Zero at the Bone (14 page)

Another wall was devoted to photographs of the zoo staff at work. Under each photo was a label identifying the subjects. She scanned the names for Lester Renfro. When she found it, she raised her eyes to a picture of a man sitting next to a lioness, his arm draped around her shoulders. She studied her father’s high tanned forehead, dark eyes, and serious long mouth. She felt an impulse to take the photograph off the wall and slip it into her bag.

Looking through the other pictures, she was surprised at the number of familiar faces. She recognized the three men in the group next to her yesterday at the news conference. They were holding up a snake that appeared to be twenty feet long. Supporting the head was the rumpled, unshaven Vic, the head veterinarian. At the middle stood the emaciated man with the bad skin—
ALONZO STOKES, CURATOR OF REPTILES
, said the label. The tail end was held up by the muscular man with the tattoos—
WAYNE ZAPALAC, REPTILE KEEPER
.

She jumped and whirled around when the door opened. The director breezed in. His thick white hair was ruffled, as if he’d been running, and his cheeks were ruddy. He wore a plaid flannel shirt and the same red knit tie as yesterday.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Katherine. I was off the grounds for a while. Showing birds of prey to St. Andrews’s third graders.” He collapsed into a chair and pulled a dead mouse out of his shirt pocket. He smiled apologetically as he laid it gently on the coffee table. A man with lots of charm, Katherine decided.

“Now. Sit down and tell me what I can do to help you,” he said, fixing Katherine with a direct look.

Katherine sat in the same green leather chair she had sat in yesterday. It felt just as good.

A deep reluctance to do what she had planned was keeping her throat closed. He smoothed his hair down, waiting for her to speak. She took a deep breath and forced the words out. “Sam, I need a job. Right away. Starting tomorrow.”

His expression changed, she thought, from solicitous to wary. But maybe she was imagining it.

“A job?” he asked, raising his thick eyebrows.

“Yes. A job here. I’m dead broke.” This was absolutely true after her day of shopping. Her bank balance, after she had rented the safe-deposit box, bought clothes, and sent Joe his check, was reduced to $2.89. “I’ve had extensive experience with animals. I don’t know if you know I’m a professional dog trainer.”

“Yes. But that’s a far cry from zoo work. Forgive me for asking, but didn’t your father leave anything?”

“No. He was in debt.”

“In debt? But he seemed to live so frugally.”

“Yes. It’s puzzling.”

There was an agonizing silence during which Katherine struggled against the impulse to say, “It’s all right. I’ll find something else. Don’t worry.” But she held her tongue between her teeth and waited him out.

“Well,” he said finally, “I don’t think this would be a good idea for you—the associations, the constant reminder. Maybe I could help find you something else locally, if you’d like, with a trainer or kennel.”

Katherine swallowed. Begging came hard. “You had asked if you could help and this is the one thing I need, Sam. I find I really am interested in zoo work—probably runs in the blood. Not just my father, you know, but my grandmother, and my uncle, and even my cousin Sophie’s working here now,” she reminded him. “I have to stay in town to settle things, but I’ll need to eat.” She gave a little laugh. “I’ve run a boarding kennel, so I know how to clean up after animals. I’ll do anything you have.” Oh, yes, I certainly know how to shovel the shit, she thought.

He rose from his chair in silence and walked over to his desk. He rummaged through one of the piles, trying to find something. “I want to do whatever I can for you, Katherine, but I don’t want to hire someone and have them leave the week after we train them. I really think this isn’t a good idea.”

“I plan to stay,” said Katherine, astonished at the lie. “My home is being foreclosed on and I have nowhere to go. So I’m planning to stay here.” She cringed inwardly at the sound of her words. Pulling out all the stops now.

“There are several good training kennels in Austin,” he said. “I bet we could find something right up your alley. Probably pays better, too, much better, given your experience.”

She looked at him with eyes widened as big as she could make them. “I really want to be at the zoo, though. Sentimental reasons.”

“Well,” he said, pulling out a sheaf of papers and looking down at at it, “the only thing we’ve got now involves handling reptiles, and most people don’t want to do that. Anyway, it’s a temporary job at minimum wage, no benefits. And Alonzo Stokes is a real slave driver. Believe me, this is a job you don’t want.” He looked straight into her eyes.

Katherine met his gaze and said in the strongest voice she could muster, “Yes, I do want it. It sounds fine. Reptiles. I can do that.” She tried to smile her thanks. “Can I start tomorrow?”

He looked stunned. “Katherine, I don’t feel I’m doing right by you here. If it’s a matter of money to get you through the next few days, we can manage a loan of some sort. Or surely your uncle—”

Katherine interrupted before he could go any farther. “No, thanks. What I need is the job and I’m ready to start.”

He shrugged and gave a weak smile. “Okay. In the morning you can pick up a temporary uniform in the business office. But first you’ll need to have an interview with Hans Dieterlen, our head keeper, as a courtesy to him. He likes to pass on all the hirees. Let me see if he’s around.”

He sat at his desk and picked up the phone. “Kim, see if you can get Hans before he leaves. I’d like him to stop in my office for a minute if he can.” He put down the phone. “Anything else?”

Katherine wanted to ask about acquisitions and how they were handled, but her natural caution stopped her. If illegal activities were going on at the zoo, this man could be right in the middle of them. So she asked, “Do you have something I could read to familiarize myself with how the zoo operates, Sam? So I could get a little smarter about it quickly?”

He smiled and began rummaging under one of the stacks on his desk. “Our annual report to the membership would be a good place to start.” He pulled up a brochure with a glossy picture of an orangutan on the front. Just then the phone rang. He answered and listened. “Okay. Thanks, Kim. Leave him a message to come talk to Miss Driscoll in my office at seven tomorrow morning. Would you do that?” He put down the phone and said to Katherine, “Hans is tied up now, but he’ll see you tomorrow. You can work out the details then.”

As he leaned across the desk to hand her the brochure, he said, “This will give you a good idea of how the zoo operates.”

Just as she was about to take it, he flipped it over to show her the picture of a smiling man on the back. “But here’s your best source of information. Your uncle’s involved in all aspects of the zoo, and of course no one knows more about the zoo than your grandmother, but I’m afraid she—” He stopped there and shrugged.

“What?” Katherine asked. “She what?”

“Well, I haven’t seen her for for a while. I hear she’s very ill, so your uncle is really the best source now.”

“Yes. I’m going there for dinner tonight. I’ll ask him.” Katherine stood up and spoke her first honest words of the conversation: “I really appreciate this, Sam. Thanks.”

“My pleasure. But beyond this, I can’t help. You’ll have to please Alonzo Stokes.” He laughed and shook his head. “That’s not easy.”

Katherine studied the picture on the back cover as she walked out of the office. Underneath was a caption that began, “Cooper James Driscoll, Director of the Anne Cooper Driscoll Foundation and President of the Austin Zoological Society, the governing body of the Austin Zoological Gardens.”

Something stirred in her memory. She read the rest of the caption. “The ACDF is a zoo endowment set up in 1950 by Anne Cooper Driscoll for capital improvements at the zoo and for the purchase of new animals for the collection.”

ACDF! She pictured those initials written again and again in the payment-fund column she had puzzled over last night and this morning.

So. A foundation set up by my grandmother, run by my uncle, buys a bongo for the zoo on the same day one is unloaded at a private ranch in Kerrville. And my father finds that worth taking a picture of and hiding it away for me.

Now I am really interested.

10

KATHERINE sat slouched behind the wheel, studying the huge white brick colonial. Set back from the street and surrounded by ivy-covered oaks, it looked as though it had been there forever. The perfection of it ignited her sense of being an outsider about to enter some closed and enchanted circle of real Driscolls. She was about to have a job interview, only this one would determine whether she became part of the family or remained outside it.

Stupid, Katherine. Who cares?

She jerked on the handle and shoved the door open. You’ve lived thirty-six years very nicely without being a member of this family, and you’re only here today because you were invited. Don’t make such a big thing of it.

She slid down from the Jeep.

Walking up the brick path, Katherine was comforted by the sensual flow of silk against her hips and legs. She had no remorse over spending the last of her bank account on the expensive slacks and blouse. They made her feel tall and cool and independent, and right now she needed all the help she could get.

If someone were to ask her at dinner, “What are you doing to mourn your father?” she would have to admit that she had spent her first day of bereavement shopping. She smiled, thinking about it. It had helped. She felt better.

She stood in front of the dark-green door, tucked her hair back, drew a long breath for relaxation, and pushed the brass doorbell.

Sophie flung open the door and smiled admiringly at the new outfit. “You look much better than you did yesterday,” she said. “Come on in. Mother and Daddy are anxious to meet you.”

“Anxious” is probably the right word, Katherine thought.

Sophie walked ahead of her. She was barefoot, wearing a loose Mexican dress, emerald green embroidered in white, her wild hair held down by a matching band. They walked through an overdecorated living room with white carpeting so thick their feet left tracks in it, past a formal dining room with a mahogany table that could seat twenty, toward the back of the house.

She saw immediately that the front rooms were rarely used showrooms, an antechamber to the real house the family inhabited.

Sophie led her into an enormous paneled den stretching the entire length of the house. Thirty-foot cathedral ceilings with exposed dark beams and leaded lancet windows dwarfed the overstuffed furniture. A huge stone fireplace topped with the head of a Cape buffalo dominated one end of the room. This room, totally different in architecture from the rest of the house, had clearly been added on. It was designed to imitate an old English hunting lodge—an appropriate environment for displaying the master’s collection.

Katherine raised her eyes and surveyed the collection of animal heads that populated the dark walls—hunting trophies from all over the world. The ubiquitous local white-tailed deer gazed down at her with glassy eyes, but they were overshadowed by more exotic game. There was a moose with a rack the size of a tree, a grizzly bear, several magnificent horned antelopes, and even a lion, mounted with his nose puckered in an eternal snarl.

She tried to repress the repugnance she felt for this display of death. After all, who was she to get moralistic about killing animals? All her adult life she had trained retrievers to hunt and in the process had shot countless birds. She was a hunter herself.

Nevertheless, as she looked around this room, she felt waves of contempt for the person who had killed and exhibited these glassy-eyed corpses.

Sophie saw her reaction and said, “Daddy’s an incorrigible hunter.” She shrugged. “Men. What can you do?”

A voice boomed from the far end of the room. “No need to apologize for me, little girl.”

A large, vigorous man in his late fifties had entered and was striding toward Katherine with a jovial smile. As if I were a long-lost relative, she thought as she managed to return the smile. She extended a hand which he ignored in favor of enfolding her in a hearty hug. It seemed to last forever. She felt crushed, lost, smothered in the beefiness of his torso and the chemical smells of his deodorant and after-shave, and, under it all, the smoky smell of Scotch.

“There you are,” he said, releasing her and stepping back to study her, “my niece, little Katie, grown into a good-looking woman. Last time I saw you, you were this high. It’s about damn time we got acquainted.”

Katherine struggled against her sense of being a different species from this man. She looked at the tanned face and sunken navy-blue eyes, the perfectly even white teeth, the slicked-back dark hair. This man was her uncle, a blood relative, her mother’s brother. But it was like meeting a stranger. Without being aware of it, she had been hoping for an immediate sense of kinship, a blood tug that would draw her close.

She wanted to say something, but nothing that came to mind seemed appropriate for the occasion, so she smiled and nodded.

She was saved by the entrance of a petite blond woman in her early fifties who was doing everything possible to look like the University of Texas cheerleader she had no doubt been thirty years earlier. She began to talk the minute she entered the room. “So glad you’ve come to see us, Katherine. It’s so good after all this time to meet you—though, as I was saying to Coop when we heard about this really terrible business yesterday, the circumstances are so tragic for your father and so unfortunate for the zoo.” Her scarlet lips and thin, blue-veined hands moved in constant nervous flutters as she talked. “Dying in that way, after all his experience. So hard for you. It must have been quite a shock. Sam says you just happened to be there yesterday and found out by chance and I thought isn’t that just the way things go.”

On and on she prattled, without breath or thought, an ongoing stream of discourse, uncensored, unedited. Garrulousness was ordinarily something Katherine hated, but at that minute, it provided a welcome relief from the need to do anything but nod.