Wild Action (3 page)

“That would be ideal,” Harris said. “Having someone with a vested interest helping out.”

“Why don’t you see about it right now,” Brown suggested, sliding his phone across the desk. “I’d feel a lot better if I knew things were arranged.”

Nick desperately tried to think of a reason for
not
seeing about it right now, but no divine inspiration came. So either he had to admit he’d quit his job— barely two seconds after saying he could take a leave from it—or he had to pick up that phone.

“Well?” Brown said.

Wishing to hell he’d been thinking more and talking less, Nick reached for the phone, punched in his own number and had a brief conversation with his answering machine.

“Done,” he said, clicking off. “I can take up to six weeks.”

The sick-looking smile Carly gave him said she wasn’t exactly thrilled about that—which he found darned irritating.

She needed help and he was offering to help her. Of course, he’d be looking after his own interests as well as hers, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that instead of being grateful, she looked as if she were racking her brain for some alternative solution.

“Is there a problem with this idea?” he finally asked.

Carly hesitated. There were several problems with
it, but she did need
someone.
More specifically, she was pretty sure what she needed was a man with a deep voice. Like Nick’s. And her odds of getting anyone else on short notice…

She just wished she weren’t certain Nick would have a fit when he found out what he’d have to do. It was hardly a matter of helping out with horses and cattle.

“No,” she said at last. “There’s no problem. You just took me by surprise.”

“Fine. Then it’s settled. I mean, I’m assuming there’s a spare bedroom in the house?”

“Ahh…yes, of course. It has four bedrooms.” She reminded herself Nick was a police detective, which surely meant he wasn’t into rape and pillage. But that only alleviated one worry.

The scratch he was sporting hardly boded well for his ability to work with animals—in which case he might turn out to be more of a liability than an asset.

Just for starters, what if Attila didn’t like him? Or what if Nick was too frightened of the bear to try working with him?

For a moment, she considered telling him that was what she
really
needed help with. Then she decided she’d better save it for later. Nick obviously expected her to say something, though, so she asked if he knew anything about the movie industry.

“No, but I’ve always been a quick study.”

She managed a smile.

He gave her a warm one in return.

Roger and Bill were positively beaming.

But if the three of them figured this was such a great arrangement, why was her intuition saying it had all the makings of a catastrophe?

W
HILE SHE WAS ATTEMPTING
to get them out of downtown Toronto, Carly got lost so many times Nick stopped counting.

Instead, he started thinking that if she proved to be as good at running a business as she was at navigating, he’d made a wise move by deciding to stick around and keep an eye on his inheritance.

Their conversation was interrupted every time she pulled over to check her street map, which made it awfully disjointed, but by the time they found the Don Valley Parkway and were headed north, she’d managed to tell him a little about most of the animals they owned.

To his relief, the bear was the only potential mankiller in the bunch. Aside from Attila, there were the birds in the aviary, a couple of ponies named Paint and Brush, a parrot called Crackers and a few cats and dogs.

Oh, and she’d mentioned rabbits, as well, but they didn’t sound like much work. They wandered around loose, so it was only a matter of giving them food and keeping an eye on them. Similarly, Rocky, the trained coon, did his own thing at night and slept on the porch roof during the day.

Actually, Nick had assumed there’d be a lot more animals than there were, but when he told Carly that, she gave him a sidelong glance and said, “Trained animals all need to be worked with or they don’t stay trained. That’s where the
agency
part comes in. We have a lot of animals under contract that are owned by other people. Everything from lizards and snakes to tigers and an elephant.”

When she lapsed into silence, he immediately started thinking about the bear again. “This Attila,” he said. “How did you end up with him?”

“He was orphaned by a hunter—would have died if we hadn’t taken him in. He’d either have starved to death or been eaten by an adult bear.”

Bears didn’t exactly sound like charming animals, but Nick kept the thought to himself.

“So Gus and I bottle-raised him,” Carly went on, “until he got too big to live in the house.”

“Ahh. And he doesn’t mind being in a cage now? All by himself?”

“Oh, he’s not lonely. Bears aren’t pack animals, so he’d be on his own in the wild. And he doesn’t live in a cage. Gus didn’t believe in caging wild animals, and neither do I.”

“You mean…” Nick cleared his throat uneasily. “You mean, he wanders around loose? Like the rabbits?”

“Well, no. He’d find some of the other animals just too tempting, so he’s got a fenced field—with a pond to swim in and a bunker Gus built him for hibernating. We call it his cave.”

Nick nodded, wishing it was January instead of July. He’d be a lot happier if Attila was hibernating, because he had a horrible feeling a fence wouldn’t
stop a six-hundred-pound bear that really wanted out of its field. But maybe it was declawed and detoothed and whatever.

When he asked, the look of utter horror on Carly’s face told him there wasn’t a chance. And he’d lay odds it was
his
forty-nine percent of the beast that included the claws and teeth.

Apparently, Carly did mind reading on the side, because she said, “There’s nothing to worry about, Nick. Attila’s a real pet.”

He nodded, but it was tough to get his head around the idea of a pet that weighed as much as three large men put together. “So…you’re not nervous working with him?”

“No, not at all.”

Without a doubt, that was the best news he’d heard since he’d learned they
had
a bear. He had every intention of doing his share of the work, for the next few weeks, but he’d be drawing the line at Attila. And that meant it was a darn good thing she had no problem with him.

Carly drove a little farther up the parkway, breathing a sigh of relief when she spotted the exit sign for the highway. She’d missed it more than once in the past and always had a devil of a time making her way back.

“I guess you’ve noticed I don’t have much sense of direction,” she said, pulling onto the exit ramp. “But I’ll be okay from here.”

“Good.”

“That’s how I ended up with Gus,” she went on when Nick said nothing more. “It was because I got lost.”

“Oh?”

“Uh-huh. I grew up in Kingston, which is where my parents still live. But after I finished high school I had a chance for a summer job in Toronto, and I took a wrong turn on the way there.”

Nick eyed her for a minute, making her wish she’d kept quiet. Everybody had faults, though, and surely he couldn’t think that having a poor sense of direction ranked right up there with pulling wings off flies.

“Isn’t there a major highway that runs between Kingston and Toronto?” he asked at last.

“The one we’re on now,” she admitted. “But I guess I wasn’t paying attention and zigged when I should have zagged. At any rate, the car I’d borrowed quit on me, so I walked down the nearest side road until I reached a house—which turned out to be Gus’s. And when we got talking, he mentioned he’d been looking for someone to help with the animals.”

“Then you just moved in with him?”

Nick’s tone made her look at him. Surely he didn’t think…

Just in case he did, she said, “I assume you didn’t mean
moved in
the way it sounded. I was an eighteen-year-old kid and Gus was fifty-nine, so there was certainly nothing like
that.”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Everyone who’d ever worked full-time for him lived in the house. It only made sense.”

“Right. All I was thinking was…most eighteen-year-olds wouldn’t have buried themselves out in the country. It couldn’t have done much for your social life.”

The remark made her smile. Her mother had been worried about that from day one.

“It was worth the trade-off,” she said honestly. “I
love working with animals—it’s not really like working at all. So even though I’d only intended to stay through the summer, I ended up never leaving. And Gus gradually became like a favorite uncle to me. He was the sweetest man in the world. It’s too bad you didn’t get to know him.”

“I had no chance to. He cut off contact with the family before I was born.”

She didn’t reply for a moment, trying to decide if Gus would have minded her explaining things. Finally, she said, “He never intended that to be forever, you know.”

“No?”

“No, he assumed he’d eventually be able to cope with seeing her again.”

“Seeing who again?”

Carly glanced across the van once more, her heart sinking when she saw Nick’s puzzled expression. Surely she hadn’t put her foot in it, had she? “Your parents must have told you what happened,” she tried tentatively.
“Why
Gus left Edmonton.”

“Well…yeah.”

Nick sounded as puzzled as he looked, which meant she
had
said the wrong thing.

“Actually, my parents told me all kinds of stories about Gus, but I’m not quite sure which one you were referring to.”

“Oh. Well, if you’re not, then they didn’t tell you everything. So I should have kept quiet.”

“Why? I can handle whatever you were going to say. So who did Gus think he’d eventually be able to cope with seeing again?”

She stared ahead at the highway, not wanting to answer the question. But what else could she do?

Making something up wasn’t an option. She hated being lied to, so she never lied to anyone else unless she felt it was
really
necessary.

“I guess it doesn’t matter much at this point,” she finally said. “But Gus was in love with your mother.”

“What!”

“It’s true,” she told him gently. “They both were. Both Gus and your father. And when she chose your father, she broke Gus’s heart. That’s why he left town.

“But he assumed that after enough time had passed he’d stop caring. I guess he never did, though. Then he learned your parents had died. I I’m sorry about that.”

“Thanks,” Nick said, hoping she wouldn’t pursue the subject. His parents had been gone for five years, but he still didn’t like to talk about the crash.

They’d taken up their Cessna knowing a storm was closing in. And ever since, he’d wished he’d objected more strongly to the way they flew regardless of the weather. Not that they’d have listened, but still…

“Gus always kept in touch with a friend in Edmonton,” Carly continued. “Which is how he knew about their accident. And about your being a detective and all.”

Nick nodded, then sat staring out at the passing countryside, his thoughts returning to the story Gus had told Carly.

He’d certainly been a sly old fox, because the
truth
was what Nick’s parents had told him. There was no doubt about that. From the day his grandfather discovered that Gus had made off with their money, he’d never even allowed his elder son’s name to be spoken in his presence.

But Gus had obviously reinvented his past, making it tragically romantic—which certainly fit with everything Nick had ever heard about him.

Glancing across the van, he eyed Carly for a minute. In the bright sunlight, he could see there were pale freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. Between that and the way the air conditioner’s breeze was playing with strands of her hair, she seemed a lot younger than she had in Brown’s office. Younger and very innocent-looking—the kind of woman who aroused a man’s protective instincts without even trying.

Not that she’d aroused his. The only reason he was hanging around was to protect his
own
interests. Hers simply happened to coincide.

“What
did
you know about your uncle?” she asked.

He hesitated, then said, “I guess not as much as I thought” For half a second, he’d considered telling her the truth. But since she’d cared for Gus, it would only upset her—assuming she’d even believe it

And she likely wouldn’t. If she’d worked with him for twelve years and referred to him as the sweetest man in the world, he must have really cleaned up his act

“You obviously didn’t know he’d gotten into the animal-actor business,” she said. “But you’ll get a kick out of hearing how it happened. Initially, he won a share of Wild Action in a poker game.”

Nick grinned. That sounded more like the uncle he’d always heard about He’d bet Gus had been cheating, too.

Carly looked over at Nick once more, thinking that while he was smiling might be a good time to bring
the conversation back to the subject of Attila. But when she tried, she couldn’t make the bear’s name come out, so she said, “Then, eventually, Gus took over the entire agency. It was a smaller operation in those days, and it wasn’t doing very well, but he’d discovered he was good with animals. So he bought a big piece of property and began gradually attracting clients.”

Focusing on the road ahead once more, she told herself she was a chicken. And that she was going to have to tell Nick about the problem with Attila
very
soon.

But maybe it would be better to wait until they got home and he’d unpacked. And it would probably help to give him a stiff drink of Gus’s best Scotch first.

“What’s this movie we’re involved with?” he asked after she’d turned north onto Highway 12.

“It’s called
Two for Trouble.
And it’s basically about two ten-year-old boys who take off from summer camp and get lost in the woods. That’s the part of the film Jay will be shooting on Gus’s…our property. A lot of it’s forest.”

“And the stuff he’s shooting in Toronto?”

“Oh, those scenes are supposedly in Manhattan. And the summer camp’s supposedly in upper New York State—but they’ll actually be using Camp Runa-Muck, near Lindsay.

“At any rate, the opening scenes in the city show the parents getting the boys ready for camp. The adults are the name actors—Sarina Westlake and Garth Richards. You know them? She looks a lot like Meg Ryan, and he’s the Latin-lover type.”

“Uh-huh. I know the two you mean. They’re married in real life, aren’t they?”

“Yes. But in the movie they play single parents who fall in love while they’re helping search for their kids.”

Nick waited for Carly to go on. When she didn’t, he said, “That’s it? That’s all there is to the plot?”

“Well, Jay’s the kind of director who improvises, so I expect he’ll add a few extra wrinkles during the shooting.”

“Or maybe a
lot
of extra wrinkles? I mean, it doesn’t exactly sound like a box office smash.”

“Let’s just hope it is, because Gus held out for a small percentage of the profits.”

“Oh? How small?”

She held up her hand with her thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart

“Oh,” Nick said, looking disappointed.

“He did really well to get anything. In any event, the movie might turn out to be a lot better than the story line sounds. I’ve read the script, and there’s pretty good adventure and drama, what with the boys in a woods full of wild animals.”

“And Attila’s one of the wild animals?”

She nodded but didn’t elaborate. It really
would
be better to leave any further discussion of that until later.

“We’re almost home,” she said, pointing toward the township sign and changing the subject.

“Township of Scugog,” Nick read aloud.

“In Ojibway, it means ‘muddy, shallow water.’”

“Ahh.”

When he seemed content to simply watch the passing scenery for the remainder of the trip, Carly let her thoughts drift back to the meeting in Brown’s office. Nick had taken the bad news a lot more coolly than
she would have. But she had a horrible feeling he wasn’t going to be even half as cool when it came to Attila.

Turning onto the Sixth Line, she decided it might be smart to give her new partner
four or five
drinks of Gus’s best Scotch before they talked about Attila.

W
HEN THEY TURNED ONTO
the gravel road that Carly said led to the house, Nick could see she hadn’t been joking about a lot of their property being forest.

Huge trees overhung the road on either side, with only the hydro poles and power lines to indicate this wasn’t really the middle of nowhere. Then the road curved and they were at one edge of a fifteen-or twenty-acre clearing with the house ahead in the distance.

Built of gorgeous old fieldstone, it had white gingerbread trim on both the second-story gables and the overhang of the porch. He was just about to comment on how nice it was when four large gray blurs appeared from nowhere and streaked toward the van.