Different Dreams (13 page)

Malou put down her binoculars and made a few scrupulously impartial notes devoid of this maudlin anthropomorphism she was allowing herself to indulge in.

When she picked up the binoculars again, the new mother, Tulip, loped into view. She was carrying Mesquite, the infant Malou had watched her teaching to crawl the other day. Malou started making notes on the young mother's position when a sixth sense made her pick up her binoculars again. Something was not quite right about the way she was carrying her baby. Or, more exactly, the way the baby was allowing himself to be carried. Malou drew a fine focus on the pair, then tracked their movement for a few moments.

Malou let the binoculars sag on their strap as she stood and headed toward Tulip. It was clear that the baby
had
learned to crawl. Maybe just a few tottering steps, but they had been enough. Malou waited until Tulip put her baby down. The lifeless infant still clutched a few bright coyotillo berries in his little fist. She carried him back to the station.

Malou was surprised to find Ernie up and groggily pouring a cup of coffee into himself.

“Looks like another coyotillo poisoning,” she informed Ernie. “I'll go out back and find a nice place for him.”

“Out back” was the euphemism she'd always used for the small plot of land used as a cemetery, usually for macaques who had lived a full and happy life.

“No, wait,” Ernie stopped her. “I'd better conduct an autopsy.”

“Why? He's still holding some of the berries.”

“Just to eliminate all the variables,” Ernie countered, taking Mesquite from her.

Malou didn't argue; her mind was on more pressing matters. “We have no choice now. We've got to inspect the compound for coyotillo.”

“It'll be a waste of time.” Ernie put his mug of coffee down. He was now fully awake without the benefit of caffeine. “All we'd find would be one broken branch of coyotillo.”

“Ernie, level with me. Cam's not here now, so you don't have to confine yourself to nasty insinuations. You think that someone, and probably Cam, is tossing coyotillo over the compound fence.”

“So, he's Cam to you now, is he? Well, it doesn't matter. Yes, I think someone is trying to do away with the monkeys.”

“But why?”

“Why?” Ernie echoed cryptically. “If you could get the stars out of your eyes for a minute or two, you'd be able to see that answer quite clearly.”

“Listen, Ernie, where the welfare of the troop is concerned, there are no stars in my eyes.” She spoke sharply, guilt and defensiveness edging her words.

“Oh no? Then you wouldn't mind telling me where you were night before last and most of last night as well.”

“Since we are a team here, Ernie, I suppose you have a right to know. We were trapped in the rain. Cam mistook Stallings's original ranch house for the main house. It's on low ground and the road washed out. I'm sorry, I had no way of notifying you.”

“What a crock.”

Ernie's unequivocal response jarred Malou. “What do you mean? That's exactly what happened.”

“You're trying to tell me that Landell didn't even know how to get to the headquarters of the ranch he now owns. Forgive me, Malou, but that strains my credulity somewhat.”

Here, in the harsh light of morning, with Cam far away, Malou too was hard-pressed to believe in his ignorance.

“I imagine, though, that the next day Landell was conveniently able to find his way to his lost ranch house.”

“Actually, Jorge found us and showed Cam the way.”
Or at least that's what Malou presumed the hulking ranch hand was doing yesterday morning as he and Cam stood talking on the porch of the stone house. Of course, Cam had whisked Jorge outside so quickly that she didn't hear most of their conversation, so she couldn't really be sure. All she had heard was Jorge saying, “Everything is done as you ordered.” But she wasn't about to repeat the ominous-sounding words to Ernie.

“And you believed that?” Ernie's expression left no doubt that he was still unconvinced.

Malou had no more time to allay his doubts—or hers. “Listen,” she said, trying to reestablish the camaraderie that had existed between them, “I have an idea about how to pull something good out of these tragedies. I've never read about its being done before, but I was thinking, why don't we try substituting Bambi for Tulip's baby?”

“It'll never work.” Ernie pronounced his opinion as if it were the final word on the subject. His high-handedness was beginning to irritate Malou a bit.

“It might very well not work, but I certainly plan on trying.” Her assertiveness seemed to snap Ernie out of the fit of grouchiness that had overtaken him. “I'm sorry, Malou,” he said, sounding again like the rumpled, distracted, easygoing researcher he'd always been in the past. “This whole business about the research station being shut down and the troop disbanded has really gotten to me.”

Malou reached out a hand and placed it on his forearm. “That's why you've been working so hard, isn't it? You're racing the clock, trying to come up with some headline-grabbing report that will focus attention on Los Monos, aren't you?” Malou knew his motives. It was exactly what she would be doing if she weren't trying to save the troop by raising money through foundation grants.

Ernie shrugged. “Something like that,” he admitted.

“Don't worry,” she reassured him. “We'll keep the troop together. I've uncovered several strong leads already and I'll be following them up. And you shouldn't be so suspicious of Landell.” She had switched back to using Cam's last name without even thinking about it. “He really wants to give us a chance to keep Los Monos going just the way it is.”

Ernie stood. “I'd better be getting back to the lab.” His clothes looked as if he'd slept in them. With a pang, Malou realized that he probably had fallen into bed exhausted last night without bothering to take them off. Now that she understood what he was attempting to do, Malou was willing to forgive him a few outbursts. They were both after the same thing.

“Ernie, don't work too hard.”

“Everyone does what they have to do,” he said as he ambled back to the lab.

Malou carefully unlatched the cage and took Bambi
out, glad now for the extra bit of weight she'd managed to put on during her confinement. She wasn't as big as Tulip's baby, but at least the difference wouldn't be as obvious.

Outside, Tulip was racing from one new mother to the next checking the babies clutching their chest fur, searching for her own lost infant. Malou rubbed her hands thoroughly over Bambi, trying to transfer as much of Mesquite's scent to the orphan as she could.

Acting on instinct, Malou hunched down and approached the group of mother monkeys grazing on a patch of prickly pears. She clutched Bambi to her as if the monkey were her own baby and went to the edge of the group. Imitating the procedure the macaques had developed themselves only weeks after coming from Japan and seeing their first cactus, she gingerly plucked off a pale green cactus pad and dropped it to the ground. Bending down, she carefully rubbed it in the earth until all the spikes had been smoothed away. Then she flipped the pad over and debarbed the other side.

She stopped short of eating the macaque delicacy. Her aim had been to ingratiate herself to the group, and she had done that. She placed the pad on the ground, laid Bambi down next to it, and backed away.

At first none of the grazers seemed to pay much attention to either baby or cactus pad. But Malou noticed the furtive side glances of amber eyes. Then, bit by bit,
an adventurous monkey, Tulip's sister Tawny, edged over toward the food left behind by the hairless monkey who walked upright. Tawny poked several times at the pad, quickly withdrawing her hand after each probe. Finally, convinced that the cactus pad was exactly what it seemed to be, she snatched up the discarded treat and chomped into it.

Next, the abandoned infant claimed her attention. Malou stood back, barely breathing, remembering how interested Tawny had been in her sister's baby when Tulip was trying to teach Mesquite to crawl. Apparently, her interest in infants hadn't faded, for Tawny began stroking Bambi, then gently poking her. Malou bit her bottom lip, ready to intervene if the poking became too forceful. Finally, Tawny picked the baby up, delighted by her new plaything. Now came the tricky part.

On the other side of the cactus patch, Tulip raised her lilac eyelids and saw her sister with a baby. Tulip knew three things: Her baby was missing. Tawny did not have a baby. Tawny had already, at least once before, tried to steal
her
baby, Mesquite.

Tulip charged over to her sister and yanked Bambi away from her, then ran off to a secluded spot. There Tulip sniffed at the baby. Bambi burrowed in, clinging to Tulip's chest and searching for a teat. By now Tulip's breasts were painfully full. For a second, Tulip let the baby nurse. Then, after sniffing once more, she batted the baby away.

Malou's heart sank and the lip she held between her teeth trembled. She'd tried, but her ploy hadn't worked. Ernie was right. Bambi's life would have to be lived in a cage. She stood to collect the rejected baby. Before she could reach her, however, Tawny zoomed in and snatched the baby back. Even if Tulip wasn't interested,
she
was still enamored of her new plaything.

For a moment, Tulip watched her sister dandling the baby and warding off the other females who came to investigate the tiny newcomer. Then Tulip turned away from the imposter who had posed as her own little Mesquite, even going so far as to smell faintly like her lost baby.

Malou edged in closer, not wanting to frighten Tawny into running off with her new toy. Tawny and the chattering group of females around her backed off. Tulip's amber eyes cut back and forth to her sister and the baby and the upright ape creeping toward them.

Malou would never know how Tulip reached her decision. Did monkeys make compromises with life just as humans did? Had Tulip weighed the possibility of Mesquite's ever coming back to her and realized that he would not? That it might be better to have a baby that smelled faintly like her own, even though she was the wrong sex and a runty thing to boot, than no baby at all? Or was it simple monkey greed—an impulse not unknown to higher primates—to have that which another coveted?
Whatever the motivation, with troop attention focusing on the new baby and Malou creeping in toward it, Tulip made up her mind.

In a flash of ash blond fur and bared bicuspids, she tore into the center of the group around Bambi and grabbed her baby away from Tawny.
Her
baby. For that, Malou saw with enormous relief, was precisely what Bambi had become. Bambi, nursing hungrily, was now Tulip's baby.

Malou raced back to the station to tell Ernie the good news. But he was holed up in the lab with no inclination to emerge. His only response, muttered darkly through the locked door, was, “It won't last.”

“Thanks for the encouragement, Little Miss Sunshine,” Malou teased him, too happy to allow his pessimism to infect her.

He answered with a dry chuckle.

From the front room, Malou heard the chime of her cell phone, meaning that a text message had made its way through the sporadic cell service.

The building reverberated under Malou's tread as she hurried back to the front table and grabbed her phone. The sender was the great Edward Darden himself. In abrupt textese he wrote:

Have plan. Must speak with new owner. Have him call me. Keep fingers crossed. D.

Malou shuffled through a stack of papers, looking
for the letter she'd gotten two weeks ago from Stallings's lawyer telling her that Cam was the new owner of Los Monos. She dug out the piece of heavy cream stationery. Just as she remembered, it had the phone number and address of Cam's development company.

She went back to pound on the locked lab door again and tell Ernie she was going up to the ranch house to call Cam.

“Think you can find your way to the right one?” Ernie's question was muffled by the closed door.

Malou was determined not to let him needle her. “Who knows? I'll set off flares if I get lost. Listen, there's a remote chance that Cam might be out on a job site and I won't be able to reach him by phone. In that case, I'll have to run into San Antonio and track him down.”

“Of course, you'll ‘have' to run into San Antonio.” The sarcasm in Ernie's tone was unmistakable.

Malou chose to ignore it. “Any problems with the jeep when you took it into Laredo last week?”

“Malou, do you mind? I'm a researcher, not a car mechanic.”

And certainly not a diplomat,
Malou thought as she headed out for the jeep. The aged and abused vehicle sputtered to life with its usual cranky reluctance. A few minutes later, Malou was pulling up in front of the ranch house and enough bars appeared on her phone to guarantee a good signal. As she predicted, though, Cam
could not be reached by phone. The receptionist offered to draw Malou a map out to the job site if she would stop by the office. That appeared to be the only solution, and Malou agreed.

As Malou pointed the jeep north for the hour-and-a-half ride, she was forced to admit that the prospect did not displease her. That Ernie's sarcasm about her “having” to drive to San Antonio had hit a nerve of truth. She vowed to devote more time to her co-worker in the future. It wasn't easy being isolated out on a remote research station with only one other human to relate to. She'd never felt the isolation much since her work and temperament involved her so much with the troop. Ernie didn't have that involvement; he worked more with individual animals. Her absence and preoccupation recently must have been hard on him.

Odd, she reflected, the months she'd spent alone on various research stations had never affected her much. She'd certainly never felt the exhilaration she did now driving into the city. But she knew it wasn't the city, the prospect of being around people, that excited her so unbearably. One singular person was causing her stomach to roller-coaster and her pulse to race. One absolutely unique man: Cameron Landell.