Zero at the Bone (23 page)

“If you insist on staying here, I can have a regular patrol come by often and keep an eye on you—here, and at the zoo. We don’t have the manpower for any more than that. I wish we did. Do one thing to humor me, though. At least get your cousin to come over here and stay with you. Call her now.”

Katherine opened her lips to refuse. She couldn’t ask someone to share the danger … but—she hesitated. It could be an opportunity. If Sophie were staying here, she could pump her about the foundation and about the family history. There never seemed to be enough time when she was with her cousin to talk about all the things she wanted to discuss. Anyway, it would feel good to have her around. If she’d agree.

“I’ll call her,” Katherine said. “I’ll have to tell her about the note. She might not want to take the risk.”

“Oh, she looks like a game girl. Go on and call her,” Sharb urged.

*   *   *

“This is like a slumber party,” Sophie said, putting her needlepoint down and lighting her tenth cigarette since midnight. She rolled heavily onto her stomach on the narrow cot. “Lord, I’d like to have a drink. I don’t suppose you … No. Did you have slumber parties growing up in Boerne?”

Katherine did not know how to answer that without portraying herself as the poor little match girl. “No,” she said, “there was always work to do at home. My mother and I were sort of a unit, so I really didn’t have many friends at school.”

“My mother and I never had much in common,” Sophie said, taking a deep drag on the cigarette and holding the smoke in for several seconds. “But I would have loved to meet your mother. When she was young.” She exhaled the smoke and lowered her voice. “Because she was a bad girl, I think, like me in past years.”

Katherine tried to keep her voice light so she wouldn’t frighten Sophie away from the subject. “How were you bad and how was my mother bad?”

Sophie rested her cigarette in the ashtray and let her face sink into the pillow, so her voice emerged muffled. “I got pregnant and had an abortion at sixteen; I was already drinking a whole lot at seventeen, smoking pot, skipping school; I barely made it out of high school. I think my father bribed Austin High to give me a diploma. I went to bars, picked up cowboys, you name it. But I’ve outgrown it now, all but the drinking.”

Katherine shifted position in the chair, dangling her legs over the arm. “My mother never outgrew the cowboys. You know anything about that?”

“Well, I don’t know the details; no one will talk about it, but every time I did something really bad, so my father had to notice, he’d say, as sort of the worst thing he could think of, ‘Just like my sister, throwing your life away. If you go on like this, you’ll find yourself chucked out of the family, too.’”

“So what did she do to get thrown out of the family?” Katherine asked. “That was one of the secrets she wouldn’t talk about.”

Sophie was silent, face sunk into the pillow.

“I’ve often thought I was probably unplanned,” Katherine said to egg her on.

Sophie looked up, pale eyes bright with interest, cheeks flushed pink. “Yeah. I think she got pregnant at seventeen, ’cause Dad said I’d outdone even her on that score. Gram just couldn’t accept it. She’s a stickler for”—Sophie laid her hand over her heart and gazed heavenward—“the family honor.”

“What else?” Katherine asked.

“Well, I think she had affairs after she was married,” Sophie said, watching carefully to gauge Katherine’s reaction. “But so did I. Doesn’t sound so awful.”

“What makes you think she did?”

“Well, at one point, after I was married and living in Dallas, when I really screwed up, got into a car wreck with this married man and Dad had to come bail me out of jail, and this man’s wife was there yelling at me, Dad said that I was following in Leanne’s footsteps and it would lead to disaster like it did with her.”

Katherine knew immediately that it was true: Her mother had lived dangerously and something very bad had happened. She felt a prickling at the back of her skull, like a memory trying to form, to get up on its knees and creep to the front of her brain, but it couldn’t quite get going.
Whispered secrets in the middle of the night. Then screaming and accusing. It was because of something my mother did. We were driven away by something horrible she did. It happened the night we left. Yes. I felt ashamed, as if we were being driven out of the Garden of Eden, like the pictures of Adam and Eve in my storybook, stooped over in shame, as they were driven away by an angry angel with a sword.

Katherine glanced up suddenly to see Sophie kneeling in front of the chair, patting her knee. “I’m sorry. Katherine, I’m such a clod. I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry.”

“Oh, no,” Katherine said earnestly. “I asked you. I need to know. I’m just trying to remember what happened, but it was so long ago and I think I’ve chased it out of my head. Sophie, do you know what happened the night my mother and I left Austin? I remember just enough to know it was something very bad.”

“I was just a baby then,” Sophie said.

“I know, but haven’t you heard anything about it?”

Sophie leaned back against the cot and picked up her needlepoint. She worked a few stitches without looking at Katherine. Finally she said, “What I’ve heard from Mother and Daddy is that Leanne’s behavior just got too outrageous and Gram couldn’t cope with it anymore. She was worried about scandal, the family name, all that bullshit. She told her to go away and never darken her door again.” She looked up to see how Katherine was taking it. “Is this too painful?”

“No. I want you to tell me everything.” She smiled at her cousin. “Now tell me what you know about my father. Everything.”

“Not much really,” Sophie said, stretching out on the floor in her green silk pajamas. “I liked him. He was so nice to me when I started at the zoo, acted like an uncle, even though he wasn’t anymore. And he was this tall, strong, good-looking man.” She smiled up at Katherine. “I always appreciate that. He was standoffish to some of the people there, but he seemed especially to help young women. Not lecherous, just helpful. I wondered if it was because he missed you all those years.”

“What else? Tell me everything you know.”

Sophie thought. “That’s really about it. My parents never had anything to do with him, so the only time I saw him was at the zoo.” She ran a hand through her hair to try to smooth it down, but the frizzy curls bounced right back to where they had been. “Oh! But there’s one thing: Even though Mother and Daddy didn’t have anything to do with him, Gram did.”

Katherine sat up straighter. “She did?”

“Yeah. I know he went to see her a few weeks ago because I overheard Dad getting into a real snit over it on the phone. He was telling that tight-assed woman who works there that if she let Lester Renfro in again, he was going to fire her. He said she was to check with him before letting anyone in to see Gram.”

Katherine said, “Well she’s taken it to heart. I know because I went to see her today after work and she wouldn’t let me in, and she had to check with your father. But why?”

Sophie shrugged and yawned. “I guess ’cause she’s so fragile. God, though, with Daddy it could be anything. Maybe he’s afraid she’ll leave you some money or her house or something if she sees you. He’s desperate to inherit before he has to declare Chapter Eleven. But if you want to see her, you should be able to.” She yawned without covering her mouth.

Sophie looked down at her watch as she stubbed out her cigarette. “Three
A.M.
God. I’m beat.” She pulled herself up onto the cot and let her head drop to the pillow. “Don’t you have to get up in three hours? Let’s go to sleep. Or are you scared to?”

Katherine unfolded from the chair, reluctant to stop the conversation, but barely able to hold her eyelids open. She stood up and stretched. “Yeah, a little scared. But I’m so tired now it won’t matter. Sophie, thanks for coming. It really helps.”

Sophie rested her head on the pillow and waved a hand in the air, wiggling her scarlet fingertips. “Oh, actually,” she said into the pillow, “the invitation came in the nick of time. I hate to think it took a death threat to get me out of the house, but I was stifling there and I can’t afford a place of my own yet. I’ll stay as long as you want me.” She dropped her hand down and patted Belle’s head where she slept next to the cot.

Katherine switched off the light at the door.

Sophie squealed in surprise. “Oh, leave it on tonight. Okay?”

Katherine switched it back on. “Night.”

Ra got up and followed her, but Belle stayed where she was. Katherine looked back and saw that Sophie was gripping the dog’s collar.

15

AFTER three hours of sleep, Katherine woke to the alarm and sat up in bed.
Damn.
The first of November. Only six more days until the auction.

As she drank her strong coffee in front of the kitchen window, a police car cruised by, slowing as it passed the house. Sharb keeping his word. She wondered at her own absence of fear. Maybe the two weeks of steady apprehension she’d felt in the snake pit had built up an immunity. But it was so unreasonable. Why should her fear of a caged reptile transcend her fear of a death threat? She thought about it on the drive to the zoo. Lots of people were afraid of snakes, but her fear seemed to be deeper and somehow more personal. Maybe it had originated with those snakes in the glass boxes in their living room. And they had left that house, she and her mother, before she had had a chance to work the fear out.

As she entered the keepers’ area, Danny Gillespie, Wayne Zapalac, and Vic Jamail were leaning against the counter, gathered around a fat, rust-colored blood python. Danny was restraining the thick body on the stainless-steel counter while Wayne held its head up, his fist wrapped around it just under its black-and-gold eye. Vic manipulated with both hands several metal rods and a hypodermic, all stuck into the snake’s gaping mouth. The blood python was a friendly, sluggish, non-venomous snake, so Katherine moved in closer to see what they were doing.

Danny looked up at her. “Intestinal problem,” he said. “Amebiasis, Vic thinks.”

Slowly Vic drew out a long-handled curette and scraped the contents onto a piece of foil. Then he pushed the plunger of the hypodermic. The snake writhed powerfully, but Danny held the coils down calmly, his sinewy arms showing the strain as the tendons bulged out and the muscle flexed.

“Why don’t you use a snake tube?” Katherine asked.

“Too much trouble for such a nice guy as this,” Vic said, drawing out eight inches of hypodermic tube. “You obviously haven’t tried to persuade a snake into one of those. It’s like trying to stuff a limp noodle into a drinking straw.” Both Danny and Wayne laughed, nodding at the analogy.

Vic put down the hypodermic and reached for his coffee cup on the edge of the sink. He took a long drink, his eyes studying Katherine over the rim.

Wayne held on to the python’s head while Danny looped the coils around his arm and with his other hand pinched the head right behind the eyes, taking it over from Wayne.

“It should go in Quarantine F,” Wayne said, pointing to one of the white fiberglass isolation cages along the wall. He looked up at Katherine and said, “How’re you doing, Katherine? You look like you had a big night.”

“Do I?” she asked, amazed at his perception. She’d thought she looked pretty normal. “What are you doing over here, Danny? How’s Brum?” she asked as he opened the door and threw the big snake in.

Danny turned and slicked his thinning blond hair back from his forehead with a delicate hand. “He’s okay. I’m taking your place today. Sam decided the cats don’t need round-the-clock baby-sitting anymore, so Salvador is feeding them and I’m here.”

Then she noticed that her clipboard with her schedule and notations was out on the counter. “Taking my place? Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He pointed at Vic. “Vic just told me to report here and take over your chores for the day.” He picked up her clipboard. “But I need you to go over some of your notes with me. What’s this about the bushmasters? You’re moving them today?”

“Tomorrow, I think, or whenever the female’s shed is finished. That’s the big female in the exhibit and the male in the quarantine box—they’re supposed to go into the breeding room together. Blind date.”

Wayne pulled a newspaper from the counter and looked at it. “Long, dark South American male,” he pretended to read, “one of the smoothest of his species, two penises, seeks cool female who’s into mice and long snoozes. Purpose: Courtship behaviors leading to copulation and eventual clutch of vipers.”

Katherine laughed and was surprised to see Danny’s smooth peach skin coloring to red. He looked down as he chuckled.

“So, if you’re taking over for me, what am I supposed to do?” Katherine asked in Vic’s general direction.

“I need some consultation with a canine expert,” Vic said. “I hear you’ve had a bit of experience. Ever trained a wolf?”

She looked up at him in surprise. “Tried to once. A hybrid, half-wolf, half-husky. This rancher had set his heart on having it as a family pet.” She shook her head, remembering the man’s disappointment when the wolf-dog killed and ate his wife’s elderly poodle. But she
had
taught him to sit and heel.

“You can tell me about it on the way over to Wolf Woods,” Vic said, gathering up his instruments and loading them into his battered backpack. “I’ve got my Jeep outside. Anytime you’re ready. My assistant is down with the flu, so I hoped you’d fill in for the day after we finish with the wolves.” He stopped in the doorway to wait for her.

Katherine felt flustered and apprehensive. Any one of these men could be the pointman and she was being coerced into going off alone with a man she didn’t know. To stall for time, she picked up her clipboard and glanced at her notes for the day. Danny looked over her shoulder. “Well, first I need to check on the Gaboon vipers. We’re supposed to do a fecal check on the young male. He’s been losing weight, Alonzo tells me, so we isolated him to get a sample today.”

“I can do that,” Danny said. “I worked here before and it’s more pleasant to do a reptile fecal than a tiger fecal, believe me.” He took the clipboard out of her hands.