by Tory Cates
“No. Mr. Stallings was very jealous of his privacy. He never invited any of the researchers to his home.”
“This must be it,” Cameron said, matching the scrawled lines on the crumpled paper to a road ahead. They turned off on an asphalt road that curved beneath a rusted wrought-iron arch. At the crown of the arch was a tipped-over S representing Stallings’s Lazy S brand. “This ranch house had better really be something,” Cameron grumbled as they moved out of sight of the highway. “It would have to be to make Stallings’s property worth even a third of what he claimed.”
The road dipped down through a low water crossing. A thin trickle of water ran across it. “Bet that’s hell when it rains,” Cameron noted disapprovingly.
Malou barely glanced at it or noticed when the paving ended. She was spellbound by the beauty of the property. An infinity of tender spring green stretched out all around her, wrapping the land in the promise of new life that sprang forth like a miracle each year to defy the harsh surroundings. With the trained eye of an ethologist, she caught glimpses of animal life that most people would have missed. Of startled deer peering through the foliage. Of armadillos trundling through the underbrush. Of javelinas bolting away from the sound of the oncoming car.
“It’s remarkably unspoiled,” she exalted.
“Yes, and even more remarkably undeveloped,” Cameron groused. “I haven’t seen any of the improvements, the fences, the pastureland, the buildings that Stallings told me were here.”
They emerged from the jungle of green and rounded a curve. At its end sat a lovely stone house.
“It’s like something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale,” Malou breathed in wonder at the small structure almost buried in the dense vegetation.
“It’s pretty grim all right. But the only way it’s connected to a fairy tale is how Stallings portrayed it to me.” Malou noticed that as he shook his head in disgust, most of it seemed to be directed against himself.
Outside the car, Malou caught the tumbling, crystal song of a canyon wren and the poignant scent of the wisteria-like purple blossoms of the mountain laurel. A creek sparkled in the distance, cutting a silver trail around the giant trunks of century-old live oaks. She touched the stone of the house and wondered what long-dead craftsman had chiseled it with such delicate precision. For her, the air was as redolent with enchantment as it was with the sweet scent of the mountain laurels.
Even Cameron could not remain totally immune to its spell. With each fragrant breath he inhaled, a bit more of the tension that coiled around him eased its grip. “Pretty,” he pronounced the deliberately tepid verdict. “Not profitable, but pretty. God, if you could only put pretty in the bank, all our problems would be solved.”
“But you can’t,” Malou sighed.
“Not unless you happen to have a highly unusual banker. In which case I’d like to meet him. Soon.”
That little bit of levity was all that was needed to bring the scene’s magic to life. As they approached the front door, Cameron halted her. “Uh-uh-uh,” he warned, pointing to the base of the massive door, which was supported by a sturdy oak plank. “That is a threshold if I’ve ever seen one. Custom demands that I carry you across it.”
Malou was trapped securely in his arms before she had a chance to protest, “I’m pretty sure that custom only applies to newlyweds.”
“Who wants to risk it?” he asked, pressing close to her as he leaned in to turn the knob. With a grand step, he crossed the threshold. “You know,” he said, pausing on the other side, a distracted look on his face, “I can’t remember another time in my entire life when I’ve swept a woman off her feet, and now I’ve done it twice in one day. What do you suppose it means?”
“That you’re in training for Olympic weight lifting?” Malou hazarded.
“Cute. Criminally cute.”
And, there in a stone house smack in the middle of spring, with the fragrance of mountain laurel blending with birdsong, held for the second time in her life within a man’s strong arms, Malou felt cute. She didn’t feel like a dedicated researcher and the winner of several prestigious awards in her field. She felt cute. Criminally cute. “We’ve made it across the threshold, Cameron.”
Without making the slightest move to put her down, he said, “Call me Cam. It’ll take so much less effort—and breath.”
“All right . . . Cam. But we’ve still crossed the threshold.”
He glanced down. “So we have.” He let her slide to the floor. “You wouldn’t happen to have a small monkey handy that we could perch on your shoulder? That seemed to have made wonderful things happen earlier.”
“I didn’t think you’d noticed.” Malou turned away to hide the goofy grin spreading across her face and to tamp down the intoxicating rush of feelings bubbling through her as if a geyser of champagne had been unloosed. She forced herself to focus on the interior of the house. The living room they’d stepped into was dominated by a fireplace of fieldstone. The oak floors shone with the rich gleam of decades of polishing. Charming watercolors, botanical drawings of the local plants, hung from the thick walls. The furniture was sturdy and wood. A candlestick phone was mounted on a wall by the door leading into the kitchen, where a pump handle curled up over the sink.
“It’s a place out of time,” Cam said in a low voice, just beginning to take everything in. “Other than the phone, there’s not a thing in here from even the twentieth century.”
Malou looked around from the old cast-iron pot hanging in front of the fireplace to the wooden butter churn sitting beside the sink in the sunny kitchen. “You’re right,” she whispered, an eerie feeling seizing hold of her.
“No TV. No air-conditioning. No electric lights,” he said, taking an inventory of all the artifacts of the twentieth century that were missing from the cozy dwelling.
“It’s hard to believe that Mr. Stallings conducted all his business dealings from here.”
“He did have a telephone,” Cam said, picking up the old-fashioned receiver and holding it out to Malou so that she too could hear the dial tone.
“And a gramophone,” Malou declared, opening up a mahogany box to reveal an old crank-type record player. A stack of thick 78 RPM records stood beside it. “ ‘By the Light of the Moon,’ ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,’ ‘Chattanooga Choochoo.’ ” Malou read out the titles.
“What a strange old codger,” Cam said, studying the books on a shelf. All were bound in dark leather, black and maroon, their titles lettered in gold on their spines. A complete collection of Dickens, some Robert Louis Stevenson, several slim volumes of poetry, and several more thick books on botany. Cam moved into the kitchen. “At least we won’t starve,” he called out. “Ample supply of canned goods. Hope you like peas, Spam, and peaches.”
“My favorites,” Malou answered. “Right up there with Chateaubriand and Godiva chocolates.”
“And we certainly won’t go thirsty,” Cam announced, stepping back into the living room, a bottle in either hand. “At least the old boy had taste in what he drank. Glenlivet scotch and good Kentucky bourbon.”
For a fleeting moment, with Cam framed in the doorway, beaming with pride in his discovery and absorbed with boyish curiosity, Malou wished it really could have been her threshold he’d carried her across. That this were their own little house, far from the rest of the world and all the problems pressing in on both of them. The memory of the most pressing of those problems broke the spell. “I’d better start trying to get in touch with some foundation heads.” She dragged a stool up next to the kitchen door.
“Right. Work,” Cam reminded himself as he put the bottles down and headed back outside. He returned with a leather attaché case and settled down on the sofa to begin reading through a stack of legal-sized documents.
Malou’s first call was to her mentor at the university, Professor Everitt. He supplied her with names, numbers, and tips on the best approaches to take with the various foundation directors. He also suggested a number of renowne
d primatologists she could call for support and testimonials as to the value of Los Monos. She thanked him and dived into the long list she had accumulated.
Not surprisingly, most of the men and women she needed to speak with were out. Those she did catch were treated to a sincerely impassioned plea. Impressed enough by the urgency in Malou’s voice not to brush her off with a standard reply, most promised to look into the matter further.
“Don’t look too much further,” she ended her spiel to the director of the National Genetics Research Lab. “There’s not time enough if we’re going to save the troop. The new owner has only given me three weeks to come up with new funding sources.”
Cam, who’d obviously been listening in, asked, “Why do I feel like the heavy here?”
“You’re not,” Malou assured him, still not entirely convinced herself. “You’ve given me a fair chance to save them. You didn’t have to do that.”
Before Cam could respond, Malou’s phone rang. It was Charlotte Dunsmore returning her call. Malou was surprised to find herself addressing the founder and director of the Dunsmore Foundation, which was dedicated to saving and studying primates.
“Yes, yes, Albert has told me all about your monkey ranch down there,” the woman, who sounded to be a very jaunty seventy, interrupted when Malou started in on her set explanation of exactly what Los Monos was. It took her a second to realize that “Albert” was Professor Everitt. “Now, what’s the current difficulty?”
Malou outlined the problem.
“Sounds serious,” Mrs. Dunsmore said.
Malou waited for Mrs. Dunsmore to tell her to submit her application in triplicate and she would give it “every consideration.” Instead, the older woman asked, “Would five thousand help out?”
Malou felt her mouth working, but no words were coming out.
“We aren’t a large foundation, you realize,” Mrs. Dunsmore continued, a slight annoyance at Malou’s silence prickling her voice. “All we’d be able to do is help tide you over this emergency; then you’d have to find permanent support elsewhere.”
“Oh, five thousand would be fantastic!” Malou was finally able to force the words out.
“Fine, I’ll put a check in the mail today and we can look after the paperwork when it’s convenient. You’ll have to excuse me now. Polly just wheeled in the tea tray.”
In the middle of Malou’s effusive thanks, the line went dead.
“We got five thousand dollars!” she whooped.
Cam cocked an eyebrow in her direction. “Bravo. You’ve saved a bit more than three monkeys.”
Startled by his cool response, Malou’s exuberance sagged.
Cam put down the forty-page contract he was reviewing. “You still don’t understand, do you? We have to have more than just enough to pay the water and feed bills for a few months. We need steady, long-term income to cover taxes, lost revenues, and, more than that, I need a great big lump of cold, hard cash to plunk down on my banker’s desk in three weeks’ time. All of which means that you’ll have to find a foundation interested in purchasing not only the monkeys, but also the land along with them. Because I’ll guarantee you this: I can most certainly sell that land without the monkeys on it.”
“Forgive my naiveté,” Malou said, her flashing temper frozen into her icy tone. “My childish enthusiasm over such a pittance must be a sore trial to you.”
“Don’t be snippy,” he commanded. “You need to know what the facts are if we’re going to work together. You keep trying to make me into some kind of ogre out to crush you and your little monkey farm. That’s not who I am, Malou, or how I operate. My idea of winning is when both sides get what they want. No losers, no tears. It’s not in my power to give you what you want unless I forfeit everything I’ve worked for all my life, so you’ll have to work for it. Your five thousand is an encouraging sign. When you multiply it a few hundred times, we can start thinking about breaking out the champagne. Until then, if you plan on holding up your half of this joint venture, you’d better graft that phone onto your ear.”
Malou turned away, smoldering. Furious at Mr. Cameron Landell and even madder at herself because he was, once again, right. Undeniably, insufferably right.
Chapter 4
Malou turned back to the phone. So intent was she, that she didn’t notice when the canyon wrens fell abruptly silent or when the temperature began to plummet or when sullen gray clouds began to shroud the sun. Had she been paying attention to anything other than a series of disembodied voices, she surely would have felt in her bones the ominous stillness that fell across the land just before the first fat, angry drops of rain pelted from the sky to kick up tiny geysers of dust wherever they fell. But it was Cam, disentangling himself from the slippery tentacles of legalese in the contract he was studying, who noticed first.
“We’d better think about starting back,” he said, directing Malou’s attention to the downpour.
“But that was Edward Darden,” she moaned, gesturing to the phone she’d just hung up. “The Father of American Primatology,” she explained to Cam’s blank look. “He’s just gone to check on a funding report he received yesterday; then he’s going to call me right back. I can’t risk being somewhere that the reception is bad.”
“Well, we certainly wouldn’t want to drop a call from the Father of American Primatology,” Cam jibed.
“It’ll only be a few minutes.”
“With the way that rain is coming down, you’d better hope it’s not much longer. Like every other kind of weather down here, rain is serious in south Texas.”
“Don’t worry,” Malou reassured him. “I’ve lived through lots of rainstorms at Los Monos.”
“I’m sure you have, and that’s because Los Monos is on high ground. We’re considerably lower here.”
“Just a few more minutes,” Malou pleaded.
“Take all the time you need. I’m quite comfortable here.”
And so they waited: Cam stretched out on the couch with his contract and a ceramic mug filled with spring water and some of Mr. Stallings’s fine scotch. Malou perched nervously watching the phone, waiting to take up the conversation with Edward Darden, a man she’d read about in textbooks and admired since her first days in primatology. The sky grew darker and hurled more rain with each passing minute.
By the time her phone rang, raindrops were pattering down on the tin roof with the machine-gun vigor of a team of tap dancers rehearsing for a Busby Berkeley spectacular. And all the Father of American Primatology had to report was that he’d been unable to locate the papers he’d gone to hunt for. But he did promise to alert everyone in the primatology community to how dire the situation was out at Los Monos. Malou thanked him politely, hung up, jumped off her stool, and began scurrying about collecting her papers and hat.
Cam, disturbed by the sudden flurry of activity, peeked his head over the top of the couch.
“It’s raining,” Malou explained. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?” he asked, bundling papers back into the briefcase.
A few seconds later he was holding the door open as Malou bolted out into the cloudburst. They were both drenched by the time they reached the car. Sheets of rain made the short drive to the low water crossing into a twenty-five-minute test of navigation by instinct. Half the journey was conducted with Cam’s head stuck out into the downpour, trying to ascertain whether or not they were still on the road. But the worst was yet to come, and come it did at the low water crossing. Unable to see it, Cam stopped cold mere inches away from plunging into the trickle, which had been transformed into a rushing torrent.
“Looks like this is the end of the line,” Cam announced jauntily.
“Why?” Malou asked with sudden alarm.
“Why?” Cam echoed with disbelief. “Malou, there’s no way we’re going to make it across that.”
A kind of panic swirled up from the pit of Malou’s stomach at the thought of being trapped overnight with
Cam. “Can’t we at least try?” she asked.
Cam’s brow furrowed at the suggestion. “Malou, that water’s four feet deep if it’s an inch. This is no amphibious vehicle. I don’t intend ending up as one of those silly people you read about every year who are swept away when they try to cross a creek in a flash flood.”
“You’re right. I guess I was just worried about Bambi and . . .” Her voice and explanation trailed off weakly. In the awkward silence that followed her fib, the sound of the rain drumming on the car roof seemed to be amplified.
“Malou, you were worried about spending the night with me.” Cam’s voice was gentle as he stated the obvious truth.
A withering shame flushed through Malou. Was she really that transparent?
“You can put your mind at ease,” he continued. “I’m not in the habit of compromising the honor of prim primatologists.”
“What a boon to the profession,” Malou answered with a mocking gaiety, trying to disguise her abashment as Cam put the SUV into reverse.
Dashing back into the stone house left them drenched again by the cold rain. Cam went for his third fully clothed shower of the day by running out to the woodshed for an armload of logs. After dealing expertly with a temperamental damper, he sparked a blazing fire that restored the room, gloomy and darkened by the storm, to its former cheeriness. Malou stood before it trying to bake out the chill that had seeped into her bones.
“This will not do,” Cam announced, watching her shiver. He pulled a quilt off a chair and wrapped it around her shoulders, then lit a kerosene lantern and set out to explore the rest of the house. A few minutes later he returned with several thick terry towels slung over his shoulder, dragging a steamer trunk behind him. He tossed a towel to Malou and opened the trunk. Inside was a complete wardrobe, male’s and female’s, circa 1935. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just slip into something a little bit drier.” Without any further preamble, Cam stripped off his sodden shirt, used it to rub away the beads of moisture trickling down his back, and dug into the pile of clothes.
