Читать книгу Safe At Home - Carolyn McSparren - Страница 7

SOMETHING TRIGGERED the alarm on the front gate. Pete Jacobi jerked awake, narrowed his eyes at the lighted alarm clock beside his bed. Two-thirteen in the morning. He’d been asleep less than three hours.

He groaned and raised his head. Icy rain still thrummed against his bedroom window. The powerful halogen motion detectors mounted under the eaves and by the front gate shattered the droplets into prisms.

If that was some local teenager trying to sneak in to test his nerve against the elephants, he’d picked the wrong weather for it. The girls were undoubtedly snoring contentedly in their enclosure. Or would have been until the noise woke them. They’d be pretty grumpy if any spotty adolescent kid from Hollendale tried to hoo-raw them tonight.

During the summer the girls often roamed the east Tennessee hills of the sanctuary most of the night, but they didn’t like really cold weather. Although when the trees started to ice up, and Pete tried to insist that they wear their earmuffs, they’d pay little attention to him. If they wanted them off, off they’d come.

He swung out of bed, jerked on the jeans he’d thrown on the floor, thrust his bare feet into the muddy rubber boots he’d dropped beside them. “Damn!” he snarled as his cold toes met the even colder rubber.

The lights and alarms should have spooked any normal intruder home to Hollendale by now. Pete shut off the alarm and heard in its place the insistent burping of the intercom he’d installed at the gate a couple of months earlier. Someone was still out there. He hit the talk switch. “Yeah?”

The voice that answered him was female and full of concern. “Please, you’ve got to help her! She’s bleeding.”

He jerked fully awake. “I’m a vet, not a doctor.”

“I need a vet. I’ve got to get her inside. She’s so cold already, I’m afraid she’ll die on the way to town. I think somebody shot her.”

He ran his hand over his hair and blinked to clear his eyes. “Okay, okay, lady. Relax. I’ll come open the gate.” He yanked his wet poncho from the hook beside the door and pulled it on over his shoulders. It felt as though he’d jumped into a vat of raw oysters. He took a deep breath, pulled open the office door and sprinted for the high-wire gates. His feet slipped and threw globs of mud onto his legs at every step.

She was hanging on to the far side of the gate with both hands. The moment she saw him, she turned and climbed into the front seat of a small pickup truck and slammed the door.

He clicked the padlock loose and began to pull the tall wire gates open. “Tomorrow I’m ordering an electric gate opener,” he snarled into the teeth of the wind. He wouldn’t, of course. Any extra money went to feed his girls, not to make his life easier.

The moment he’d shoved the left-hand gate open far enough for her to squeeze the pickup through, she floored the thing. He’d been intending to climb into the passenger seat beside her. Instead, her tires threw up a wall of icy muck that hit him square in the face. He yelped.

“Thanks a bunch!” he called after her as he closed the gate and hooked the open padlock over the hasp. He wiped his face with one hand and strode back to the office. She’d slammed on her brakes and now stood beside the bed of the truck. She was wearing a dark parka with the hood pulled forward over her face. He could tell nothing about her except that she was maybe five foot six and slim.

“Help me. I can’t move her.”

He leaned over the back of the truck expecting to see whatever dog or possum or coon she’d run over with her car. His mouth fell open. He turned to the woman. “Is she yours?”

“No. I found her on the road. She’s so still. She’s not dead, is she?”

He reached a tentative hand next to the animal’s rib cage. He felt a flutter. “She’s alive, but I don’t know for how long.” Without glancing at the woman, he said, “Go around the side of the building to the parking area and in through the small door. Inside you’ll find a button that raises the overhead door. I’ll drive her in.”

He realized as the woman started away that if she disappeared at this moment he would have no idea what she looked like or who she was.

He spun the tires getting the truck started, then moved it toward the growing oblong of light as the door lifted. He drove into the cavernous room, turned off the engine and stepped out of the truck. “Okay, close the door,” he said. “Sleet’s getting in.”

She punched the button again, and the door began to lower. He jabbed at the intercom button on the telephone mounted on the wall beside him.

“There’s no time to call anybody,” she said urgently.

He waved her away. After a moment, a sleepy voice answered.

“Dad?” he said. “Throw on some clothes and get over here fast. Bullet wound. No, the elephants are fine.” Pete glanced at the truck. “You are not going to believe this. Some crazy woman’s just dragged in a half-grown female African lion.”

“OKAY, BOY, what’s all this about a lioness?” Mace Jacobi slammed the door to the parking area behind him, shucked his parka and gloves and walked over to the pickup truck.

“Take a look,” Pete said. He’d hung his poncho beside the side door and slipped into a sweatshirt. He knelt on the lowered tailgate. “Can you believe this?”

Mace peered over his son’s shoulder. “Well, I’ll be damned!” He turned to the woman who hung over the side of the truck. Her fingers gently caressed the golden pelt of the animal. “She yours?”

“No. I almost ran over her on the road. At first I thought she was a big yellow dog, but the tail was too long, and she didn’t move like a dog. Then she turned and looked at me and her eyes went red in the headlights and…” She took a deep breath. “She just keeled over. I jammed on the brakes and slid all over the road. Almost wound up going over the side of Bryson’s Hollow.”

“Bryson’s Hollow?” Pete asked. “What’s a lone woman doing driving the Hollow road this time of night?”

“I live down there. Please, there’s no time for this. Can you help her?”

“Got to get her out of this truck and onto the examining table,” Pete said. “Can’t do it alone. Don’t know how you managed it.”

“I carry a big piece of plywood in the back of my truck. I dragged her onto it and used my trailer winch to haul her up.”

“Madam,” Mace said formally, “I take my hat off to you.”

“She could have bitten your head off,” Pete said. “Come on, Dad, she can’t weigh more than a couple of hundred pounds.”

“More or less. Madam, please be so good as to position your truck so that the rear end backs up to that steel table over there. No sense in carrying her farther than we have to.”

Five minutes later, Pete and Mace Jacobi had the unconscious cat on the steel table. She was limp, but the heavy bones and sinews of her body looked like steel cables under her fur.

“What can I do?” the woman asked.

“You’ve done your part,” Pete answered. “Dad, better get a full syringe of ACE ready in case she starts to come around. She’s going to be pretty pissed off when she does.”

“If she does,” Mace said as he slid his stethoscope onto the animal’s rib cage.

Pete gently probed the blood-matted pelt on her shoulder. “Doesn’t seemed to have nicked any major vessels, and it’s so damned hog-killing cold, the bleeding’s pretty much stopped. Somebody shot her all right. No obvious exit wound. Bullet must still be in there.”

“I’ll get the X ray.” Pete turned and nearly fell over the woman. “Why don’t you go sit down back there out of the way and let us work.”

She backed off as Pete rolled a heavy piece of steel equipment out of a cabinet in the corner by the office door.

“Listen, I can’t keep calling you lady. You got a name?”

“Newsome. Tala Newsome.”

Tala? Odd name. He wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly. But Newsome he recognized. The Newsomes owned most of the county and half the businesses in Hollendale. Irene Newsome was on the county council Mace had dealt with when he built the sanctuary.

Tala Newsome shoved back the hood of her parka and began to unzip it. Her long black braid was soaked and hair stuck to her cheeks in pencil-thin tendrils. Her nose was red, her cheeks and lips denim blue. And her eyes…

He stopped in midstride as her eyes hit him like a cannon shot. Then his father’s voice jerked him back to the present.

“Don’t stand there, boy. She’s starting to warm up. Don’t need her jumping up and tearing our heads off.”

TALA SANK into a wooden kitchen chair propped against the metal bars that closed off the back section of the enormous room. The moment she sat down she realized how tired she was and how badly her shoulders ached.

Even without the lioness, the drive out to the farmhouse in Bryson’s Hollow was no picnic. After midnight with winter sleet pelting the road, it was downright treacherous. Nights like this she wished she still lived in town with Irene, Vertie and the kids.

But she couldn’t—not permanently. She’d tried staying in the big old Newsome mansion after Adam died, but as wonderful as Vertie and Irene were, she’d felt as if by leaving the farmhouse she’d somehow broken her last connection to her dead husband. She needed to be in Bryson’s Hollow for now. Maybe someday she could move on, but not now, not yet. Not with so much unfinished business and so many promises to keep.

Besides, if she’d stayed with the Newsomes tonight, she’d never have found the lion.

She blinked her eyes, shook her head to clear it, and watched the two men working in the circle of light over the steel table. The rest of the storeroom, or hospital, or whatever it was, lay in shadow.

The younger one, Pete, was doing the surgery. She’d known he was here, of course. The whole town knew about the elephant sanctuary, but she’d never seen him, not even at the grocery store.

He had a good face, a strong jaw and crinkles at the corners of his eyes. At the moment they looked more like frown lines than laugh lines, but he might have a nice smile if he ever bothered to use it.

Of course, who wouldn’t be grouchy being dragged out of bed at two in the morning in a sleet storm?

His father wasn’t grouchy, though. He’d been woken up as well, but he’d spoken kindly to Tala. He was almost courtly, and he’d taken time to smooth his iron-gray hair and beard. But then, Tala hadn’t given Dr. Pete Jacobi time to do much except throw on his clothes.

He looked a great deal like his father, only bigger. Much bigger. Like a professional football player. Or a big, brown grizzly. And when he’d stripped off that wet poncho, he had real muscles, and lots of chest hair. Broad shoulders…kind of a hunk…

In the semidarkness where she sat, she felt her eyelids grow heavy and jerked awake.

She ought to open the overhead door and drive back out into the night. She’d done all she could do for the cat, and she’d worked a double shift at the Food Farm tonight.

She needed sleep badly. She could simply unhook the padlock on the front gate and close it after her. The younger Dr. Jacobi hadn’t actually locked the thing, merely hooked it over the hasp. The men probably wouldn’t even notice she’d gone.

Except that the minute that door began to lift, the wind and rain would whip in again. And one of them would have to leave what he was doing to close it behind her.

Excuses. What she really wanted—needed—was to stay until they finished, until they could tell her whether or not the cat would live. She couldn’t bear the thought that it might die.

She’d been through too much death.

She leaned her head back against the bars behind her and closed her eyes. In an instant Adam’s face swam up from her subconscious. Didn’t often happen nowadays. She’d almost forgotten what having a husband was like, the sound of his laughter, the warmth of his arms around her…

She felt the gentlest caress on the top of her head as though someone had picked up a hank of hair between thumb and index finger. She blinked her eyes and yawned. The two men still worked halfway across the big room.

There it was again. A fairy’s breath that ruffled her hair slightly. She rubbed her hand over her head and felt the bars behind her. Imagination. Too little sleep. Too much excitement. She relaxed again, and a moment later felt a tug on her hair. She reached behind her and felt…

She stifled a scream, jumped up and spun around. An elephant’s trunk extended through the bars behind her. She froze. It slid gently over her face, down her cheek, then patted her shoulder, almost as though consoling her.

She gulped, moved slowly back four paces, and realized that she was looking into the faces of three large gray lumps clustered on the other side of the bars. There were six concerned eyes, not two.

The elephants stood shoulder to shoulder, swinging their trunks gently back and forth. She hadn’t heard them approach—not a single footfall or shuffle on the concrete floor of what must be their cage. Where had they come from? Dark as it was, she could swear they hadn’t been there earlier when she sat down.

She felt a sough of wind against her face. Around the corner of the enclosure in deep darkness she saw some kind of heavy plastic sway slightly. It looked like the barrier at a car wash. She fought down a giggle. She’d seen dog doors and cat doors, but never an elephant door.

The center elephant, by far the largest, with skin as heavily wrinkled as a hundred-year-old crone, reached out to her again. This time Tala put her palm up so that she could feel its soft breath on her fingertips. She reached out her other hand and stroked the long gray nose tentatively.

She felt her eyes begin to well with tears.

“Got the blasted thing!” Pete Jacobi shouted. Tala jumped, the elephants snuffled and swung away. The moment was over.

She turned to the light. Pete held up a round object in a pair of steel forceps. “Looks heavy—.357 Magnum at a guess. Came from a fair distance, otherwise there’d be more damage and one hell of an exit wound. Good thing it wasn’t a rifle. What nut would go after a lion with a handgun?”

“For that matter,” Mace answered, his head bent, his gloved hands busy with the wound, “who’d have a lion around here to go after in the first place?”

Pete turned to look at Tala and smiled. She felt her heart turn over. His eyes really did crinkle at the corners, and he had a nice, wide mouth. She started to smile back when she realized he was looking past her.

“Hello, girls,” he said. “Not real thrilled at the sleet?”

She heard an answering snuffle and stomp. “Let me get this wound closed and I’ll introduce you,” he said. Whether he planned to introduce her to the elephants or the elephants to her, she wasn’t entirely certain. She suspected his priorities were elephants first, human beings second.

Tala knew no more than anyone in Hollendale knew about the two veterinarians. She’d seen Mace buying groceries at the Food Farm, but she’d never actually met him, although Irene liked him.

Apparently the younger one seldom went outside the sanctuary, and when he did, he pointedly ignored any effort to make friends. A real sourpuss, her mother-in-law had called him.

But watching his fingers as he worked over the big cat, Tala knew she’d been right to stop here, instead of driving the lion into town to Dr. Wiskowski’s clinic. The way this vet smiled at his girls proved he wasn’t a sourpuss with animals.

“Have you thought what we’re going to do with her?” Mace asked his son. “We’re certainly not set up for big cats, and she’s got to be under constant supervision.”

“One thing at a time, Dad.” Pete’s hands made gestures over the cat’s shoulder. “While I’m closing, better give her a massive shot of antibiotics,” he said.

“Right.” Mace went to a drug cabinet along the wall, pulled a small key off a hook beside it, opened the cabinet and rooted among the bottles and jars. He held one up and squinted at it over the tops of his bifocals. “This ought to do.” Then he pulled a large syringe from a drawer under the cabinet and filled it with milky liquid from the bottle. He returned the remaining medication, carefully locked the cabinet again and hung the key beside it.

Mace held up a small piece of the lioness’s fur and slid the needle sideways into her neck. She didn’t stir.

“Shouldn’t she be waking up?” Tala asked.

“Bite your tongue,” Mace said.

“The longer she’s out of it, the safer for everybody,” Pete added. “I’d prefer not to give her anything to put her under again if I can help it. Her heartbeat’s a little weak. Big cats can lose a fair amount of blood without too much danger, but we have no way of knowing how much she bled before you found her, and it’s not as though we’ve got a handy donor to give her a transfusion.”

Mace peered down at the animal. “Neat. Couldn’t have done better myself. Okay, now what?”

“I’ve still got that old dog kennel you used for the beagles,” Pete said. “Won’t hold her if she decides to climb out over the top, but with that shoulder, I don’t think she’ll feel much like moving for a couple of days. We can hook it together in a few minutes, put down some blankets and a water dish and close up the room.”

“And pray she doesn’t wake up and destroy the place.”

Pete glanced at Tala. “You have any idea what you were getting into?”

“No. But I probably would have done it anyway,” she said. “Only I don’t know how I’ll pay you…”

“Don’t sweat it,” Mace said, smiling at her over the tops of his glasses. “Don’t often get a chance these days to work on a big cat. Kind of miss it.”

“We’ll work something out,” Pete said.

Mace turned to his son. “Come on, boy, let’s find those kennel panels.”

“Can I help?” Tala asked.

“Nope. Climb into your truck and shut the doors in case she wakes up before we get back. Leave the windows up.”

“She wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Yeah. Right,” Pete said, and looked down at the cat. “Let’s get her on the ground before we leave. Don’t want her coming to and falling off the table onto the concrete.”

“Get a blanket. We can lay her on that and then slide her onto it when we get the cage set up,” Mace said.

Thirty minutes later all three of them grabbed the blanket and slid the cat into the kennel. It was six feet high and built of sturdy steel cyclone fencing, but it had no cover, nor was it anchored to the concrete. One good bash by a large furry body could send it crashing to the floor.

At the moment, however, the cat slept. Pete filled a plastic bucket with water, set it in the corner of the pen and securely fastened the door to the enclosure behind him. “Keep your fingers crossed,” he said.

“You better get on home,” Mace told Tala kindly. “It’s nearly four in the morning. Your folks’ll be worried about you. Want to call them before you leave?”

“No one will miss me,” she said, and realized how pitiful she sounded. “I mean, I live alone at the moment.” She fought a yawn. She was suddenly desperately tired, so tired her knees started to give way.

She felt a sinewy arm around her waist, and grasped Pete’s shoulder.

“Hey! Don’t pass out now!” he snapped.

“She’s out on her feet,” Mace said. “No way can you drive home, my dear. Not along the Hollow road.” He turned to his son. “She’d better bed down here for a few hours.”

“Here?”

She pulled away from him. “I’ll be fine.”

“No, Dad’s right. You’re punchy. You’ve got no business driving as far as the gate.” Pete walked off toward the door at the front of the room. “Come on. You can have the sofa. I’d give you the bed, but I’ve messed it up already, and you fit on the sofa better than I would.”

“I couldn’t—I’ve—you’ve…”

“I won’t attack you.”

“Better take him up on it,” Mace said, and kneaded her shoulder gently. “I’ll fix you one of my special caffeine bombs in the morning. That’ll keep you awake until Christmas.”

She glanced at the lioness. “Do you think maybe she might wake up before I have to leave?”

“Maybe.”

That decided her. She nodded.

“You go on,” Mace said. “I’ll back your truck out and leave it outside by the front door with the keys in it. Don’t want claw marks on it if she gets out.”

“Right,” Pete said.

“Oh, and Pete, if you do somehow manage to sleep in, I’ll feed the girls in the morning and check on our patient. I’ll wake you if I need you,” Mace said.

Pete hunkered down a moment beside the cat, whose great pink tongue lolled between long, white teeth. “She’ll probably wake us up early. If she starts mouthing off inside these metal walls, it’s gonna sound like the hallelujah chorus.”

Mace yawned and opened the door of Tala’s truck. “Whatever happens to her now, my dear, take it from me, you did a fine job.”

Pete shepherded her through the door in the far wall that led down a short hall to his quarters.

“What a sweet man,” she said when the door closed behind them.

“Tell that to the vet students he’s terrorized over the years.”

“Vet students?”

“Yeah. He taught veterinary medicine for twenty-five years. Lived and breathed it. Now he’s retired, he’s terrorizing me.” Pete opened a closet door and pulled out blankets, bedding and a pillow. “Now, we have to get you out of those wet clothes.”

“I just want a flat place to lie down before I fall down,” she said, looking around. The small living room obviously also served both as office and kitchen.

The gray tweed couch was plenty long enough, but from the looks of it, was nearly as old as the doctor himself. At this point, however, lumpy mattresses were the least of her concerns.

“You can have one of my old sweatshirts.” Pete looked her up and down. “Probably come down to your knees. And I keep fresh toothbrushes in the guest bathroom.”

For unexpected female overnight guests, no doubt. The ones who did not sleep on the couch. Although if he was as gracious to them as he’d been to her, she doubted he’d have many takers. “You’re very kind.”

He seemed to withdraw instantly from her small compliment. He tossed the bedding onto the sofa, disappeared into his bedroom, and a moment later tossed a gray sweatshirt on top of the pile. “Here. The guest bathroom’s down the hall. You passed it on the way in. Fresh towels under the sink.”

“Thank you.”

“G’night,” he said and shut his bedroom door. Not quite a slam, but close.

She made up her bed, stripped off her wet clothes in the bathroom and slipped on the sweatshirt. It had shrunk so short it barely covered her crotch, but was so big through the chest and so long in the arms that she probably resembled one of his “girls.” She waved a gray arm at the mirror like a trunk and considered trumpeting, but thought better of it. She didn’t think he’d be amused.

She tried to wring some of the water out of her long braid, pulled off the rubber band that held it and loosened her hair with her fingers. Come morning it would look as though rats had taken up residence, but at least it would be dry.

She realized she had left her purse with her comb inside her truck. It could darned well stay there. She’d retrieve it tomorrow morning.

She crawled onto the couch, snuggled down and listened to the rain drum on the windows.

She’d get up early and drive to the Newsome mansion in time to have breakfast with Vertie, Irene and the kids. She could hardly wait to tell them her wild story. Surely even thirteen-year-old Rachel couldn’t act blasé about a real live lion. Eight-year-old Cody would probably beg to skip school and drive right back to the sanctuary to see for himself. Her children thought she was pretty boring. If this didn’t make her at least a little interesting, nothing would.

She heard something more like a cough than a roar from that big room. Tala was up and through the door before she gave a thought to what might be waiting for her on the other side.

The lioness eased herself up on her good right paw and raised her head as she let out another half roar.

Tala dropped to her knees beside the kennel and laid a tentative hand flat against the wire mesh, ready to snatch it away. Instead, the cat butted her forehead against the mesh, for all the world like a house cat. “Hello, baby,” Tala crooned as she worked her fingers through the mesh to scratch behind the lioness’s ears. The animal rewarded her with a low thrumming sound.

“Are you nuts?” Pete Jacobi said from behind her.

“Look, she’s awake,” Tala said softly.

The lioness sat up and bared her teeth at Pete.

“Get out of there!” He grabbed her arm and hauled her to her feet, then practically dragged her back through the door. Suddenly he seemed to realize he was holding a barefoot woman wearing nothing but a pair of lace underpants and his old sweatshirt. He dropped his hands and backed off, although she could have sworn that the look he gave her legs was appreciative.

A moment later he was his old grim self. “Woman, don’t you go through that door again under any circumstances. You hear me? The next time she could be sitting on top of the file cabinet waiting to bite your head off.”

“But—”

“Listen,” he said as though she were about three years old. “That is a lion in there. An L-I-O-N. It is not some big old pussycat. It is a carnivorous wild animal, and it’s hurt. It doesn’t know why it’s hurt or who hurt it, and it will not differentiate between the good guys and the bad. You, lady, are not its rescuer, you are breakfast. Are we clear on that?”

“But—”

“Are we clear?”

She nodded.

“Now go to bed and let me get a couple of hours’ sleep. And if she roars again, stick your head under the pillow and ignore her.”

But Tala found herself straining to hear another of those chuffing sounds.

After about five minutes of quiet, she began to drift off. The last face to swim into her consciousness was not Adam’s, but Pete Jacobi’s, his fierce amber eyes glowing out of a craggy face that seemed to morph into the face of a male lion with a heavy mane in place of his unruly hair. The face opened its mouth, but instead of that momentary smile she’d seen when he looked at the elephants, she saw only very long and very sharp teeth. The better to eat you with, my dear, she thought as sleep finally claimed her.