Kathleen Creighton - Lady Killer

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, the 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.

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.

I don’t know how long we stand there, the three of us, staring into each other’s eyes. Then, suddenly, the lion twists its body and bounds away over the rocks and is gone.

Elena gives a little gasp and looks at me. Her face is pale, and there is moisture on her cheeks. “Don’t tell Mama,” I say, and she shakes her head, quickly and hard. “We can’t tell anyone-ever,” I say as she wipes her cheeks with her hands. “If we do, they’ll come with guns and shoot it. You have to promise.”

She nods, sniffs and says, “She didn’t hurt us.”

But she takes my hand again as we walk back to the camp, and I feel a prickling on the back of my neck, as if yellow lion eyes are watching me all the way.

“Wow,” Daniel said. “She’s never done that before. Look, Mom. She’s not even afraid.”

Tony looked up at Brooke and shrugged. “Just got the knack, I guess,” he said, making light of it because his chest felt peppery inside and his world still shivered around its edges with the vividness of the memory flashback.

He heard her take a shuddering breath. “Daniel, time for you to get started on your homework. You have some makeup work to do. Don’t even think about arguing.”

Daniel hurriedly closed his mouth, evidently having been ready to do more than think about it. He let his drooping shoulders and hanging head show how unfair he thought it was, and lumbered off in the loose, disjointed way of disappointed children everywhere. Tony vividly recalled employing the same drama tactics, to roughly the same effect.

“He sure does mind well,” he remarked, and she made a dry sound that might have been a laugh.

“He’s been on his best behavior since…all this happened.” She said it without much expression in her voice but couldn’t keep the shadows of everything she’d been through in the recent past from flashing across her face.

Couldn’t keep it from Tony, anyway, because he had an eye trained to notice such subtleties. The tension in her facial muscles made his own ache.

Gently, not wanting to distress her more, he finally asked the question she’d already offered to answer. “What happened here?” When she didn’t reply immediately, he said, “I promised I wouldn’t write or photograph anything about it, and I won’t. But you’re right-I would like to know.”

He’d meant to leave it there, but she finished for him as if he hadn’t. “Whether you’re in the company of a killer or not?”

She crouched down beside him and put her face close to the wire and her fingers through it, and the cougar licked her fingers and butted her head up against the wire like a house cat wanting to be petted. Tony heard a peculiar rumbling sound, almost a vibration felt in his bones rather than heard, and with a small sense of wonder, he realized the animal was purring.

With her eyes closed, Brooke fought to gain control of her emotions, wondering why it seemed so tempting to give in to them here, now, with this strangely charismatic and imposing man. She drew in a breath and began.

“I was late getting home from town…”

He listened intently, not interrupting, and when she was through with her story, she stood up, and so did he. She looked down at Lady, who, at some point during her narrative had flopped down at the base of the fence and was lying stretched out with her back to them, close enough to touch through the wire. She seemed completely relaxed except for the tip of her tail, which twitched now and then.

“She seems to have accepted you completely,” she said with a small laugh, because she was in suspense, wanting to know how he was going to respond. Because she needed so badly to be believed. “For her to turn her back on you like this, it means she trusts you.”

“What can I say?” he said, showing that incongruous dimple. Then he cleared his throat, and his voice was abrupt, almost harsh. “Mind if I ask you some questions?”

She shrugged and spread her hands. Not saying the words, but thinking, What does it matter? Feeling gray and dismal and hopeless.

“I guess what I don’t understand is how they think you could have done this when your-excuse me-when Duncan was already dead when you got here, and Daniel is your witness to that fact. What? Do they think he’s lying to protect you?”