Wolf in Tiger's Stripes

by Victoria Gordon

  “I’m Roberta Jardine, if you’re wondering,” the woman said, offering a strong handshake from a hand clearly accustomed to hard work. “You’ll be this journalist person, I presume. Judith ... something?”

  “Judith Bryan. Yes, I am. And a slightly confused journalist person, too. Is ... was ... Bevan going out to ... to actually shoot at somebody?”

  It seemed a ridiculous question, even in her own ears, given what she’d just seen, but the image of Bevan Keene going off to a gunfight like some character from a western movie just didn’t – couldn’t – seem real. Except she knew it had just happened, but somehow her mind couldn’t quite connect such activity with the Bevan Keene whose arms had, only moments earlier, held her with such exquisite tenderness.

  “Poachers.” Roberta Jardine spat out the word as if it tasted bad. “And likely he’d only shoot at their tires, unless of course they shoot at him first. Which has been known to happen.”

  Her entire attitude suggested that Bevan’s action was the most normal thing in the world. And in her dark eyes, something else, but Judith couldn’t interpret it. Amusement? Contempt? Whatever it was, there was no doubt that Judith, herself, was the target.

  “They’re common round here, poachers,” Roberta Jardine said, and this time the fire in her eyes was more obvious. Judith couldn’t help but get the message – Bevan Keene wasn’t the only one with poacher problems. Roberta Jardine also had them – and Judith had just been cast in the role.

  “I ...” Judith paused, uncertain of what she should say, of what she could say. The Jardine woman had seen them embracing and nothing Judith or anyone else might say would deny the facts of it. Roberta Jardine didn’t need telling where things might have gone had she not interrupted. Judith didn’t need telling either; she knew only too well!

  Judith suddenly had a mental flash of Roberta Jardine and Bevan locked in passion, their hands moving across each other’s body with the knowledge of long experience, their bodies merging with none of the awkwardness new lovers must endure.

  Then the woman shrugged, the gesture self-explanatory, saying without words that poachers didn’t bother her that much, telling Judith that she was irrelevant in the long term, that Roberta Jardine simply wasn’t concerned.

  “I won’t stay,” she said then. “Lord only knows how long Bevan will be, and I’ve work to do.” Unlike you, said her eyes, but her voice was different. “I presume we’re still planning to get underway next week.”

  “I guess so. We haven’t really discussed it in detail, but most of the equipment has arrived, I believe, and I know Derek Innes is expected sometime next week.”

  “That’s good. We wouldn’t want to start this jolly little circus without him, would we?” Roberta’s eyes said the rest – she wouldn’t be involved at all if not for Bevan Keene. And her opinion of their chances for success, it seemed, about matched Judith’s own.

  “You don’t sound especially enthusiastic,” Judith replied, finally having recovered some semblance of balance. If she was going to work with this woman for the next few months, it would be politic to at least try and find some common ground, some understanding of why Roberta Jardine was involved – excluding the obvious – and what she expected from the project.

  Again that haughty shrug.

  “I suppose I’m not enthusiastic. In fact, I’m definitely not, which isn’t anything you have to make a point of telling Bevan, because he already knows. It’s damned foolishness, and I’ve said so, to be importing greenies like this Innes bloke. We’ve got plenty of radical types of our own, without going to the trouble of bringing in more.”

  “I can certainly see your point,” Judith said. “Tasmania’s environmental issues have a history of demonstrators being brought in from the mainland, I understand.”

  “Hired guns. Oh my, yes. We’ve had our share of those,” was the reply. Bitter. Angry. “Thugs and layabouts and airy-fairy intellectuals who’ve never done a day’s work in their lives and never will. And,” Roberta added in a slightly more conciliatory tone, “a lot of well-meaning, honest, well-intentioned people who are simply ignorant. All they think about is pretty, furry little animals and majestic trees, and they forget that the issues are just not that simple!”

  Now she looked squarely at Judith, but her anger was directed elsewhere.

  “The problem is that everything these days revolves around politics,” she said with cold determination. “So what we have is politicians who are too busy playing politics to settle down and run the country, or the state, or whatever, and environmentalists who are more interested in politics than actual conservation, and the poor bloody farmers and timber workers get caught in the middle.”

  “And it isn’t going to get any better,” Judith said, caught by the other woman’s genuine concerns because they so clearly mirrored her own.

  “No,” said Roberta Jardine. “It isn’t going to get any better. And roaming round the countryside looking for an extinct Thylacine isn’t going to make anything better either.”

  So you think they truly are extinct. But you’re still letting yourself be dragged into this.

  “But ... but why are you involved in this, then? I mean ... surely you have other priorities, other work.”

  “I have. I’ve a property to run, just for starters. Twenty-three thousand acres, twenty-three thousand sheep, about fifty million ’roo and wallaby – or so it sometimes seems – and whatever deer the poachers don’t get. And Bevan has even more of all that.”

  “Which doesn’t exactly answer my question,” Judith insisted, her journalistic instincts surging to the fore. There was more to this than she’d originally thought, and Roberta Jardine might just provide her with the key.

  “You’re awfully thick for somebody who’s supposed to be a hot-shot journalist. We’re in it, both Bevan and I, to keep the bastards honest.”

  The bleakness of the statement put the entire issue in a nutshell. It was an element Judith had, of course, thought of herself. Knowing the desire of some conservationists to lock up every possible bit of land as wilderness, wanting either to keep any future development under strict control or eliminate it altogether, she had instinctively recognized the potential of this tiger expedition to be grossly exploited.

  All that would be required, she knew, would be for a tiger to be discovered in the right place – unlikely and/or impossible as that might be – and the howls for a protected environment would give the conservation-movement radicals ammunition for a world-scale campaign.

  And wouldn’t Derek love that? He’s probably on his knees right now, praying for exactly such an outcome.

  Perhaps it was the accusation of being thick, perhaps just her own professionalism, now slightly fragile in light of her betrayal by Derek and her own foolishness in that affair. Whatever, it was sufficient to cause a flare of indignation.

  “I am not thick,” she replied angrily. “I know exactly what you mean and to a very large degree I agree with you, although I can see you hadn’t even considered that possibility. Because ‘keeping the bastards honest,’ as you so delicately put it, is part of my involvement in this, too. A very large part!”

  If she expected to score any points with that disclosure, she was mightily mistaken. Roberta Jardine didn’t so much as flinch. She flicked her short-cut mane of ebony hair in a gesture of total disdain as she moved toward the door, then turned back to glare at Judith through hostile, speculative eyes.

  “Before you get too far in your campaign to manipulate Bevan,” she said, “just remember that he might be doing the same thing to you.”

  And before Judith could even think to reply, Roberta Jardine was gone, slamming the kitchen door behind her.

  12

  Reaction set in even as the sound of the slamming door reverberated through the house. Judith found herself trembling, her body as affected as her mind from the confrontation, but more by the incident which had preceded it.

  Absently reaching for the remainder of the
good red wine from dinner, she had to use both hands to steady the pouring of a glassful, then to lift that glass to her trembling lips.

  “What a fool! What an utter half-wit you are!” she told herself, only to flinch at the sound of her own voice, loud in the emptiness of the room. She was still shaken, both by her reaction to Bevan’s caresses and by an unexpected and quite surprising reaction to seeing him go out of the place armed and ready for violence.

  Judith was no stranger to violence, at least as an observer. She had seen dramatic examples of it during her career, where confrontation between conservationists and forestry workers had become increasingly common. She had seen idiots lie down in front of bulldozers, chain themselves high in trees and fling themselves down as barriers to the chainsaws of working foresters. She had seen allegedly peaceful demonstrations turn into violent mob scenes with pushing and shoving and people with cracked heads and bloodied noses and the aftereffects of mace and pepper spray. She’d seen the results of car bombings and what happened when a sawmill blade struck a piece of steel deliberately inserted into a sawlog.

  And in her younger years, when she’d done her mandatory stint on police rounds, she’d seen violence of a different, but no less bloody sort.

  But never had she been faced with somebody she knew going out with a gun to do what she reasonably considered to be a policeman’s job. She kept seeing in her mind the expression on Bevan Keene’s face, a combination of bleak determination and a quite obvious readiness, almost a joy, at the prospect of doing battle.

  And this from a man who only moments before had been equally, infinitely gentle, loving her, touching her with caresses of thistle-down softness, kissing her with ...

  “Or putting on a damned good act,” she said, suddenly savage with the more likely reality. “And of course that’s what he was doing. Even Roberta Jardine could see it. It’s only you, naïve soul that you are, who couldn’t see the bastard’s performance for what it was.”

  Sipping the wine, she paced the kitchen, wondering now what she ought to do. She didn’t particularly want to see Bevan again tonight, and she wasn’t even sure about seeing him tomorrow. Roberta’s allegation about his motives, however catty, made too much sense to be ignored. She finished the wine, poured herself another glass without bothering to think about it, then found herself staring at the goblet and wondering, for an instant, how it had suddenly gotten full again.

  “Enough of this,” she muttered, and set it aside while she devoted time to clearing the table and washing up the dirty dishes. That, at least, made some sense, she thought. The problem was that it didn’t take long enough. She was finished, had prowled through the cupboards and managed to put everything away where it seemed to belong, and Bevan still hadn’t returned.

  “Well, to hell with you, then,” she told the empty room, and marched upstairs to the bedroom designated for her use. She stripped and stood for an instant, nightgown in hand, then shook her head in exasperation and got dressed again and returned to the kitchen. Whatever the logic, she simply couldn’t just go to bed and sleep while her host was out chasing armed poachers.

  But what else could she do? She didn’t know the situation, would be more of a nuisance than anything if she took her rental car and started driving around the back roads looking for him.

  “Stupid ... stupid ... stupid,” she told herself, then stared at the half-empty wine glass that had magically appeared in her hand. “And this is stupid too,” she said, then drained the glass.

  Around her, the huge old house creaked and groaned and mumbled to itself in its own language, reinforcing her feeling of being an outsider, perhaps an intruder. A poacher? Judith smiled to herself, whimsically reviewing Roberta Jardine’s attitude on that score.

  “I suppose from her point of view I might be,” she mused aloud. “If only she knew what a ridiculous suggestion that really is.” Stop kidding yourself, Judith Theresa. If she hadn’t interrupted, he’d have finished seducing you without any argument at all – and you’d have been loving it.

  Judith moved out to the back verandah and idly scanned the night sky, her ears cocked in a futile attempt to interpret the sounds around her. From the kennels, one dog ventured a tentative challenge to the sound of the kitchen door opening and closing, then quieted. In the distance, a cow rumbled some message, spawning a host of replies, and somewhere nearer in the night a mob of frogs played a monotonous game of rock, rivet, rock, rivet over and over and over again.

  On some distant road, she could hear the muted rumble of a vehicle, but she listened in vain for the sound she wanted to hear, that of Bevan’s vehicle returning. At least, she thought, she hadn’t heard the sound of gunfire. Or would she? She had no idea of the distances or directions involved. Perhaps at this very moment Bevan was playing a deadly game somewhere out in the scrub.

  Finally, the coolness drove her back inside, and she turned to the extensive library for comfort. There were countless books there she’d never even heard of, and it didn’t take long to lose herself in the rare collection of works about the elusive Tasmanian tiger.

  Fascinated, she took some of the material over to where she could lie down on the big leather couch with its excellent reading light. The minutes disappeared as she became increasingly engrossed in the book, then faster still as she drifted into slumber, waking only at the touch of something soft at her throat.

  Judith opened her eyes to see Bevan’s departing figure, and she lifted her hands against the mohair coverlet he’d apparently spread over her.

  “Bevan?” Her cry caught him in the doorway, and he turned to smile at her.

  “Ssssh. There’s a lady sleeping in here,” he replied softly.

  “You’re ... you’re all right?” Judith ignored his low-key jest. “I was worried.” And she paused, unable to put into words exactly what she felt, because she was no longer certain herself, now that she’d seen him again.

  “Bit tired is all,” he said, and walked over to seat himself on the edge of the couch and look down at her. He reached out one hand as if to stroke her cheek, then hurriedly checked the motion and put the hand down by his side. But not before Judith’s attention was drawn to it.

  “Let me see,” she insisted, and grabbed at the hand, only to jerk her own away again as he winced in pain. “What have you done to yourself?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, but too late. Judith had already turned her gaze to his other hand, which was in full view. Two of the knuckles were lacerated and oozing blood.

  “Nothing? Let me see your other hand,” she demanded, slithering to sit upright, reaching out again to grasp – this time – at his right wrist. The right hand was more severely damaged. All four knuckles were cut, one almost to the bone, and already the hand was starting to swell badly. It was covered in dirt and blood.

  Judith gasped at the sight, then pressed against Bevan’s bulk, trying to move him so she could get herself off the couch. “We have to get that cleaned up,” she said, angry now because of her worry. It was all too obvious how he’d injured his hands, and she wondered at the condition of the other person, or persons involved.

  “I was about to do exactly that,” he said calmly, rising with lithe, fluid grace to let her bounce to her feet, where she stood glaring at him.

  “I’ll just bet.” Then she paused, eyes wide and mouth open, as she finally noticed the slight cut to his chin as he bent his head to stare ruefully at his damaged hand.

  “Well, I’d hardly leave it like this, would I?” he muttered.

  “How should I know?” she countered. “You walk out of here without a word, carrying a gun like some sort of idiot cowboy or something, and then you come back all covered in blood. How do you expect me to know anything?”

  Grabbing him by his shirt-front, she began to drag him toward the kitchen, muttering under her breath as she did so. Once at the sink, she started cold water running and ordered him to put both hands under it.

  “What have you got to put on the
cuts?” she demanded, and was already walking away toward the bathroom and the medicine cabinet she expected to find there.

  “No, in that cabinet right there,” he said, waving a dripping hand toward the far end of the room.

  Judith changed tack and yanked open a cupboard door to find a veritable wilderness of jars and tins, salves and ointments and powders. She was fumbling around, furiously reading one label after another, unsure which was for humans and which for dogs or horses or sheep, when Bevan’s calm voice finally got through to her.

  “I know you’ll find this quite hard to believe, Judith, but there was a semblance of order to that cabinet before you got messing round in there. Can I suggest you just look for iodine, and if you can’t find that, there’s a bottle of Watkins liniment on the bottom shelf. That’ll do just as well.”

  He’d finished washing his hands by this time, and stood calmly drying them on some paper towel, watching Judith and shaking his head in apparent amazement.

  Iodine? Not that she could find. The liniment, however was plainly visible, so she grabbed it up along with a packet of cotton buds, then returned to the sink, trying to read the liniment label as she went.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” she asked. “It doesn’t say anything about being a disinfectant or anything.”

  “That stuff,” he replied, “cures anything! And be sparing with it, please, because I have to have a friend bring it in from Canada for me whenever he makes a trip, and I don’t want to waste it.”

  “I will use as much as I think I need,” she snapped, scowling when she saw that his hands now looked worse clean than they had dirty. “And I hope it stings even worse than iodine!”

  “It will, but don’t let that stop you,” he replied, grinning hugely now. “Not that I expect it would. You may be lovely, but I doubt you’re overendowed with nursing-variety empathy.”