She took a calming breath, closed the screen door behind her, sat down again in the chair and watched him. It came as a mild shock that somehow without being aware of it, she had acquired such knowledge of this man, had become so intimate with his movements and posture that she could recognize him in the dark. Hell, she doubted she could identify Harry so easily.
The car started, headlights flared on, and it carved a wide, slow circle in the yard and headed away down the gravel road. It was then she noticed the dim lights on its roof. A taxi.
Without a word of greeting Thorn mounted the porch, took a seat in the rocker beside her. In the weak moonlight she could see he was wearing khaki shorts and a work shirt, his boat shoes.
He reached over, lifted her left hand from the arm of her rocker, gave it short squeeze and released it.
"I found the guys."
"What guys?"
"Ones who imported the orangutans."
Allison opened her mouth but didn't speak.
"It was Kurt Franklin's doing," said Thorn. "He dropped by the marina, asked if I'd go check these guys out, pretend I was a vet, say I was there to examine a sick orangutan. Apparently he'd done business with these animal dealers in the past. I had the evening free, so I went."
"What in hell is Kurt Franklin doing playing around with animal dealers?"
"Apparently he'd been trying to help you. Doing some freelance undercover work for you. Wanted to impress his future mother-in-law. That's what it sounded like. He's been going around to different dealers around the area, pretending he was in the market for illegal animals. He'd leave one of his business cards, see who called. But now he's decided to drop it all. After Winslow and Bronson, he's scared. That's how he acted."
Allison shook her head. Good Christ, this is what she'd wrought with her warmongering against the animal trade, inspiring the Kurt Franklins of the world to put themselves in harm's way. Her own daughter. Innocents.
"But the point is, these guys have a young orangutan in their warehouse. I saw it."
"That doesn't mean a thing. It could've come from anywhere."
"It just arrived last week. And, Allison, it has a silver mark on its forehead."
She drew a breath, stared out into the night, felt as though her heart were taking a slow swan dive off the airless cliffs inside her. Then, from a great distance away, she heard herself ask, "Is it Joshua Bond?"
"No," Thorn said. "White Brothers Imports." She turned her head, peered at him for a moment.
"Raimondo and Orlando White?"
"Yeah, a tall one and a short one. The small one's bald, no eyebrows. Creepy little guy. The other guy is tall and blond, handsome in a slick sort of way, like a Miami Beach gigolo."
"That's ridiculous," she said. "The White brothers are snake dealers. Small-timers. Reptiles, a few birds, that's all. They don't even deal in primates."
"They do now. They have an orangutan in their warehouse. Three years old, four. With a silver patch."
Abruptly she rose from the chair, stood for a moment, then marched into the Shack, switched on several lights. She began to search the litter of newsletters on her desk, digging through the pile till she found the ones from last summer, a couple of articles on Orlando and Raimondo White. Feeling the shiver rise inside her as she turned the pages, a growing certainty even before she looked at their photos, recalling their voices speaking up in court, their paltry defense. They hadn't known indigo snakes were on the endangered list. In their warehouse they had a dozen of them. Six thousand dollars' worth. The White brothers were caught on a routine permit inspection by Fish and Wildlife. Allison recalled the little one, his courtroom whine.
"Hey, give us a break, we're just simple businessmen trying to make an honest living. Don'tcha have bigger fish you should be going after? The real bad guys. Dope dealers or something."
Replaying their voices in her head, she could recall their accents had the same colorless, generic vowels of Miami natives. The slightest tang of redneck mingled with a bland Midwestern flatness.
She located the newsletters, spread them open, stared at the photos she had snapped of the White brothers as they left federal court back in June, guilty, but despite a massive letter-writing campaign to Judge Hildreth, they'd received a suspended sentence. The photo was taken on a cloudy day, windy. The tall, blond one was making blinders of his hands to conceal his face, the short, hairless one was smiling insanely and shooting a bird directly into the camera.
"Is it them?"
She looked up.
"How did you find me, Thorn? How did you know where to come?"
He hesitated a moment, standing in the center of the small living room, glancing at the walls, the shelves of old leather books, photographs of Winslow and Sean. Fading black-and-whites of Julius Ravenel and his scruffy band of hunters squatting around their kill of the day. The oak tavern mirror with one of Julius's green felt hats still hanging from a peg, two wrought-iron lamps, a cherry drop-leaf table surrounded by four spindle-back chairs, one of her grandmother's forest quilts hanging from the west wall. Thorn's face softened.
"I went by your house," he said, bringing his eyes to her. "After I got off Parrot Jungle, I went over there and Harry said you were probably out here."
"And he told you how to get here?"
"No, you told me. A few years ago you described the place, which roads to take, all of it."
"I did?"
"You don't remember? You and me and Winslow, fishing the flats off Islamorada, two years ago, three maybe. She was still in college. It was spring break, I think. You caught a snook, a half dozen reds. Winslow and I were skunked. Beautiful day, though, glassy calm. One of those scrubbed-clean skies."
"Why did I give you directions?"
"You were going on about the Shack. I said it sounded like the kind of place I like. You gave me directions, invited me out for a visit. It took three years, but here I am."
"And you remembered something trivial like that, all this time? This road, that road, left, right."
"I didn't consider it trivial."
She looked at him carefully, this simple man who always seemed slightly cranky unless he was in a boat, out of sight of land. But not so uncomfortable now. Glancing around her cabin, liking what he saw. Shoulders relaxed. A plain, almost ascetic man who had reduced his life to a handful of truths, a few things he loved. Fishing, tying his lures, his few close friends, his books, tinkering with his boats, endless repairs on his house beside the bay.
Winslow and Sean called him Nature Boy. And that was an easy mistake to make, for he often acted like a guileless adolescent. He was artless, with a silly Eagle Scout view of politics and women, totally out of synch with the jigs and jogs of current events, the MTV throb of the moment.
But even as a child, Thorn had seemed to Allison to have haunted depths. Struggles he didn't reveal, inner grapplings that never made it past the spartan surface. He was no saint. She'd seen him lose his Zen placidness more than once. But he was fierce in his loyalty to his friends and his quirky code, and just as resolute at keeping the rest of the world's troubles and modem ideas at bay. Nature Boy, yes. And he could be childish too. But as Allison had come to see over the years, Thorn was far more difficult to fathom, a man of more parts than he first appeared.
"So is it them? The White brothers. These are the guys from Borneo?"
She looked down at the pictures again.
"Yes, it's them. I'm pretty sure anyway."
"Good," he said. "So what're we going to do?"
She stared at him, felt a tingling behind her eyes as if tears were mounting again. Never any doubt from him that she was sane, that these men were after her. Might even be out in the dark right now, fixing their aim.
She said, "The first thing I'm going to do is talk to them."
Thorn took a seat on the rattan couch, with its faded cover of burgundy and gold flowers. Forty years out of style. Thrift-shop decor. Thorn looked entirely at home there.
; "Talk?" Thorn said. "They don't strike me as big talkers."
"I didn't actually see them in Borneo," she said. "But I remember their voices. So I need to hear how they sound. I need to be absolutely sure."
"And then?"
"They didn't do this alone," she said. "There's somebody pulling their strings."
"You're sure of that?"
"They have no reason to kill me. I went after them in June, it was a little case. They got off, suspended sentence, not even a stern warning from the judge. Where the hell's their motivation?"
"Maybe they took it more personally than that. Or maybe these two don't need a lot of motivation to get violent. That's how they seem to me, touchy, stretched a little tight. One foot standing on the brake, the other mashing the accelerator."
"There's more to it, Thorn. Believe me. Something else is going on here. It isn't about indigo snakes, a trivial court case."
Allison stood in front of the couch, rubbing at the groove where her wedding ring had been. Massaging that finger as if she were trying to bring blood back to a withered limb. Then following Thorn's eyes, looking down at her hands, seeing what she was doing, a gesture she recognized had become a habit.
"Are you okay, Allison?"
The varnished lamp shade behind the couch put Thorn in a pale golden halo. She dropped her hands to her sides.
"I'm fine," she said. "Getting my second wind."
He held her eyes for a moment, his gaze growing serious, then moving beyond that. Probing her eyes as though he were searching for something hidden inside her.
"Tell me something, Allison."
"Yes?"
Thorn showed the edge of a smile.
"Do you smell gasoline?"
She sighed, came over to the rattan couch, sat down, leaving a space between them. Looked at him straightforwardly. Then she admitted it with her eyes, what she'd been intending to do. And Thorn, without a nod or shrug, somehow acknowledged the confession.
"Been a hard time," he said. "You've been strained to the limits."
"Hard," she said. "Hard isn't the half of it."
He smiled, brushed the coarse yellow hair from his forehead, resettled himself on the cushion, coming halfway around toward her, right arm up on the back of the couch.
"But not suicide," Allison said. "I was just going to get rid of this place. Be done with it. That part of my life."
He nodded.
"Because of what you did here, all those newsletters. You got people angry at you. This is where it all started."
"Yes," she said. "Exactly."
Thorn looked around at the room.
"Well, I'm glad I got to see it once before you torched it."
In the corner of the room the fax machine emitted a single ring. Thorn stared across at it.
"One of the members," she said, dismissing it with a wave. "The machine's out of paper, but it'll store the message. I've got it hooked through the computer's buffer memory. It can store a month of messages if it needs to."
"What the hell is that thing?"
She looked at him.
"It's a fax machine, Thorn."
"Oh," he said. And then a moment later, "I've heard about them."
She smiled uncertainly. It might be a joke, might not. With Thorn you couldn't tell. Living without hot water, radio, television, or phone, in a Key Largo stilthouse he built out of scrap lumber, Thorn considered it a major concession even to have wired the place for electricity. It wasn't so much that he disliked modern conveniences, but rather that he found the primitive way he lived to be sufficiently convenient already.
His gaze was wandering the room again, touching everything, then lingering on the Remington beside the front door.
"You're my first guest," she said. "It feels very strange."
He turned his eyes on her. They were a greenish blue, the color of the ocean over white sand shallows.
He studied her as if he was searching for a way to begin, tapping his finger against the flowered cushion between them, his hand close to her shoulder. Allison felt a hard jiggle in her pulse, felt the two of them teetering unexpectedly on a critical moment neither had calculated or wanted. Then she saw his earnest expression slowly back down, dissolve to a drowsy grin.
"If I'm your first guest," he said at last, "that probably explains why you've forgotten your manners and not offered me anything to drink."
For a late-night snack they shared the last of a jar of crunchy peanut butter, with glops of raspberry preserves spread over stale Triscuits and Melba Toast, and washed the choking mess down with an Oregon pinot noir she found in one of the high cabinets, drank it from tea glasses with wicker sleeves. It was an absurd and wonderful feast, Allison finding herself suddenly famished from her voyage into the dark outlands of depression.
"I never should have gotten you involved," she said, at the round cherry table covered with the remains of their splurge.
"I'm glad you did," he said. "I like the orangutans. It's not like anything I've ever done before, holding them, talking about them to strangers. But it feels good. Like I'm stretching, finding some new muscles. I appreciate your coming to get me like that, dragging me out of the house, out of my navel gazing."
"You're welcome," she said.
"I'd probably still be in there. Drinking tequila, feeling sorry for my idiot self."
"I'm giving it up," she said. "The Wildlife Protection League, all of it. Going to start spending more time with Sean and Harry. Learn how to be a mother again, a wife. Just forget the White brothers. Tell the police what I know and then just let it all go."
"And if the police don't do anything?"
"They won't. But that doesn't matter. I'm through with it, exhausted. Everything I've been doing, look what it's caused. Look at the horrible, shitty mess I've made."
Thorn nodded.
She said, "You're not going to try to talk me out of it?"
"Out of which part?"
"Any of it."
He said nothing, a sad smile rearranging his face. The man used silence like a second language. More honest eloquence in that one pained squint than Harry was capable of in a year of gilded talk.
"This guilt," she said, thumping a fist between her breasts. "I've tried to keep going, ignore it, outrun it."
"But the little bastard is tenacious, isn't he?"
He smiled, had a sip of his wine.
"Like one of those viruses that never dies," she said. "It gets into you, finds a place to hibernate. From then on it can pop up whenever it gets hungry again. Nothing you can do about it. It feels like it's going to be there forever."
Thorn brushed some crumbs off the edge of the table into his hand, then dusted them into his plate.
"Lately I've developed some fondness for the things I can't do anything about," he said. "It's all the other goddamn things that still give me trouble."
She made a bed for him on the rattan couch. Set up an old black oscillating fan on the dining table, aimed it his way. There was an awkward moment as she was heading for her room, about to bid him good night, a clumsy dance, he in I her way, she in his.
He reached out, put a hand on her forearm, drew them out of their bumbling orbit. She faced him, swept her free hand through her hair. He seemed reluctant to let her go.
"It doesn't matter to me," he said. "If you don't want to pursue this thing with the White | brothers, drop it right here, that's fine by me.
"I Don't feel like I'm pressuring you one way or the other."
"I'll sleep on it," she said. "Decide tomorrow."
He told her good night and stepped forward, pressed a kiss to her cheek. Not the least bit | brotherly, but not pushing for more either.
She didn't know why, but the words came into her throat, thrummed her vocal cords and were spoken before Thorn's kiss vanished from her cheek.
"I've been planning to leave Harry for months, but now I don't know. I'm confused. Sean pleaded with me to stay with him, to try to make it work out. Maybe she's r
ight."
"Maybe she is."
She stepped back from him.
"But I don't know," Allison said. "Sometimes I think I'd be better off by myself. Live alone, like you do."
She found herself massaging the finger again and pulled her hands apart, let them hang at her side. A long roll of thunder grumbled in the west.
"You've seen those pictures," Thorn said. "A row of chimps squatting down, three or four, each one's picking lice off the one beside it. Working together, the common good. I see that, and then I think about orangutans. You know, how they'll swing down out of the trees to mate for a few days, but otherwise they're by themselves. Up in the canopy, fifty years, sixty, hardly ever seeing another one of their kind. Nobody to pick their lice."
A breeze sifted through the house, a spicy hint of approaching rain.
"And who picks them off you, Thorn?"
He smiled, drew a breath.
"Oh, I've learned to get most of them myself. Now and then I stumble on somebody willing to trade off. But it isn't easy. It's not the life I would've chosen. Up in the trees."
"Do we get to choose?" she said.
He bowed his head slightly, considered it a moment.
"Maybe not," he said. "Maybe not."
She was silent. Thorn raised his eyes, looked intently into hers, observing her in a way no one had for years. As though he were seeing someone Allison had left behind long ago. Seeing her with a raw completeness, undistracted by her various aliases. Not Allison the wife, the mother. Not Allison the wildlife vigilante, the social activist.
Seeing instead Allison Ravenel. A thirteen-year-old girl fishing with her father alongside Thorn and Kate Truman thirty years ago. And seeing Allison Farleigh. A grown woman, vigorous, standing now in a cabin in the center of a stark and empty land. As if Thorn were looking at a person Allison had gradually abandoned in the countless qualifiers of growing older. Like a great river whose strength has dwindled as it wanders down a thousand lesser tributaries.
Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4) Page 20
