Calvin left at lunchtime to eat with Kip; I ate my peanut butter and banana sandwiches alone in the Penguinarium kitchen, tired in body and mind from the strain of learning a new routine.
The hasty lunch restored me a little and left time to pursue yesterday’s resolution, starting with a look in Rick’s locker. Perhaps he’d left something there that would shed light on his last night.
I detoured past the new exhibit area on my way to Reptiles. The price for “Asian Experience” was passage of a big bond measure and destruction of the last patch of natural forest in the zoo. A scraggly ridge of topsoil and mashed understory plants fringed a wide area of mud now sculpted into hills and depressions, replacing the hills and depressions there originally. Mangled second-growth firs, maples, and alders lay in a heap to the side. The bulldozer was still mired in mud. Revenge of the landscape? I paused for a moment’s memorial to summer lunches in the woods, the occasional woodpecker jackhammering on a snag, white trilliums in the spring. The new exhibit would be great, but the woods had been fine the way they were. I mourned things that would never be the same again.
In front of the Reptile area service door, I gathered myself, preparing to enter Rick’s old territory. Denny emerged before I was quite ready, with his little canvas lunch sack in hand.
“Hey, Ire. What’s up?” he asked.
“Don’t call me that,” I said, instantly irked. “You know I hate that.” I stepped inside, keeping a wary eye on the floor and elsewhere. “I’m going to clean out Rick’s locker.”
Denny followed me inside, put his lunch down, and turned toward the two padlocked cabinets at the back of the service area that served as personal lockers for keepers assigned to Reptiles.
I stood inside the door. “Denny, I don’t need help. You go on to lunch.”
He stopped. “What’s the problem?”
“I’d rather do this alone.”
Denny looked unsettled. “Why? What do you think is in there?”
“Spare socks.” Denny deserved better, but I couldn’t find what it took to be nice. He’d done his erratic best to help at the memorial service and, at times, I felt a lingering loyalty toward him. He was a disaster as a boyfriend, feral and unreliable, but he’d never been devious or dishonest. I simply wanted to do this alone.
He didn’t leave, but he stayed near the door, watching as I edged past him and through the narrow corridor between two curving rows of wood and glass boxes, their clear faces turned toward the public area. Each contained something reptilian—I hoped. Once when I was there with Rick, I’d nearly stepped on a small boa. By some miracle, my heart had restarted itself and Rick never noticed how close I was to screaming or bolting, the archaic primate response to an unexpected snake. He had scooped the snake up with his hands and plunked it back where it belonged, adjusting the lid so it couldn’t go roaming again, no big deal.
I got to Rick’s cabinet, the one left of the sink, without any unplanned encounters, but was stymied by the padlock. It was the kind that requires turning a dial first one way, then the other to hit each of three numbers. I had no idea what the combination was. Denny might know, but I didn’t feel like asking him and giving him an excuse to watch over my shoulder. Frustrated, I gave the padlock a yank, and it opened. Rick had used the zookeepers’ trick of leaving a padlock so it looked locked but wasn’t, saving time. His hand had been the last to touch that lock, I realized as the ache reawoke in my chest.
Inside were an old fleece jacket, wadded up on the top shelf, and an empty yogurt container with fuzz from an ancient lunch brought from home. Rubber clogs to the rear of the bottom shelf. A tiny snake skin in a little plastic jar, frail translucent scales the reptile had left behind. Also in the jar were two small leathery eggshells, each split open and empty. No socks, but Rick was present, vivid and whole for an instant. I stood paralyzed.
I pulled myself together, hauled everything out, and set it on the counter, standing on tiptoe to be sure the top shelf was emptied. Denny couldn’t tolerate not seeing and came up behind me. I handed him the yogurt container to throw in the trash.
“Why do you think the padlock was open?” he asked. “Did Rick leave it that way or did someone else go through the locker already?”
“Why would anybody care? The lock was open because Rick couldn’t be bothered to protect some crummy clothing. You want this jacket and the clogs?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I went through the jacket pockets—empty—and gave it to him with the clogs. Denny peered over my shoulder into Rick’s cabinet, then opened the one to the right of the sink and stuffed the items inside.
I closed the door, wanting to be gone, then opened it again. “There’s a lot of dirt inside. Where’s some paper towels or a rag?” Clean, it would be ready for someone else to use, resolving one of the many messes Rick had left behind.
Denny handed over a wad of paper towels. I swept mud cookies and grit over the bottom edge of the cabinet and caught them in my hand. I was about to release it all into a wastebasket when a small bit of light-colored rock caught my eye. I picked it out and threw away the dirt. The “rock” turned out to be a small, stained tooth. I dropped it in the jar.
Denny plucked the jar from my hand and held it face-height to examine.
“Give that back,” I snapped.
“Box turtle eggshells,” he said. “Rick hatched them out a year or so ago and one survived. I don’t know what the snake skin is.”
“It’s mine, is what it is.” I grabbed his wrist. “Give me that.”
Denny recoiled. “Hey, chill! Oh—do you think this is why Rick was at the zoo? Maybe he was investigating poaching or smuggled animal parts for Asian medicine. Or maybe—”
“Give me a break. It’s stuff he found.” I took it from his fingers. “You’ve got a nerve.” I put the lid on the jar and stuck it in my pocket.
“Man, you are harshing everyone these days.” He rubbed his wrist and looked at me, speculative. “You expected to find something else?”
“No, not really. I gotta go.” I started to edge past him toward the door.
He didn’t move out of my way. “You eat already? I’m headed to the café.”
“I ate.”
“Catch a look at the baby garter snakes before you go. Cute.”
Cute snakes weren’t quite enough of a concept to hook me, but Denny blocked my path and waved me down the aisle. I gave in, wondering what was really on his mind, and walked to an off-exhibit box with a suspended lightbulb and newspaper on the floor. Little stripy snakes each the size of a pencil oozed around a jar lid confining red earthworms. Perfect little scales covered their shiny, big-eyed snakey heads; tiny pink and black tongues flicked in and out, except for the ones that had their mouths full as they slowly ingested their worms. “Cute” was stretching it, but I could see the appeal, like slithery jewelry.
“Shit!” Denny yelped in my ear, and galloped back to the cabinets. He flung first one drawer open, then another, emerging with a pair of scissors. “They can’t let go,” he said, hustling back to the baby snakes and leaning over two wee reptiles that each had an end of the same earthworm. They’d swallowed toward each other until they were close to touching. He snipped the worm in two between their noses and straightened up, relieved. “If they meet head to head, one of them has to try to swallow the other, like corporate takeovers. Mutual assured destruction.” He checked that everyone had a worm without any sharing and pulled the jar lid out.
Denny was positively parental, a side of him I’d never suspected. Reptiles did that to some people. No wonder he and Rick had been friends.
Staring down at the little snakelets, he said, “I wish Rick were here to teach me how to run this section. He knew so damn much and I have to figure everything out a piece at a time.”
“Denny, do you know what Rick was doing here at Finley that last night?”
“No.”
Just “no.” I waited, but he w
as focused on putting the earthworms away in the refrigerator. “Would he come to check on the snake eggs that were incubating?”
“The blood pythons? If he did, he would have written something in the log. I was going to ask you why he was here.”
This was like pulling teeth. “I have no idea or I wouldn’t be asking. So was there anything in the incubator log?”
“Nothing.”
“I’d like to see it.” I was careful to keep my voice neutral.
But Denny heard some hint of doubt. “I checked it. You think I wouldn’t bother? He was my friend.” He closed the fridge door and walked back to stand too close to me. “I’d like to know what came down that night.”
You could get skin damage from Denny’s full intensity. “I want to see it myself.”
“It’s got zip, Ire.”
“Let me see the goddamned thing.”
Denny recoiled, then led me to a tattered spiral notebook next to a large box of clear plastic with fancy equipment on top. The box contained a tray of kitty litter, or perhaps vermiculite, with a dozen or so white eggs nestled in it. The eggs were shaped like kiwi fruit, lacking the taper to one end that a hen’s egg has. I’d seen the incubator before with Rick, when we first started dating. He’d explained that the faintly penciled X on top of each egg was to help keep the orientation consistent. I was a novice bird keeper, but I knew bird eggs need regular turning and that reptile eggs won’t tolerate it.
The notebook was a record of temperature and humidity for incubations dating back years. The blood python section was the most recent, with notes every few hours back three weeks. The last entry with Rick’s initials was 3:00 PM the day before he died. I studied the page carefully. It had nothing to tell me. I set it down.
“See?” Denny said.
I took a deep breath. Why did he always get to me? “Don’t knock yourself out, but if you think of anything useful, you might mention it to me.”
“Sure. Does that go both ways?”
I looked at him and shrugged, uncertain what he was getting at but prepared to be annoyed. That was how it went with Denny and me.
I pulled the plastic jar out of my pocket as I walked back to the Penguinarium and took another look at the contents. The little snake shed was appealing, a perfect translucent sketch of a snake, and I’d never seen turtle eggs before. The tooth was probably unidentifiable and it wasn’t even interesting. Maybe Rick had found it in the woods before the construction started. We all had our collections of zoo bits. My tokens of the wild world included a bird’s nest made of lion and tiger whiskers, a red-shafted flicker feather, and a nice squirrel skull from a roadside rest.
But I was kidding myself. The little objects in the jar weren’t just tokens. They had power, power to bring Rick out of the vague gray shadows, to make him real and let him bushwhack my heart once again. I put the jar back in my pocket, wondering if I should toss it into the nearest trashcan, and willed him gone.
Calvin was waiting with a big stack of food pans he wanted me to scrub while he filled out reports. Then he wanted help hauling gravel in a wheelbarrow and shoveling it onto the path at the pond.
“Time to head for the barn,” was all he had to say at day’s end.
I drove home exhausted. Calvin’s concern about every detail wore on my nerves, but it was what I would do in his place. Nitpicking suited me far better than Arnie’s blithe indifference. Calvin had made it clear I needed to prove myself and that he expected eight hours of hard work. It was looking to be a long week.
That night, bed seemed like the best place on earth. But soon I was lost on a cloudy trail, following tiger tracks in blood-streaked mud, frightened and alone. I must have cried out, because Winnie jumped on the bed and woke me. The rest of the night was lost to regrets, recriminations, and riddles.
Chapter Eight
Tuesday, Calvin remained taciturn and cool. He showed me once again how to fix vitamin-enhanced fish. After sharing herring and pleasantries with each penguin, he told me to start on the aviary diets and went off to check other bird areas and collect the food pans. I chugged an extra cup of coffee to beat back sleepiness and focused on being useful.
The Birds section came in three main parts: the Penguinarium was enclosed and climate-controlled with windows for viewing from outside the exhibit; the outdoor aviary, The World of Birds, a large area visitors could enter, was mesh all around and on top, except that two sides and part of the top were solid; the waterfowl pond was open, with a low barrier circling it to keep people out. A spectacled owl, a crippled bald eagle, and a red-tailed hawk were afterthoughts tucked in small cages between the pond and the aviary. Two red-headed parrots lived at the Children’s Zoo.
I hadn’t worked this section except for a few days when I was first hired. I thought of birds mostly as prey species for small cats or as backyard ornaments that my mother fed sunflower seeds. Getting serious about fluttery, fluffy things was going to take some work. I’d ask Calvin if he would loan me some of the books stored in a cupboard, books about penguins and waterfowl.
Left unsupervised, I referred to the diet records and carefully whacked fish into halves, quarters, and thin slivers to match a variety of appetites and beak sizes. Penguins brayed and splashed in the exhibit, sometimes coming to the baby gate to check whether I was doing it right. I took a break from fish prep to watch them over the gate.
In the water, the penguins were agile and elegant. Usually two or more synchronized their dives and turns, Olympic style. Out of the water, they waddled comically on the central “island” where the nest boxes were strategically placed. Unlike cats, they didn’t have potty corners, so walking around the island was a slippery business for humans. It smelled different from Felines, of digested fish instead of digested meat. “Pretty whiffy,” Calvin said each morning.
Two penguins were out of sight, sitting on eggs in nest boxes, but there would be no chicks. “Too crowded in here,” Calvin had said yesterday. He had removed the real eggs, which were sitting on the counter, and replaced them with plastic eggs. The birds didn’t care. When I asked why the fake eggs, he’d explained that incubating shut off egg laying. “If I don’t leave them something in the nest to set, they’ll keep laying,” Calvin said. “They ain’t chickens and it’s not good for them.”
The Penguinarium kitchen had the usual stainless steel counters plus a refrigerator and two sinks. One sink was for washing; one was for running cold water into a bucket of fish if the fish weren’t fully thawed. A wall was taken up with shelving and one full shelf was devoted to insects. Bird keeping meant bug keeping: bins of mealworms and wax worms and a wooden box with hundreds of crickets crawling around on egg cartons. The fridge held cardboard containers of nightcrawlers. The worms and insects were for the bewildering assortment of species in the World of Birds aviary. I was determined to be open-minded.
Homey touches included a yellow Penguin Crossing road sign, a big crayon drawing of penguins done by a third grader many years ago, and a plush stuffed penguin perched on a shelf. Newspaper articles about a big oil spill off South Africa were taped to the walls, with shots of penguins so black with oil that they looked charred.
After washing fish slime off my hands, I tackled the other diets: cutting fruit, setting mice out to thaw, measuring out various grain mixes. I was short of food pans, since Calvin hadn’t come back with them, and had to set out two meals on paper towels.
The only food prep left was the mix for a pair of fruit dove chicks that Calvin was hand-feeding. That didn’t require a food pan. But he might want to fix it himself. Would it be better to wait until he returned? I could be the timid trainee or I could read the instructions and get the job done. It wasn’t as if I’d never prepared a complicated diet.
I assembled the blender, measured all the ingredients, and blended them to an even, if unappealing, consistency. Calvin stored the stuff in a metal pitcher in the fridge. When I picked up the blender to pour the contents in
to the pitcher, the bottom part with the blades fell off onto the floor, where I stepped on them and slid, flailing my arms and waving around the rest of the blender for balance until I caught myself against the now-goo-coated sink. I emitted a few alarm barks in the form of profanity. When I leaned down to retrieve the blender bottom, the plastic jar with the turtle eggs fell out of my jacket pocket, where I’d forgotten it from the day before. I was bending over to pick that up when Dr. Dawson walked in.
He looked a little startled and stood a moment taking in the scene. “Good morning, Iris. Uh, is Calvin around? I’m looking for penguin fecals he was going to get yesterday.”
I straightened up, setting the jar and the blender bottom on the counter, and gathered my wits. “No, he’s probably over at the aviary. Let me see if they’re ready.” I made it to the fridge, slipping a little. No white Styrofoam plastic cup with a lid and a “fecal sample” note on it. “He’s probably planning to get you fresh ones this morning. He should be back any minute.” I actually had no idea what Calvin’s plans were, but it was good form to try to cover for him. I grabbed paper towels and started wiping the floor. What evil alignment of planets had sent Dr. Dawson to the Penguinarium at this particular moment?
Dr. Dawson nodded. “I can wait a bit.”
I marveled that he could look and act so professional—button-up blue shirt, gray pants, leather shoes—faced with a disheveled keeper flinging slop around. He stood and watched me, then took off his glasses and polished them on a handkerchief.
“Are all the cats okay?” I asked, unnerved. “Is Rajah eating?”
“Oh, yes. They’re all fine.” He put the glasses back on and frowned at me a little, looking lost in his own thoughts. At last he said, “I’m glad to have a moment to speak with you privately. Wallace is gun-shy right now about accidents. Possibly he overreacted. Moving you away from Felines, before we introduce the clouded leopards…Well, I might have made a different decision.”
Night Kill Page 7