Zero at the Bone (5 page)

And today, just as on that first trip, her heart quickened as she exited Mopac onto Windsor and entered the posh old Enfield area, turning onto Woodlawn. The houses got bigger, older, richer. She slowed down, studying each house, feeling, as always, alien to the opulence of this old neighborhood, as if she were a transient who would be stopped by the police for loitering where she didn’t belong.

She came to a stop in front of the largest house on the street, a stone mansion with slate roof and leaded glass windows. Not a beautiful house, like some of the others on the street, but solid, massive, ageless, speaking of money and permanence—qualities she had never known.

This was her grandmother’s house. Still was, according to the most recent Austin phone directory.

The first time Katherine had driven by the house twenty years ago was the day after she got her driver’s license. She had talked Leanne out of the beat-up old station wagon, saying she was just going to drive around San Antonio. But instead she’d driven directly to Austin, where she stopped at a gas station to look in the phone book and got a street map. Then she’d found her way here, to this stone mansion, and sat outside looking at it, just as she was doing now.

She had first gotten the idea of going when she read in the
San Antonio Light
that Anne Cooper Driscoll had received an honorary doctorate from the University of Texas for her many contributions to the quality of life in Texas, especially to the Austin Zoo. The newspaper picture was of a perfectly groomed, handsome woman of sixty, smiling in her cap and gown. That had been twenty years ago. Now Anne Driscoll would be over eighty. She might even be dead.

Katherine rested her head back on the seat and watched the lacquered oak front door. In this house, this mansion, her mother had grown up. Katherine could understand how miserable it must have been for her to have to live in the small rundown house they had occupied in Boerne, to work as a saleswoman at Joske’s, and to raise a daughter on her own. In this house, her mother had lived in luxury until she eloped with Lester Renfro.

The story Leanne told and retold was of herself, the indulged daughter of a rich family, being seduced at eighteen by a handsome zookeeper she’d met while doing volunteer work at the zoo. She’d given up everything for him, gone against her family and social class to marry him. Then he turned out to be a violent and evil man. She had tried to make it work, but finally she had been forced to leave him in the middle of the night, taking five-year-old Katherine and fleeing Austin. Lester Renfro had not only driven them from the city of their birth, but he had caused an irrevocable split between Leanne and her mother and brother, who had washed their hands of her.

Katherine wasn’t sure if the story was true or not. It was hard to know with her mother. But no one had ever made a more complete break with the past than Leanne Driscoll. After leaving Austin, she had never returned, not even to pack her possessions. She never again saw her husband or her mother or her only brother. She had slammed shut the window and pulled down the shade on her past.

The problem was it had slammed the window on Katherine’s past, too.

She looked at the leaded windows of Anne Driscoll’s house. The draperies were pulled closed. The silent house gave nothing away, kept all its secrets. Secrets. There were so many secrets in this family.

Katherine could understand why her grandmother had objected to her daughter’s marrying so young, and marrying someone poor. But that happened in many families, and they didn’t break with each other forever over it. Leanne had always refused to talk about it, but something had happened that created a break so total that mother and daughter never saw each other again after Leanne and Katherine had moved to Boerne. Katherine thought about her grandmother, an old woman living alone in this immense house. What could happen that was so bad that you would never want to see your daughter and granddaughter again? She could not imagine.

She looked at her watch. It was after one-thirty. Time to get on with it. Katherine took MoPac south. She crossed the bridge spanning Town Lake and turned left into Zilker Park where the Austin Zoological Gardens had been located for close to sixty years.

She had driven past the zoo often on her trips to Austin, but she had never entered. It would have been a natural thing to do. When she was in Houston or Dallas, she always went to the zoo. But she did not want to make even a gesture toward a father who had made no gestures to her.

To her surprise, the parking lot was almost full—on a Monday afternoon during the school year. The zoo was doing great business.

She let Ra out for a brief run before leaving him in the car with the windows open.

As she walked through the entrance gate, she stopped and looked up, transfixed. On top of each gatepost was a huge stone elephant balanced with one leg on a stone ball. She gasped in recognition. I know those elephants. I loved them. He lifted me up over his head so I could touch their trunks. We walked across that wooden bridge and watched the birds along the creek.

She paid her six-dollar adult non-member admission at the window and picked up a map. Crossing the wooden bridge over the creek, she felt a sudden rising panic. What should she do first? She could just go and look for Lester, but she wouldn’t even recognize him. What if he wasn’t pleased to have her appear here so suddenly? Maybe this meeting should have been more private—at his house perhaps. Maybe she should have called ahead.

She glanced down at her khaki shorts and old Nikes. At least she should have changed her clothes. He hadn’t seen her since she was five. What would he think? Her mother had been so beautiful, so meticulous in her grooming. Would he expect that in her? Be disappointed that she was a different kind of woman?

She walked slowly past the large flamingo display and the snack bar, looking for a ladies’ room. She found one behind the snack bar. When she emerged five minutes later, her hair was brushed, her face washed, and she had applied some light lipstick.

To give herself time to recapture her resolve, she paused in front of a wooden bulletin board:
TODAY’S ZOO NEWS
. Next to it, in a huge cage, labeled “Parrots of the World,” vividly colored birds squawked and spread their wings as a spray of mist rained down on them from the top of the cage. She ran her eye down the listings of recent births, public feeding times, and “Meet the keeper” demonstrations. A large handwritten note proclaimed the imminent arrival on breeding loan of a female white rhino from the Frankfurt zoo, the birth of a spider monkey, and the hatching of a clutch of thirty-nine king cobras. Thirty-nine! Katherine shivered and turned away.

She walked back over the bridge to the administrative office. She would ask for him in the office. They could call him, so he’d be expecting her. Give him a little advance warning.

The offices were tucked behind a stockade fence near the gate. She entered a room throbbing with noise and so jammed with people she could barely push her way in. Men and women with cameras and microphones sat on the sofas, leaned against the walls. They all held notebooks and tape recorders. Several uniformed men surrounded the reception desk. Surely, Katherine thought, this is not all for the birth of some king cobras. For the rhino, maybe.

Sideways, she worked her way through the crowd to a desk where a young woman with a long blond French braid was talking on the telephone with her hand pressed against her other ear to shut out the clamor of the room. Into the phone she shouted, “I can’t give you that information,” and slammed it down.

Katherine leaned over the desk and said, “I’m here to see Lester Renfro. Could you call him and tell him he has a visitor?”

The woman opened her mouth wide, then snapped it shut with a click. “Is this some sort of joke?” she asked, staring at Katherine.

“A joke? No,” Katherine said. “Why?”

She noticed that the uniformed man leaning against the next desk watching her closely was an Austin policeman.

The woman reached across her desk for a folded newspaper which she offered to Katherine. “Here,” she said, tapping a finger on a picture at the bottom of the front page, “this is the afternoon edition of the paper. Just came out.”

Katherine saw a photograph of the massive broad head of a tiger. The caption underneath said, “Brum, the Siberian tiger that killed his keeper this morning at the Austin Zoo.”

Katherine took the paper and braced one hand on the corner of the desk. The article accompanying the photo was headlined, “Tiger breaks window, kills Austin Zookeeper.”

She had to read the article twice before it registered.

*   *   *

AUSTIN
—
A five-hundred-pound Siberian tiger smashed through a glass window early today, dragged a veteran Austin zookeeper into the animal’s display area, and mauled him to death.

Lester Renfro, sixty, apparently was walking through a service corridor when the tiger broke through a 2-1/2-square-foot, quarter-inch-thick glass-and-wire mesh window and pulled him outside to a natural-habitat area, Austin Zoo director Sam McElroy said.

“We are uncertain at this time just how the accident happened,” McElroy said. “There were no witnesses to the attack.”

The tiger, a five-year-old male named Brum, was isolated after the attack, but will not be destroyed, according to McElroy, because it is a member of an endangered species.

Renfro, a zoo employee for thirty-seven years, had been senior zookeeper in charge of large cats since 1978. Previously, he had worked with reptiles and small mammals. He is the second worker killed at the zoo in its fifty-six-year history.

*   *   *

A reporter standing next to Katherine had been reading the article over her shoulder. “Pretty grisly,” he said. “They won’t say yet whether the tiger snacked on him. Really that’s what everybody’s here for, to get in on the autopsy information. The director is holding a press conference in a few minutes.”

Katherine leaned against the corner of the desk.

“Ma’am?” the policeman said, “could you give us some space up here for the news conference? We’re about to start and we need to clear this area out.”

Katherine didn’t hear him the first two times he asked. She was thinking about timing and that hers was possibly the worst in the world. Thirty-one years. And on the day she decides to come see her father, he gets killed by a tiger.

Damn him. The fires of rage began to fill her chest again. God damn him to hell. Typical. His last act in the world was to let me down.

Again.

4

KATHERINE elbowed her way through the crowd to the back of the room. She needed to be alone, and she needed to lean against something solid. In a hallway just outside the main room, she found the only available surface to lean on—a doorframe leading into the men’s room. There she braced her shoulder and tried to exhale the anger that was mushrooming inside her, but it clung to her lungs like a coating of napalm.

Goddamn. This is so frustrating. Now I’ll never get a chance to tell him how angry I am, how long I waited for him. As soon as you start to depend on anyone in this world, they leave, or die. I suppose I should feel sad. I should feel sorry for him dying a violent death like that. But I don’t. Not at all.

She reached a hand into her shoulder bag and rummaged around until she touched the cold metal of her keys. She found by feel the small brass key she’d added to her ring before she left home. It was the one Lester had sent her. She closed her fist tight around it, until its sharp edges bit into her palm. What about the money now? What about whatever is in storage waiting for me? That’s what I came for. God, I hope he wrote it all down.

The men’s-room door swung out suddenly, cracking into her bent elbow. Sharp shooting pains coursed through her arm. She moaned and pulled the throbbing arm in tight against her chest. As though the tears had been lined up waiting, they broke through and trickled down her cheeks.

A tall man with shaggy black hair filled the doorway. His zoo uniform was rumpled and covered with dark stains. He glanced down to see what he’d hit. “Oh. Was that you? Sorry,” he said as he came through, his hand making a quick pass over the front of his pants. “Sorry.”

He did a double take when he noticed the tears on her cheeks. His swarthy, unshaven face turned serious. “Was it as hard as that? Your elbow, huh?” He reached a big hand out to touch her shoulder, but when she shrugged away, he dropped it into his pants pocket. “Will it be okay?” he asked.

Katherine nodded furiously to get rid of him.

“Well, sorry again,” he repeated, backing away. “But that really isn’t a good place to stand, is it?”

He moved only a few steps away to join two other men in dark-green zoo uniforms who were standing in a huddle with the secretary with the long braid. The four of them put their heads together in animated whispered discussion. They stopped talking and snapped their heads around to the front of the room when the door to the director’s office opened and three men emerged. The man in the middle raised his hands for silence and got it as the reporters turned their cameras on him. Flashbulbs flickered.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you.” He was a wiry, kinetic man of about fifty, with a huge head of thick white hair. He wore a faded blue workshirt, red knit tie, and khaki pants. Two grim-faced men flanked him. One, short and stocky as a fireplug, wore a shiny dark suit. The other, Teutonic-looking and stern, with a gray-blond crew cut that showed his scalp, was dressed in a crisply ironed zoo coverall.

The group noise faded to a murmur.

Katherine cradled her aching arm and leaned back against the doorframe, keeping an eye on the group in front of her. They were clearly zoo employees, so they must have known her father. She wondered what they had thought of him. The men’s uniforms all had zoo-emblem patches on their left sleeves and name patches she couldn’t quite read over their right breast pockets. The young woman wore a khaki short-sleeved safari-style shirt and shorts of the same color and fabric, which showed off her muscular tanned legs to advantage.