“Alone.” More words seemed to be trying to escape, but they failed.
I waited, but he slipped into his car, closed the door, and started the engine without looking at me. I stepped back to let him flee.
He rolled down the window. “You need to, to stay away. From me.”
A plea? I watched him drive off, bewildered. Stay away for his sake or for mine? I opened my car door and sat, wondering once again about Ian. I’d seen him pushed to anger. I couldn’t guess what would trigger violence. He was so strange…Would he attack Wallace, his supporter and buffer against Sam? To eliminate a competitor for Dr. Reynolds, a woman he was terrified to speak to and had no chance with? Was sympathy for the outcast blinding me to reality?
One all-too-obvious reality was that Ian’s social incompetence was a perfect mismatch for Sam’s pride and sensitivities and that Wallace had made the situation a thousand times worse. What a train wreck. I could not imagine how this could ever be set back on the rails.
I turned the key in the ignition and glanced around before backing up. And nearly jumped out of my skin. Dale, Thor’s sidekick, leaned his face inches away from mine, only the driver’s window between us. I almost wet myself. He straightened up and stepped back, mission accomplished, his sullen, triumphant face framed by messy black hair. Mowing him down was almost irresistible. Back up, shift to Forward, crush him against another car…I flipped the locks down and pulled out of the lot. Murder had never seemed so reasonable.
Chapter Seventeen
My father sat in the Honda’s passenger seat, unclear about what I was up to, but willing to cover my back. I told him, “She’s Calvin’s daughter, and I need to talk to her about zoo business. She’s likely to get mad.”
“What are you up to?”
“I can’t say without causing trouble. I should keep it confidential.” The last thing I needed was my parents panicking again about Wallace’s death. He started in with the silence and the look that compels the whole truth. I scrambled out of the car.
The house was a shabby white bungalow in Lents, not the most prosperous neighborhood in Portland. I walked up an uneven path through an unkempt yard and studied the front door. An all but illegible note on a white card instructed me to knock, which I did. The doorbell had apparently perished long ago. That happened at my house and I fixed it with a twelve-dollar, no-wire, battery-operated doorbell in about ten minutes. Janet hadn’t bothered.
Finding the address of A Team Mom had turned out to be simple. I sent an email saying I had information about Kevin Wallace that I needed to discuss. Period. She had taken the bait. A short phone call led to this meeting.
The surprise came when I put her first name and connection with Wallace together. She was Calvin’s daughter and had worked at the zoo administration office before my time. Jackie told me all about her. Janet and Wallace dated until one day the gate receipts were found in her purse, and she was fired for theft. Several months ago I accidentally discovered that she was set up in an act of malice by another zoo employee, one who hated Wallace and wanted to ruin his romance. I’d told Wallace and Calvin, expecting that one or both would tell Janet that her name was cleared.
It was Thursday, my day off, and the first opportunity for this visit. While the dogs romped in the park, I’d thought about my appointment with a possible murderer. At the last minute, I’d abandoned the logic that Janet had to be smaller than my current size and therefore was no threat. I called my dad for backup.
The door opened and a woman said, “Yes?” The hair was still blond, with assistance, but the cute figure in Calvin’s photos of the young Janet had become a series of overlapping spheres—breasts, belly, hips all rounded and flowing into one another. She was still short, but the confident grin was long gone. She wore a loose chartreuse blouse over stretchy black pants, black flats, a little makeup. Her hair was curly and neatly brushed.
I waved toward my car as I said, “I’m Iris Oakley. My dad wants to wait in the car.” She glanced at the Honda, not interested, and let me in.
She sent me to a sofa covered in gray vinyl. It skidded a little on the worn oak floor when I sat down. No rugs anywhere. A teenage boy sat at the dining room table hunched over a drawing with a pencil clenched in his fist. He didn’t look up, and she didn’t introduce him. All she said was, “My other son is out.”
She seated herself in a matching gray chair. “You’re from the zoo. A friend of Kevin’s?” Her voice wasn’t friendly.
“Not a friend so much. I’m a keeper, so he’s—was—my boss. I’m a bird keeper, so I work with your dad.”
The house smelled of air freshener underlaid with cooking grease. No sign of a cat or dog. She nodded and waited.
“The zoo has to conduct an investigation into his death. I have a few questions.” The first sentence wasn’t a lie, exactly.
Janet sat back and crossed her legs. “A cop was here already. He asked a bunch of questions and swabbed all my shoes. So why you?”
I nodded as though that were old news. Points to Detective Quintana. “The zoo has to file its own reports on the death.”
Janet looked at me thoughtfully. “And they sent a keeper?”
She was no fool. I shrugged. “Like the job description says, ‘Other duties as assigned.’”
“Because you’re pregnant and can’t do the heavy work.”
“Right.” The all-purpose explanation. “I know that you worked at the zoo years ago and left under a cloud. Your dad must have told you that new evidence cleared you of the theft charge. I hope that Wallace—Kevin—apologized for the zoo and corrected your personnel file.”
Each hand gripped a corner of the chair seat, the fingers chubby and tight. “Apologize? Correct the personnel file?” It was my turn for silence. “That’s rich. You’re still young. You don’t know what it’s like to have God flick his finger and knock your world apart. You still think that things can be fixed.”
She had that wrong. I knew how fast life can change and that some things stayed broken forever.
Her upper lip curled with irony. “I thought I was strong. I should have been. I was pretty and smart back then, and my parents loved me. That should have been enough, right? Take a hit and bounce back, right? You don’t know shit.”
I recoiled a little, and she smiled from some dark well of cynicism.
“I lost my job, my reputation, and my fiancé all in one hour. I was a thief—a criminal—and I was supposed to be grateful to get fired and not arrested. Kevin kicked me out, bam. No chance to figure out how that money got into my purse. I was set up, and I knew it, and I couldn’t do a thing about it. Kevin adored me one minute and despised me the next. He never doubted for an instant. The only one who believed me was my dad.”
“Calvin was pretty bitter about it. He lost a lot of respect for Wallace.”
“Lot of good that did. He wanted to quit his job and Mom wouldn’t let him, so I was to blame for them fighting and for him stuck in a job he hated. He thought she got cancer from the stress, and he blamed Kevin for that, too.”
Calvin liked his job, that I was sure of. I let it pass. “The truth came out. I hope that helps.”
“Yeah, my dad told me months ago, but Kevin couldn’t be bothered, not then. After my entire life is down the toilet, I finally get a letter from him, and that’s supposed to make it all better. It came the same week my second husband walked out on me. Nice timing, huh?”
“When did you get the letter?”
“A few weeks ago.”
Wallace had known Janet was innocent for six months. I wondered why he hadn’t acted sooner. Then I wondered what did trigger him to write. Maybe starting a relationship with Dr. Reynolds. “So you got in touch with him?”
“Yeah. I’m in recovery—AA—and my group thought it might be a good idea. So I met him at a Starbucks. I’m fat now, but he knew who I was. We talked. It didn’t change my life.”
“Why did you send him the
email? The one about rotting in hell.”
“We talked, and I remembered that I once actually cared for him. My group said hating him only hurt me. But I came home, came back to this.” She waved a hand. “He never gave me the tiniest benefit of the doubt. He’d known me for six, seven months, worked with me, dated me, knew my father, said he loved me. We were engaged, for God’s sake. I was twenty-one. You know I’ve never held a job for over a year? Not since then. Every time things would get tough at work, I’d quit so they couldn’t catch me by surprise and fire me. I married the first guy who asked me, and he wanted me to work, wanted the income. I couldn’t do it, not for more than a couple months at a time. So I drank, and he left.”
“You got home and the hate came back, so you sent the email.”
“Hate him? That’s way too simple. What can you say about the guy who wrecked your entire life? He didn’t mean it? It was all a mistake? My mother used to say, ‘Sometimes sorry isn’t good enough.’ What an understatement. Yeah, I wasn’t going to let him think he’d fixed everything up nice. He hadn’t done shit except stir it all up again.”
I looked and I couldn’t see Calvin in her, nothing of that square, silent, kind man, except the ability to hold that same bitterness for years. “Um, Janet, do you think he deserved to die?”
She looked at me sharply. “That’s for God to decide. And I guess he did, all right.”
“You wouldn’t have wanted to help that along?”
Janet’s mouth twisted, something between a smirk and a wry smile. “There was a time I would have, but it wouldn’t do me any good, would it? It’s not like me forgiving him or him dying makes any difference, does it? I’m stuck here on the A team.” She nodded toward the boy, who hadn’t moved a muscle except for tiny finger movements on his sketch pad. “Aaron and Adam, autism and asthma. And me: alcoholic and abandoned.” The summation sounded rehearsed. It seemed to please her. “You’re pregnant. Good luck with that.”
She sat still for a moment. Her face softened and aged. “I can’t figure out whether I failed God’s test, or I got caught in his struggle with the devil, and he forgot to come back and pick up the pieces. Either way, I’m on my own, no matter what AA makes me say.” She came back to the present and stood up. “I got stuff to do, if that’s all you’re here for.”
The questions I still needed to ask weren’t enough to keep me in that house.
My hand shook turning the car key in the ignition.
“Go okay?” my father asked.
“Remember the Robert Frost poem about the world ending in hate and ice? That’s the woman to do the job.” I drove to his shop in silence, checking carefully at all the intersections, and dropped him off. At my house, my house that smelled of bacon from breakfast and the peonies my mother had cut for me, I sat on the floor with Winnie and Range and let the dogs lick the bitterness off me.
Chapter Eighteen
My mother had scored excellent seats, six rows back from one of the two rings. Each ring was defined by foot-high barriers and covered in wood chips. Above stretched a tangle of wires, lights, ropes, nets, platforms, and mystifying contraptions understood only by circus roustabouts. The visibility was great, the noise was a thunderous combination of over-amped pop music and screaming children. Instead of a Big Top tent, we clustered in the cavernous Portland Rose Garden, the stadium where the Trail Blazers play basketball and big-name music acts perform. Confetti drifted in the breeze from giant fans above. Popcorn scent was thick, with a hint of horses. I shared my row with four fifth-graders to my right and five to my left. Most of the kids wore the little red clown noses the ticket-takers handed out. My mother sat a row forward to my left and a parent sat to the far right in my row, a military-like deployment over “our” two rows to maximize adult presence.
I’d tried to get Marcie to join me, but no luck. She and Denny were off to a concert. A small girl behind me kept kicking my seat. I turned around and glared at her with zero success.
On the way in, an earnest young woman in a long dress had handed me a brochure about circuses mistreating animals. I’d tucked it into a pocket to study later.
My job was to be a responsible adult. My skills did not yet lie in that direction, but no problem. The kids were safely entranced by clowns goofing around in the ring, except for one red-headed boy on my left who focused on catching the floating confetti. This scene was all about entertainment, with a capital E. It totally obliterated the morning’s soul-stain from Janet née Lorenz.
The clowns invited a few kids from the audience to practice tight-rope walking and circus-style bowing in the ring in front of us. Our bunch nearly stampeded that direction, but my mother employed The Voice, and they sank back in excited defeat.
The audience was a standard Portland crowd dressed in drab tee shirts and jeans with sensible shoes. The high-wire couple above us shimmered and glittered in purple and silver, the clowns vibrated in fluorescent green, red, and yellow. Dark-clad roustabouts—men in a range of ages—hauled gear around and set up wires and platforms. The men were swift, efficient, and nearly invisible. I suspected that few in the audience noticed them at all.
The first acts, or maybe pre-acts, were low-key despite the relentless music. Clowns zipped around in tiny cars, young men jumped sturdy bicycles through hoops, a little white dog ran around and got into trouble with the clowns. The kids shrieked and parents smiled. It seemed hokey and unspectacular, until I realized that this non-scary action acclimated the little kids so they wouldn’t freak out at the more high-powered acts. I’d been one of the freak-outees in my early years, and I appreciated the thought.
The real Big Show kicked off with a parade around the outside of the two rings. Pretty horses, some white, some black, with silver spangles. Two elephants with huge red and gold spangles on the harnesses adorning their heads. More clowns. Family groups of performers, each family in a different bright, tight costume, waving at the crowd. More horses. Zebras, of all things. A pack of fluffy dogs. Two more elephants.
I tried to notice more than spectacle. The animals in the parade looked well fed and surprisingly relaxed. They bustled along as though they knew exactly what to do. The zebras, who seemed to be young fillies—hard to tell for sure—looked pretty bratty, but they mostly did what they were supposed to. I suspected that an adult zebra would hold circus discipline in contempt, no matter how long the buggy whip.
Two elephants trotted into the ring nearest us, trunk of the second locked onto tail of the first, a red and gold costumed woman on each neck. Damrey and Nakri used to live this life of constant travel, new situations, noise and confusion. They, too, had spent long hours chained or confined in a boxcar stall. Neither of these elephants showed a pink scar around an ankle like Damrey’s. One looked like Nakri with the addition of little tusks—“tushes”—at the corners of her mouth. She sat on a stool while her leggy rider did a headstand on her forehead. Then both elephants stood teetering with all four legs on the little stools, curling their trunks up. I felt embarrassed for them, but unclear about what all this was like from their perspective. Perhaps the performance was a welcome respite from boredom and inactivity. Even if it was, did that justify a life so different from what they were built for? Perhaps their winter quarters were warm pastures where they roamed free for months in payment for entertaining our young. Perhaps not.
The elephants exited and were replaced by clowns, then a trapeze act. The high-wire performances made me anxious, despite the net. I rubbed my belly to reassure my child that we were safe on the ground and no one would fall to their death. The kids in our bunch were riveted, leaning forward with open mouths. So was my mother, except she kept her mouth closed.
When I looked back from scanning my charges, the lighting had changed, and somehow a netted ring full of tigers had materialized in front of us. I’d been expecting this, yet all the setup slipped right by me, and I flinched to see the cats so close.
Some of the tigers were normal gold
and black, like Rajah, others were white with black stripes, and one was all white. They did not look as accepting of their jobs as the elephants. The trainer earned snarls and threatening paws as the cats leaped from stool to stool, jumped through hoops, and rolled over on the ground. He carried a lightweight pole and the cats were trained to respond to its position. Several times the trainer’s hand passed swiftly by tiger mouths, handing out little meat rewards. The kids would never notice. The unhappy body language was troubling despite the sleek coats and healthy weights. I couldn’t pretend the tigers enjoyed the performance. When the trainer was focused on a complicated stunt with the white tiger, one of the normal-colored animals slipped off his stool, ears flat, body crouched, moving behind the man. The trainer caught it in his peripheral vision, turned, and flicked the whip, shouting. Busted, the tiger climbed back onto his stool. The episode could pass for part of the act, but all my instincts insisted that sooner or later, that trainer was doomed. Like Rick. I was glad when the act ended.
I relaxed at the liberty horses. Black ones and white ones, bridles and belly-bands glittering in silver and gold, they pranced in formation, guided by flourishes and taps from a light whip, whirling and rearing with long manes and tails billowing. Amazing grace. The sensual display of power under control. A willing partner-dance with their trainer. I hoped.
After acrobatic performances, more trapeze daredevils, and a dog act, we arrived at the raucous final crescendo—another parade of human performers, elephants, horses, and dogs with the loudspeakers straining to achieve new decibels. Then we edged out through the crowd, trying to keep our kids together in the crush. I saw them all onto the school bus, with my mother boarding last. I hadn’t contributed more than a warm body, but that seemed sufficient for her.
Still half-deafened, I drove home thinking of the many peculiar ways humans interact with animals. Thor was right that Nakri and Damrey deserved better quarters, but it looked to me as if they might prefer what they had now to returning to the circus. They had freedom of movement and as much entertainment as the elephant keepers could devise. In the zoo’s case, it was the elephants who were being entertained.
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