Bone Valley (5 page)

“Sons of bitches killed it,” Angus said, his voice low and angry.

“They killed it?” I said, in disbelief. Who kills a Florida panther? They are almost all gone anyway. “Who would kill it?”

“Think about it,” Miguel said. “Who had the most to gain?”

“Antheus? Somebody from the mining company killed it?”

“Left the body by that gate, where we stopped. Right outside the gate, on the public easement. A female panther. Gut shot, and left to die. Fish and Wildlife investigated, but never could prove who killed it.”

Suddenly I hated people.

“Fish and Wildlife folks still coming out here, looking around, thinking they might find a mate,” Angus said. “But nobody’s found any evidence of a second panther. Yet.”

“So, that’s why we’re here. We’re going to introduce the world to this new panther.” Miguel held up the Baggie of cat poop. “Little panther scat, plus a set of tracks down to the creek, should leave a convincing trail.”

“Let’s do it,” I said, and grinned like I meant it.

While Angus showed off how much he knew about Florida panthers by telling us how far to space the tracks, and all such stuff as that, Miguel and I walked side by side, me with the left paws, and him with the right, and we made a clear track of the panther along the edge of Horse Creek, then down into the water, as if the big cat was drinking, then back to the high grasses, where Miguel left the scat, I scratched sand over most of it, and then Angus neatly followed our trail, brushing out all our footprints with a palmetto frond.

We hooped and hollered a bit, danced in the thick undergrowth where we wouldn’t leave prints, and Miguel pulled a camera out of the sack, snapped a couple shots of the scat and a long view of the panther’s tracks, and then we boogied out of there, happy as kids who’d put a scarlet king snake in the teacher’s desk.

Back in the truck, I took both Miguel’s and Angus’s hand for a second, and said, “Thank you for including me.”

They nodded and we crawled into the cab of the pickup and started back toward pavement.

Okay, I was glad to have been along on this Screw the Big Boys trip, and I couldn’t wait to tell Delvon what we’d done, but I got to puzzling. “Why’d you take me?” I asked.

“We wanted to test your dedication to the Cause,” Miguel said.

What cause? I thought, but then Miguel took a curve a bit too fast and I slid into him, thigh to thigh, and my brain just stopped working.

Yeah, okay, I was kind of engaged to Philip, even if I wasn’t talking to him right now, and I needed to get a grip on this lusting-after-Miguel thing. Pushing my leg away from physically touching Miguel, I promised myself not to act upon that lust until I resolved things with Philip, one way or the other.

Philip the steady, Philip the smart, Philip who brings wine and roses—I started listing his positive traits. For starters, he’d never have led me across a barbed-wire fence, through the no-trespassing signs, on a cat-track-and-scat spree.

But that was as much a negative as a plus for Philip, I realized, and leaned down to scratch a bug bite.

Angus scratched at something on his leg at the same time and pushed against me, and when I pulled away, I bumped back up against Miguel. Yeah, okay, it wasn’t my fault the front seat was so small, so I went with the flow and let my thigh sit there bouncing against Miguel’s and setting off electrical charges as the little red truck lurched down the road.

Angus broke my reverie. “Hey, Mike, let’s go by and check on Lenora. We’re in the neighborhood.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Miguel said, then smiled at me. “It’ll be another education for Lilly.”

Not sure I wanted to learn anything else today from my fake-the-panther clients, I glanced at my watch. I wondered when my next chance at getting some bottled water was going to be. A Save the Forest trail mix bar wouldn’t hurt either.

Apparently catching me looking at my watch, Miguel the considerate asked, “Lilly, is it all right with you if we take a side trip?”

“Does she have a refrigerator with bottled water?”

“Yep,” Angus said.

Miguel turned on a dirt road, then bumped along until he cut left on a branch that I would have considered a primitive trail not meant for motorized vehicles. Bump, lurch, rub went my thigh against Miguel. Definitely foreplay potential.

“You ought to see these roads after a good rain, hardly passable at all. The Manatee River is just right over there, behind those water oaks,” Angus said, pointing to a stand of oaks to the left of the truck, and once more breaking my sexual reverie.

Okay, the cosmic forces had assigned Angus the role of keeping me from getting in too over my head with Miguel. I should be grateful. No, Philip the almost forgotten should be grateful.

On that disrupted note, Miguel drove through a tunnel of loblolly pines and live oaks, and turned left toward the hidden river, into a wide opening. When he stopped the truck, I looked about. I couldn’t see the river, but I could smell its wet-moss and primordial scent. In front of me, I saw a collection of Florida-cracker outbuildings, a barn with a rusted tin roof, and a dog-trot house, well past its prime. By, say, like a lifetime. A boxy Volvo was parked under a tree, and, given its dings and bangs, I figured it for an old one.

Lots of plastic animal cages, a pump, a metal watering trough, piles of stuff, and more piles of stuff. My can’t-stand-piles-of-stuff inner alarm went off—big time. On the other hand, I felt like I had just been transported back to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s time and place. The dog-trot house with its central hallway and tin roof had a certain charm.

As Miguel and Angus jumped out of their respective sides of the truck, I followed, watching closely where my feet landed. When I looked up, a woman was standing in the doorway of the old house. She was wearing a blue scarf around her head, turban style, and had the taut yellow skin of someone seriously ill. Then I realized there was no hair showing beneath the turban. Her lips were drawn and narrow, deep lines and purple shadows surrounded her eyes, and her thinness had passed fashionable about ten pounds back.

“Angus, Miguel, you boys are a sight for sore eyes. Come on in and help me feed the baby birds.” Her voice was light, chipper.

“Lenora, we’d like to introduce you to our friend Lilly. She’s our lawyer.” Miguel offered a hand to Lenora and she took it, squeezed it, and smiled.

But Angus barreled past me, straight into Lenora, and he hugged her until I worried he would crack a rib.

“Lilly, delighted,” she said, when Angus finally let her go. “If you are
their
lawyer, you must be smart and dedicated. Do you like birds?”

Nodding, I held my ground and didn’t move toward her. I was still nervous about all the piles of stuff, and, okay, a little nervous about her. I don’t always know how to act around sick people; crazy people, yes, but there I’ve had plenty of experience.

Nervous or not, the next thing I knew I was inside the dog-trot cabin, listening to a raucous chorus of feed-me-feed-me chirps and shoving dampened chunks of puppy chow mix down the throats of baby birds, while Lenora coached me. “Easy, easy. Just a little bit at a time. They’ve got tiny throats.”

Well, okay, at least I didn’t have to regurgitate worms.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Miguel and Angus were working a row of cages, feeding the baby birds with a rhythm that suggested knowledge and comfort with the routine.

Once assured that I wasn’t going to strangle a bird, Lenora turned to her own brood, feeding, sweet-talking, and making a kind of a humming noise about it all.

“What are they? I mean, what kind?” I asked.

“Mockingbirds, a lot of them, wrens, cardinals, red-wing blackbirds, chickadees, jays.” She ran the names of the birds past me in a quiet voice until even their names sounded like humming.

“Where do they all come from?”

“From everywhere. Domestic cats get their momma, or they fall out of the nest, the trees get cut down, you name it. Bad boys shoot the momma bird; I hate a BB gun. There’s a hundred different ways the average person kills a bird, usually without even knowing it. You know how many thousands of birds die every day just smashing into cell-phone towers?”

No, and I didn’t especially want to learn that fact. Thank you, but I had enough trouble getting to sleep as it was.

“So you run, like, a bird-and-wild-animal rescue?” I asked, dodging the dead-bird lecture and shooting for the obvious.

“And some farm animals. I got three goats, all of them lame. Some sicko had them cuffed around a foot, each of them, so tight that the skin rotted. Sheriff ’s detective rescued them after a call, but the infections were so bad they all went lame. I’ve been holding them for the court that’s going to prosecute the owner for abuse. I reckon those goats are mine, though. When the case is over, who’s going to want a small herd of limping goats?”

Assuming this was a rhetorical question, I didn’t jump on it. Besides, if I came home with even one disabled goat, my neighbor Dolly the Hall Monitor of the Universe would have the zoning police on me in half a minute.

Ducking possible goat adoptions, I reached into the next cage, where something that looked like a cartoon version of a blue jay was hopping up and down and shrilling at me—as if this were my fault! When I tried to catch it, it pecked at my hand and jumped back.

“Don’t be shy. That one’s got an attitude,” Lenora said.

I grabbed for the little miscreant and nabbed him. After I lifted him out of his cage so that I could do my Mother-Teresa-with-birds thing, it pecked me again so hard I nearly flung it down.

But Lenora and Angus burst out laughing.

“Here,” Angus said. “Let me take him.”

I passed off the jay to Angus, and turned back to Lenora. “Aren’t jays the bad guys of the bird world?”

“A little bit, but that’s mostly exaggerated. Besides, it’s the bad boys we love the most, isn’t it?” she said, and looked right into Angus’s eyes and smiled. As if on cue, I looked soulfully into Miguel’s eyes, and wondered why he was being so quiet.

When Miguel more or less ignored me, I eased off to the next cage and the next bird. Furtively, I eyed Lenora and Angus, trying to make up my mind whether they were lovers, friends, or what.

Finally we finished feeding the birds, and Lenora said, “I’d show you around, but I’m pretty tired. There’s a lot of small animals in cages and fences outside. I’ve got some gopher tortoises with busted shells in a fence out back. You know, you can fix ’em when they get hit—if the body’s okay, that is—by using duct tape on the cracked shells.”

As I nodded, not sure how useful that tidbit would prove to be in my litigation practice, Angus took her arm. “Let’s go sit down,” he said. “We’ll give Lilly the grand tour another day.”

At Lenora’s invitation, the four of us went into a primitive kitchen, where we took turns washing our hands. The tap water smelled of sulfur, but I splashed my face anyway. Miguel asked for water for me and Lenora pulled a bottle of Zephyr Hills, the local spring water, out of an ancient and rusting refrigerator. I all but snatched it from her.

“Sit,” she said, but she kept standing, so we did too.

“We can’t stay long,” Angus said. “We’ve got that phosphate meeting in Bradenton. Sure you don’t want to come? Help stop Antheus Mines?”

“I hate those bastards so much. Especially that M. David Moody, what he was trying to do to this place. But I have a few more animals to tend. I can’t go.”

At the mention of M. David’s name, I stopped gurgling water and listened closer, hoping for some enlightenment on the subject of his recent death.

“What about Adam? Can’t he help?” Angus asked.

Oh, okay, no enlightenment.

“He’s got Samantha and they’re off touring until next weekend. But I’ll be all right. My creatures can be left long enough for me to go home and get some sleep. Nobody stays here all night anyway unless there’s an animal in active crisis. But as long as there’s daylight, I want to be here, so, forgive me, I need to pass on your meeting.”

I wanted to jump in and ask a bunch of questions, but something in the look I saw pass between Angus and Lenora stopped me. Theirs was a private conversation.

“I’ll skip the meeting and stay with you,” Angus said.

“Don’t be silly. That phosphate meeting is your thing, these birds and creatures are mine.”

“All right. But I’ll come back after the meeting.”

“You don’t need to come back. I’m fine. You can’t treat me like an invalid. Besides, I’ve got Bob to keep me company.”

“Bob?” Angus asked

“Sure. Hang on, let me go get him.”

Lenora left for a minute and when she came back in, she had a baby squirrel cupped against her chest. Something was wrong with its head, but her hand held it in place and I couldn’t get a good look.

“Bob,” she said, by way of introduction. “Go on, y’all, sit down.”

We all sat, and Lenora cooed at the baby squirrel and curled down into the kitchen chair nearest Angus’s. “Got his skull cracked. They were clearing out some woods on Antheus’s property last week, to put up some kind of office building or something, and one of the crew cut down a tree with a squirrel’s nest in it. Mom and the rest of the babies got run over by a Bush-hog, but one of the men saved this one, hurt as he was. He brought it to me.”

No one spoke.

“With a baby squirrel, they grow so fast. So incredibly fast. His brain will grow too big before the skull heals.”

Angus leaned toward her from his chair, but none of us spoke.

“He won’t make it,” she said, her voice almost a whisper, but she rubbed the soft skin under Bob’s chin and smiled at the little animal.

I realized I was holding my breath.

“But he eats, he’s not in any pain. I call him Bob because of the way his head bobs around if I don’t hold it.”

“Is there any hope for him?” I asked, finally breaking the silence and forcing myself to inhale.

“He’s okay for now. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

I looked down at my hands, still holding the bottle of water, and I was embarrassed by my question, though I wasn’t sure why.