Fourth Bear (21 page)

“You’re very perceptive.”

The bear twitched his nose. “The mighty sniffer never lies, Officer.”

“What’s your name, bear?” asked Jack.

The bear chuckled and scratched his nose. “Bruin,” he said,

“Edward Bruin.” He looked at Jack again and added, “You can call me Ed.”

“How many of you live here in the wood?”

“It is not a
wood,
” retorted Ed pedantically, “it’s a forest. It’s
always
a forest. Wood is something you make cricket bats out of.”

“Sorry. How many of you live here in the
forest?
”

“My good lady wife, Ursula, and Nigel, our son. The missus is indoors, and Junior’s at school.”

Jack nodded. There were
three
of them—things were looking better and better. He showed the bear Goldilocks’s photo.

“Have you seen this woman in the forest sometime in the last week?”

Ed donned a pair of spectacles and squinted at the snap, recognizing her immediately and opening his eyes wide. “That’s her!”

“You’ve seen her recently?”

“Seen her?” echoed the bear. “Why, she nearly wrecked the place.”

“When?”

Ed scratched his head and rolled off the hammock onto all fours, stood up to his full height, which was at least seven foot six, stretched, farted and then lumbered off into the house.

“Come inside, Inspector,” he said, beckoning Jack to follow. “I want to show you something.”

The interior of the bear’s house was austerely furnished but neat and tidy. There were only two rooms, one up and one down, and the downstairs comprised kitchen, dining and living area all in one. There were flagstones on the floor, and the walls were finished in a pastel blue color. A pretty pine dresser laden with crockery was against one wall and next to that a small upright piano, the lid up and a book of hymns open on the music rest. In front of the hearth there were three stoutly built wooden chairs. A large one for Ed, a slightly smaller one for his wife and next to that a tiny chair that had recently been broken and mended. On the wall were various sepia-toned pictures of friends and relatives, and above the mantelpiece was the Lord’s Prayer embroidered upon a framed piece of cloth. The small dwelling was plain, and no modern contrivances littered its simplicity. There was no television, no stereo player, nor any modern appliance of any sort. The only artificial light was a large brass oil lamp in the center of the oak kitchen table.

Mrs. Bruin was at the range, taking a loaf out of the oven with a pair of oven gloves. She was smaller than her husband and wore a rose-patterned dress with a lace pinafore and a bonnet through which stuck her ears. She didn’t take any notice of Jack at all.

“Darling…?” said Ed in a low voice, holding his hat in his paws and blinking nervously. She looked up sharply and glanced at Jack.

“You’ve spilled honey down your front,” she said in a voice that was not quite as low as her husband’s.

“Have I, my dove?” said Ed, looking down at the sticky stain on his blue waistcoat and rubbing at it ineffectually with a claw.

“You’ll make it worse!” she scolded, and took a cloth to the offending stain. Ed gave an embarrassed smile in Jack’s direction.

“What does the human want?” asked Mrs. Bruin, again without looking at Jack.

“Police,” said Ed simply.

Mrs. Bruin stopped rubbing his waistcoat and looked at Jack suspiciously, placed her hands on her hips and said, in a weary tone, “Okay, what’s he done now?”

“Sorry?”

“What’s he been up to? If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a thousand times:
Man is a bad influence.
I caught him wearing his baseball cap on backward, and he insists that the tongues of his sneakers stick out. He keeps on using phrases like ‘monster’ and ‘far out.’ Yesterday he sneaked a GameBoy into the house. He keeps on asking for an iPod and won’t forage. He’ll come to a sticky end, and it’s all
your
fault!”

She had directed the last sentence at her husband, who reacted as if he had been stung with a cattle prod.

“Mine, sweetness?”

“Yes, yours. If you’d been more firm after we adopted him, we might not have a delinquent on our hands. ‘Clip him around the ear,’ I said. ‘Oh, no,’ you said, ‘youth must have its voice,’ you said. Well, look what’s happened. All
you
ever do is lounge around; I get all the meals, and you won’t lift a finger to help!”

Ed had been fiddling nervously with the brim of his hat, slowly backing away from the tirade.

“To think what I could have had!” she added, curling a lip at Ed and showing him a large white canine. She grunted and turned to Jack, smiled and said, “He’s really just a cub, Officer. I’m sure he was only under the influence of some of that human rabble from the village. What exactly has he done?”

“I’m not here about your son, Mrs. Bruin.”

“No?”

“No. I’m looking for this woman.” He held out the photo.

Mrs. Bruin glared at her husband, who shrugged. She wiped her paws on a tea towel and examined the photo closely. “Ah,” she said.
“Her.”

“Perhaps you can tell me a bit more?”

“My husband will tell you all about it, Officer. He’s the boss in this house.”

Ed stood up straight when he heard this and placed his hat on the bentwood stand. He led Jack to the other side of the room and offered him a chair.

“Have a seat, Inspector. Tea?”

“Thank you.”

“Honey sandwich? It’s all quota—no substance abuse in this house.”

“Thank you, I’ve already eaten.”

“Do you mind if I have one?”

“Not at all.”

Ed licked his lips and shouted across to his wife, “Two teas, pet—and a honey sandwich for our guest.” He winked broadly at Jack and smiled slyly.

“So when did you last see her?” asked Jack.

“It must have been Friday morning—”

“Saturday,” said Mrs. Bruin from the other side of the room.

Ed looked around. “I think it was Friday, actually, dear.”

“Saturday,” she growled. “We had to go to the vet about your worms.”

There was a ghastly pause. Ed looked at Jack with an expression of acute embarrassment etched upon his features. He smiled sheepishly.

“Thank you, darling,” said Ed sarcastically. “I’m sure Inspector Spratt has better things to do than hear about my ailments.”

“If you hadn’t been rummaging in the trash, you never would have got them in the first place,” replied his wife airily.

I was
not
in the trash,” he said indignantly. He lowered his voice and turned to Jack. “Worms can happen to almost
anyone.
Even,” he added, nodding in his wife’s direction, “to the trouble and strife.” He nodded his head triumphantly, checked to make sure she hadn’t heard and then sat back in his chair. “What were we talking about?”

“Goldilocks.”

“Oh, yes. It was last Saturday. My good lady wife had made some porridge for breakfast—again, strictly quota—and we all went for a walk in the forest while it cooled.”

“Is that normal procedure?”

“Yes, indeed; it’s completely true what they say about bears and forests. Our morning
constitutional,
as it were. The forest speaks, you know, Inspector. Every morning it has changed in some small way. By the way the trees sway and the birds sing and the leaves—”

“That’s very interesting, Mr. Bruin,” interrupted Jack, “but what happened about the porridge?”

“Oh, well, we came home to find that my son’s porridge had been eaten. He was most upset about it.”

“Goldilocks?”

He held up a claw. “Wait a minute. Then we noticed that my son’s chair had been sat on and broken.”

“This one here?”

“Yes, I’ve tried to mend it, but it’s never quite the same, is it?”

“And then?”

“We went upstairs and found
that woman
asleep in my son’s bed!”

The bear stared at Jack as though he should be as outraged as Ed was.

“Then what did she do?”

“Isn’t that enough?” asked Ed angrily. “You would have thought that finally, after two thousand years of being hunted, kept in grotty zoos, made to ride motorcycles and dance to some forgettable tune played by a repulsive and usually toothless Eastern European, we members of the Ursidae family had won the right to be left alone.”

“She broke a chair, but surely that’s not the end of the world?”

“It’s the thin end of the wedge,” he replied indignantly. “How would you like it if a bear wandered into your house when you were out, ate your breakfast, destroyed your property and then had the barefaced cheek to fall asleep—
naked
—in your bed?”

“I see your point. Why didn’t you report it?”

“What’s the use? Most of the police I’ve ever met have been ursists.”

“Not in my department.”

Ed sighed. “You may not
think
you’re ursist, Inspector, but you are. You said to me earlier, ‘What’s your name,
bear?
’ Is that how you treat other men? ‘What’s your name,
human?
’”

Jack could see his point. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.”

Ed harrumphed. Since he occupied the moral high ground for the moment, he thought he would carry on.

“We’ve had a pretty checkered history with humans, you know. But the way I figure it, you lot can’t seem to make up your minds about us at all. On the one hand, you name constellations after us, make us deities and use us as strong national symbols, and on the other hand you hunt us to near extinction.”

“Bears are not exactly alone in that category.”

“Agreed, but you also name athletic teams after us, create in our image tremendously popular characters like Winnie-the-Pooh, Paddington and Yogi, and every child has a teddy bear of some sort, yet up until 1835 it was considered a fun day out to pay good money to see my kind either being torn apart by dogs or blinded and then beaten with a stick. Your first Queen Elizabeth liked nothing better than to watch us being tormented in some highly imaginative way.”

“I can only say that I hope we have made up for it,” replied Jack, unable to defend the indefensible but loyally trying to apologize for his own species’ treatment of bears over the years. “The Animal (anthropomorphic) Equality Bill was quite far-reaching.”

“Equality is
not
what we want, although it is a start,” said Ed slowly, flicking away a fly that was trying to get at the honey spilled down his front. “Any creature that wants to be the equal of a human has set its sights way too low. We have an ursine saying, Inspector, that goes something like this: ‘If you crap with your ass in the mountain stream, the poo won’t stick to your fur.’ Do you see what I mean?”

“Not really.”

Ed frowned. “Yes, I guess it loses something in the translation.”

“Tea?” inquired Mrs. Bruin, placing a tray of steaming cups on the table in front of them. “I’m sorry the mugs are a bit large, Officer. I won’t be upset if you don’t drink it all.” She smiled sweetly and tickled her husband affectionately behind the ear.

The mugs held about a gallon of tea each, and Jack could hardly even lift his. As soon as his wife was back at the cooking range, Ed greedily ate up the honey sandwich that Mrs. Bruin had put in front of Jack.

“Well, I’m sorry for all that, but my chief interest at the moment is Goldilocks.”

“Who?” asked Ed, who could be dense at times.

“The one who broke the chair.”

“Oh,
her.
Well, like I said, it’s not the damage, it’s the
principle.
An apology would help.”

“I’ll see what we can do,” asserted Jack, wondering whether Goldilocks was in a fit state to apologize—or do anything at all.

“Why was she asleep in your son’s bed?”

“Tired, I guess,” said Ed simply. “We quizzed her, of course. She said that my porridge was too hot and Ursula’s was too cold, but Junior’s was just right.”

“So she ate it up?”

“Right. Then she said she tried my chair but it was too hard, my wife’s but it was too soft, but Junior’s again was just right.”

“And she broke it?”

“As you can see.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then she said she was tired, so she went upstairs to bed. Again, my bed was too hard, my wife’s too soft—so she fell asleep on Junior’s. I’ve never heard of anyone so
fussy.
”

Jack paused for a moment. “And she was asleep when you found her?”

“Right.”