by Mary Walker
Her father owed $60,000 to First Western Bank on a second mortgage he had taken out a few years ago on his house, this bungalow in front of her. In this wretched real estate market, the house would likely bring less than $50,000. Since Lester had only $200 in the bank, the lawyer estimated that when the smoke cleared, Lester’s estate would be in debt at least $10,000. No financial comfort for her there.
No life insurance.
No safe-deposit box.
Damn the man. Dangling the promise of salvation in front of her and then reneging on it.
When the lawyer had finally finished delivering his bad news, Katherine had considered telling him about the key and the storage receipt Lester had sent. But, in the lifelong habit of keeping her own counsel, she had swallowed the words. She’d take a look first, to see what was there, if anything. She could always ask for advice later if she needed it.
She put her hand in her purse and fingered the little key. Yes, it was solid—a real key. She closed her eyes and visualized a scene on the back of her lids. She locates the storage unit. She inserts the key in the lock—a perfect fit. She opens the door to find a roomful of thousand-dollar bills, stacks and stacks of them—her patrimony. She stuffs them into several grocery bags, loads them into her car, and drives straight to the Bank of Boerne. She walks into George Bob Rainey’s office and tosses ninety-one of the bills onto his desk and walks out without saying a word.
She opened her eyes and dismissed the image with a shake of her head. Fun to think about, but it was a fairy tale. This was real life. If there was money hidden away, it would have to go to pay off Lester’s debts. Commitments.
She jerked the keys out of her purse. Damn. It would be nice to be able to fantasize just once without commitments intruding.
Katherine took a few deep breaths to compose herself for Lester Renfro’s house. It was easier if she thought of him as Lester Renfro rather than as her father. And, in fact, it was more accurate. He was no more than a stranger to her. The man had not been her father for three decades. She supposed she should be mourning him, but really, what was there to mourn?
Ra’s avid sniffing of the yard and the wood steps of the front porch reminded Katherine there was a dog even before the barking burst from the house. A big dog, from the sound. Of course he would have a big dog. Like Pasha, the German shepherd they’d had when she was very young. He’d told her in the letter to remember Pasha.
Funny, she hadn’t thought of him in years, but now she could picture him clearly—his large pointed ears and his soft, thick black-and-tan coat. Her first dog. Maybe … Oh, God, no. Katherine, you’re losing your marbles. Dogs don’t live for thirty-one years. And anyway—She had a flash of memory—Pasha died! He died the night we left Austin. I saw him dead on the bedroom floor. Strange, I’ve never remembered that before. I used to ask her about it, again and again—what happened to Pasha?—but Mother would never answer me. It was a secret. One of her many secrets.
She slammed the tailgate and approached the house. As she climbed the steps, the barking intensified.
“Listen to that, Ra,” she said. “That’s how a real watchdog sounds. You could learn a thing or two here.” Ra’s ears were triangled up and his tail lowered in anxiety. “Don’t worry, you baby. One thing we know is how to deal with watchdogs.”
As she inserted the key into the lock, the dog inside bayed frantically, nails skittering and scraping on the other side of the door. She turned the key until the lock clicked. Then, switching to that hard-earned voice she had cultivated over twenty years of training recalcitrant dogs—that menacing voice of absolute authority—she spoke two low, guttural words through the closed door: “Down, sir.” The thud of a heavy body hitting the floor rewarded her.
“Good, boy. Stay.” She pushed the door open very carefully.
It was an old black Lab bitch graying around the muzzle and wearing a red leather collar. She was panting in confusion and anxiety at not doing her job.
Katherine turned to Ra and pressed a flat hand toward the ground. He dropped into a down on the porch. She held up her palm to him to indicate he should stay and stepped over the threshold.
The house was dark and cool, all the draperies drawn.
Very slowly, avoiding looking directly into the dog’s amber eyes, she approached, cooing a stream of constant endearments: “You beautiful old girl, good girl, doing your job. There, there, we’ll be friends. Hungry, you old thing? Well, it’s been a hard day. I bet you didn’t like your run-in with Lieutenant Sharb either.” She knelt and offered a hand to sniff. The dog extended a bright red tongue and licked her hand frenetically.
Katherine lifted the metal tag hanging from the collar and read it. “Belle,” she said. “What a pretty name. I bet you’d feel better after a snack, wouldn’t you, Belle?” Katherine stood and headed in the direction she knew the kitchen must be, allowing the dog to rise and follow her.
They passed through a room that had been intended as a dining room, but in the light from the open door Katherine saw that it had been used as a photographer’s studio. The table pushed against the wall was covered with cameras and lenses and film and stacks of papers.
The entire wall space of the room from chair rail to ceiling was covered with photographs. All of them were black and white except for one section on the long wall opposite the window, where a burst of color caught her eye. She paused and sucked in her breath when she thought she recognized the subject of those color photos. But the black dog beckoned, whining and looking back at Katherine as she pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen.
“Okay, here I come.” Katherine followed her into an immaculate white kitchen. The dog lay in front of a low cabinet and whimpered, staring at the cabinet door. “I don’t even have to look for it, do I, Belle?” Katherine pulled out a bag of Alpo Dry and dumped a heap of it into an empty bowl on the floor.
Slowly Katherine walked back to the swinging door and pressed it open, surveying the photographs that papered the room. She reached out and flicked a light switch next to the door, flooding the room with fluorescent light. From all four walls, animals leapt out at her, filling her vision. Animals in zoos. Animals in the wild. Giraffes and rhinos, okapis, orangutans, gorillas, koalas, strange reptiles, exotic birds, hyenas, but above all, cats—big cats. Tigers, snow leopards, lions, servals, panthers, lynxes, and others she couldn’t identify.
She was simultaneously eager and afraid to look at the color photos she had glimpsed before. Her eyes moved slowly around the walls until they came to rest on them. She could see from where she stood that they were all of one person—the same person over and over. She approached very slowly, her jaw open in amazement.
There were about fifty photos of her, some of her and Ra, her and other dogs she’d trained for field trials. A few of Ra alone. But mostly of her.
And they were beautiful. The best photographs of her she had ever seen or could even imagine.
From early childhood, Katherine had always hated seeing photographs of herself. They seemed unnatural, as if she were trying to be someone else, face frozen, body stiff and blocky. It was the visual equivalent of hearing one’s voice for the first time on a tape recorder.
But these pictures … she couldn’t take her eyes off them. They showed her as she wanted to look when she was feeling best about herself. In action. Doing what she did best. Dressed in the clothes she loved. Her face alive, catching the light.
For the first minute, the images of herself engrossed her so totally that the questions stayed at bay. The pictures had all been taken at field trials around the country. One series, her favorite, was taken in Vermont in October of last year, at the meet where Ra won his field-trial championship.
The largest photo, which had been blown up to ten inches by fourteen, was a close-up of her wearing a red ski sweater under her white handler’s jacket. She stood in a field fiery with autumn colors, her left arm extended from the elbow, giving Ra a line to the retrieve. Her face was intent,
glowing in the afternoon light, and her cheeks were flushed with the cold. It brought flooding back the feel of that day, that glorious day when everything had gone right, when Ra had responded to every motion of her hand as if she were casting him out to the exact spot for the retrieve.
Another photo was a close-up of her face in profile, so close she could see the tiny gold stud in her ear and the almost invisible scar on her upper lip.
Suddenly Katherine’s legs shook under her, unable to hold her weight for another second. She sank slowly to the floor into a cross-legged sit, never taking her eyes from the pictures. Now the questions were flooding in.
Did he take these pictures?
How come she hadn’t even been aware they were being taken?
Why so many?
As she glanced around the room, she knew for a certainty—she wasn’t sure how, maybe from the consistent camera angles, or something about the vision—that all these photos bore the mark of one man. Lester must have taken them all. She was sure of it. That meant he had been there many times, close enough to her to take a picture as intimate as this. But why? And if he was there, why didn’t he talk to her? She must have seen him many times at the trials and walked right past him without recognizing him.
A rush of hot pain gripped her neck and shoulders. Only a lover—or a loving father—would take pictures like these. Oh, God. Oh, God. She leaned forward and her bare legs were wet with falling tears before she even knew she was crying.
A cold nose poked in under her arm. Without looking up, she reached out and touched the sleek short hair of her father’s dog. She leaned her head against the broad side of the old Lab and wept as if she were a five-year-old child. “I’m glad no one’s here to see this but you, old girl,” she murmured to the dog.
From the open door came footsteps and a woman’s voice calling, “Now that is an incorruptible dog out—” The voice trailed off when Katherine jerked her wet face up toward the sound. She felt the shock of being discovered in a forbidden activity.
A tall woman wearing huge sunglasses stood in the door. She wore tight jeans stretched over ample hips and held an unlit cigarette in her hand. “Oh, I’ve come at a bad time for you,” she said. “I could come back later.” She leaned over toward Katherine. “Or I could stay and we could talk about it.”
Katherine’s chest heaved in an effort to respond, but no sound emerged.
“I know,” the woman said. “I’ve done nothing but cry for the last six months and it’s hard to cry and talk at the same time, but you can learn to do it. Here. I’ll talk while you catch your breath.”
She slipped the strap of a huge straw bag from her shoulder and let it thud to the floor. “I’m Sophie Driscoll, your cousin. I just talked to Travis, the old dear, and he said you’d probably be here, the police would give you the key. So I came to be family.” She looked at Katherine’s bent head. “Kind of late for that, huh?”
Katherine tried to dry her cheeks with the back of her hand. With her lowered head she gestured to the wall of photos. “I didn’t know he had taken these. I didn’t know he was there. He never even introduced himself.”
Sophie slid her big sunglasses up to the top of her head and leaned over to study the pictures. “That’s impossible,” she said.
Katherine lifted her head, allowing her face to be seen in all its blotched and streaked vulnerability. “Really. I had no idea.”
Sophie pulled a silver lighter from her jeans pocket and lit the cigarette. “Good Lord, this family. Lester could easily be as weird as the Driscoll side. I’m dying to see if someone like you who’s been raised away from the influence”—she blew smoke out and waved her hand to direct it away from Katherine—“is as weird as the rest of us. I’ve wondered whether it’s genetic or learned.”
Sophie smiled down at Katherine, who was still sitting on the floor, stroking the old Lab and hiccupping. “But you look like family. You look like Gram. Lucky. Can I get you something to drink? A cigarette? A chair?” She snapped her fingers. “Some Kleenex?”
Katherine looked up at the broad face framed in frizzed ginger-colored hair, nodded, and laughed. Sophie turned and strode into the kitchen, giving the swinging door such a shove that it continued to swing violently on its hinges until she passed through it again with a roll of paper towels. She thrust them at Katherine, who tore one off and blotted her wet face.
“Sophie Driscoll? Cooper Driscoll’s daughter?”
Sophie shrugged as if in apology. “Yeah. You’re really out of the loop, aren’t you?”
Suddenly Katherine wanted to be in the loop. And this woman could help her. “Did you know my father? I thought your side of the family didn’t even talk to him.”
“Oh, my parents didn’t.” Her voice took on a bitter, strident tone. “God forbid they should associate with a hardworking zookeeper. It will be fun to see how they maintain their superiority now they are poor.”
Katherine sat up on her knees. “Poor?”
“Sure. Everybody knows my dad is close to bankruptcy.”
“But I thought—”
“Oh, yeah, we used to be, and Gram still is rich. She’s too smart to get into the trouble Dad did. But she won’t help.”
“But you did know my father?” Katherine repeated.
“A little. Just since I started working at the zoo part-time.”
“Oh. Fill me in on … the family. I’m not even sure how many of you there are.”
“Us. Not many. We’re a dying breed, the descendants of Anne Driscoll. Unless you plan to produce some children, I think you and I are going to be the last generation. There’s me and my father, and my mother, of course.” She sighed. “I think it’s time for a reunion. Why don’t you come over tomorrow night and meet them?”
“Well, I’m not sure what I—”
Sophie interrupted. “Oh, shit. Just say yes and come. God, this family is stiff-necked. Now it’s probably gonna take you twenty years to decide to forget your grudges and come to dinner.”
Katherine stood up in one quick motion. “I don’t have any grudges.”
“Well, that would make you the only one.” Sophie picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “I have lots of grudges and I’d love to tell you about them now, but I’ve got my AA support group in ten minutes. I’d cancel, but they’d all say it was resistance. And I really need it. So we’ll save the catching up for tomorrow. Okay?”
Katherine nodded.
“Around six. God, you probably don’t even know where we live.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Claire Avenue, 312. We’re in the book if you forget or need to call.” As she started through the door, she stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “Sorry about Lester and everything. I really liked him. See you tomorrow.”
Katherine watched from the door as Sophie folded herself into a silver BMW. This was something totally new. A cousin. Family. Was it a good idea to go to dinner? Sophie’s parents might not want to see her, probably didn’t. Well, she would go whether it was a good idea or not.
A faint stab of guilt caught her in the stomach. Her mother would not want her to do this. She had made Katherine promise never to try to contact her family. But Leanne was dead. And there had to be some statute of limitations on these family feuds, didn’t there?
She gestured Ra to come into the cool house and closed the door. The Lab got up from the hall rug and the two dogs sniffed each other for a minute. Then they plopped down close to one another on the cool brick floor in the front hall.
Katherine returned to the studio and studied the pictures her father had taken of her. They showed a woman so alive and absorbed that she was almost beautiful, the first time Katherine had ever thought herself so. That was what her father had seen and he had loved it from afar. Something had prevented him from making contact with her, but that something wasn’t lack of love. Her eyes burned with the effort of holding back the tears. He did love her. All those years she’d yearned for him to co
me, he did love her. What was it that had kept him away?
She walked slowly to the door, as if in a trance, locked it, and returned to sit in front of the pictures. She gave up resisting and the tears began to flow again, stinging the skin of her cheeks as they fell. He did love her, and had wanted to do something to help her. Really that was enough, just knowing that. Somehow losing the house and kennel and even Ra didn’t seem quite so devastating a prospect as it had. Her father had loved her and he had wanted to help.
When she was finished, it was almost dark outside. She stood up and walked around the house turning on lamps. She felt an absolute certainty now. Her father had promised money; it had to be somewhere.
And there was something he wanted her to do for him. She would discover what it was and she would do it.
8
KATHERINE’s first impulse was to jump into the car immediately and find the Lamar Boulevard Self-Storage, see what was waiting for her there. But she needed to take care of business first. If she was going to stay here tonight, she’d have to call Joe and cajole him into staying to take care of the kennel.
Before making the call, Katherine wandered through the tiny house, absorbing the neat feel of the small, well-ordered rooms. There was nothing ugly anywhere. It was sparsely furnished, but what was there was handsome and practical. It was a house organized around the interests of the occupant. The studio was set up for work. The small second bedroom had been turned into a library with a wide range of books on animals, photography, and some fiction. The only furniture in the room besides the bookshelves was an easy chair with a gooseneck reading lamp next to it. Later, she decided, she would go through the books more carefully, and spend some time in that easy chair.
In his bedroom, she sat down on the bentwood chair in front of his open rolltop desk, composing herself to call home. Her eye explored the contents of the cubbyholes at the back of the desk. In the first hole was a green plastic checkbook, a sheaf of canceled checks, and some bank statements. She pulled out the checkbook and opened it, aware of how personal an item it was.