Different Dreams (18 page)

And it was her fault.

She followed the path of two juveniles in a never-ending game of tag, chasing each other across the prairie. The pursued escaped his pursuer by scrambling up an old deer-hunting tower and diving off of it into the pool below. He landed with a splash. A crotchety adult bending over to drink at the pool's edge cuffed the splasher, sending him yelping away. Then the drinker crept forward, sliding into the cool water.

Odd, Malou thought, wondering why the adult had been so testy about being splashed. She zoomed the focus of her binoculars in on the swimmer and found her answer as a tiny, big-eyed head sprouted on top of the one gliding through the water. It was Bambi clinging to Tulip as she took the baby for her first swim. Malou rejoiced. The cuffing had been the natural overprotectiveness of the macaque mother. Tulip had accepted Bambi.

The cloud that had settled so suddenly and so darkly over Malou lifted. She watched the baby hang on to Tulip's ears and ride her head like a tiny jockey. Gradually the terror left Bambi's oversized eyes as the cool water lapped up around her. She even turned loose of one ear long enough to splash a paw into the water and bring a glistening drop up to her nose to sniff. Identifying it as nothing more than water, the baby licked the drop away
and beat her hand against the pond. Though she splashed directly into Tulip's face, the older monkey didn't react. She just continued on her way, gliding through the pond with her baby perched up high and safe.

Malou went back to her census list, happily working her way through it, noting who was attacking whom and who was coming to whose defense. She checked to see if any of the young males now reaching four and five years of age had been banished to the periphery, and which ones had been allowed to remain with the females, Sumo, and a few other top-ranking males at the troop's center. She watched to see which mothers came to the defense of their children, knowing that such defense would have a large bearing on the child's ultimate rank in the troop.

And always she watched for her old friend Kojiwa. The day was warm, so Malou assumed that he was relaxing in the shade of a cactus somewhere, probably being groomed by one of the aging females who had remained loyal to him even after he'd lost the leadership of the troop to Sumo. But when Malou came to the end of her list and had still not spotted Kojiwa, she began to worry. The old-timer was tough as a juniper root, but he was also getting on. He'd already outlived every other monkey his age. But, Malou reminded herself, that didn't mean that the old fellow was indestructible.

She picked up her binoculars and searched. On her third pass of the area she focused in on what she had at
first taken to be a clump of brush. But no, the color was more a tawny gray than a brown. She zoomed the lenses in and came to the inescapable conclusion—that was the time-bleached coat of a venerable oldster.

She knew it was Kojiwa long before she reached the clump of fur, but it wasn't until she saw sunlight glinting off the blinking eyes that she began to run toward him. Her pulse accelerated wildly when she saw that a limb torn from a coyotillo bush lay beside him. He still clutched a few berries in his hand. Malou gathered him into her arms. He was too far gone to protest. Running as best she could with her burden, Malou rushed back to the station. She nestled him in a blanket and went to pound on the locked lab door.

“Ernie, open up. I need you. It's an emergency!” Her colleague was much better versed in macaque physiology than she was. She knew about macaque society, but Ernie knew about the animal's anatomy.

He burst out of the door and slammed it behind himself. “What in God's name is it?” he asked harshly, alarmed by Malou's urgency.

“Kojiwa.” The name came out in a gasp, expelled on the last bit of air left in Malou's overtaxed lungs. “Coyotillo berries.” She telegraphed the situation.

Ernie understood immediately. “He's dead.” It was more of a statement than an inquiry.

Malou shook her head.

“Where is he?” Ernie asked brusquely.

Malou pointed to the front of the station, and Ernie brushed her aside as he followed her finger to the sick monkey.

“You carried him in?” Ernie asked as he bent over and lifted Kojiwa's lid to peer into the amber eye. The pupil had shrunk to a pinprick of darkness. Ernie took a small flashlight out of his pocket and flicked it on, directing the beam into Kojiwa's eye.

“He's not going to make it.” Ernie pronounced the verdict with a flat finality.

Malou was stunned as she watched him turn to go back to the lab. “No!” she screamed. “He
is
going to make it.”

Ernie stopped and looked at her as if she were a raving madwoman. Malou didn't care at that moment what he thought of her mental condition. She started barking orders at him. “We can't waste any more time. There's no telling how long ago he ate the berries. We've got to improvise some kind of stomach pump. You know more about macaque physiology than I do. We could take one of the tubes we use for worming and . . .”

Ernie returned to her side and looked again into Kojiwa's eye. “Won't work,” he declared flatly, clicking the light off and repocketing it. “He's too far gone. There's almost no pupil response.”

“But we can't just let him . . .” Malou couldn't finish the sentence. “We've got to at least
try
to save him.”

“Why? He's lived longer than he had any right to.”

Malou accepted Ernie's refusal, but she wasn't about to let it dictate her response—or take up any more of the valuable minutes that were ticking away as more of the poison circulated through Kojiwa's faltering system.

“Stand aside, please,” she asked, making her way to the tubes she would need to rig up some semblance of a stomach pump. Ernie stepped aside grudgingly. Hurriedly she prepared an injection of a sedative that would immobilize Kojiwa and slow down his circulation. Next, she selected a length of sterile tubing and, propping Kojiwa's powerful jaws open, began to slide it down his throat.

“Here, let me do that,” Ernie said, taking the tube from her shaking hands. “You don't know the esophageal contours.” He fed the tube in expertly and proceeded to attach a syringe.

“Make a mild saline solution,” he ordered her. “We'll need it to flush out the stomach.”

Only when they'd finished and were washing up was there time for Malou to tell Ernie how much his help had meant. “I couldn't have done it on my own,” she admitted. “We would have lost him for sure.”

“There are no guarantees that you haven't,” Ernie said, squirting orange Betadine soap on his hands.

“I know, but at least we tried.” Unable to resist the impulse, she stood up on tiptoes to plant a kiss on Ernie's fuzzy cheek. He reddened beneath his beard. As they
dried off their hands, Malou went to check on Kojiwa. He had finally stopped resisting the sedative and was sleeping. As he relaxed into unconsciousness, his tightly gripped fist finally unclenched. Some of the berries that had brought him to such grief were still there.

“You know,” Malou said, “the old guy must be getting a little senile to start eating coyotillo at his age. He's known for years to avoid them.”

Ernie merely grunted in reply and continued toweling off his hands.

Malou bent over the sleeping monkey and plucked the poisonous berries off of his callused palm. They were sticky. She held them to her nose. Unable to believe what she smelled, she licked lightly.

“Hey, no wonder he ate these berries. They're coated in honey!”

Ernie dropped the towel and went to her side, taking the berries from her to sniff and then taste. “God, they are,” he concluded. “With the macaque sweet tooth, they'd eat pebbles if they had enough honey on them.”

Malou's mind whirred into high gear. “Not only that, but there was a torn coyotillo branch lying beside Kojiwa when I found him.”

Ernie tossed the berries into the trash. “I don't guess we need Sherlock Holmes to crack this mystery.”

“Someone's deliberately trying to kill the monkeys.”

“That's what I've been saying all along,” Ernie said
with strained patience. It was obvious from the look of distaste that spread across his features that Ernie's chief suspect hadn't changed.

“And you think Cam's responsible?”

“The motivation and opportunity are both there.”

“You must be joking,” Malou said, knowing full well that he wasn't. “You want me to believe that Cameron Landell, multimillion-dollar developer, drives down here late at night in his Escalade to toss honey-coated coyotillo branches to a bunch of monkeys.” The image was so ludicrous that Malou was able to dismiss it along with Ernie's cockamamie suspicions.

“No, Landell's too smart and too rich to do it himself. That's what hired hands are for.”

Hired hands like Jorge Maldonado. The ranch hand's face came to Malou's mind, as well as the evidence of the Mexican's almost feudal loyalty to
el patrón.
There was no question that he would do his master's bidding, and even relish the doing if it meant a few less of the monkeys that threatened his
vaquero
image of what should be raised on a true ranch. No, there was no love lost between Jorge and the monkeys that infested his domain. She thought of the last time she'd seen the hired hand—on the porch of the stone cabin.

She remembered how abruptly Cam had whisked the man out of the house and onto the porch where they would be beyond Malou's earshot. She thought of Cam's
denying that he spoke Spanish, then being quite able to make all his wishes known to the Maldonados.

Ernie watched almost as if he could see the tumblers within her brain falling into place to unlock the mystery of the monkey killings.

Malou could not believe that she was thinking what she was. She rejected the whole idea. “No, it's impossible. Why on earth would Cam want to kill off monkeys that he could sell for fifteen hundred apiece?”

“Listen, he's made it abundantly clear that whatever he could get for the monkeys would be peanuts compared to what the land under them is worth.”

“Well, killing them off one by one would be an awful slow way of clearing the land,” Malou countered, but already an unsettling image was taking shape in her mind. Ernie put a name and a focus to that image.

“Public relations.”

“What are you talking about?” she snapped.

“I'm talking about sacrificing a few animals so that when he decides to sell off the whole troop he can use them as a way of justifying that decision. He can point to the monkeys who are dying out here in the open and claim that they'd be better off in a lab somewhere.”

“Cam doesn't care that much about public opinion to go to all that trouble,” Malou said, but her tone had lost some of its starch; she was remembering Cam's reaction to the phone call informing him that protesters had
gathered outside Landell Acres. Just the possibility of negative media attention had been enough to send him flying into the night. She knew he was at the mercy of the bank holding his note and that banks did not take kindly to projects that generated that kind of attention.

“Oh, doesn't he?” Ernie countered. “You told me how enraged he became when you threatened to call in the press if he disbanded the troop. What's happened in the meantime to change his feelings? Or, more to the point, what's happened to change yours?”

Against her will, Malou felt a guilty, scarlet flush stain her cheeks. “My feelings for this troop have never changed; you know that, Ernie. I'm trying to ward off the threats to it just like you are.”

“Maybe it's your feelings about those threats that have changed, then.”

Malou started to lash out at Ernie, to tell him how wrongheaded and unfair he was. But she stopped. He was right. Her feelings about the greatest threat her troop had to face had changed, for Cam was that threat.

Ernie stared, waiting for her response. When none came he merely nodded with a sad understanding, then walked back to the lab. From down the long hall, the sound of the lab door locking behind him echoed up to Malou.

Before she was aware of doing so, Malou had caught her bottom lip between her teeth and was worrying it.
Silently she tried to rebut each of Ernie's charges. She fought to scour herself of all that she'd come to feel for Cam, to dispassionately analyze him, his motives and actions.

The effort was a failure. All it succeeded in doing was to stir up a roil of conflicting emotions. She struggled to point the finger of guilt in another direction, but like a compass returning unerringly to true north, it always swung back to Cam. And always her heart rebelled at the notion. She could not believe that the lover who, only a few hours ago, had initiated her into the sweetest secrets that a man and a woman can share could be capable of such treachery, such cruelty. No, it simply could not be true.

From his bed in the makeshift recovery room they had fashioned for him, Kojiwa snuffled in his sleep. Malou went to the old-timer. His breathing was shallow, his pulse still weak and thready. Malou patted his dark paw, so much like a human hand. He was the kindest and the bravest of the troop. He had witnessed more than his aged amber eyes had ever been intended to see. He deserved a gentler, more dignified death than this.

Anger at a faceless poisoner revitalized Malou. She could listen no longer to the siren song her heart was singing to her. As it had for some time now, the survival of all the monkeys that old Kojiwa had led into this new land depended on the clarity of her vision. She'd let
love cloud her perceptions for a dangerous interval and even now knew that she couldn't completely wipe away the seductive mist that clung to her. But she could see where the path of her duty lay, and if love twined across that path, trying to trip her up, she would have to cut it away.

She had no other choice.