by Tory Cates
Malou went back to her census list, happily working her way through it, noting who was attacking whom and who was coming to whose defense. She checked to see if any of the young males now reaching four and five years of age had been banished to the periphery, and which ones had been allowed to remain with the females, Sumo, and a few other top-ranking males at the troop’s center. She watched to see which mothers came to the defense of their children, knowing that such defense would have a large bearing on the child’s ultimate rank in the troop.
And always she watched for her old friend Kojiwa. The day was warm, so Malou assumed that he was relaxing in the shade of a cactus somewhere, probably being groomed by one of the aging females who had remained loyal to him even after he’d lost the leadership of the troop to Sumo. But when Malou came to the end of her list and had still not spotted Kojiwa, she began to worry. The old-timer was tough as a juniper root, but he was also getting on. He’d already outlived every other monkey his age. But, Malou reminded herself, that didn’t mean that the old fellow was indestructible.
She picked up her binoculars and searched. On her third pass of the area she focused in on what she had at first taken to be a clump of brush. But no, the color was more a tawny gray than a brown. She zoomed the lenses in and came to the inescapable conclusion—that was the time-bleached coat of a venerable oldster.
She knew it was Kojiwa long before she reached the clump of fur, but it wasn’t until she saw sunlight glinting off the blinking eyes that she began to run toward him. Her pulse accelerated wildly when she saw that a limb torn from a coyotillo bush lay beside him. He still clutched a few berries in his hand. Malou gathered him into her arms. He was too far gone to protest. Running as best she could with her burden, Malou rushed back to the station. She nestled him in a blanket and went to pound on the locked lab door.
“Ernie, open up. I need you. It’s an emergency!” Her colleague was much better versed in macaque physiology than she was. She knew about macaque society, but Ernie knew about the animal’s anatomy.
He burst out of the door and slammed it behind himself. “What in God’s name is it?” he asked harshly, alarmed by Malou’s urgency.
“Kojiwa.” The name came out in a gasp, expelled on the last bit of air left in Malou’s overtaxed lungs. “Coyotillo berries.” She telegraphed the situation.
Ernie understood immediately. “He’s dead.” It was more of a statement than an inquiry.
Malou shook her head.
“Where is he?” Ernie asked brusquely.
Malou pointed to the front of the station, and Ernie brushed her aside as he followed her finger to the sick monkey.
“You carried him in?” Ernie asked as he bent over and lifted Kojiwa’s lid to peer into the amber eye. The pupil had shrunk to a pinprick of darkness. Ernie took a small flashlight out of his pocket and flicked it on, directing the beam into Kojiwa’s eye.
“He’s not going to make it.” Ernie pronounced the verdict with a flat finality.
Malou was stunned as she watched him turn to go back to the lab. “No!” she screamed. “He is going to make it.”
Ernie stopped and looked at her as if she were a raving madwoman. Malou didn’t care at that moment what he thought of her mental condition. She started barking orders at him. “We can’t waste any more time. There’s no telling how long ago he ate the berries. We’ve got to improvise some kind of stomach pump. You know more about macaque physiology than I do. We could take one of the tubes we use for worming and . . .”
Ernie returned to her side and looked again into Kojiwa’s eye. “Won’t work,” he declared flatly, clicking the light off and repocketing it. “He’s too far gone. There’s almost no pupil response.”
“But we can’t just let him . . .” Malou couldn’t finish the sentence. “We’ve got to at least try to save him.”
“Why? He’s lived longer than he had any right to.”
Malou accepted Ernie’s refusal, but she wasn’t about to let it dictate her response—or take up any more of the valuable minutes that were ticking away as more of the poison circulated through Kojiwa’s faltering system.
“Stand aside, please,” she asked, making her way to the tubes she would need to rig up some semblance of a stomach pump. Ernie stepped aside grudgingly. Hurriedly she prepared an injection of a sedative that would immobilize Kojiwa and slow down his circulation. Next, she selected a length of sterile tubing and, propping Kojiwa’s powerful jaws open, began to slide it down his throat.
“Here, let me do that,” Ernie said, taking the tube from her shaking hands. “You don’t know the esophageal contours.” He fed the tube in expertly and proceeded to attach a syringe.
“Make a mild saline solution,” he ordered her. “We’ll need it to flush out the stomach.”
Only when they’d finished and were washing up was there time for Malou to tell Ernie how much his help had meant. “I couldn’t have done it on my own,” she admitted. “We would have lost him for sure.”
“There are no guarantees that you haven’t,” Ernie said, squirting orange Betadine soap on his hands.
“I know, but at least we tried.” Unable to resist the impulse, she stood up on tiptoes to plant a kiss on Ernie’s fuzzy cheek. He reddened beneath his beard. As they dried off their hands, Malou went to check on Kojiwa. He had finally stopped resisting the sedative and was sleeping. As he relaxed into unconsciousness, his tightly gripped fist finally unclenched. Some of the berries that had brought him to such grief were still there.
“You know,” Malou said, “the old guy must be getting a little senile to start eating coyotillo at his age. He’s known for years to avoid them.”
Ernie merely grunted in reply and continued toweling off his hands.
Malou bent over the sleeping monkey and plucked the poisonous berries off of his callused palm. They were sticky. She held them to her nose. Unable to believe what she smelled, she licked lightly.
“Hey, no wonder he ate these berries. They’re coated in honey!”
Ernie dropped the towel and went to her side, taking the berries from her to sniff and then taste. “God, they are,” he concluded. “With the macaque sweet tooth, they’d eat pebbles if they had enough honey on them.”
Malou’s mind whirred into high gear. “Not only that, but there was a torn coyotillo branch lying beside Kojiwa when I found him.”
Ernie tossed the berries into the trash. “I don’t guess we need Sherlock Holmes to crack this mystery.”
“Someone’s deliberately trying to kill the monkeys.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” Ernie said with strained patience. It was obvious from the look of distaste that spread across his features that Ernie’s chief suspect hadn’t changed.
“And you think Cam’s responsible?”
“The motivation and opportunity are both there.”
“You must be joking,” Malou said, knowing full well that he wasn’t. “You want me to believe that Cameron Landell, multimillion-dollar developer, drives down here late at night in his Escalade to toss honey-coated coyotillo branches to a bunch of monkeys.” The image was so ludicrous that Malou was able to dismiss it along with Ernie’s cockamamie suspicions.
“No, Landell’s too smart and too rich to do it himself. That’s what hired hands are for.”
Hired hands like Jorge Maldonado. The ranch hand’s face came to Malou’s mind, as well as the evidence of the Mexican’s almost feudal loyalty to el patrón. There was no question that he would do his master’s bidding, and even relish the doing if it meant a few less of the monkeys that threatened his vaquero image of what should be raised on a true ranch. No, there was no love lost between Jorge and the monkeys that infested his domain. She thought of the last time she’d seen the hired hand—on the porch of the stone cabin.
She remembered how abruptly Cam had whisked the man out of the house and onto the porch where they would be beyond Malou’s earshot. She thought of Cam’s denying that he s
poke Spanish, then being quite able to make all his wishes known to the Maldonados.
Ernie watched almost as if he could see the tumblers within her brain falling into place to unlock the mystery of the monkey killings.
Malou could not believe that she was thinking what she was. She rejected the whole idea. “No, it’s impossible. Why on earth would Cam want to kill off monkeys that he could sell for fifteen hundred apiece?”
“Listen, he’s made it abundantly clear that whatever he could get for the monkeys would be peanuts compared to what the land under them is worth.”
“Well, killing them off one by one would be an awful slow way of clearing the land,” Malou countered, but already an unsettling image was taking shape in her mind. Ernie put a name and a focus to that image.
“Public relations.”
“What are you talking about?” she snapped.
“I’m talking about sacrificing a few animals so that when he decides to sell off the whole troop he can use them as a way of justifying that decision. He can point to the monkeys who are dying out here in the open and claim that they’d be better off in a lab somewhere.”
“Cam doesn’t care that much about public opinion to go to all that trouble,” Malou said, but her tone had lost some of its starch; she was remembering Cam’s reaction to the phone call informing him that protesters had gathered outside Landell Acres. Just the possibility of negative media attention had been enough to send him flying into the night. She knew he was at the mercy of the bank holding his note and that banks did not take kindly to projects that generated that kind of attention.
“Oh, doesn’t he?” Ernie countered. “You told me how enraged he became when you threatened to call in the press if he disbanded the troop. What’s happened in the meantime to change his feelings? Or, more to the point, what’s happened to change yours?”
Against her will, Malou felt a guilty, scarlet flush stain her cheeks. “My feelings for this troop have never changed; you know that, Ernie. I’m trying to ward off the threats to it just like you are.”
“Maybe it’s your feelings about those threats that have changed, then.”
Malou started to lash out at Ernie, to tell him how wrongheaded and unfair he was. But she stopped. He was right. Her feelings about the greatest threat her troop had to face had changed, for Cam was that threat.
Ernie stared, waiting for her response. When none came he merely nodded with a sad understanding, then walked back to the lab. From down the long hall, the sound of the lab door locking behind him echoed up to Malou.
Before she was aware of doing so, Malou had caught her bottom lip between her teeth and was worrying it. Silently she tried to rebut each of Ernie’s charges. She fought to scour herself of all that she’d come to feel for Cam, to dispassionately analyze him, his motives and actions.
The effort was a failure. All it succeeded in doing was to stir up a roil of conflicting emotions. She struggled to point the finger of guilt in another direction, but like a compass returning unerringly to true north, it always swung back to Cam. And always her heart rebelled at the notion. She could not believe that the lover who, only a few hours ago, had initiated her into the sweetest secrets that a man and a woman can share could be capable of such treachery, such cruelty. No, it simply could not be true.
From his bed in the makeshift recovery room they had fashioned for him, Kojiwa snuffled in his sleep. Malou went to the old-timer. His breathing was shallow, his pulse still weak and thready. Malou patted his dark paw, so much like a human hand. He was the kindest and the bravest of the troop. He had witnessed more than his aged amber eyes had ever been intended to see. He deserved a gentler, more dignified death than this.
Anger at a faceless poisoner revitalized Malou. She could listen no longer to the siren song her heart was singing to her. As it had for some time now, the survival of all the monkeys that old Kojiwa had led into this new land depended on the clarity of her vision. She’d let love cloud her perceptions for a dangerous interval and even now knew that she couldn’t completely wipe away the seductive mist that clung to her. But she could see where the path of her duty lay, and if love twined across that path, trying to trip her up, she would have to cut it away.
She had no other choice.
Chapter 9
Why the glum expression?” Cam asked.
They’d made polite chitchat for a few miles as they headed northeast toward Austin and the anniversary party for Malou’s parents. But for the last twenty miles a heavy silence had fallen between Cam and Malou. She sat beside him, lovely in an emerald green sundress that plunged to a provocative V in the front, a bow-tied package resting primly on her knees, but her thoughts were miles away.
Malou glanced over, wishing that she could trust what she saw with her own eyes, for the sight was innocence personified. Cam looked and smelled fresh from a shower. His unruly hair was still shiny wet and combed over his forehead like a choirboy’s. His firm jaw gleamed from the smooth scrape of a razor. The tie knotted at his neck was a touching concession to the occasion. All in all, he might have been a boy dressed by his mother for a birthday party. Except that everything boyishly appealing about Cameron Landell was counterweighted by his undeniable maleness, by the aura of raw masculinity that pervaded his every look and gesture.
Why the glum expression? Malou repeated his words, testing them. Did he already know the answer to that question? Had he, in fact, been the cause of the unhappiness that was writ so large across her face? She watched him closely as she answered his question.
“One of the monkeys, Kojiwa, was poisoned. He’s still very sick.” Cam’s features took on a look of worried concern. Malou watched and wondered. Had the expression been waiting there all the time, rehearsed and ready to be hauled out the instant she told him her “news”? Perhaps Cam had even specially selected the old monkey and marked him for death as a particularly insidious way of demoralizing her, of making her want to abandon her fight to keep the troop together. Together on Cam’s valuable land. No, she protested, she was letting Ernie’s paranoia get the best of her. Even if he’d had such a foul intent, Cam couldn’t have told one monkey from another if his life depended on it.
“Kojiwa. I’ve heard you mention that name before. Isn’t he one of your favorites? The original leader of the troop or something like that?”
“Yes.” So he did remember Kojiwa and the special place he held in her heart. And even if Cam couldn’t pick the old-timer out of the troop, Jorge probably could.
Cam’s hand, warm and comforting, covered Malou’s. “I know how much these guys mean to you, sweetheart. If you don’t feel up to being around a mass of people, we could call your parents and cancel. Have a quiet dinner somewhere.”
After the unrelieved stress of the last few days, the long nights spent nursing Kojiwa, the strained days of feeling like an enemy collaborator before Ernie’s silent scorn, Malou was almost undone by Cam’s gentle concern. Tears leaped spontaneously to her eyes and pooled there as she looked up at him. She wanted nothing more at that moment than to do exactly what he’d suggested, to escape to some tranquil little restaurant. To share a few glasses of wine and a simple meal with the man beside her, then to let him take her to bed and exorcise all the suspicion that was festering within her. Looking at him, and feeling the powerful pull of a thousand conflicting emotions, her misery only increased.
“No,” she finally answered, drawing herself up and forcing back the tears. “My parents will be expecting us.”
Cam patted her hand, then turned back to the road.
In Austin, they pulled off the interstate to wind their way through the campus of the University of Texas. Malou’s spirits rose slightly as they passed through the narrow streets shaded by giant magnolias, with their waxy green leaves and huge white blossoms. She pointed out the anthropology department, where she’d spent the most important years of her life. Cam slowed down as Malou translated the Latin inscription chiseled into the limestone above the e
ntryway.
“Know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” She spoke from memory, her eyes not on the chiseled words but on Cam. What was the truth? Would she ever find it if she kept losing herself every time he came near her? And, even if she did finally identify it, could the truth ever set her free from the desire for the man beside her that even now, even as she considered his possible guilt, coiled within her, aching to be unloosed?
Cam drove on, following her directions. They led to a prestigious neighborhood in West Austin. He found a spot on her parents’ street, and he took her arm as they strolled up to the house she’d lived in from the age of ten on. Azaleas were in full bloom, crowding in on either side of the curving walkway leading up to the stately, Greek-columned house.
“Not too shabby,” Cam whispered in her ear, breaking the tension that had built within Malou.
She smiled up at him, grateful that this house and its owners didn’t exercise the same kind of power over him that they did over her.
A swirl of guests had clotted near the main entryway. She recognized a number of her father’s colleagues from the university, most of them in casual Mexican guayabera shirts and beards. The women wore styles a couple of years out-of-date that proclaimed how little interest they had in things as frivolous as fashion. Spotted among them were the winners of major awards her father honored in public and envied in private. She’d grown up sharing his belief that while his work was every bit as good as theirs, it simply wasn’t as “showy,” which is why he never won the awards he deserved.
White-gloved and jacketed waiters circulated among the guests, passing trays of champagne in tall flutes. “Waiters,” Malou whispered in amazement to Cam. “Looks like they’re pulling out all the stops for this little do.” Her parents rarely went in for such ostentatious displays.
