Lady Killer

by Kathleen Creighton

  Staring into them, she realized she’d moved without consciousness, gravitated closer to where he stood in the open doorway of his car. Whoever he was, she thought as she took two quick steps backward, good guy or bad, in his own way Tony Whitehall was dangerous.

  She said sharply, “I haven’t decided whether I want to tell you that yet. But if we’re going to discuss it, you should probably come up to the house. It’s too hot to stand here in the road.”

  She turned and walked away, back up the lane, and behind her she heard him say, “Yeah-okay. Sure.” And then the car door closed and the engine fired. A moment later, the sedan came prowling slowly past her.

  She gave him points for having the good sense not to stop and offer her a ride.

  The house was stone, like most Tony’d seen in the Hill Country so far-the older ones, anyway. It sat on a little rise and had a wide front porch that looked out toward the lane and the live oaks and the paved road below. But the real view, he saw when he’d parked beside the pickup truck and gotten out of his car, was in back of the house. From here he could see the barn, of newer vintage than the house and built of wood and metal; several other storage buildings, which might or might not have been garages; a couple of feed storage tanks and some animal pens. These were all off to one side, while directly in back of the house a wide meadow swept down to a creek bed, which was dry now, in September, like most of the Southwest watercourses he was familiar with, and studded with granite outcroppings and copses of still more live oaks. The meadow was dotted with oak trees-not live oaks, but the big, spreading kind-and bordered by a fence rampant with fading sunflowers. A couple of horses and an assortment of brown-and-white goats and some llama-looking creatures occupied the shade provided by the oak trees. Beyond all that, the rolling Texas hills stretched away to distant blue haze.

  “Nice,” he said to the view’s owner as she came to join him. The dog, he noted, was still glued to her side, and the boy had come now to the back-porch door and was watching him intently, arms folded and feet planted firmly a little apart. Like a sentry, he thought.

  “You should see it in the spring when the bluebonnets are in bloom.” It was a pleasant remark, but her face and her eyes reflected no joy or pleasure.

  As if, Tony thought, all the light in her life had been snuffed out like a candle’s flame.

  She turned and went up the steps to the back door, indicating with a slight movement of her head that he was to follow. Squelching the empathy for her that kept intruding on his objectivity, and with the dog padding silently at his heels, he did, pausing to wipe his feet on the mat outside the door the way his mama had taught him. He entered the kitchen, and the dog squeezed past him and went to assume her Sphinx posture on a rug near the door that led to the rest of the house, making it clear to him his admittance went only this far and no farther.

  A wave of his hostess’s hand indicated he should sit down at the kitchen table, so he did. He felt as if he’d been called to the principal’s office, which had the effect of rendering him, for one of the few times in his life when in the presence of a beautiful woman, at a loss for something to say.

  Since he didn’t seem to be much good at talking to Brooke, he looked across the table at her son, who had hitched himself halfway onto a chair and was studying him solemnly, with his head propped on his hands. “You’re Daniel, right?” Tony held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Tony.”

  “I know.” Daniel ignored the hand and, without actually pointing, indicated the laptop computer lying open but dormant on the table. “I Googled you.”

  “Ah.” Tony shifted so he was facing the boy more directly, though he was intensely conscious of the kid’s mother drilling holes in the back of his head with those dark blue eyes. “Then you know,” he said earnestly, “that I’ve done photo essays of all kinds of animals. Wolves, elephants, gorillas…”

  Daniel nodded. “You’ve been all kinds of places, in wars and disasters and stuff. So how come all of a sudden you want to do a story about one little mountain lion?”

  Tony sat back in his chair, and all he could think was, Wow.

  Behind him he heard, softly, “I’d like to know the answer to that, too.”

  He turned halfway around in his chair, ready to launch into the story he and Holt had concocted, which he now had no real faith was going to hold up under the scrutiny of these two. “Mrs. Grant-”

  Her eyes squinched as if she’d felt a sharp pain. “Oh, please don’t call me that. Brooke is fine.”

  “Okay…Brooke. Actually,” he said, glad that this was at least partly true, “I’ve been interested in doing a story on exotic animal smuggling and illegal breeding for quite a while. Like, what happens to these animals after their owners decide they can’t or don’t want to take care of them anymore-”

  “That’s not-” Daniel began, but a gesture from his mother silenced his protest.

  Tony glanced at him, then forged ahead into the part of his story that was somewhat less than truthful. “I was doing research-yeah, okay, I Googled-and the news story about what happened to your, uh, with your cougar came up. At that point it was supposed to have been a case of-” he threw the boy a look of apology “-an unprovoked attack by a wild cougar who’d been raised as a pet.”

  This time it was he who held up a hand to hold off Daniel’s furious denial. “So, since I was in Arizona, visiting my mom at the time, and that’s right next door by Texas standards, I decided to come and see if you’d let me use your lion as the focus of my story. I didn’t know until I got here about…what’s been going on.”

  He sat back, relieved that he could at least end on a note that was God’s honest truth. “Look, I’m truly sorry. I know this is a bad time for you. But like I said to Daniel, if doing a story on your cougar can help keep her from being put down…”

  “Will Lady be on Animal Planet or something like that?” Daniel’s face was flushed and eager, though his eyes remained wary.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping for. Or National Geographic, maybe. I don’t know at this point.” He didn’t add that if the story was big enough and went the wrong way, it could wind up on some of the crime shows and even on TruTV.

  Daniel looked past him and said, “Mom?”

  Tony turned to look at her, too, and they both waited for her to say something.

  For a long moment she didn’t and just stood there leaning against the kitchen sink, with her arms folded, gazing at her son the way he’d seen his own mother do when she couldn’t think up a good enough reason to tell him no. Finally, she hitched in a breath-the decision had been made-and Tony held his until she said, “Daniel, why don’t you go see if Lady’s up for visitors?” When Daniel seemed about to argue, she added in a firmer tone, “We’ll be out in a minute. I have some questions I need to ask Mr. Whitehall first.”

  Daniel slid out of his chair and was out the door in the shot-from-a-cannon manner of little boys everywhere, and the dog rose to her feet, then sat back down and watched him go, clearly torn by this division in her flock. Tony braced himself while Brooke turned her intent gaze his way.

  “Mr. Whitehall-”

  “Please,” he said, with a teasing parody of her own wince, “call me Tony.”

  She didn’t smile-okay, so evidently she wasn’t going to be affected by his charm-as she pulled out the chair her son had just vacated. She sat in it, then once again fixed him with that stare.

  He looked back at her, trying to look guileless and all too aware that he’d never been much good at guile, anyway. The air around and between him and the woman seemed to quiver with suspense, until he couldn’t take it anymore and finally had to break it. “Well, okay, you said you had questions.”

  “Actually,” she said, with a defensive little jerk of her head, “I’m waiting for you. So go ahead-ask it. The question I know you’re dying to ask.” When Tony just looked at her in a lost kind of way, she gave an impatient wave of her hand. “Oh, come on. Of course, it’s why you’re here.
Did I or did I not kill my husband?” She closed her eyes briefly and corrected herself. “Ex-husband. That’s what you really want to know. I can practically hear what’s playing inside your head. Did she really shoot her husband with a tranquilizer gun, then put him in a cage with a mountain lion, frame the lion for the killing and arrange it so her nine-year-old son was the one to find his father’s body and provide her with an alibi?”

  “Jeez,” Tony said under his breath, unexpectedly shaken.

  She clasped her hands together in front of her and leaned toward him across the table. “Look, I don’t know if I believe your story about Animal Planet and all that, but what you told Daniel is true. You are in a position to maybe save an animal we love from being destroyed. So, I’m willing to let you do your story-or whatever you call it when it’s photographs-as long as you understand it’s to be about the cougar and only that. Nothing else. Not one word or picture of me or Daniel-”

  He sat back and let out a breath through pursed lips. “Ma’am, I don’t think that’s possible. It’s your lion. You and your son raised him, you said. I can’t very well leave you out.”

  She put a hand over her eyes. “Oh, hell. No. I suppose not.” The eyes hit him again, fierce and bright. “You know what I mean. You are not to make this about what happened to Duncan. What they say I did. Understand?” She waited for his nod, then sat back, looking like she’d just run a race.

  She wasn’t ready to trust him.

  He’d had some experience coaxing wary creatures into an acceptance of him and his cameras, and he realized that was how he’d begun to think of her-as someone who needed to be wooed. Not as he would a beautiful woman, but as if she were one of the shy, wild things he’d stalked and filmed in their natural habitat. That experience had taught him that the way to win such a creature’s trust was not to press, not to move too fast, but to hold back and let her come to him.

  So, instead of accepting her invitation…demand…challenge…and asking her the questions she’d obviously prepared the answers for, he pushed back from the table and asked softly instead, “Can I see her-your lion?”

  “Oh,” Brooke said, and he felt he’d won a small victory when she looked taken aback. “Okay. I guess so. Sure.”

  Okay, fine. She led him back down the steps and across the yard to the barn in a grumpy silence, more annoyed with herself than with him. So I psych myself up to tell you my story, and now you don’t want to hear it? Fine with me.

  So why this odd and completely contrary sense of disappointment?

  Maybe because…I really do want to tell him. Maybe because I want so desperately for someone to believe me, and I thought maybe, just maybe, this man who isn’t from around here and doesn’t know Duncan or have any reason to be wary of the local law would listen and believe I’m telling the truth.

  But he didn’t seem to want to hear the story from her point of view, which was probably just as well. Her lawyer would have had a fit, anyway.

  “Don’t you want to get your camera or something?” she asked as they passed his sleek gray sedan, parked alongside her dusty pickup.

  “Animals tend to be suspicious of cameras aimed at them,” Tony explained, aiming that smile across at her as they walked. “I imagine they must look something like guns-a threat, anyway. I like to let animals-people, too, actually-get used to having me around before I start shooting, photographically speaking.”

  “I don’t think Lady’s ever seen a gun,” Brooke said, then thought, Not until a couple of days ago, when somebody shot Duncan with a tranquilizer gun, maybe right in front of her.

  And she wanted so badly to tell him that, to talk to someone about how awful and impossible it was that anyone could think she’d do such a thing.

  “Animals seem to have an instinct about things like that,” he said. “Somehow they know.”

  Brooke nodded. After a moment, because the need to talk to someone was just too strong to resist, she said, “Lady’s mother was shot and killed, but she was just a blind kitten hidden away in her den at the time, so I don’t think she’d have any trauma from that.” She glanced over at Tony. “That’s how we got her. It was a drought year, and a lot of animals-deer and antelope-had come down from the mountains, looking for food. So, naturally, the predators came, too. And there’d been reports of livestock being killed, and then a hiker was attacked, so the sheriff’s department was called in. Duncan and Lonnie-that’s his partner-were the ones to find the cougar, and after they shot her, that’s when they found out she had cubs. Or kittens. I don’t know which one is right, either.”

  She threw him a suggestion of a smile, one that only hinted, Tony thought, at what a real one would be like. Glorious.

  “Anyway, they looked for the den, but it was the next day before they found it. By the time they brought them home to me, the babies were weak and dehydrated, and the weakest one-the male-we couldn’t save it. We fed Lady with an eyedropper at first-Daniel and I did. Daniel was just a little guy then, but he really did help.”

  “So…your husband is the one who brought you the cougar?”

  “Yeah.” She gave a funny little laugh that acknowledged the irony in that, but didn’t say the words. “We kept her in the house at first. When she got bigger, she followed Daniel around and wrestled with him like a puppy-or like he was her littermate. She’d stalk him and pounce on him and play fight with him, the way puppies and kittens do. It’s the way predators train to catch and kill prey, you know. Duncan always worried she’d hurt Daniel, but she never did-beyond a few scratches and teeth marks and tears in his clothes.”

  With the dog padding quietly along between them, they went through the center aisle of the barn, between rows of horse stalls and out the other side, into a lane flanked by fenced enclosures. Some of these contained small shelters, which, Tony surmised, were for the goats he’d seen in the meadow pasture. Down at the far end of the lane, he could see a high chain-link fence, like the kind usually used to enclose tennis courts. Daniel was kneeling in the dirt beside the fence, his fingers laced in the wire fabric. Tony’s heart began to beat faster when he saw the sleek and tawny shape looming close on the other side, but when he and Brooke and the dog got to the enclosure, the cat had vanished.

  “She’s shy with strangers,” Daniel explained, squinting up at them, and now Tony saw the cat farther out in the compound, standing wary and alert in the shade of an oak tree.

  For cougar habitat, the compound ranked among the best he’d seen, with not only trees and brush for cover, but rocky outcroppings for climbing and a piece of the dry streambed running through it. “Nice,” he said, and Brooke nodded.

  “I had it built when I knew Lady couldn’t ever be returned to the wild. Of course, I knew that when she got bigger, she’d become a danger to the other animals.”

  “Not to mention the people,” Tony said, glancing at her. She looked away, but not before he saw a flare of anger in her eyes.

  “You may not believe this, but as rough as she was with Daniel when she was little, that’s how gentle she is now that she’s grown. And with me, too. She’s so sweet natured…That’s why I can’t-” She broke off, shaking her head as she stared through the chain-link fence. After a moment she went on in a voice tight with strain. “Duncan never liked her. And she didn’t like him, either. I think they were both afraid of each other. As if…I always wondered if somehow Lady knew he was the one who’d killed her mother. And Duncan…” She paused. “Far-fetched, I know.”

  “Maybe not,” Tony said. “Maybe he had the scent of her mother on him when he first picked her up. Her blood.”

  Brooke drew a sharp, quivering breath. “Can you get her to come closer?” she asked Daniel.

  He shook his head as Tony crouched down beside him. “She doesn’t like strangers.”

  “That’s okay,” Tony said.

  And then there was silence. His pulse pounded in his ears as he stared across the open space between the fence and the oak tree, and from its shelter, t
he cougar stared back at him. He could hear the hum of insects and the far-off whistle of a hawk…the sound of a car or a tractor starting up somewhere…but, above it all, the beating of his own heart.

  And then the distance between him and the cougar seemed to shrink, and the animal’s distinctive dark mask grew larger, her vivid yellow eyes glowing like fire.

  He heard a soft gasp from close beside him, and an even softer “Sshh…” from somewhere above his head.

  He couldn’t take his eyes away from that mask…those eyes. And slowly, they came closer, and closer still, until they seemed to fill his entire world, his whole field of vision, the way they had once before, long, long ago.

  Chapter 4

  His father had been working cattle in the high country that summer-the high-altitude meadows of the Sierra Nevada. The cow camp had cabins for the hands, so his mother and the four youngest kids-the ones too young to have summer jobs-had joined him for a month toward the end of the roundup season. Branding time. Josie and Anita had been ten and twelve that year, and they liked to go watch the cowboys work the cattle, but Tony and Elena had been too young to be trusted to keep out of the way, so they had to stay in camp with Mama.

  Or they were supposed to.

  We’re bored, Elena and I, and Mama is busy in the cookhouse, helping the cook make biscuits for dinner, so we decide to go find our own adventures. We’ll stay well away from the meadow where the cowboys and the cattle and horses are, we tell each other, so we won’t get into trouble.

  We’re walking along, and we come around a big pile of rocks, and there it is, right in front of us. A mountain lion. We freeze, all three of us, and the lion seems as surprised as we are.

  I can’t seem to breathe. Everything inside me has frozen solid. All I can see is the lion’s face, with its black mask and big yellow eyes. It seems huge, taller than I am, and I can almost feel its breath on my face. Beside me, Elena whimpers.

  “Don’t move,” I whisper without moving my lips. But I feel my sister’s hand creep into mine.