Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  The For Sale sign was streaked with bird shit.

  That was when Sheila had the thought she still remembered two decades later. People could—and would—do everything they could to kill Florida, to kill the world, but that it was ridiculous, hubristic, to think they’d succeed. Nature would find a way to survive.

  These birds, turtles, butterflies would have to move when this land, too, was cleared, but they’d find someplace to go. Some would probably die, but not all.

  The rest might even return to the plots where the first houses had been carved out of the swamp. Sheila had noticed that some of the buildings were already overgrown, sagging, their wood rotting in the relentless humidity and heat.

  * * *

  THE FINNERAN FUNERAL was at a Catholic church that looked like it had been built the week before. Hot white light poured through the clear windows up near the top, cooler blue and green through the stained glass lower down.

  Sheila saw that the beams running across the ceiling showed signs of termite damage.

  The sad, shocked crowd had too many young parents in it, and far too many children. Girls, mostly, dressed in whatever dark clothes they owned, their faces sallow under permanent Florida tans. Short skirts were in style here, rows of bare legs swinging in the pews.

  A young priest spoke of seasons, of forgiveness, of love. Sheila didn’t bother to follow what he was saying. She was looking at the two simple wood coffins that sat before the priest and thinking about her own parents.

  Then her gaze sought out the gray-haired woman in the front pew and the girl in black beside her. Mary Finneran and her granddaughter, the child of the deceased. Kaitlin.

  Kaitlin was bent over, focused on something in her lap, her right hand moving. Writing? No. Sheila thought she was drawing.

  * * *

  AFTERWARD, SHEILA WENT to the end of the line to pay respect to the mourners. At the head, Mary Finneran was pale, red eyed, but she seemed calm and composed. Strong. Beside her, Kaitlin looked thinner than she had in the video, with her grandmother’s sharp chin and a watchful gaze.

  Hanging from her right hand was a piece of white paper with a drawing on it. In her left was a ziplock bag containing a few colored pencils.

  Sheila couldn’t make out what the drawing showed, just its range of colors. It seemed that the girl had mostly used silver or gray, with a little blue as well.

  The line moved slowly forward. Nobody was speaking until they reached the Finnerans, not even the children shuffling along. It was quiet. Silent as a church.

  Eventually Sheila’s turn came. Mary Finneran locked eyes with her. “Dr. Connelly?”

  Sheila nodded. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Thank you.” The older woman looked Sheila up and down, as if deciding whether to trust her. Kaitlin’s quick glance held the same cautious judgment.

  Mary looked over to where the hearse, the limousine, and the diminished crowd of family and friends waited for the trip to the cemetery. The priest and a man in a dark suit stood nearby, exuding mournful impatience.

  “We have to go,” she said, still indecisive. Then, sighing, she reached into her black handbag and withdrew a square slip of paper. “Come to this address at five o’clock,” she said. “Can you find it?”

  Sheila said yes.

  Without another word, Mary Finneran put her hand on Kaitlin’s shoulder. Together they walked out the door and into the light.

  As the girl turned, Sheila caught a glimpse of what she’d been drawing during the service. It was a dolphin. No, two: an adult and a baby, pearly blue-gray and alive in the gleaming silver water.

  * * *

  SHEILA HAD CALLED the day before. Without giving any details, she’d told Mary Finneran that she thought the official story of the Finnerans’ death was wrong.

  “Why should I believe you?” Mary Finneran had said. “Why do I need you in my hair? You can’t imagine the number of calls I’ve gotten, and plenty of them have been from cranks. Why should I trust you’re any different?”

  Sheila had thought it over before saying, “You were the first”—struggling with the words—“on the scene, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see any dead bees?”

  “What?”

  Sheila, certain that the grief-stricken older woman was about to hang up on her, had hurried on. “Listen,” she’d said. “Africanized bees are deadly, but they’re still honeybees. When they sting a person, they leave their stinger behind. Then they die almost immediately. Someone who’s been attacked will be surrounded by dead bees.”

  There’d been a long silence over the line. Then Mary Finneran had said, “You’re telling me Kait was right.”

  Before Sheila could answer, she’d gone on. “No! No, I need to hear it face-to-face. Can you come here?”

  And Sheila had said, Yes. Yes, of course.

  * * *

  FIVE O’CLOCK. THEY were sitting on Mary’s back porch, the hot day edging into a cooler evening.

  Mary went to get something to drink. Sheila leaned back in her chair and watched first a white egret and then a small flock of ibises flap past.

  Unkillable Florida.

  When Mary returned, she was carrying a tall glass filled with ice cubes and a light brown liquid. “Iced tea,” she said, “with a kick.”

  “Thank you.” Sheila took the glass, cool and sweaty in her hand. She sipped it. There was gin in it.

  “Where’s Kaitlin?” she asked.

  Mary sat across a glass-topped table from Sheila, sipped her own drink, and said, “She goes by Kait. She’s inside drawing something, I imagine, but I’m sure she’ll be out soon.”

  Then her mouth firmed. “Which makes it a good time now to spit out what you came down to tell me.”

  Sheila nodded. Before she could speak, though, the door slid open. Kait stood there, wearing yellow shorts and a red T-shirt with some restaurant’s name on it, her face without expression. All coltish arms and legs, unruly mop of hair, and dark eyes staring into Sheila’s own from across the deck.

  She was holding something in her hand: a sheet of paper.

  Mary said, “Kait, what have you been drawing?”

  Still the girl hung back. As Sheila watched, she saw her body gradually grow rigid. When she finally moved, it was on stiff legs. An angry stride. She slapped the drawing facedown on the table in front of Sheila.

  “They won’t believe me,” she said, almost spitting out the words. “They say I’m making it up.”

  Sheila turned the drawing over. It was what she expected it to be, but even so the sight made her heart pound.

  A portrait, almost scientifically accurate, of a thief. The head, the bloodred wings, the aggressive posture, triangular head tilted, the way it stood high on its legs—all were unmistakable.

  Only its abdomen was too thick, but the whitish liquid Kait had drawn dribbling from the end explained that, too. This was a newborn thief, still attaining its final adult shape.

  “Well?” Kait was staring at Sheila. “Do you believe me?”

  Instead of replying, Sheila bent over, reached into the shoulder bag at her feet, and withdrew a copy of Jack’s drawing.

  She placed it on the table beside the other. The two thieves stared up at them.

  “My God,” Mary said. Her hand was over her mouth.

  “Yes,” Sheila said to Kait, “I believe you.”

  Kait stared down at the drawings. “The wasp-thing,” she said.

  * * *

  THEY TOLD THEIR stories. Only once, as Kait described watching the life and death of the baby dolphin, did she grow teary. The rest of the time, she spoke in a sober voice that betrayed, Sheila thought, too little emotion. As if the girl had already spent too much time thinking about what she’d seen. Or had already dissociated herself from it.

/>   The same way Sheila sounded as she described what had happened to her mother.

  Mary mostly listened. By the time the two of them were done, she looked older than when they’d begun.

  “You say these creatures started in Africa,” she said.

  Sheila nodded. “As far as we know, yes. West Africa.”

  “But now they’re here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Sheila gave a shrug. “You must know how easy it is for invasive species to spread in this day and age.” She paused. “They used to have to hitch rides on the wind or on islands of floating vegetation. These days it’s effortless.”

  Mary was frowning. “That’s not what I meant.” She gestured at the drawings. “These creatures were happy to live—and stay—in their forests for, what, thousands of years. Millions. Why are they spreading now?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Sheila said. “Declines in population of food and host species in their home range? A change in their biology, some evolutionary leap that’s led to increased aggressiveness? Pure chance? Any answer is just a guess.”

  “It doesn’t matter why,” Kait said.

  Sheila said, “You’re right.”

  “It just matters that they’re here.” Kait looked up at her. “They’re in Africa. They’re here. Are they everywhere else, too?”

  Without thinking, Sheila put a hand out and brushed a lock of hair out of Kait’s eyes. The girl flinched a little, but didn’t pull away.

  “I’m afraid so, honey,” she said.

  * * *

  WHEN KAIT WENT inside to get ready for bed, Mary said, “Why were they attacked? I mean, my son and his wife. Was it just a coincidence?”

  Sheila looked at her, trying to decide how much speculation to share. Finally she said, “That’s possible, but I think it might have been something else.”

  “What?”

  “Retribution.”

  Mary stared at her. “You mean, like payback? They come back and punish you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sounds like a crackpot theory to me.”

  Sheila thought of Jack’s similar—though less temperate—response and didn’t say anything.

  “But how would the other ones know?” Mary’s gaze shifted toward the sky, where a big heron was winging in front of darkening clouds. “Are they always watching?”

  Sheila opened her mouth to say something like, We have no idea, when she heard Mary say, “Oh, God.”

  Sheila lowered her gaze.

  The older woman’s face was contorted. “Kait was there,” she said. “When Tim killed that one. She was there.”

  Sheila understood. Somehow the idea hadn’t occurred to her. The idea that Kait might still be in danger.

  “I think,” she said and hesitated. “I think that, if it was going to happen . . . it would have already.”

  “But you don’t know, do you?” Mary was on her feet. “You’re just guessing.”

  She stopped beside the door. “I have a friend with a place in Charleston,” she said, half to herself. “I’ll call her from the road.”

  Then she paused, her eyes widening. “But will that be enough? These creatures. You said they’re everywhere.” She seemed almost to be begging. “Sheila—tell me where to go that will be safe.”

  But Sheila had no answer.

  Fifteen minutes later Kait was sitting in Mary’s car. “Grandma,” she was saying, “we’ll be fine.”

  Mary, ignoring her, made sure Kait’s seat belt was securely fastened.

  When Sheila had loaded two suitcases into the trunk, Mary handed her another square piece of notepaper. There was a phone number written on it in green ink.

  “Call me when you know it’s safe,” Mary said. “When you’re sure.”

  Sheila just looked at her, and after a moment Mary, amazingly, laughed. It was a bitter, self-mocking sound, but still, it was a laugh.

  “All right,” she said. “Don’t wait that long.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Manhattan

  BURUNDI. MADAGASCAR. FIJI. Ecuador. Mexico.

  Trey stuck the last of the morning’s pins in the map, then stood back to look at the ever-thickening and growing clusters.

  “Useless,” he said under his breath. Then, more loudly, “I’m useless.”

  Jack looked up from his desk. After their encounter with George Summers at Ag, he’d admitted that he had to get back to work. To his real work, the kind the museum paid him for. He was still gathering data on the thieves, but an increasing amount of his attention was focused elsewhere.

  In front of him lay a tray from Entomology’s collections room. Rows of black-and-yellow wasps stuck on pins, a yellowing card scrawled with ornate fountain-pen handwriting identifying genus and species beneath each one. Philanthidae, the drawer was labeled. And the English, too: Beewolves.

  Beewolves, wasps that preyed on bees, were Jack’s specialty.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “I said that I’m useless here.” Trey wriggled his shoulders. “Looking at YouTube videos, reading blogs, checking out the latest picture pinned on—”

  “Pinterest,” Jack said.

  “Whatever. A million people could do all that better than I can.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Jack said. “Your girlfriend will be back soon. She can take over the job of sticking pins in the wall, and you can go back to staring out the window. You’re a ninja master at that.”

  His eyes widened a little at Trey’s expression. “Okay, don’t bite me. Ix-nay on the ins-pay. What are you going to do instead?”

  Trey was silent for a few moments, but he’d already thought it through. He’d known for days where his path was leading.

  “I have to find out what the thieves are doing,” he said, “and I can’t do that here. Not via computer. Not with—” He held his hands out. “Not with pins, real or virtual.”

  Jack gave a half grin. “‘Obsessive Traveler Flies the Coop,’” he said. “I read it in the paper, just below ‘Dog Bites Man!’”

  His expression grew more serious. “How, though?” he asked. “How do you know where to go?”

  Trey had been figuring that out, too. He looked at the telephone, a technology even he was comfortable with, though he hated it, too.

  “I know where to start,” he said.

  Kinyare, Uganda

  “EIGHT WEEKS,” THOMAS Nyramba said.

  Fortyish, thickly built, with a shaven head shaped like a bullet, he was sitting behind the desk of his wood-paneled office in the Kinyare police station. Trey occupied a wooden chair opposite him.

  The sunlight coming in through the windows was tinted green by the surrounding forest. Over the rattling of the ceiling fan, Trey heard the nearby shrill of crickets and, farther off, the loud calls of a great blue turaco, a dinosaur-like bird that lived only in these African rain forests.

  “Eight weeks, or a little more.” Nyramba shrugged. “That was when we first saw them. How long were they here before that?” Another shrug. “Who knows?”

  Trey nodded. Yes: Who knew? He’d spent four months in this region some years back, surveying the area for ICT, and he knew that the dense, wet forests guarded their secrets closely. The people of Kinyare might have detected the thieves just two months earlier, but that didn’t mean the wasps had just arrived. They could have been hiding out for years, picking off a colobus here, a golden monkey there. A chimpanzee. A human.

  “But it does not matter,” Nyramba said. “They are here now, and they will stay.”

  Another cry echoed through the room. Not the call of a turaco this time, or any other bird. A man’s shout.

  Thomas Nyramba tilted his head. “John Ndele,” he said. “Do you remember him?”

  Trey did. A loud drunk, with sma
ll, yellow-shot eyes and a propensity for using his fists. You couldn’t have spent much time in Kinyare without knowing John Ndele.

  “He finally killed his wife,” Nyramba said. “So now he is down the hall.”

  In a cell, that meant. In many villages, in many countries, killing your wife was not much of a crime. But in Kinyare, Thomas Nyramba’s rules applied. You broke them at your peril.

  Ndele shouted again.

  “That would wear on my nerves after a while,” Trey said.

  “Yes. It does.” Nyramba’s sudden, wolfish grin showed white teeth against dark skin. “But not for much longer.”

  * * *

  JOHN NDELE LOOKED up from his cot when the cell door swung open. His expression said, About time!

  But then, as he pushed himself into a sitting position, he saw who had come for him. His squinty eyes widened, and his face paled.

  Along with Trey, Thomas Nyramba had brought his two deputies, beefy young men in khaki shirts and sunglasses. “You thought we would let you walk free?” Nyramba said. Then, “Stand up.”

  His voice prickled the hair on the back of Trey’s neck.

  Ndele didn’t move. The deputies looked at Nyramba, saw him nod, stepped into the cell, and hauled the prisoner to his feet.

  For a moment Trey thought Ndele would faint. He slumped in the deputies’ grasp, and his eyes rolled, showing the yellowish whites.

  Nyramba took a step forward and slapped his face. That woke Ndele up. He began to weep.

  Trey stood still and did not speak.

  * * *

  “HOW MANY IN your village have died?” Trey asked.

  They were heading down the Nkuru Trail, which led south away from town and into an undisturbed stretch of forest. The deputies went first, pushing Ndele, his hands cuffed, before them. Trey and Nyramba followed, far enough behind that they could talk.

  “Too many, before we learned.” The police chief sighed. “Our doctor. A nurse. Others. Five of our hunters never returned from the forest.”

  Trey grimaced. “I think hunters are always among the first,” he said. “They’re alone. Unprotected.”