.

  They both peered into the hole, but saw nothing but the few rotting potatoes that had been there earlier.

  A squirrel in a nearby tree chattered at them.

  “You don’t know where the boat key went to, do you?” Lizbet asked the squirrel.

  The squirrel let loose a string of odd chirping noises.

  Lizbet hid her grin and followed the squirrel’s direction. She spotted the key hiding in the tall grass. She pointed it out to Declan, but moments before she reached it, a crow swooped down and scooped it up with his talons.

  “Hey!” Lizbet called after it.

  “Give those back,” Declan demanded.

  “But it’s shiny and pretty, the crow cawed, fluttering his wings and hovering above them.

  “Do you have anything shiny?” Lizbet whispered to Declan.

  “Why?” Declan pulled out a handful of coins.

  “Crows like shiny objects.” She plucked out sparkly quarter and a lackluster dime. “They’re shallow that way.”

  “Hey! I heard that!” the crow squawked.

  Lizbet held out her hand, showing him the coins. “We need the keys.”

  “But we don’t want you to go,” the crow cawed. “It’s empty without you here.” He lifted his beak in the air. “I’m deeply insulted that you think I could be bought.”

  “It’s so weird,” Declan said, shaking his head. “It’s like he’s actually talking to you.”

  Lizbet flashed Declan a glance to make sure he didn’t actually believe that she could communicate with the crows.

  “Maybe if you had some bread,” Declan suggested.

  “I think bread is a good idea.”

  “Give me the keys!” Lizbet growled.

  “All right, no need to be huffy.” The crow dropped the keys at her feet.

  “Thank you,” Lizbet said.

  “When will you be back?” the crow asked.

  It felt mean not to answer, but after sliding another look at Declan’s confused expression, Lizbet pressed her lips together and hurried toward the boat and Elizabeth.

  #

  Neal’s Nursery opened every morning at seven. Declan, of course generally missed the early shift because of school, but since it was spring break, he was there bright and early. He picked up his hose and began the task of spraying down the cement floor while Mr. Neal chatted with his plants, wiped their shiny leaves, and deadheaded the spent blooms. And while Declan believed in talking to plants almost as much as he believed in arguing with crows—which was not at all—he had to admit that Mr. Neal’s plants looked healthy and happy.

  And Lizbet and that crow?

  And not just the crow...there had been some sort of vibe between her and that squirrel as well. Vibe? He didn’t believe in vibes, healing crystals, vampires, or anything that he couldn’t see, hear, or touch. Which, an ornery voice in his head told him, ruled out atoms, protons, and nuclear fission. Those are different, he argued with the voice. Those had scientific backing. Then he remembered he didn’t believe in voices in his head. He aimed his hose at a lilac bush, taking care not to spray the newly formed blossoms, while shutting out the voice.

  “Declan!” His mom dressed in a gray pantsuit and a silky pink shirt hurried toward him. In her real estate broker-wear, she looked out of place among the plants, bags of soil, and bird feeders. “It’s your grandfather. He’s awake!”

  Declan took his thumb off the hose’s nozzle, shutting off the spray. He’d much rather stay at the nursery than return to the hospital, but one look at his mom’s anxious face helped him make his decision. “Let me talk to Mr. Neal.”

  “I already did,” Gloria said. “Hurry! We don’t know how much time we have.”

  We. Was that like a collective we, or did it mean she had someone—and by someone, he meant his stepfather—with her? He rolled up the hose as quickly as he could while his mom fluttered with impatience beside him.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he called to Mr. Neal on his way out the door. His steps slowed when he caught sight of Godwin’s mammoth Mercedes idling in the nearly empty gravel parking lot.

  Godwin glared at him through the darkly tinted windows.

  Declan looked down and realized he was still wearing the bright yellow Neal’s Nursery apron. He also had water and mud splattered on his jeans and dirt clung to his fingernails. He took off the apron and used it to wipe off his hands before he climbed into Godwin’s car. Wadding it into a ball, he dropped it on the floor beside his muddy sneakers.

  “I wish we had something more appropriate for you to wear,” Gloria said.

  “Do you want to swing by the house?” Godwin asked.

  “No, no,” Gloria said, casting Declan a worried glance over her shoulder. “He’ll have to do.”

  He’ll have to do? Do what? His mom was being ridiculous. She hated her dad. For nearly eighteen years, she’d had nothing to do with him, nothing to say to him, and now that the old man was dying, now that she had something to gain and something to lose, she wanted to play nice. It rankled him.

  “My clothes are completely appropriate for working, which was my plan,” Declan said, slouching lower into the back seat.

  “There’s work and then there’s dirty work,” Godwin said, looking at him through the rearview mirror. “You have to decide whether or not to get your hands filthy.”

  What does that even mean? Declan wondered. Was Godwin making a metaphor for life? Declan wasn’t ashamed of working at the nursery. He liked it. Sure, Mr. Neal was sort of goofy, but he was also kind. Just that morning he’d been singing to the rhododendrons because he knew that old Mrs. Harper would be picking them up and transplanting them into her flower bed. He worried any time the plants left for a new home.

  “I’m going to go to medical school,” Declan said. “Medicine can be extremely messy. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “Of course not.” Gloria blew out a breath and scowled at Godwin.

  Godwin used the rearview mirror to shoo
t Declan a look that said, I have a problem with you. At least that’s what Declan thought it said, because just like he didn’t speak plant or crow, he also didn’t really get Godwin. And he didn’t see how his mother could.

  They rode to the hospital in an icy silence. Declan’s hands grew cold and he tucked them under his arms to keep them warm. He refused to ask Godwin for anything—even a request for turning up the heat was more than his pride would allow.

  They crossed over the Mercy Island Bridge and broached the hill leading to Queen Anne General, making Declan think of the first time he had met Lizbet. He smiled, in spite of himself, remembering how she’d thought she needed a veteran or a Presbyterian to help find her mom. He had thought she was so strange...and he still did. Sort of.

  “You need to look sad!” Gloria told him after she caught his eye in the mirror attached to her window shade. “It’s bad enough you’re dressed like a hillbilly!”

  Declan’s smile faded. A dark cloud hovered over the Queen Anne skyline...and his mood.

  #

  Weeks slid by. The police made little to no headway on the investigation, and if it wasn’t for Elizabeth’s pestering, Lizbet suspected they would have dropped it altogether. Lizbet settled into the ranch’s quiet rhythm. She woke with the sun, helped Elizabeth feed the animals, and puttered in the garden until Matías or Maria showed up to help her with her online classes. But one morning while Lizbet and Elizabeth were spreading feed for the chickens, visitors interrupted their newly established routine.

  When Josie and a tall dark man with a widow’s peak slid out of a large black Mercedes, Elizabeth softly swore, wiped her hands on her apron, and patted her silver curls into place.

  Lizbet watched from the chicken pen while Elizabeth went to greet their guests. Something about the man pricked Lizbet’s memory. Then she remembered him from the hospital. He’d asked her if she was a P.D. James fan. She wondered how he knew Josie and why he was coming to visit Elizabeth.

  They chatted with her grandmother for a few minutes, but they were too far away for Lizbet to hear their conversation above the chickens’ jabbering. Minutes later, Elizabeth returned, looking perplexed and unhappy.

  Lizbet waited for her grandmother to comment on the visitors. When Elizabeth returned to spreading the chicken feed with tight lips and a scowl etched between her eyebrows and Josie and the man walked across the fields, Lizbet decided not to pry, even though she really wanted to ask why both of them would chose to walk through a horse pasture wearing business attire.

  “They’re going to ruin their shoes,” Elizabeth said with a smirk.

  “Josie will snag her tights,” Lizbet added.

  “That’s not all she’s trying to snag,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t trust that Gaylord Godwin.”

  “Josie seems to. Who is he?”

  “He’s a local businessman and land developer. Josie has less animal instinct than the chickens. She wouldn’t recognize a wolf in sheep’s wool if he came up and blew her house down.”

  Elizabeth’s expression and mood grew darker the longer Josie stayed. When Matías’s beat-up truck pulled down the drive, Lizbet wiped her hands on her skirt, and left to start her studies.

  Elizabeth just nodded as Lizbet headed for the house, Matías, and the sanctity of the computer.

  Lizbet met Matías at the back porch.

  “Who’s here?” Matías asked, his eyes following the couple rounding the barn.

  “Josie—she’s my aunt—and some man.”

  “What are they doing? I mean, they don’t look like they’re here to ride horses or pick cherries.”

  Lizbet bumped him with her shoulder. “I’m sure Josie doesn’t need an excuse to visit her mom.”

  Matías’s lips twitched as he pulled open the back door and held it open for her. “What makes you so sure?”

  She passed underneath his arm through the doorway and stopped in the mudroom to remove her dirty shoes. “I don’t need a reason to visit my mom, other than I want to.”

  “Yeah, but you’re you.” Matías smiled down at her.

  She didn’t know what that meant, so she let it go.

  “Want to start with calculus?” Matías asked, taking a chair beside her desk.

  “No one ever wants to start with calculus,” Lizbet muttered.

  “Wrong. No one ever wants to start with bio,” Matías said.

  She just shook her head. He liked math and she loved biology—it was like they each spoke a different language...especially when they worked on her Spanish. Matías was fluent since his father was Hispanic. His mother was Native American. His family’s dark coloring made Lizbet feel like she belonged in a way she’d never felt with Elizabeth, Josie, or even her own pale mother.

  Lizbet pulled up Lincoln Academy’s website and resigned herself to calculus, even though she didn’t know what possible use it could ever be. “What do you want to do, Matías? Will you stay on your dad’s farm?”

  “Only if he’ll let me modernize it. We could do so much more, be so much more if he’d move out of the Stone Age.”

  “So you do want to stay?”

  He cocked his head. “Yeah, but I want to study business and marketing. My dad has an okay thing going now, but the market for farm fresh produce is exploding and we’re just scratching the surface.”

  “Like the chickens.” Lizbet smiled.

  “Exactly,” Matías said. “How about you?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look beyond the island because I didn’t want to hurt my mom, but now...I don’t think I could go back to the way things were, even when she gets better.” If she gets better.

  “So, if you could do anything, be anything,” Matías pressed.

  “I’d really like to travel.”

  “That’s a far cry from hiding out on an island.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “We better work on your Spanish.”

  They fell into a comfortable silence as they studied. Hours later, a rattling on the window interrupted them. Tennyson stood on the sill, his back arched.

  “Someone wants in?” Matías asked.

  Lizbet pushed away from the desk, stretched, and went outside to get her cat.

  “Those people are up to no good,” Tennyson said as soon as Lizbet pulled him off the ledge and into her arms.

  “What do you mean?” Lizbet asked, after she rounded a corner and was sure Matías couldn’t hear or see her.

  “They plan on turning the ranch into a resort—they called it a dude ranch.”

  “A resort? Elizabeth won’t let them do that.”

  “That’s their plan,” Tennyson said. “The female thinks Elizabeth shouldn’t be living out her by herself. She thinks it’s dangerous. She said, and I quote, ‘My mother is getting stranger and stranger every day.’”

  “But it’s Elizabeth’s ranch. She should be able to live here no matter what.”

  “I’m just passing on what I heard.” Tennyson snuggled into her.

  “Where does Josie think Elizabeth should live?”

  Tennyson flicked his tail in response while Lizbet wondered what it would mean if Elizabeth did move off the ranch. Would she move in with Josie? Surely Josie wouldn’t want that, right? And where would Lizbet stay? Maybe they would continue to let her stay on the ranch. She gazed over the pasture at the horses. They were the most visible of the animals, but Lizbet knew a whole society lived in the tall grass. There were mice, chipmunks, moles, foxes, and too many insects to count. She and Elizabeth wouldn’t be the only ones displaced.

  Still cradling Tennyson, Lizbet went inside and sat down at the desk. She tried to focus on her studies, but her mind was racing.

  “So, do you want to come?”

  A beat too late, she realized that Matías had been talking to her.

  “Of course,” she said brightly, trying to hide the fact that she had no idea what she’d just agreed to.

  #

  “You don’t understand,” Lizbet said to
Maria. “It’s not that I don’t want to go to your graduation party. It’s that I don’t have anything to wear. And—” She waved her hand over her face, indicating that she didn’t have any makeup. “I have money,” she said. “Although I really shouldn’t. If Elizabeth would only charge me for food and rent, I wouldn’t feel so indebted.”

  Maria wrapped her arm around Lizbet’s shoulder. “I know Elizabeth loves having you here.”

  “How much is she paying you and Matías for tutoring me?”

  Maria’s eyes shifted away. “I can’t tell you, but—“

  “No buts!” Lizbet stood and flounced over to her closet. “I hate feeling like a freeloader!” She rifled through the few hanging dresses, skirts, and blouses she had brought with her.

  “Believe me, you are not a freeloader! Running a farm is a lot of work, and you’re doing more than your fair share! According to my dad, Elizabeth is slowing down. He said she wouldn’t be able to stay here if it wasn’t for you.”

  Lizbet blinked back fast hot tears. She hadn’t yet told anyone what Tennyson had overheard about Josie thinking her mom shouldn’t stay at the ranch, but she knew that moving would kill Elizabeth. “It’s not enough. I should do more.”

  “Look, I have some old clothes I’ve outgrown. You could have them.”

  “And then I’ll just be indebted to you!”

  “Don’t think of it like that!” Maria said. “Think of it as saving me a trip to the consignment shop.”

  “Consignment shop?” An idea clicked in Lizbet’s mind. Elizabeth had rooms and closets, not to mention a basement and attic, full of stuff. Maybe Lizbet could sell a few things to help pay her way. And maybe while she was at the consignment shop, she could find a few new—to her—outfits.

  Maria squealed when Lizbet shared her idea. Together they ran to find Elizabeth to see what she thought.

  #

  Declan and Beetle stood at the corner of East Fifth and McLeod directly in front of Cat’s Consignment Shop. People and cars passed by, but he only had eyes for the girls he could see through the large window. Lizbet. But instead of her typical hippie-looking skirt, she wore a pair of tight-fitting jeans, red cowboy boots, and a white blouse. She looked ridiculous. And yet...not.