Wild Action Page 3

  Actually, Nick had assumed there’d be a lot more animals than there were, but when he told Carly that, she gave him a sidelong glance and said, “Trained animals all need to be worked with or they don’t stay trained. That’s where the agency part comes in. We have a lot of animals under contract that are owned by other people. Everything from lizards and snakes to tigers and an elephant.”

  When she lapsed into silence, he immediately started thinking about the bear again. “This Attila,” he said. “How did you end up with him?”

  “He was orphaned by a hunter—would have died if we hadn’t taken him in. He’d either have starved to death or been eaten by an adult bear.”

  Bears didn’t exactly sound like charming animals, but Nick kept the thought to himself.

  “So Gus and I bottle-raised him,” Carly went on, “until he got too big to live in the house.”

  “Ahh. And he doesn’t mind being in a cage now? All by himself?”

  “Oh, he’s not lonely. Bears aren’t pack animals, so he’d be on his own in the wild. And he doesn’t live in a cage. Gus didn’t believe in caging wild animals, and neither do I.”

  “You mean…” Nick cleared his throat uneasily. “You mean, he wanders around loose? Like the rabbits?”

  “Well, no. He’d find some of the other animals just too tempting, so he’s got a fenced field—with a pond to swim in and a bunker Gus built him for hibernating. We call it his cave.”

  Nick nodded, wishing it was January instead of July. He’d be a lot happier if Attila was hibernating, because he had a horrible feeling a fence wouldn’t stop a six-hundred-pound bear that really wanted out of its field. But maybe it was declawed and detoothed and whatever.

  When he asked, the look of utter horror on Carly’s face told him there wasn’t a chance. And he’d lay odds it was his forty-nine percent of the beast that included the claws and teeth.

  Apparently, Carly did mind reading on the side, because she said, “There’s nothing to worry about, Nick. Attila’s a real pet.”

  He nodded, but it was tough to get his head around the idea of a pet that weighed as much as three large men put together. “So…you’re not nervous working with him?”

  “No, not at all.”

  Without a doubt, that was the best news he’d heard since he’d learned they had a bear. He had every intention of doing his share of the work, for the next few weeks, but he’d be drawing the line at Attila. And that meant it was a darn good thing she had no problem with him.

  Carly drove a little farther up the parkway, breathing a sigh of relief when she spotted the exit sign for the highway. She’d missed it more than once in the past and always had a devil of a time making her way back.

  “I guess you’ve noticed I don’t have much sense of direction,” she said, pulling onto the exit ramp. “But I’ll be okay from here.”

  “Good.”

  “That’s how I ended up with Gus,” she went on when Nick said nothing more. “It was because I got lost.”

  “Oh?”

  “Uh-huh. I grew up in Kingston, which is where my parents still live. But after I finished high school I had a chance for a summer job in Toronto, and I took a wrong turn on the way there.”

  Nick eyed her for a minute, making her wish she’d kept quiet. Everybody had faults, though, and surely he couldn’t think that having a poor sense of direction ranked right up there with pulling wings off flies.

  “Isn’t there a major highway that runs between Kingston and Toronto?” he asked at last.

  “The one we’re on now,” she admitted. “But I guess I wasn’t paying attention and zigged when I should have zagged. At any rate, the car I’d borrowed quit on me, so I walked down the nearest side road until I reached a house—which turned out to be Gus’s. And when we got talking, he mentioned he’d been looking for someone to help with the animals.”

  “Then you just moved in with him?”

  Nick’s tone made her look at him. Surely he didn’t think…

  Just in case he did, she said, “I assume you didn’t mean moved in the way it sounded. I was an eighteen-year-old kid and Gus was fifty-nine, so there was certainly nothing like that.”

  “No. No, of course not.”

  “Everyone who’d ever worked full-time for him lived in the house. It only made sense.”

  “Right. All I was thinking was…most eighteen-year-olds wouldn’t have buried themselves out in the country. It couldn’t have done much for your social life.”

  The remark made her smile. Her mother had been worried about that from day one.

  “It was worth the trade-off,” she said honestly. “I love working with animals—it’s not really like working at all. So even though I’d only intended to stay through the summer, I ended up never leaving. And Gus gradually became like a favorite uncle to me. He was the sweetest man in the world. It’s too bad you didn’t get to know him.”

  “I had no chance to. He cut off contact with the family before I was born.”

  She didn’t reply for a moment, trying to decide if Gus would have minded her explaining things. Finally, she said, “He never intended that to be forever, you know.”

  “No?”

  “No, he assumed he’d eventually be able to cope with seeing her again.”

  “Seeing who again?”

  Carly glanced across the van once more, her heart sinking when she saw Nick’s puzzled expression. Surely she hadn’t put her foot in it, had she? “Your parents must have told you what happened,” she tried tentatively. “Why Gus left Edmonton.”

  “Well…yeah.”

  Nick sounded as puzzled as he looked, which meant she had said the wrong thing.

  “Actually, my parents told me all kinds of stories about Gus, but I’m not quite sure which one you were referring to.”

  “Oh. Well, if you’re not, then they didn’t tell you everything. So I should have kept quiet.”

  “Why? I can handle whatever you were going to say. So who did Gus think he’d eventually be able to cope with seeing again?”

  She stared ahead at the highway, not wanting to answer the question. But what else could she do?

  Making something up wasn’t an option. She hated being lied to, so she never lied to anyone else unless she felt it was really necessary.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter much at this point,” she finally said. “But Gus was in love with your mother.”

  “What!”

  “It’s true,” she told him gently. “They both were. Both Gus and your father. And when she chose your father, she broke Gus’s heart. That’s why he left town.

  “But he assumed that after enough time had passed he’d stop caring. I guess he never did, though. Then he learned your parents had died. I I’m sorry about that.”

  “Thanks,” Nick said, hoping she wouldn’t pursue the subject. His parents had been gone for five years, but he still didn’t like to talk about the crash.

  They’d taken up their Cessna knowing a storm was closing in. And ever since, he’d wished he’d objected more strongly to the way they flew regardless of the weather. Not that they’d have listened, but still…

  “Gus always kept in touch with a friend in Edmonton,” Carly continued. “Which is how he knew about their accident. And about your being a detective and all.”

  Nick nodded, then sat staring out at the passing countryside, his thoughts returning to the story Gus had told Carly.

  He’d certainly been a sly old fox, because the truth was what Nick’s parents had told him. There was no doubt about that. From the day his grandfather discovered that Gus had made off with their money, he’d never even allowed his elder son’s name to be spoken in his presence.

  But Gus had obviously reinvented his past, making it tragically romantic—which certainly fit with everything Nick had ever heard about him.

  Glancing across the van, he eyed Carly for a minute. In the bright sunlight, he could see there were pale freckles scattered across the bridge of her n
ose. Between that and the way the air conditioner’s breeze was playing with strands of her hair, she seemed a lot younger than she had in Brown’s office. Younger and very innocent-looking—the kind of woman who aroused a man’s protective instincts without even trying.

  Not that she’d aroused his. The only reason he was hanging around was to protect his own interests. Hers simply happened to coincide.

  “What did you know about your uncle?” she asked.

  He hesitated, then said, “I guess not as much as I thought” For half a second, he’d considered telling her the truth. But since she’d cared for Gus, it would only upset her—assuming she’d even believe it

  And she likely wouldn’t. If she’d worked with him for twelve years and referred to him as the sweetest man in the world, he must have really cleaned up his act

  “You obviously didn’t know he’d gotten into the animal-actor business,” she said. “But you’ll get a kick out of hearing how it happened. Initially, he won a share of Wild Action in a poker game.”

  Nick grinned. That sounded more like the uncle he’d always heard about He’d bet Gus had been cheating, too.

  Carly looked over at Nick once more, thinking that while he was smiling might be a good time to bring the conversation back to the subject of Attila. But when she tried, she couldn’t make the bear’s name come out, so she said, “Then, eventually, Gus took over the entire agency. It was a smaller operation in those days, and it wasn’t doing very well, but he’d discovered he was good with animals. So he bought a big piece of property and began gradually attracting clients.”

  Focusing on the road ahead once more, she told herself she was a chicken. And that she was going to have to tell Nick about the problem with Attila very soon.

  But maybe it would be better to wait until they got home and he’d unpacked. And it would probably help to give him a stiff drink of Gus’s best Scotch first.

  “What’s this movie we’re involved with?” he asked after she’d turned north onto Highway 12.

  “It’s called Two for Trouble. And it’s basically about two ten-year-old boys who take off from summer camp and get lost in the woods. That’s the part of the film Jay will be shooting on Gus’s…our property. A lot of it’s forest.”

  “And the stuff he’s shooting in Toronto?”

  “Oh, those scenes are supposedly in Manhattan. And the summer camp’s supposedly in upper New York State—but they’ll actually be using Camp Runa-Muck, near Lindsay.

  “At any rate, the opening scenes in the city show the parents getting the boys ready for camp. The adults are the name actors—Sarina Westlake and Garth Richards. You know them? She looks a lot like Meg Ryan, and he’s the Latin-lover type.”

  “Uh-huh. I know the two you mean. They’re married in real life, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. But in the movie they play single parents who fall in love while they’re helping search for their kids.”

  Nick waited for Carly to go on. When she didn’t, he said, “That’s it? That’s all there is to the plot?”

  “Well, Jay’s the kind of director who improvises, so I expect he’ll add a few extra wrinkles during the shooting.”

  “Or maybe a lot of extra wrinkles? I mean, it doesn’t exactly sound like a box office smash.”

  “Let’s just hope it is, because Gus held out for a small percentage of the profits.”

  “Oh? How small?”

  She held up her hand with her thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart

  “Oh,” Nick said, looking disappointed.

  “He did really well to get anything. In any event, the movie might turn out to be a lot better than the story line sounds. I’ve read the script, and there’s pretty good adventure and drama, what with the boys in a woods full of wild animals.”

  “And Attila’s one of the wild animals?”

  She nodded but didn’t elaborate. It really would be better to leave any further discussion of that until later.

  “We’re almost home,” she said, pointing toward the township sign and changing the subject.

  “Township of Scugog,” Nick read aloud.

  “In Ojibway, it means ‘muddy, shallow water.’”

  “Ahh.”

  When he seemed content to simply watch the passing scenery for the remainder of the trip, Carly let her thoughts drift back to the meeting in Brown’s office. Nick had taken the bad news a lot more coolly than she would have. But she had a horrible feeling he wasn’t going to be even half as cool when it came to Attila.

  Turning onto the Sixth Line, she decided it might be smart to give her new partner four or five drinks of Gus’s best Scotch before they talked about Attila.

  WHEN THEY TURNED ONTO the gravel road that Carly said led to the house, Nick could see she hadn’t been joking about a lot of their property being forest.

  Huge trees overhung the road on either side, with only the hydro poles and power lines to indicate this wasn’t really the middle of nowhere. Then the road curved and they were at one edge of a fifteen-or twenty-acre clearing with the house ahead in the distance.

  Built of gorgeous old fieldstone, it had white gingerbread trim on both the second-story gables and the overhang of the porch. He was just about to comment on how nice it was when four large gray blurs appeared from nowhere and streaked toward the van.

  “Wolves?” he said anxiously. “You didn’t tell me we had wolves.”

  “We don’t. Those are the dogs. We took them because they looked so much like gray wolves, even as pups, but they’re actually half husky and half malamute.

  “They’re perfectly safe. They don’t even bother the rabbits,” she added, giving him an amused glance as she pulled the van to a stop. “Their names are Harpo, Chico, Groucho and Zeppo. Collectively, of course, we refer to them as the Marx brothers.”

  And Uncle Gus, Nick remembered someone once mentioning, had been a huge Marx brothers fan.

  “I said we, didn’t I?” Carly murmured with a sad little smile. “I wonder how long it’ll take before I stop doing that.”

  She got out of the van and hugged each of the dogs in turn. Then they rushed around to the passenger’s side and stood eyeing Nick through the window— drooling as if they were looking at lunch.

  Checking them out from up close, he wondered if Carly was certain they weren’t at least part wolf. They were one hell of a size, and he’d never seen any other dogs with those sinister-looking yellow eyes.

  Telling himself they weren’t a whole lot bigger than the German shepherds the police used, he opened his door and climbed out—the heat and humidity hitting him hard.

  It had been hot in Alberta, but that was a dry heat. Ontario was at least as hot and sixty times more humid.

  He cautiously extended his hand and let the dogs sniff it. Despite their appearance, they seemed friendly enough, so he risked taking his eyes off them long enough to get his suitcase and jacket from the back.

  “I thought Dylan might still be here, but his truck’s gone,” Carly said. “The high school kid who’s been helping out,” she explained.

  Nick nodded, then gestured toward the wooden building with the wired-in open area that stood maybe sixty yards away. “That’s the new aviary you mentioned?”

  “Uh-huh. Attila’s field is at the bottom of the hill beside the house, and the little barn you can see is where we feed the rabbits and stable the ponies. But let’s save the grand tour until after you unpack and change. And then maybe you’d like a drink. There’s some Scotch that Gus used to say was smooth as silk.”

  Glancing at his watch, Nick discovered it was only four-thirty. He’d been up for so long it seemed later. “It’s a little early for something as strong as Scotch,” he said, “but a cold beer would go down fine.”

  They’d just started for the porch when a tremendous roar rattled his eardrums. He stopped dead, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. Carly and the dogs continued along as if they were deaf.

  “What the h
ell was that?” he demanded, hurrying to catch up.

  “What was what?”

  “That noise.”

  “Oh, it was just Attila welcoming us home. He must have smelled us.”

  “From this distance?”

  Carly gave him another amused look. “Bears have an incredible sense of smell. They can scent things for miles. But he won’t mind if we don’t say hello until later.”

  Nick looked in the direction of the hill, half surprised to see the ground wasn’t vibrating. The last time he’d heard anything that loud he’d been in Costa Rica, watching the Arenal Volcano spew fire and boulders—and that had made him a little nervous, too.

  Following Carly the rest of the way to the house, he did his best to relax. After all, she’d told him she was perfectly fine with the bear, so there was no reason she’d need any help with it

  He just wished he didn’t have the sense there was something she hadn’t told him.

  CARLY CHANGED INTO SHORTS, then went back downstairs and chatted with Crackers while she made a jug of iced tea. The parrot loved company and was papertrained. So, years ago, Gus had built a big solariumtype addition to the kitchen, and Crackers was pretty good about staying in it.

  “Treat!” he demanded as she stirred the tea.

  She cut him a wedge of apple, then poured herself a glass of tea and put the jug into the fridge, lingering in front of the open door and thinking how heavenly the coolness felt

  The house was too old to have central air, and Gus hadn’t liked air-conditioning anyway. He’d always said that even window units were for wimps, so she’d learned to live with the hot, muggy spell that inevitably settled in during July. But she’d far rather live without it.

  Hearing footsteps on the stairs, she dug a beer from the back of the fridge and reluctantly closed the door. When she turned, Nick was standing in the kitchen eyeing Crackers.

  “Is he usually out of his cage?” he asked.