Anna Pigeon - Track of the Cat Part 17

"It's okay," Karl said, folding the twenty-five-pound kitten into his arms. Held in his ma.s.sive 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 ketamine 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 Flanagan'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 p.r.i.c.kled.

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 G.o.d," 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 d.i.n.ky 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 n.o.body'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.

CHAPTER 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. She'd watched the storm build. The lightning had started a couple of hours before sundown.

Sheila had been alive and pursuing her hobby around six p.m. Less than nine hours later she was dead in Middle McKittrick, miles across the park's ruggedest country. In her stomach were the remains of a meal the other half of which Anna had found in her daypack with the camera. In her neck a puncture wound half an inch deeper than it should've been. Sheila had not gone to McKittrick under her own power and she had not been killed there.

The Rambler rolled out of the hills and onto the long straight road hemmed close on both sides by Paulsen's new barbed-wire fence. Ahead was a gate made of welded lengths of pipe under an arch of weathered tree trunks bearing the[image]brand.

Anna pulled the car into the dirt lane and sat for a moment behind the wheel wondering just how she would handle the next couple of hours. She wished she were not tackling Paulsen alone. Of all the strong-arm people in her life-Karl and Rogelio and Paul-it was Christina whom Anna wished for; Christina with her dark eyes and credible lies and good sense.

Before leaving Guadalupe, Anna had put a note in Chris's mailbox. She'd tried to avoid the dramatic cliche, but her note conveyed the same basic idea: If I'm not back by dark, call the police.

Reminding herself that she'd not come to Paulsen's like the Earps to the O.K. Corral, that she had come to look, to talk, mostly to listen, Anna was comforted. No lights and sirens, no accusations; there had been, after all, no official crime-simply a string of freak accidents. At best she would find a few more answers. At worst, Paulsen would.

"Quit stalling," Anna said and levered herself out of the car to open the gate. It was the first in a series and she began to wish she'd brought Christina along for reasons other than company and courage. Pa.s.sengers traditionally opened and closed all the gates.

A grove of ponderosa pine and fine old cottonwoods let her know she was nearing the end of her journey. Nestled in the vee of two skirting foothills, near the main spring, the dependable water source that guaranteed life to his ranch, would be Jerry Paulsen's home.

The rutted dirt road Anna had been following for four miles through cow pastures didn't prepare her for the imposing formality of the Paulsen homestead. Built of white-painted clapboard, it rose two stories over lawns that had once been groomed to east-coast standards but had since succ.u.mbed to drought and pine needles. Traditional green ornamental shutters framed the windows. A deep portico with antebellum-style pillars protected wide double doors.

There were no flowers of any kind. Window boxes were empty, the planters lining the short front walk were bare. To Anna it indicated that there was no Mrs. Paulsen and that either there once had been or Mr. Paulsen had once hoped there would be.

The old Rambler couldn't face the sn.o.bbery of the portico. Anna parked off the gravel in the shade of a cottonwood and walked the twenty yards to the front door. The knocker, two horseshoes hinged together, was jarring in the context of the house's architecture. In front of the formal doors lay a worn mat reading WELCOME Y'ALL. Beside it was a rudely welded boot-sc.r.a.per.

Anna lifted the knocker and let it drop. Against the thick oak it made a pathetic "plink." Using more vigor, she banged it again. From inside she heard a voice. The words were unintelligible but the singsong rhythm clearly telegraphed: "Just a minute."

The door was opened by a Mexican woman in jeans and a T-shirt with the America's Funniest Home Videos America's Funniest Home Videos logo on the front. She was probably near Anna's age but an extra thirty pounds and a bad perm made her seem older. Cold air poured from inside the house. logo on the front. She was probably near Anna's age but an extra thirty pounds and a bad perm made her seem older. Cold air poured from inside the house.

"You better come in," the woman said. "We don't wanna air-condition alla New Mexico." A cheeky smile wrinkled up to her eyes and made Anna smile back. "You looking for Jerry or Jonah?"

Vaguely, Anna remembered Mr. Paulsen had a son of that name. "Jerry," she said.

"Good, 'cause Jonah's away at college." The woman laughed then as at a favorite joke, one that never palled no matter how many times she played it. "Jerry's out back havin' his cigarette. I'm Lydia." Lydia led the way back into the refrigerated house. They pa.s.sed through a formal parlor with wing-backed chairs, which Anna surmised were never touched by anything but a dust cloth from one year to the next. Down a long hall lined with animal prints and through a smaller room that had been a butler's pantry, Anna followed. Abruptly, Lydia stopped. The old pantry opened directly into the den. Clearly this was the house's heart; where people did their living.

Anna found it oppressively masculine. The walls were done in dark wood and adorned with the severed heads of animals. Mostly indigenous-or once indigenous-to the United States: grizzly bear, big-horned sheep, bobcat, mountain lion, moose, elk, p.r.o.nghorn, wolf, and the pathetic little joke of the Southwest: the jackalope-a bunny's head with the horns of a young antelope glued on.

The severed parts; Karl unhooking the kitten's claw. Two more pieces clicked in. Suddenly Anna knew when a lion wasn't a lion: when it's dead. And she knew how Sheila Drury had been killed. Tearing her gaze from the dismembered creatures lest the knowledge could be read in her eyes, she surveyed the rest of the room.

Guns finished the decor. The collection was impressive. German dueling pistols from near the turn of the century, a pearl-handled revolver, several long rifles, an ornate iron tube that could only be a custom-made silencer.

The owner and sole inhabitant of this lair was seated in a bentwood rocker looking out over a flagstone patio to the brown hills beyond. He held a cigarette between his thumb and index finger, smoking with careful pleasure. Though surely he had heard their clattering entrance a second or two before, he turned with evident surprise.

"Mr. Paulsen, this is ..." Lydia turned to let Anna finish the introduction.

"Miss Anna Pigeon of Guadalupe," Jerry Paulsen filled in. "We've met before."

They had. Twice that Anna could remember. Both times fleetingly, both times she was merely "another ranger" hovering impatiently at Corinne or Paul's elbow while short insincere exchanges were made at gate and cattleguard. Not really enough to spark this instant recognition unless Mr. Paulsen had a phenomenal memory. Or someone had been talking about her; and recently.

He rose and took Anna's proffered hand. In lieu of shaking it, he clasped it between his own, patting it in an avuncular fashion. He had the look of a kindly old uncle as well as the manner: He was not tall but of good size-five-foot-ten or -eleven with the boots-broad shouldered with a bit of a belly hanging over his silver-dollar belt buckle. The deep leathery tan of the Southwest looked good over a ruddy complexion. White mustache and thick white hair with its natural wave coaxed to perfection set off very keen blue eyes.

A Good Old Boy, Anna thought as he played the host, beaming her into a chair, sending Lydia to the kitchen to make coffee. Anna wondered what he knew. More than she did, probably.

"You're looking fit," he remarked when his duties had been done and he sat again in the bentwood opposite her. His eyes took all of her in from stem to stern. Or withers to rump. He had the look of a man admiring a bit of horseflesh.

"I heard you'd taken a tumble above Turtle Rock."

"Stepped into nothing," Anna said and accepted the coffee Lydia brought. The usual cowboy-sized mugs were missing. The coffee was served in white fluted china cups bordered with gold. She took a sip: instant. Anna added a generous dollop from the cream pitcher and the mess turned bluish gray: skim milk.

Paulsen drank his steaming hot and black. "Bad luck. Y'all have had a rash of bad luck from what I hear. Some old boy just got himself snakebit? Hate those d.a.m.n things. I know you folks over at the park coddle 'em like new calves but by G.o.d I still stomp every one that slithers across my path. Hating snakes is the natural state of man."

Anna looked at him over the rim of her cup. The only thing the blue eyes gave away was a pleasant twinkle. Jerimiah D. was enjoying himself, Anna realized. He'd sparred with the National Park Service for twenty years. It was probably his favorite sport next to hunting.

Jerimiah D. Bells rang in Anna's head.

"What's the 'D' for?" she asked suddenly. "Jerimiah D. Paulsen."

"Well, now, where did you hear that?" he drawled and the twinkle in his eyes grew, if anything, brighter. Anna'd stumbled onto something but she had no idea what and, as he seemed to enjoy it, she suspected it was of no value.