Zero at the Bone (12 page)

Katherine looked back at the stuffed dog. It reminded her of the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs—earthly treasures guarded by godlike dogs.

Katherine inched forward. “Let’s see what treasures you’re guarding, Pasha, if you are Pasha.” She crossed the threshold into a room the size of a closet. On the floor sat three large cartons and a cheap metal file cabinet with two drawers. Katherine felt her whole body droop at the sight. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but this was not it.

She said aloud to herself, “What do you think people keep in these storage units, Katherine? Were you really expecting stacks of money?”

She approached the file cabinet and opened both drawers. They were filled with manila folders, but the light was far too dim for her to read the labels. She looked up at the ceiling. Damn. No light.

“Well, Ra, we’ve got our headlights, don’t we?” She stepped back to the car, checking up and down the long row of closed and locked doors once more. No one. She started the car engine and turned on the headlights. They were not directed toward the closet, so she backed up and turned the car at an angle so the beams were aiming as close to the inside of the unit as she could get them.

Ra sighed and lay down in the open doorway while Katherine went to work on the files. Starting with the top drawer, she pulled out each file and examined the contents, holding it up into the light beam. The entire drawer was composed of magazine and newspaper articles about zoos, animals, and photography. He was a prodigious clipper—like her.

The second drawer contained old invoices and banking dating back to 1960. The man kept everything and organized it—like her. She rummaged through and located his check registers dating from July of 1988 back all the way to 1960. She held each one in the headlight’s beam as she flipped through, pausing each time she came to the tenth of the month. There they were, payments of $1300 going back nine years, to June of 1979.

In May of ’79, the check was for only $1000. She checked the deposit column and noticed that his paycheck deposits were smaller. As she went back through the years, the size of the checks diminished as the years receded, in direct proportion to his income. In 1960, when he was earning $7500 a year, he had been paying only $300.

But for the past twenty-nine years her father had been turning over almost half of his income to Travis Hammond. Why? And when did it start? The records stopped in 1960. What about before that? When she was a baby and the family was living together, had he been paying then, too? She stuffed the registers in her bag, wiped her sweaty face with her shirttail, and turned to the cartons.

She emptied them methodically. One was filled with envelopes stuffed with negatives and prints—all of animals. The other two were filled with old magazines—
Modern Photography, Zoo Management, Audubon, Smithsonian, National Geographic
—and paperback books on all subjects. After she had gone through them item by item, she repacked them hastily.

When she finished, she turned around to face Ra, still lying in the doorway. “It has to be here, Ra. Whatever it is. For starters, he sent me the key and receipt for safekeeping. Also, there’s plenty of room back at his house for this stuff. He didn’t need this storage space, but he’s hidden something here for me, and he’s left his old watchdog to guard it.”

She stood up and wrested the top drawer out of the cabinet. Sweat began to drip down her temples. She lifted out the other one and tipped the whole cabinet into the light beam so she could examine the inside of the cabinet. Nothing. She lifted each drawer and felt the underside. Nothing. She tipped the cabinet back, resting it against the wall so she could look underneath. Nothing but a few pillbugs and spiders. She checked the rear of the cabinet before shoving it back against the wall.

“Well, shit, Ra. Where is it?” The dog didn’t respond. He was asleep in the doorway. She stepped over him to get out of the stuffy closet for a breath of air. She looked at her watch. Ten o’clock. Closing time. One more look.

She stepped back over the sleeping dog, into the dark closet, and glanced around at the plasterboard walls and ceiling and the cement floor. Finally, her gaze settled on the stuffed dog in the dark corner, where the headlight beam didn’t reach. She hadn’t wanted to touch it, it looked so dusty. She hadn’t wanted to look at it either. She wasn’t sure why.

Now she examined its outline in the dark. How do they stuff dead animals? she wondered. Like the Egyptians, they probably take out all the insides first. So the body would be empty and they’d have to stuff it. That’s why it’s called stuffed! Stuffed with what?

She approached and rested a hand on the dog’s croup. The dusty, dry fur and hardened hide didn’t feel anything like the warm, muscular rump of a living dog. She knelt down and ran her hands up the back, neck, and head, down the chest, between the front legs, and along the belly. She stopped suddenly and moved her fingers back a few inches. There was something that felt like a welt under the fur. She explored it with two fingers. There was a slit in the belly running from between the front legs back to the groin.

Maybe this was the way stuffed dogs were made. No. The stuffing would fall out. Very gingerly, she inserted the tip of her index finger through the opening. She withdrew it immediately, thinking of the spiders underneath the file cabinet, then remembered she wasn’t afraid of spiders and stuck it back in, farther this time. She felt only a void.

Slowly she moved back along the opening, wiggling the finger around until she touched something. It felt like the edge of a thick piece of cardboard. She tried to feel more of it, but her finger had knocked it away.

To locate it, she needed to fit her whole hand in. She inserted four fingers to the knuckles and pulled gently outward on one side of the slit. It widened easily so she could slip her hand in. She found it immediately—the edge of a thick envelope or a file folder. She could feel the edge, but she couldn’t get a grip on it.

Sweat trickled freely down her hairline now. She withdrew her hand and wiped her face with her sleeve. Then she sat down to get a better angle up into the dog, resting her cheek against the musty dead fur. Using her left hand to enlarge and hold the opening, she inserted her entire right hand in past the wrist. The rawhide-like edges scraped the skin of her hand and wrist, but she pushed on until she located the object and was able to grab it. It felt like a big envelope.

But her hand was much bigger now, with it closed over the envelope, too big to pull through the opening. She used her left hand to pull and pry at the edges, gradually enlarging the slit, but still she could not get her hand out. The knuckles were raw and scratched from trying.

She refused to let go of the envelope. Her back was soaked with sweat and she was breathing hard with exertion.

The headlight beam suddenly wavered and a monster shadow flashed onto the closet wall.

She swung her head around and tried to leap to her feet at the same time, but her hand, caught inside the dog, jerked her back painfully.

“We’re closing them gates now,” said a gruff voice. “Di’n’t you know we close at ten? Hey, how can you see anything in here?” He shone his light on her.

Katherine twisted her body around to look at him—a burly black man with a flashlight. “I was just fixing to release the patrol dog, girl. You lucky I checked first. He ain’t like this one here.” He waved the flashlight toward Ra, who awoke suddenly with the light on his face.

“Hey, you need help there?” He shone his light on the stuffed dog. “Je-sus, what that thing? Some stuffed dog? You need help there, lady?”

Katherine was twisted around facing him, arm pulled behind her. “No. No. I’m fine. Just finishing up with my … files here.” She tried to smile. “Sorry I’m late. I’ll be out in just a minute, okay?”

He reached down to touch Ra’s head. “Okay, you finish up. I got to close them gates. So finish up.”

“Yes, I am.” Katherine had finally abandoned the envelope and worked her hand loose. It felt like raw hamburger meat.

“Peoples don’t read that sign,” the guard grumbled, walking away.

Katherine stood up. “Goddamn it, Ra, you’re supposed to let me know when someone’s coming! Bad dog, sleeping on the job. Well, what are we going to do now?” She looked down at the stuffed dog.

“Let’s see if I can lift this thing.” She bent over, reached her arms around the dog’s legs and hefted. “Not so bad,” she grunted, staggering with it out the door. She carried it to the open back of the car and hoisted it inside. Then she pointed for Ra to get in. He hesitated. “In,” she commanded. The dog jumped into the back and sat as far from the stuffed dog as he could.

“Don’t blame you,” Katherine said, slamming the tailgate.

She got her purse from the closet, closed the door and put the lock back on.

A flash of panic coursed through her. Oh, my God, keys! She rummaged frantically through her bag. Thank God, there they were. She jumped in the car, locked the doors, and revved the engine.

The big guard was there to salute them through the gates.

Katherine’s heart pounded with excitement. “Oh, Ra, he did leave me something. I can’t wait to see what we’ve got here.”

9

AS if enacting some ritual of black magic to make the dead speak, Katherine waved her hand slowly over the twenty-one photographs and the six white pages. They had to mean something.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her father’s studio, she closed her eyes and circled her head slowly, trying to relax the tension in her neck. The stuffed dog, eviscerated once more, lay tipped over on its side, pushed out of the way, under the long table. Both living dogs slept close by.

It hadn’t been money, of course. But she hadn’t really expected that it would be.

It was a message to her from her father. He had written “Katherine Driscoll” on the manila envelope. He had hidden it away and sent her the key and the receipt so she would be sure to find it if something happened to him. It was a secret communication from him to her, the only one they would ever share. Katherine was flooded with the desire to understand the message and carry out his intentions, if only she could figure out what they were.

After wrenching the large envelope from the cavity of the dog, she had spilled out the contents and spread them in a circle around her: twenty-one black-and-white photographs and six document pages—apparently copies of Austin zoo records concerning new animal acquisitions.

The photographs were all of animals being unloaded from huge vans, some in crates, some tied and hobbled. Katherine turned them over. On the back of each photo a date and a place were written in her father’s handwriting. All were dated within the past three months and were marked with one of four names: Cloud Nine, Bandera; Circle Z, Fredericksburg; PLS, Lampasas; or RTY Ranch, Kerrville.

Katherine looked through them for the most recent ones, the four marked 10/2/89, just two weeks ago. All four had “RTY Ranch, Kerrville” written below the date.

Katherine picked one up and studied it. Four men were unloading a huge crate from a large van. Like the other twenty, it was not up to the usual standard of her father’s wildlife pictures. It looked hurried, perhaps taken from a distance in insufficient light.

She picked up another. A striped antelope, large as a cow, with long twisted horns and huge ears, stood outside a crate. Katherine didn’t know what the animal was called, but she was certain it was not native to Texas.

In another photo, a large goatlike animal with thick horns curling back into a semicircle over its neck was being released into a paddock. It had a long, flowing fringe of hair extending from its chin to its throat, chest, and down to its forelegs. It reminded Katherine of the three billy goats gruff. Again, she couldn’t name it, but knew it was foreign.

The last picture dated October 2 showed three more large antelope-type animals standing in a paddock.

In other photos, she recognized a huge Cape buffalo, four wildebeest, and a pair of ostriches. There were several more varieties of horned antelopes she couldn’t name, but she knew none of them were the native pronghorn antelope, white-tailed deer, or mule deer.

She was willing to bet these were African animals being unloaded at Texas ranches.

This was not so unusual. Katherine knew ranchers in the Boerne area who stocked their fenced areas with exotic animals and charged enormous fees for hunters to shoot them. It was a legitimate business. And a lucrative one.

She looked at the animals again and wished she knew more about African wildlife.

Then she remembered her father’s library. She sprang from the floor and ran into the tiny second bedroom her father had used to store his books. His animal collection was organized into geographical sections. Out of the African section, she pulled a book called
A Field Guide to the Larger Mammals of Africa.
As she walked back to the studio, she leafed through the table of contents. If these photographed animals were African, they should be in here.

Stretching out on her stomach, she arranged the open book in front of her, with the photos of the striped antelope and the bearded animal right above it. She paged through the book, stopping at each illustration.

Midway through, in the section on Tragelaphinae, she found the big striped antelope. It was a bongo. Its habitat was central and west Africa, very rare now. In the last chapter, Caprinae, she found the picture that matched the bearded animal exactly. It was an aoudad or Barbary sheep, a wild sheep inhabiting the Saharan zone of Africa.

It was satisfying to be able to name them.

But so what?

Katherine shut the book and pulled the letter from her father out of the zipper compartment of her bag where she had stashed it. She reread the part that said, “What you would need to do in return is something only you can do. It would not be difficult for you, I’m sure. You might even enjoy it.” What was he expecting her to do in return for the money? Something involving these documents and pictures he’d left with her name on them?