Track of the Cat (24 page)

A short search disclosed several lengths of rope, some chain, two scalpels, surgical tape, syringes, needles, a bottle of chloroform, cotton wool, a ten-pound bag of Purina Dog Chow, and a bottle of ketimine partially empty.

Sunlight flashed as the blanket covering the door was jerked aside.

19

NAILS cried from the wood and the blanket was torn free of the tacks holding it in place. Karl and Anna screamed at the same time. Standing in the sun, the horse blanket trailing from one great fist, a shovel held like a toy in the other, he looked the giant he was. Anna felt like a small furry animal cornered in its den.

"Anna!" he said, and for an instant she thought he looked pleased to see her. The moment passed. His heavy features settled into stony disapproval. "You can't be telling about this," he said deliberately, seeming to use his words to carve out his thoughts. "You can't be telling." The blanket fell to the ground and Anna saw his left hand tense up on the shovel's handle.

Feeling oddly melodramatic, she pulled her revolver and leveled it at him. It was the first time she had ever drawn it outside a firing range.

The sensation of pointing it at another living creature was disquieting.

As was the sudden knowledge that she would not hesitate to use it.

Karl raised the shovel an inch or two. Though his eyes were locked on hers, Anna found his face as unreadable as she always had.

"Put the shovel down, Karl," she said gently. "Just let it fall there beside you."

"You can't be telling," he said stubbornly and his thick fingers rippled on the wooden handle as if he assured himself of his grip.

Shifting her weight, Anna eased back from the square of sunlight shining in through the doorway. In the shadows her movements, her plans would be less easily read. "Let it go, Karl. It'll be easy. Nobody will be hurt."

To her surprise, tears, big and bright as crystals, rolled down either side of his bulbous nose. "Everybody depends on me," he said.

The sense of unreality she had felt since entering the valley deepened.

"Who depends on you?"

He waved the shovel vaguely and every muscle in Anna's body quivered. She was strung tight. Consciously, she relaxed, letting the air pull deeper into her lungs. "Everybody," Karl said again.

"Karl," Anna said, careful to keep her voice even, non-threatening. "I want you to do something for me. I want you to set down your shovel. You holding it like that is frightening me. You're kind of a scary man with that shovel. After I stop being scared for a while, maybe I can put away this gun and we can talk better. Will you do that for me? Will you put down that shovel?"

Karl put the shovel down. His big shoulders sagged. It was almost as if he were shrinking before her eyes. She lowered the pistol but kept it ready at her side.

"Will you show me who everybody is?" A fleeting image out of the horror movies she'd seen as a teenager sickened her: bodies strung up with baling wire and twine presided over by a psychotic killer.

Without protest, Karl turned and walked toward the trees up the valley from the hut. Keeping a good fifteen feet between them, her side arm still unholstered, Anna followed.

Things were clarified in Anna's eye to the point of appearing almost surreal. Each movement of Karl's shoulders, every shift of his weight as he plodded heavily along in front of her was noted, judged, rated non-aggressive and dismissed. All in a second, in a footfall. The world surrounding that thick back and shoulders receded from vision.

Consequently it took her a moment to refocus when he stopped.

To his left was a natural overhang in the stone that formed the narrow valley's walls. A grotto fifteen or twenty feet deep and fifty feet long had been formed over the centuries as the tiny seeps in the stone had melted away the soft lime. At its mouth the grotto was half again as tall as Karl. Within this shelter were several cages made from sticks and wire and a pen about ten feet square.

"Everybody," Karl said. From the warmth and pride in his voice, one might've thought he was introducing his family. Edging closer, Anna peered into the thick shadow under the overhang. The pen held a mule deer-a fawn still in spots. White bandages, wrapped as carefully as if a trained nurse had done the binding, striped its forelegs. When it saw Karl it trotted over to the fence, thrusting its rubbery little nose through the sticks. "I was getting her some lunch," Karl said accusingly.

"The little guys get so hungry."

Anna looked beyond, to the cages. The rust-colored back of a ring-tail cat showed against the chicken wire of one. The cage beyond began to rattle.

"Looky," Karl said, his eyes glowing. He had apparently forgotten the gun. Anna slipped it back into its holster and, snapping the keeper in place, followed him down the mouth of the grotto. The little fawn kept pace as long as it could then reared up like a dog, putting its tiny hooves against the fence.

Karl knelt. The rough slow voice was as gentle as a nursemaid's. "Are my girls bored?" he asked. As he reached to lift the door of the cage, a tawny paw met his brown one and he laughed. For the moment Anna had been forgotten. The door slid open and out bounded a fat cougar kitten with enormous paws. It stopped at the sight of Anna, its hind quarters piling up on its front quarters, landing it on its nose.

"It's okay," Karl said, folding the twenty-five-pound kitten into his arms. Held in his massive grip, it looked no bigger than a house cat.

"That's my shy baby," Karl said fondly and Anna followed his look back to the cage. A single round ear and dark blue eye peeked around the door.

"The orphaned kittens. You found them," Anna said. She dropped to her knees and held her hands out palm-up like a supplicant. The baby cougar crept out, smelled her hands, then batted at one experimentally.

"They're hungry girls," Karl said in the same doting voice. Without having to be told, Anna picked up the second kitten and followed Karl back to the hut. He filled two baby bottles with powdered milk using water from the cubitainers.

Outside, in the shade of the spreading pine branches, their backs against a boulder, he and Anna bottle-fed the little lions.

Anna was transfixed. Karl's valley was indeed a magical place. "Was that you I heard whistling the day I rode Gideon up after their mother was shot?" she asked.

Karl nodded. He kissed the nursing kitten between its ears.

"Were you whistling Tender Shepherd'?"

"I knew it was you'd come for the babies. I wanted to tell you they were okay. But you couldn't know." He looked around his valley.

"No," Anna said. Karl's hospital was most illegally built and operated on Forest Service land. And the official park policy was to let injured animals fend for themselves or, if seen to be suffering, or if dangerous or offensive to visitors, to be dispatched. "Let nature take its course,"

Anna quoted.

"I'm nature, too," Karl replied. "This is my course."

Anna didn't argue. "The ketimine is for the animals?"

"Sometimes I have to put them out for a while so I can help them."

"How do you get them up here? This valley is like a fortress."

"I carry them," Karl said simply.

Anna was reminded of Father Flannigan's boys: "He ain't heavy, he's my brother."

"I can carry as much as three hundred pounds sometimes."

Anna believed him. He'd carried, on his back, everything the animals needed. And he'd carried them. "The deer?" Anna asked. "I saw them as I came in."

"Chris and Al. They got to stay here always now," he answered sadly.

"Chris is lame and the littler one is blind. Outside, the cats and coyotes would get them. Maybe they'll come here and eat them but maybe not."

"Chris and Al?"

Karl said only: "The eyes." Anna understood. The does' eyes, so dark and trusting, were very like Christina Walters's.

"What are the kittens called?" she asked as he refilled the bottles.

Karl looked shy. On so big a man the expression was almost laughable but Anna didn't laugh. "Annabelle and Annalee."

"Anna."

"You came for them when they were left," he said. "They can play here,"

Karl added as the kittens, finally full, tumbled off their laps.

The kitten Anna held caught its claw in her shirt and began to struggle.

Karl expertly squeezed the paw's pad and detached the claw from the fabric. "They're so little, they're not good at retracting their claws yet," he said. The gesture triggered something in Anna's mind. A connection she should be making and wasn't.

Karl gathered up both kittens.

"You must feed them more than once a week," Anna said as she followed him back toward the enclosure under the rock.

"While they're little I'll come every day. I don't like people seeing my truck all the time in McKittrick so they might guess. I drive up back of the Lincoln and come in there most times."

Anna drew a quick map in her head. A two-and-a-half-hour drive and a two-hour hike every day after work to feed his kittens. "When do you sleep?"

she asked with a laugh.

"When they're bigger," he replied.

"Karl-" Something in her voice made him stop, turn, and look at her.

"Your secret is safe with me. I won't tell anybody. Ever." Driven by the remarkable innocence in his face, Anna crossed her heart.

"I know that you wouldn't, so I put down the shovel," he said. It didn't seem odd to Anna. A man might be willing to face a gun armed only with a shovel to keep his family safe.

Karl let Anna feed the fawn. He had named her Yolanda after Manny's fawn-skinned wife. "Is this the fawn Manny radioed was caught in the fence?"

Anna asked, remembering. "The one they couldn't find?"

"I got there first." He sounded triumphant.

A triumph deserved, Anna thought. Harland would've dispatched the little animal. It had been injured and it was too young to live on its own. Karl had worked it free of the wire and spirited it away. Anna guessed the blood she had sent to the Roswell lab had come from the body of the creature she held in her arms.

A low growl set Yolanda to struggling. The hairs on the back of Anna's neck prickled.

Karl gathered the little mule deer protectively to his chest as Anna turned and squinted into the recesses of the last and largest of the sheltered cages. A grown cougar lay in the shadows, his unwinking yellow eyes upon her. "My God," Anna breathed.

Karl nuzzled the fawn, started it nursing again. "He was shot in the hind end. I wouldn't've found him except I was looking after Manny's dog when they were gone and Dinky went with me to the West Side and set to barking. He's going to heal up soon."

"You found him on the West Side?"

"Out in the Patterson Hills by PX Well, way over there. I was checking the rain gauge."

"What will you do with him?"

"I'll put him to sleep, then I'll take him up onto the ridge where the babies' momma was killed and look after him till he wakes up good."

"What's his name?" Anna asked.

"Fluffy," Karl replied. Anna looked at him over her shoulder and he smiled broadly. "It's a joke we have," he explained.

Fluffy stretched, rose gracefully to his feet. Behind him, near where the stone wall met the grotto floor, there was a gleam of green, the color of a glowworm, but close to a foot long.

"What's that?" Anna asked, pointing.

"I cut it off Fluff's neck when I took off the radio collar. It's one of those things you shake up and then they light. Kids play with them in the towns."

"Ah . . . Fluffy . . . was one of our radio-collared lions?"

"I cut it off him and busted it so nobody'd come following the signal to see why he'd stayed in one spot so long. You can have it back," Karl offered.

Anna smiled and shook her head. Anything Karl busted was apt to stay busted. "This is where you were the night Sheila was killed, wasn't it?"

"I came up special. I thought what with that first lightning and the Forest Service flying all over looking for strikes, it would scare Ally.

She was just little and blind."

"Lightning. Of course," Anna said. The pieces of all the puzzles were beginning to fit together into a single picture. "Karl, do you remember what day it was that you shoed Gabe, Sheila's horse, over in Dog Canyon?"

Karl began a long and laborious thought process. The fawn wriggled free and stood bandy-legged next to him sucking his fingers. "I got everybody new shoes in June. Mules first as they have such a lot of hard work. Then our guys. It'd've been after the fourteenth because they hadn't their good shoes on for the Van Horn parade."

Anna waited but that was as far as Karl could take that line of thought by himself. "Was it done before the first lightning storm when you came up here to be with Ally?"

Again Karl thought. "Yes," he said with certainty.

"So the fifteenth or the sixteenth," Anna said. Karl looked impressed with her reasoning.

Annabelle and Annalee skirmished for their attention then, and Anna watched Karl play with them, keeping the injured fawn safe from the fray.

Anna's mother-in-law, just turned eighty-one, said when she was a young woman she valued intelligence over all other human attributes. Now that she was older she valued kindness.

Anna was learning.

20

TWO days later, driving down Dark Canyon, the image of Karl's hanging valley floated pleasantly into Anna's mind. One mystery at least had been solved: she knew now what the inside of Karl's brain looked like. Not an attic full of well-cared-for toys, but a garden full of well-cared-for creatures.

She doubted her next stop would have such a pastoral outcome.

On Queens Highway she turned left, up through the Lincoln. She'd timed it so she would arrive at Paulsen's ranch just after lunch. Anna hoped to catch him at his house. Chasing over twenty-five thousand acres of lonely desert in search of the man didn't appeal to her in the least.

As she drove, she went over the links in the chain that was pulling her toward Paulsen's. Karl had shod Gabe on the fifteenth or the sixteenth of June; there had been pictures of him in Sheila's camera. The pictures after that on the same roll of film had been of lightning taken up behind Dog Canyon on Jerry Paulsen's ranch. They could only be photos of the storm that hit the north side of the park the night Sheila had been killed. Anna had been camped on the ridge above Dog Canyon that night.