Zero at the Bone

by Mary Walker

  Although she had brought some other clothes with her, Katherine decided not to change out of her zoo uniform. She liked the dark-green cotton shirt with the zoo logo on the left sleeve and the patch over the right breast saying, “Katherine, Reptile Keeper.” And she liked the comfortable green pants with the big pockets. She thought it might be helpful somehow for her grandmother to see her wearing the uniform, to see that she was involved in the family endeavor.

  She slung her big canvas tote over her shoulder, shut her locker, and walked out the back door of the reptile house into the cool air of late afternoon. Her heart was beating quick and light as she headed toward the parking lot. She had endlessly imagined what this day would be like, had envisioned scenarios of everything from being ejected bodily from the house to being enfolded in loving arms. But it didn’t matter, she told herself. She was going to drive to her grandmother’s house, and this time, instead of slumping down in the car to watch the house, she was going to walk up to the door, ring the bell, and identify herself. Stiffen the sinews; summon up the blood.

  Driving up MoPac toward the Windsor exit, Katherine admired the subtle change of color in the leaves. It must have happened since she’d been in Austin, because she hadn’t noticed it on the drive from Boerne two weeks ago, and she had been so preoccupied since then that she hadn’t even looked. The sumac, brilliant red at the side of the road, leapt out from its background of rust and yellow.

  The pasture behind her house would be softened by fallen leaves now and the grass would be turning brown. If she were at home, by now she would have chopped and stacked enough mesquite at the back door to fuel a winter of fires in her big stone fireplace. Thinking about that familiar landscape caused an actual pain at the center of her body, somewhere under the heart. Seven more days and it would belong to someone else. And Ra, too. It was still intolerable to think it, but she saw no way out.

  Turning onto Woodlawn, she slowed down to give herself time for a few deep breaths. Then, out of old habit, she pulled into her accustomed place across the street from the stone mansion, and parked. No, she told herself, not this time, not anymore. She restarted the engine and turned into the circular driveway, stopping directly in front of the door.

  Before getting out, she lifted her face to the rearview mirror and smoothed her hair behind her ears. Then she slid out and slammed the door. It was too late to turn back now. She felt dramatic and silly at the same time, like a character from Dickens—the orphan being reunited with the matriarch. Even this stone mansion was Dickensian.

  She walked the stone path to the massive carved oak door, lacquered to a high sheen. She pushed the bell and listened to its chimes echo through the house. But there were no answering footsteps, no sounds at all in the house. She rang again, leaning into it for a long, insistent ring. Again she heard the chimes filling the house. This time, after a few seconds, she caught the distant thud of soft-soled shoes descending stairs. The sound got louder, but slowly, as if the person were crossing a vast space.

  Katherine crossed her arms over her chest, fortifying herself. A woman’s voice, harried and annoyed, called through the door, “What is it?”

  “It’s Katherine Driscoll. I’m here to see Anne Driscoll.”

  That was met with silence. Then came the sound of a chain rattling and a lock being turned. The door opened and a small woman in a nurse’s uniform stepped outside. Katherine caught only a glimpse of glowing dark wood floors and a curving staircase inside before the woman eased the door shut behind her, holding on to the knob so it didn’t click shut.

  Katherine looked down at her. She was a woman of around fifty, compact and neat with dyed black hair bent into a tight page boy. Her tiny bow of a mouth was outlined with vivid red lipstick. “Now,” she said with a minuscule spreading of the lips, “what was it you wanted?”

  “I’m Katherine Driscoll. I’d like to see my grandmother. Who are you?”

  The woman nodded her head once, as if she recognized the name. “How do you do, Miss Driscoll. I’m Janice Beechum, Mrs. Driscoll’s nurse. I’m afraid it’s impossible for you to see her now. She’s not up to receiving visitors. Sorry.”

  “Well, when could I see her?” Katherine asked.

  “I wouldn’t know that, miss. I’d have to ask my employer.”

  “You mean Mrs. Driscoll?”

  “Well, no. I suppose she is technically my employer. No, I mean the person who hired me and really is responsible for Mrs. Driscoll’s welfare—Mr. Cooper Driscoll.”

  Katherine stuck both hands in her pockets. She had a sudden urge to push the smaller woman down, race into the house, slam the door behind her and find her grandmother. She took a breath to remind herself of her adult status. Maybe she had come at a bad time. “Well, okay. Will you call Mr. Driscoll now and ask him when I might come back?”

  “Yes. I’ll ask him,” Janice Beechum said through closed lips.

  “Good. Shall I wait here or may I come in?”

  “Oh, I don’t advise you waiting. It may take some time to reach a busy man like Mr. Driscoll. Why don’t you telephone in a few days?”

  “A few days! I just want to drop in and pay my respects to my grandmother.”

  “I’m sorry you’re upset, Miss Driscoll, but my job is to do what is best for the patient.” She lowered her voice to a professional intonation. “She’s a very sick woman. We don’t want anything to upset her unnecessarily, do we?”

  “No, we don’t want to upset her, but we do want to see her.”

  Janice Beechum turned toward the door. “Well, I’ll see what I can do, Miss Driscoll. I need to get back to the patient.” She opened the door just wide enough to slip back inside.

  Katherine did something she wouldn’t have believed herself capable of: Before the nurse could shut the door, she put her foot in the opening to block it. “If you could just give me a time when it would be convenient for me to come back,” she said.

  Janice Beechum looked out through the narrow opening with widened eyes, as if she were frightened that Katherine was going to barge in. “Please don’t make this difficult, Miss Driscoll. I’m just doing my job. You need to talk to Mr. Driscoll.” She looked down at Katherine’s foot on the threshold as if it were a dead rat.

  Slowly Katherine withdrew the foot.

  The nurse shut the door, locked and chained it without another word.

  Katherine felt her face flush with the sudden shame of rejection. As if she were a poor relation not worthy of entering the house, she had been turned away again. Again? she asked herself. Why do I feel I’ve been turned away from here before when I haven’t? And why should I feel ashamed? When she and her mother left Austin it had been like this, as if they had done something so terrible that they were banished forever. They pretended it was because they chose to live apart, but really they had been banished and, in spite of all Leanne’s protestations, Katherine had always sensed that.

  Katherine stood there on the step, breathing hard, staring at the wood door and the polished brass knocker with “A. C. Driscoll” engraved on it. Anne Cooper Driscoll—the name was everywhere—on the foundation, on the reptile house, on this door, on plaques all over the zoo, but the person was hard to locate.

  Katherine walked back to the car slowly, hoping a window would open upstairs and a voice, old and cracked, would call her back. But she reached the car in utter silence.

  As she got back on MoPac and headed south toward her father’s house, she felt she was in full retreat, with her sinew shriveled and her blood too timid for the task; the excitement she had felt, the growing resolve to act, had fizzled into dejection.

  She turned on the radio to fill in some of the empty spaces. As soon as the music boomed through the speakers, she switched it off.

  Damn it to hell. Was she going to retreat with her tail between her legs at the first rejection? Or was she going to treat this like all-out war and imitate the action of the tiger? She began to ponder the next step. Certainly she had to call Co
oper Driscoll and find out what the story was. She had every right to see her grandmother. She would insist on it. Nothing was going to stop her. If she heard from Anne Driscoll’s own lips that she didn’t want to see her, then she would stop trying, but not until then.

  Her resolve was stiffening.

  Even before Katherine opened the car door, Belle had launched into her usual baying from inside the house. Unlocking the front door, Katherine murmured reassurances to the dog and the noise abated.

  As she stepped into the front hall, Belle was waiting, as she did every day, with a rawhide bone in her mouth. The dog pressed one end of the bone against Katherine’s hand, trying to entice her into a tug-of-war. This had started the first day Katherine had come home from work, clearly a carryover from a routine her father and Belle had enjoyed. Visualizing the sixty-year-old man playing with his old Lab always made her smile and she usually accepted the invitation to play, but today she refused. “Not now, Belle,” she said. “I’ve got to make a phone call while my resolve is firm.”

  She bent down to pick up the mail that had fallen in through the slot and carried it to the kitchen. Without looking at it, she tossed in onto the kitchen table and opened the back door to let Ra in. She had settled on allowing Belle to stay inside during the day to nap, and Ra to stay out in the fenced backyard, because he was accustomed to being outside.

  Ra burst in, first dancing circles around her, then sniffing both ends of Belle in their ritual greeting. She threw each dog a Milk Bone and headed for the refrigerator where she kept a jug of Almaden Rhine wine. She unscrewed the top and poured herself a large glass over ice cubes—a reward for getting through another day in the snake pit, she told herself. And a bracer for being assertive with her uncle.

  Sipping her wine, she sat down at the table and made the phone call.

  “Katherine, how are you?” Cooper said when he came on the line. Then he lowered his voice to a tone of unctuous concern. “Any news on the investigation front?”

  “Not that I know of,” she said. “Uh, Coop. I stopped to see my grandmother after work today and Janice Beechum said I’d need to check with you on a convenient time to visit her.”

  There was a silence. Then he said, “Well, Katherine, you should have let me know you were planning to stop by, saved yourself some time. Let’s do this. Next time the doctor comes I’ll check with him on it, see if she’s up to … oh, someone new. She’s very weak and sedated much of the time. So let me make a note here to ask him.”

  Katherine unclenched her teeth so she could respond. “When will he come by?”

  “Let’s see—Thursday or Friday, I think. I’ll let you know when I talk with him.”

  “But if she’s sedated, she wouldn’t even know I was there. I just want to look in on her. I wouldn’t stay long.”

  “Well, I’ll pass that on to the doc. He really makes the decisions about your grandmother. Don’t you worry. I’ll take care of that. It’s nice of you to stop by to see the old girl. When you coming to see us, Katherine? You never got that dinner we promised you.”

  Katherine could still smell the beef tenderloin she missed. “Well, thanks. There was another thing I wanted to ask.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve gotten interested in the Driscoll Foundation and I wondered if you’d fill me in about it. I’d love to look at some of the records and—”

  “Well, finally. I’ve been waiting years for someone in this family to take an interest. I’m not going to live forever. I always tried to get Sophie interested, but she never would listen. Sure, I’d like nothing better. Probably talk your ear off.” He laughed a jovial bark. “Make you sorry you ever asked. Uh, what records would you like to see?”

  “Well, I was wondering about acquisitions and—”

  “Sure. I’ll tell you everything you ever wanted to know, and more, probably. Of course, the records are confidential, but you don’t want to get into that level of detail, anyway. So … Miss Katherine, what else can I do you for today?”

  He was trying to brush her off. She knew the tone of voice.

  When she hung up the phone, she took a long sip of wine. He really didn’t want her to see Anne Driscoll. Why not? And why didn’t he want her to see the foundation records? Did he have something there to hide? She suspected he did. And she was going to find out what that something was.

  Reluctantly, she began to leaf through the mail. It had been nothing but bad news lately. There were two bills for her father, which she would pass on to Travis Hammond’s partner, John Crowley, who had taken over the settlement of Lester’s estate. The big envelope from Joe she had been dreading—he’d told her about it in their phone conversation yesterday. It contained mail he was forwarding: lots of bills she couldn’t pay, another letter from the bank, a note from Hester Kielmeyer, and a plea from George Bob Rainey for her to come to the bank to sign some papers. She hadn’t been home to Boerne once in two weeks, in spite of George Bob’s rantings and Joe’s pleadings; every day she made a new excuse why she couldn’t go. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want to, but it had something to do with trying to disengage herself from the place.

  On the bottom of the stack was a small blue envelope addressed to her at her father’s address in dark, smudged pencil printing.

  She worked her index finger under the flap and ripped it open, pulling out a small piece of flimsy light-blue stationery. She unfolded it. The second she caught sight of the heavy penciled block letters, even before she read the words, she felt a chill of recognition. It said, “Katherine, put your father’s house in order. Justice is nigh. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Pointman.”

  She dropped the note on the table, stood up, and walked to the front door, slowly, calmly, so as not to alarm herself, and locked it, even though she knew no one could approach the house without Belle making a racket. Her chest felt tight and her fingers cold and prickly. She rubbed her hands together to get the circulation going as she walked back to the kitchen. Ra was standing alert and trembling, staring at her with raised ears and bright eyes. She wasn’t fooling him.

  Without touching the note again and without sitting down, she read it once more.

  Then she leaned over to the wallphone and dialed the police headquarters number from memory. It took several minutes to locate him, but Lieutenant Sharb finally came on the line with a croaked, “Sharb.”

  “This is Katherine Driscoll. I just got in today’s mail a warning note, like the ones my father and Mr. Hammond got.”

  “Read it to me.”

  She read it slowly, feeling the malice in the print, in each bold pencil line.

  “Is it written in pencil on thin blue stationery?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m coming over to get it. Put it down and don’t touch it again. We’ll try for prints. Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes. We’ll talk about it.”

  Katherine hung up and let her hand fall to Ra’s head. He licked her hand and leaned into her leg. She stroked the silky ears and bent down to kiss him on the muzzle. “Don’t worry, you baby,” she said. Still standing, she lifted the wineglass to her lips and started to think about an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. It was revenge in kind that was being promised—biblical, savage, and implacable. But revenge for what? What had she done to this pointman, whoever he was? What had her father done? And Travis Hammond, what had he done?

  * * *

  Eight minutes later Sharb arrived in a patrol car with its light flashing. When she saw the whirling light through the kitchen curtains, she was aware for the first time of panic rising in her from her chest into her throat. She took another sip of wine to wash it back down.

  Belle fell into a frenzy of barking at the approach of the police car. Katherine put her out in the backyard before she went to the front door to admit Lieutenant Sharb and a young uniformed officer.

  “This is Patrolman Rogers, Miss Driscoll. Let’s ha
ve a look.” She led them back to the kitchen and pointed to the note on the table. When Sharb saw Ra sitting under the table, brushing the floor with his swaying tail feathers, he stopped dead in his tracks and sucked his breath in.

  “It’s okay, Lieutenant Sharb,” Katherine said, “he’s tame. And I put the other one out.”

  “Good,” he said. He studied the note without touching it, pulled a large Ziploc bag out of his pocket, and nudged the note into it with his pen. He took out another bag and nudged the envelope into that.

  “I don’t want to alarm you, Miss Driscoll, but this is identical to the one we found in your father’s pocket—except for two words: ‘Katherine’ instead of ‘Lester’ and ‘your father’s house’ instead of ‘your house.’ I’m not a handwriting expert, but I’ve looked at that other note a bunch, and I’ll wager it’s the same handwriting, same pencil, same stationery … same killer. And young Susan Hammond says her grandfather’s note was the same.”

  He sat down at the table. “Sit down. Drink your drink,” he said. “Let’s brainstorm.”

  Patrolman Rogers remained standing at the kitchen door, politely looking off into space.

  Katherine stayed standing and dumped her wine into the sink.

  Sharb didn’t seem to notice. “What do Travis Hammond, Lester Renfro, and now Katherine Driscoll, have in common?” he asked. “Let’s see … Travis was Lester’s attorney. They both were involved deeply with the zoo, and they shared the secret of the payments to Dorothy Stranahan. But what about you? Where do you fit in?” He looked at Katherine for an answer.

  She spoke slowly, trying to think it out. “I’m involved in the zoo now. I’m my father’s daughter. And I know about the payments, but the only person I’ve told about them is you, Lieutenant. I have a feeling it may turn out to be discreditable to my father, so I haven’t told anyone else. I’ve been standing here wondering if this pointman is someone I know and what I could have done to him.”