Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4)

by James W. Hall

  Winslow was laughing now. Sean on a roll.

  "I mean, it's all in how we market it. We could provide both services, fake or real. Make it like a test: 'If you really love her, you'll have your penis drilled. But then again, if you're not ready to commit, we've got just the thing for you.' "

  "Kurt would never do it."

  "Yeah, that's true, not Kurt. But I bet Patrick Sagawan would."

  "Knock it off, Sean."

  "He could be one of our poster guys. Patrick Bendari Sagawan, the Malaysian hunk, nephew of the richest man in the world. He palanged himself for his sweetheart. Will you?"

  All week Sean had been kidding Winslow about Patrick, the sultan's nephew. Seven years ago in Brunei, Winslow had nursed a fierce crush for him. The boy was two years older. Back then, at seventeen, he was already a lady's man with silky, cosmopolitan manners. Allison suspected, but never heard for sure, that Winslow had lost her virginity that year.

  When the orangutan count was done, the three of them were planning to spend a few days in Brunei, an hour's plane ride east. Visit old friends. Probably the only reason the girls came along on the trip at all was because of the Brunei part. They had romantic memories of the place, very different memories from Allison's. Harry had told the girls that Patrick was still a bachelor. Winslow had blushed, looking at her lap. Ohmygod, ohmygod, Sean said. Think of it, Winslow. Still mooning for you.

  "Kurt would never do it," Winslow said. "He gets a paper cut on his finger, he passes out. My big, brave boyfriend. You'd think a vet would be tougher."

  "But Patrick Sagawan would do it," Sean said. "And Thorn would too. Old Nature Boy. Now, there's a guy we can always count on."

  "Yeah," Winslow said. "Thorn would do it if we asked him. And I bet if Mother asked Dad, we could sign him up too."

  They both looked at Allison with teasing smiles. She moved her eyes to the trees.

  "Yeah, how about Dad?" Sean said. "Think he'd be willing? I mean, just as a promotional thing? Harry Farleigh, famous ex-diplomat, had himself fitted for one. How about you?"

  Allison brought her eyes back to them. They were both watching her. Sean grinning, Winslow's smile losing a little of its energy as she saw her mother's expression. Allison feeling her own face collapse. Her blood hardening.

  "What do you think, Mother? Dad go for this?"

  "I'm leaving him," Allison said. Lowering her eyes.

  Something howled in the trees nearby. Neither of her daughters spoke. By slow degrees Sean's grin sank away.

  "I'm leaving Harry." Allison screwed the cap back on her canteen, set it aside. She took a breath, looked at each of them, and said, "I wanted to tell you over here, let you have time to get used to the idea before we get back home. Give us a chance to talk it over."

  Sean stood up. She dropped the Tupperware jug of tea.

  "You're kidding."

  Allison shook her head, watching Sean's eyes darken, her mouth twisting into a bitter grin. "Jesus Christ! Jesus H. Mother of Christ."

  "Sean," Winslow said. "Come on. Cool it."

  Sean took a step toward Allison, made fists. Veins rising.

  "So that's what this trip was all about? Not counting apes, not shooting photos. You had this on your mind the whole time. That's why you made such a big deal — the Farleigh women get to spend some time together, female bonding. But no. All along it was to spring this bullshit on us."

  "I did want to spend time with you. I wanted us to be able to confront this, talk it all through."

  Sean kicked the Tupperware into the bushes. Turned and stood staring at the lush greenery, her back to Allison.

  "Goddamn it," she said, and swung around. "Twenty years, all of a sudden, out of the blue, you dump him. What? Is there somebody else? That's it, isn't it? You're having an affair."

  Allison looked into Sean's eyes and slowly told her no, there was nobody else, nobody.

  "Come on, Sean," Winslow said. "Back off."

  "Hey, she wanted to talk about it. We're talking about it."

  "It's been twenty-three years," Allison said. "And things haven't been right for a while, not since we came back from Brunei."

  Sean's face was red, mouth quivering. Not used to suppressing anything. Eyes growing damp, her mouth moving as if she were chewing a wad of gum.

  "Why now?" Winslow said quietly.

  "It's time. I've waited too long as it is."

  Winslow said, "Have you already told him?"

  "No, I wanted to tell you first. I wanted to talk with you."

  "It's your life," Winslow said. "You don't need our approval."

  "When we get back," Allison said, "I'm moving out. I'm going to live at the Shack."

  "The Shack!"

  "I'll be fine out there. It's where I want to be."

  Still silent, Sean shifted her glare back and forth between Allison and Winslow. Then she shook her head savagely, turned her back on them, and stalked down the trail in the direction they'd come.

  "She'll be all right," Winslow said. "You know how she is about Dad."

  "I know."

  "I'll go get her."

  Winslow took her baseball hat off, dropped it with her pack. She looped the Nikons around her neck and headed off down the trail after her sister.

  ***

  The male orangutan sat in his mother's nest high in an ironwood tree playing with a rambutan that she'd given him earlier in the day. The fruit was rare in this part of the jungle. A delicacy.

  The young orangutan was tearing free the meat of the rambutan and pitching the excellent food out of the nest onto the ground a hundred feet below, leaning out from a branch, watching it fall into the bushes near where the three humans sat. The mother did not try to restrain him. She simply let him play.

  The male orangutan was four years old. For the next two or three years he would live alongside her every moment of the day just as he had done since birth. His mother would protect him from the dangers of the jungle, but never once would she discipline him.

  Orangutans lived solitary lives, mainly because their food sources were spaced too widely for them to live successfully in groups. But living alone was not easy. The loneliness, the quiet. A thousand acres of dense forest were necessary to support just one adult male. Very likely the only contact her son would ever have with other orangutans would be on those rare occasions when he grew lustful and sought out a female.

  Because of this, there was no need for the mother orangutan to teach her offspring manners. It was best that he make his own decisions. So, if he found it amusing to throw away such precious food, it was all right. To be able to amuse himself, however he accomplished it, would be crucial to his survival.

  CHAPTER 2

  In the clearing beside the Lupar River Allison waited for her daughters to return. Weary, angry at herself. She hadn't intended to blurt it out like that. She'd meant to choose a quieter time, in the room at the hotel, or after dinner. Lay the groundwork, circle around to it, prepare them for the shock. But just the mention of Harry's name had made her heart lurch, loosened the feelings, and it had all erupted.

  Now it was done, the words spoken. Sean angry, Winslow shaken. And though Allison had handled it clumsily, she was at least relieved it was done. What she'd debated for so many painful months, the words she'd harbored in the silent hours of the night, were out. Hearing them come from her own lips a few moments ago, Allison was struck by how natural it sounded — leaving her husband of twenty-three years.

  Allison watched a harem of proboscis monkeys pass through the trees overhead, the male with his large crooked nose hooting at his women, moving them along. And a flock of noisy hornbills, a single owl, a scattering of parrots, a dozen gibbons.

  She propped her back against the smooth bark of a neram tree. One of the magnificent Diptero-carpus oblongifolius that grew alongside so many Malaysian rivers and sent their great arches of shade over the water. Allison listened to the flitter of insects and cries of birds. Honks and whistles, and a ho
st of frenzied shrieks like dozens of locomotives jamming on their brakes at once. The cicadas and frogs and small sparrows were setting up a pandemonium of clicks and clatters, belches and kronks, as though the jungle were some great rail yard where all the axles and gears and pistons had gone for years without grease.

  She inhaled the dense, sulfurous air, filled with a stifling bloom of decay. Above her the branches of the neram were cluttered with bright orchids and ferns. She closed her eyes, rested her head against the tree, let her breath ease. Oddly, she found the jungle racket to be soothing.

  Her heart was just finding its normal pace again when she heard a loud clattering of brush nearby. She opened her eyes and turned toward the rustle. And there, shoving the thick foliage aside, approaching her with his nimble, bowlegged gait, was a young orangutan, a male of three or four. With his right hand he carried a piece of fruit. Rambutan.

  The ape halted a yard in front of her, staring into her eyes. There was a peculiar streak of silver in the hair above his left eye as if someone had dabbed a painted finger against his forehead. It gave the ape a slightly clownish look, one frosted sprig in his otherwise deep red hair.

  After another moment, Allison slowly extended her right hand, and the young ape stepped forward, his eyes on hers. Alert, curious, maybe a trace of wariness. When he was only a foot or two away, he looked down at her hand, reached out and put the gooey remains of the rambutan into it. Allison smiled and brought the fruit close to her mouth and made a pleasurable gurgling noise. The orangutan came closer, touched the knee of her jeans, pinched the fabric, rubbed it between thumb and forefinger as if he were judging its value.

  Dream-slow, Allison set the rambutan aside and opened her arms. The ape held his ground, showing his teeth, a mischievous grin. He brushed his hand against his hairy thigh as if to wipe the sticky fruit juice away.

  Then he made several small peeps like an Easter chick and took a half step toward her, and then another, coming slowly inside her arms. He halted and brought his face close to her hair, lifted a handful from her shoulder and examined it.

  Bringing a strand to his mouth, he rubbed it against his lips, and sucked it inside and chewed on it for a moment, then in a flatulent burst he blew the hair out.

  The ape stepped to the side and examined Allison's face, then he glanced down and took hold of her left hand, held it in both of his. His grip was sensitive but powerful. And before she knew what he was doing, he had slipped her wedding ring off, her grandmother's four-carat diamond, and popped it into his mouth.

  He grinned at her, the glimmer of gold suspended for a moment on his drawn-back lips. Then he stretched out his long, hairy right arm to encircle her shoulders. She yielded for a moment or two, then gingerly Allison drew back from his embrace, raised her right hand, and touched the orangutan's face. She hadn't actually seen him swallow the ring. It was likely he'd merely tucked it into his cheek to examine later.

  Very carefully, she slid a finger along his lower lip and into his mouth, the ape beginning to peep rapidly, but not drawing away. With her forefinger she probed his gums, one side then the other, the slobbery cavities of his cheeks. On the right side, she wriggled her hand deeper into the damp hollow until her finger touched something cold and loose in the far back pocket of his jaw.

  The orangutan didn't draw away, didn't struggle, seemed to be enjoying this sloppy sport. His eyes on hers. Letting Allison teach him how this game was played.

  Allison poked the tip of her finger through the ring, dug it free. Carefully she drew it forward, had it almost to his lips, when the orangutan gave a startled screech, lurched away from her, and rose a foot into the air and hung there.

  Squeaking madly, the ape rocked his head back and stared up into the branches of the neram. From a thick limb several feet above Allison's head, the ape's mother hung by her feet. Two hundred pounds, many times more powerful than a human that size, the big orangutan bared her teeth and made a sharp guttural noise, a single fierce bark as she ripped her baby from Allison's arms. Then she gave Allison one final, loathsome glare and dragged her wayward son away, up the side of the giant tree.

  Allison came to her feet and watched the mother ape haul her young son roughly, one powerful arm slung around her son's waist. Mother and child scooted up the tree until they disappeared into the dense branches forty feet up. Allison stepped back into the center of the clearing for a better view. She watched the branches shift and sway, but the mother orangutan kept herself hidden from view as she climbed.

  Allison tore open her knapsack and found her binoculars. For half a minute more she searched the canopy till finally she heard a loud jostling in the trees and shifted her glasses to the right, and found an open corridor in the limbs where a cluster of high branches were rattling and swaying as though a heavy wind were passing through them.

  It took her a moment more to spot the dark orange shape of the mother orangutan hoisting herself higher into the limber branches, fluttering the leaves violently as she went, twigs breaking around her, the yawn and shriek of thick wood flexing beneath the great ape's weight as she worked with meticulous speed through the mesh of limbs toward the drab light of an overcast sky.

  When the two loud rifle blasts sounded nearby, Allison gasped, jerked the binoculars from her eyes, and stumbled sideways. She caught herself against the neram tree, then with jittery hands she pressed the glasses to her eyes again.

  She saw the ape hesitate, peer down at the shooter. The orangutan moved her head to one side for a better view, then she glanced upward, selected a route, and began to climb higher into the branches. As she hauled herself upward, her son, hanging around her neck, reached out and nabbed a leaf, stuffed it into his mouth.

  A man's shout came from Allison's left, then the sound of several people crashing through the underbrush, their voices low and insistent, the hard breathing of men on the run. Allison lowered her glasses and hurried down the path where Winslow and Sean had disappeared.

  A few yards down the path she stopped and stood for a moment, scanning the surrounding jungle. Wax palms and ferns, banyans, tualangs, sagas, creeper vines and broadleaf strangler figs, a thick mass of green. Visibility less than twenty feet in any direction. She hissed out her daughters' names, but there was no reply.

  In the time they'd been gone they might have walked out of earshot of the gunfire. And if Winslow had convinced Sean to return, surely they were taking cover, just as Allison should be doing. But she could not. She had to see these men. Intervene if she could. Or at the very least see their faces so she might identify them later.

  Taking the most direct route toward the men's voices, Allison moved down a creek bed that angled away from the river path they had been on. Painstakingly she followed the gully toward the noises of the men.

  After several yards she stopped and lifted her binoculars again and sighted on the canopy. It took a few moments of scanning right to left and back again, but at last she saw them, mother and son perched together in a crook of one of the hundred-year-old ironwoods that filled this part of the rain forest. Probably the tallest tree for miles around.

  The mother ape was staring down through the limbs and leaves and fronds, leaning out from her perch while her child gripped her arm. In her left hand the big orangutan gripped a clump of branches it had ripped free, holding it away from her body as if preparing to bombard her attackers.

  Twenty yards below her a flock of hornbills exploded from the branches, squawking and screaming, and the mother ape recoiled into the deep crotch of the tree.

  Allison lowered her glasses and moved on down the creek bed, maneuvering across a slight embankment, then a ten-foot stretch of slippery stones. The gully continued to slope down until Allison's shoulders were below the level of the jungle floor. Her feet slipped and she steadied herself against the muddy walls, and peered into the forest but saw nothing, only the emerald glow of the sunlight filtering through a hundred fine layers of green.

  Stretching onto her toe
s, she craned upward, and there, ten feet off, she glimpsed the coppery red hair, the back of Winslow's head as her daughter aimed her Nikon through the jungle thicket.

  Allison whispered her name, and Winslow lowered her camera and turned. When she spotted Allison, she pressed a quick finger to her lips, then reached into her shirt pocket and drew out a roll of film and held it up. By God, she'd got the bastards.

  "Where's Sean?"

  "She went back to the refuge."

  For a moment she held Allison's gaze, giving her a pained smile. As though she'd seen now in the stark and sudden drama playing out before them, the secret, evil heart of all her mother had been fighting against. And though Allison had not known it till that moment, she saw now how much she'd yearned for this. For her daughters to have a glimpse of what drove her, what had inspired her fury and passion these last seven years.

  Winslow nodded once, took a long breath, and turned away, stepping back into her blind to aim her Nikon once more.

  Allison reached up and touched the slippery walls of the gully. Nothing to hold on to, too high for her to pull herself out. She wanted badly to join her daughter, to stand beside her in this moment. But it looked like she either had to completely retrace her steps or forge ahead another thirty yards to where the ravine sloped back up onto the jungle floor.

  She went forward, picking her way across the treacherous rocks, fighting for balance at every step. At the end of the ravine she halted before the embankment and stared up at the slope, which was covered by a tangle of roots and vines. It was a great deal steeper than it had appeared from a distance, almost a vertical climb.

  As she hesitated a moment more, searching the walls for a foothold, she noticed, a few feet to her right, a recess hollowed out of the gully wall. It was partially hidden by a mat of overhanging vines. Probably some creature's burrow.