But she scrubbed on. If this was Gabriel’s way of breaking her, she refused to give him the satisfaction. Nevertheless, it was a welcome distraction when, at lunchtime, a small Chihuahua muzzle inserted itself under her rubber-jacketed arm. “Julio!” she said, slipping off a rubber glove to give him gentle noogies between the ears. “How’s my favorite dog?” She rose—with difficulty—and scooped him up so he wouldn’t wade through the mess she was making on the concrete deck. Ivy waved as Libertine came around the pool toward her.
“I think you lost something,” Libertine said, holding out Julio Iglesias.
“Wishful thinking,” said Ivy. “Are you hungry? I’m starving. Come on, let’s get out of here—my treat.”
“I’d love to, but I can pay my way.”
“By what, eating saltines and ketchup soup?” Libertine could feel herself flush. Ivy looked stricken. “I’m sorry—that was insensitive.”
“That’s all right.” Libertine climbed out of her bumblebee-yellow slicker and bib overalls, her XtraTufs and rubber gloves, and hung them all neatly on a series of pegs on the loading dock. “Let me just clean up. Do I reek? I feel like I do.”
“Dunno,” said Ivy cheerfully. “I have a sinus infection and Julio Iglesias eats poop, so clearly he’s no judge.”
As they walked to Ivy’s car, Libertine noticed that when the two of them walked together, she always let Ivy lead the way, walking a half-step behind and to her right, like a Chinese wife. In animal terms, Ivy was clearly the alpha female.
Near the parking lot they heard one of the zoo’s dozen free-roaming peacocks scream. “God,” said Ivy, shuddering. “It’s like hearing someone’s death.”
Ivy unlocked Libertine’s car door and then went around to her own. Julio Iglesias hopped in as soon as Ivy opened her door, springing into Libertine’s lap.
“He’s a suck-up,” said Ivy, miffed. “I give him the best of the best for nine years, and he’s thrown me over without a second look, the little bastard.”
“He’s just trying his wings,” Libertine soothed. “It’s good for him.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“No, basic animal behavior told me that.”
“I guess,” Ivy said grudgingly, pulling out of the zoo. “So listen, now that you’re going to stick around down here, you can’t commute from Orcas Island, so do you have any ideas about where you might live?”
“Actually,” said Libertine in a rare moment of frankness, “I may stay in my car. I’ll manage.”
“No, listen,” Ivy said. “I have an idea.”
As Libertine had learned from her previous encounters with Ivy, she belted herself in, gave herself over, and held on for the ride.
AS USUAL THE air inside the Oat Maiden was rich with delicious smells. For a moment after they’d ducked in, Ivy closed her eyes to breathe it in, thinking that homes should smell like this, even though they almost never did, any more than they harbored perfect safety, love, and respect. Still, it was a nice thought, like praying for world peace, and it warmed her a little just to have had it.
Even on this gloomy, rainy day, most of the tables were filled. Ivy recognized several associates from Matthew’s law firm, and several zoo employees. She steered Libertine to a small round table just outside the kitchen. Around the tabletop trotted cats, lots of cats, each one holding the very tip of the tail of a small but unalarmed-looking mouse. There were no predators or prey here; Johnson Johnson lived in a kinder world.
The man himself approached them swaddled in several layers of flannel shirts—despite the heat in the kitchen, he was impossibly thin and always cold—and a cotton apron that tied in the back and was so blotchy with tomato sauce it looked like he’d been repeatedly stabbed.
Ivy beamed at him and said, “Johnson Johnson, meet Libertine Adagio. Libertine is an animal psychic.”
“Communicator,” said Libertine.
Johnson Johnson mumbled a greeting, blushing. Ivy saw Libertine’s face color, too. She looked from one to the other and said with delight, “You’ve met before, haven’t you!” To Johnson Johnson she said, “Has she told you she’s going to work with our killer whale at the zoo? Well, she is, and she needs a place to stay. Do you have a tenant in your apartment right now?” Neva Wilson had lived in a converted garage behind Johnson Johnson’s house for nearly a year when she first came to the zoo to work with Sam and Hannah.
“No,” said Johnson Johnson. “Lots of people are allergic.”
“To what, mold?”
“Cats.”
“Are you allergic to cats?” Ivy asked Libertine.
“No, but—”
“Then it’ll be perfect. Can we look at it?”
“Yes,” said Johnson Johnson.
“Is there a key hidden someplace? We’d like to swing by today, if we can.”
“It’s under the mat.”
“Well, that’s not very original, is it,” Ivy chided. “Especially from a man with your creativity.”
Johnson Johnson clasped his hands together and looked at his shoes.
“Oh, honey, I’m just saying.” To Libertine she said, sotto voce, “I make him nervous. He told me once I remind him of his third grade teacher, which I gather is not a compliment.”
Johnson Johnson asked Libertine, “Do you like cats? Because you pretty much have to like cats.”
“I do,” Libertine assured him. “I communicate with them all the time.”
Johnson Johnson’s face lit up.
“She doesn’t mean her own cats, you understand,” Ivy couldn’t resist saying. “Random cats.”
“Not random,” Libertine corrected her. “They’ve looked for me.”
“I like cats,” Johnson Johnson said and then, apparently believing the subject to have been thoroughly exhausted, he walked away. The kitchen door swung open and shut behind him like a fit of indecision.
“One of God’s gentle people,” Ivy said, looking after him fondly.
“What do you know about him?”
“You mean besides the fact that he’s a sexual predator?”
Libertine paled.
Ivy poked her arm. “Honey, you have just got to lighten up. I’m teasing you—he’s a sweet man through and through. His parents had some money—not a lot, but more than enough to provide for him. He lived with them until they passed a few years ago, and they left him the house, plus some kind of a trust that my sister-in-law Lavinia administers. There was enough for him to buy the Oat Maiden when it came up for sale a couple of years ago.”
“And he runs it himself?”
“Yes and no. He came up with the menu and the recipes, plus he cooks. But Neva helps him with ordering supplies and taking care of the books. You could say it’s a collective effort.”
Libertine nodded, then cleared her throat. “What’s the monthly rent?” she finally asked.
“What do you care—I’ll be paying for it. You know, for someone who claims to be psychic you certainly misread a lot of signals.”
“I never claimed to be psychic when it comes to people,” Libertine said, coloring. “I don’t even get most people.”
“Frankly,” said Ivy, “neither one of you has the social sense God gave a goose.” She nodded in the direction of the kitchen.
Libertine looked at her water glass.
“And that,” Ivy declared, “is why the two of you are perfect.” A moment later Johnson Johnson placed their pizza in front of them as gravely as if he were delivering a religious relic. After they’d eaten they drove straight from the Oat Maiden to Johnson Johnson’s house, a beautifully maintained craftsman bungalow in Bladenham’s tiny historic district.
As promised, the key was under the mat. They circled the house to a detached garage in the back, which was also immaculately kept, with seasonal plantings and recently refreshed mulch.
“He’s a gardener,” Libertine said.
“That I didn’t know,” said Ivy, unlocking the front door. “Makes sense, though. As I
said, he’s gentle. You don’t meet many men like that. Many people,” she amended. “At least not in my experience.”
“Oh! How pretty!” Libertine slipped past Ivy, who was holding the apartment door open. The walls were painted a deep, sunny gold, the ceiling the lightest blue, with puffy, fair-weather clouds drifting across the ceiling.
“Pretty Spartan,” Ivy said, looking critically at the room’s simple convertible sofa bed, coffee table, antique washstand, and highboy.
“Do you think?”
Ivy shrugged. “I don’t know—I’ve always been a cluttermonger. It comes from growing up in the ancestral home.”
“Well, I think it’s just fine,” Libertine said emphatically.
IVY DROPPED HER off at the pool, where Libertine resumed her assault on the tires, scrubbing with a nylon pad, sponge, and even her fingernails when necessary. Two hours later, Gabriel came up to the pool top, dressed in his ubiquitous wet suit and steering a fiberglass cart full of dive gear. She waved at him cheerily. When he saw her hands—bleeding from a network of cracks—he hurried over and said, “Good god!”
“I’m allergic to the gloves.”
“Well, for god’s sake, why didn’t you say something?”
Buoyed by her lunch and the prospect of getting out of her terrible motel, she leaned into him and whispered, “I’m also wearing a hair shirt.”
He peered at her with alarm, until the slightest twitch in one corner of her mouth gave her away.
“So you do have a sense of humor.”
“Did you think I didn’t?” Before he could respond, she said, “Anyway, this one’s about done,” gesturing to the soapy truck tire she was working on. “I just have to hose it off one last time.”
“How do you feel about thawing, measuring, and bucketing fish?” Gabriel asked, clearly impressed.
“Just fine.”
“Then plan on doing fish house tomorrow morning. Five A.M.”
“Fish house?”
“Zookeeper-speak for preparing marine mammal diets. Neva will start thawing fish tonight, and tomorrow you’ll work with her to weigh and bucket it. But be forewarned—it’s messy. And smelly.”
“Sounds great,” she said, and meant it.
IN ALL, IT took Libertine only until the end of the day to get the three tires nearly surgically clean, and the work was never better than backbreaking. When it was finally time to introduce them into the pool she could hardly wait to see the whale’s reaction.
When they were certain Friday was watching, Libertine and Neva pushed the truck tire into the water. It immediately filled, wobbled, and sank straight to the bottom of the pool. Friday did nothing, barely even watched it go.
They pushed the tractor tire into the water next. It filled, too, and sank. Friday hurried to the opposite end of the pool.
They decided to leave the car tire sitting in the shallow water of the slide-out. Maybe the tires had been a bad idea.
Libertine straightened the things in her locker and tried to keep her disappointment in check. The tips of her fingers were raw; her arms and hands hurt. She didn’t know what reaction she’d expected from Friday, but she’d expected something. She reminded herself that this was a killer whale, not a dog. She reminded herself that he had rejected the gift, not her. This wasn’t personal. Still, it felt personal.
Her purse and car keys in hand, she went upstairs one last time to make sure she’d put away all her supplies. There was an unfamiliar, dark shape in the slide-out area of the wet walk, and as she approached, her heart began to pound.
All three tires were sitting in the shallow water, one stacked on top of the other in a perfect pyramid.
“Never underestimate a killer whale,” Gabriel had told her earlier that day, and she could see why.
THAT SAME NIGHT, Libertine moved into her new apartment. She loved its snugness, its bright walls and pretty little white kitchen. The furnishings were clean and cheerful, and with a few things on the wall and a plant or two, she’d be happy to come back here at the end of the day.
Chocolate was her first feline visitor, emerging almost immediately from a tube that ran from Johnson Johnson’s house to her kitchen. The cat seemed perfectly at home, and strangely incurious about Libertine. His fur was fine, sleek, and ticked—she suspected an Abyssinian ancestor or two. She sensed that he was by nature a prodigious purrer with an even temper and a sunny disposition.
Next out of the cat-tube was Chip, a stout male who wore an elegant white bib and whiskers, gleaming black morning coat and trousers. He hopped up on the end table, strode over to Libertine on the sofa, switched on a purr like a chainsaw, and turned upside down beside her to buff his coat against the couch’s nubby fabric.
She was just about to get up when she heard a little bell ring, signaling the arrival of the third and last cat, a battle-scarred orange tabby with one milky eye and a considerable gut. This, then, must be the fearsome Kitty, whom Ivy had described to her. He had the brio of an aging mobster, giving off an aura of latent power that bespoke a violent past stretching all the way back to kittenhood. He strode straight over to her. She smoothed the lay of his fur.
Suddenly all three cats’ ears came up. Libertine heard a greeting so distant it might have been coming from the ocean floor, and then all three, led by the redoubtable Kitty, disappeared into the tube.
Johnson Johnson had come home.
NEVA ARRIVED THE next morning at five to help Libertine with her first fish-house shift. It wasn’t that Neva doubted the other woman, but on principle she felt she hadn’t yet proved herself enough to be left alone in the building. Neva knew plenty of anticaptivity activists who would take this opportunity to sabotage a captive program without a hint of self-doubt or remorse. Even if Libertine was trustworthy, Neva wasn’t sure she could stand up to a stronger personality with nefarious intentions.
Now she handed Libertine one of two to-go cups of strong coffee and cranked up the volume on a Coldplay CD, cheerfully telling Libertine that fish houses the world over ran on strong coffee and musical assault.
“Gabriel told me about the glove allergy,” she said, pulling on a pair of heavy blue industrial-quality rubber gloves with traction palms and fingers, then turning off the water that had been running all night over a frozen, solid block of herring to thaw it. “But let me tell you, you don’t want to handle fish with bare hands any more often than you have to. You don’t know what pain is until you get fish scales under your fingernails. Plus they can cut. There have to be gloves out there that you can tolerate, and I’m sure the zoo will reimburse you. So okay.”
Neva pulled over a rolling Gorilla Rack with five empty stainless steel buckets that would hold Friday’s food rations for the day. With practiced speed, she set the first bucket on the stainless steel counter beside the sink, hauled over the soggy fish box, and brought up a double handful of now-thawed fish—capelin, each the size of a lady’s shoe—which she weighed before dumping it into the bucket.
“The idea is to put about forty-five pounds in each of these buckets—two hundred and twenty-five pounds a day, to start with,” she explained to Libertine. “Normally an adult killer whale would eat as much as four hundred and fifty pounds a day, but he hasn’t had anywhere near that much. We’re in major fatten-up mode, but we’ll increase the amount he eats gradually. Okay—now you.” She pushed the soggy box toward Libertine, who closed her eyes momentarily before digging her bare hands into the icy, slippery, stinging mass of fish. Neva knew from past experience that all the abrasions and cuts Libertine had gotten while scouring the tires had lit up like they were on fire. She gasped but stuck with it, piling four or five fish on the scale and then adding one more.
“You’re tough,” Neva said, watching her.
“Not that tough,” admitted Libertine. “Hand me those gloves. My allergy can’t be as bad as this is.”
Neva took a pair of inside-out blue gloves like her own from a Peg-Board drying rack and gave them to Libertine. “Make
sure you write down the exact weight of each bucket in the log, plus the combined total. Gabriel or I will enter it into the food records on the computer when we have time. And if you find a fish that’s burst or seems gushy, throw it out. We don’t get bad ones that often, but it happens.”
“It’s all just so disgusting,” Libertine marveled.
Neva considered this. “Oh, I don’t know. One summer I did raptor diets at a rehab center and that was worse. You cut up thawed mice with scissors.”
The color drained from Libertine’s face.
Neva grinned wickedly. “Snip, snip.”
FRIDAY WAS WAITING when they arrived on the pool top, his chin on the edge of the pool, mouth open and ready for breakfast.
“He’s such a goofball,” Neva said fondly. “Do you want to pet him? Actually we shouldn’t say things like ‘pet’. He’s not a golden retriever. But you know what I mean. Do you want to?”
“Oh, can I?” Libertine clasped her hands.
“You mean you were here all day yesterday and you didn’t touch him at least once?”
“No—I didn’t want to presume.”
“Some animal terrorist you are.”
Libertine looked at her, crestfallen.
“Nah, I’m just teasing you,” Neva said. “Okay, first of all take off the gloves, and then come on over. Are you, like, talking to him right now?”
“No—it doesn’t really work like that. I feel him, and he feels me, but it’s not all the time—and in his case, not in days. Sometimes that means they don’t need me anymore, and sometimes it means they’ve given up.”
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