Tiger Trap (8 page)

“Moping around the house isn’t going to make the time pass any quicker,” my mother said.

“It won’t make it pass any slower, either,” I shot back. It couldn’t be any slower than it seemed. It had only been five days. An incredibly slow five days.

“You have to go back to doing what you did before you spent time at the farm with Mr. McCurdy and his animals.”

“The things I used to do involved hanging around with my friends, the friends I’d had since I was in kindergarten, the friends I left behind when we moved here.”

“That’s not fair, Sarah. We’ve lived here for almost a year and a half. Besides, it isn’t as if you don’t have friends here.”

“I have friends,” I admitted, though it seemed as if a lot of those friendships involved being at Tiger Town. “But maybe I do want to just mope around.”

“Far be it from me to tell you what to do. After all, I’m only your mother.”

I bit my tongue before I said anything I’d regret, something that was going to get harder the longer I spent time at home. “Does Martin know about the quarantine?” I asked.

“He’s the chief of police. He knows everything. Matter of fact, he told me I had to make certain you and Nick don’t go anywhere near Tiger Town until the quarantine’s lifted. He said it was very, very important and was quite insistent. I had no idea parrots could carry anything that potentially dangerous to humans.”

“Neither did I,” I said. “I tried to get more information off the Internet, but I couldn’t find anything.”

“Nothing?”

“Not a thing about any illness that could be fatal to humans.”

“That’s surprising,” my mother said. “You’d figure that would be on there for sure.”

“It would be better if I knew the name of the disease.”

“That would help. I thought Mr. McCurdy promised he’d get you the name of the disease. Didn’t you ask him that when he and Vladimir were over for dinner?”

“I did. He said he’d talk to Anthony and get the name because he couldn’t remember it since it was such a big word.”

“But he still hasn’t told you the name?” my mother asked.

“Nope.”

“That’s understandable, I guess. He does have a lot on his mind.”

“So do I.”

“The only thing that should be on your mind is school.”

“What about school?” I asked.

“I’ve been meaning to mention it to you. There’s been a drop in your grades this term.”

“I have an eighty-nine average.”

“And it was ninety-three last year.”

“It’s still pretty good. If Nick got an eighty-nine average on his report card, you’d buy him a pony.”

“If Nick got an eighty-nine average, I’d get him a blood test so I could see what drugs he was taking that were making him so smart.”

I burst out laughing.

My mother looked sheepish, as if she knew she’d said something she really shouldn’t have. “Please don’t tell Nick I said that. I just know how well you can do.”

“I am doing well.”

“You could do better. In this day and age it’s important for a woman to be self-sufficient, to be able to support herself, because there are no guarantees she’s always going to have a husband to —”

“Don’t worry about me getting divorced, because it isn’t going to happen.”

“Don’t be so certain,” my mother said. “I never dreamed it would happen to me, either.”

“With me it’s practically a guarantee. If you don’t ever get married, you can’t ever get divorced.”

“Sarah, just because your father and I couldn’t make our marriage work is no reason for you to feel you couldn’t have a successful marriage.”

“This has nothing to do with that. Nothing. Not everything is about your divorce. I just might have other things I want to do with my life, and a marriage might just get in the way.”

“Don’t rule out marriage,” she said. “I haven’t.”

I knew what she was implying. She and Martin had gotten awfully close, awfully quick. Maybe too close and too quick.

“All I’m saying is —”

“I know exactly what you’re saying!” I snapped. “But just because I know doesn’t mean I think you’re right.”

My mother didn’t answer. She was hurt. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what exactly. “I think I’ll go for a walk,” I finally murmured.

“That sounds like a good idea,” my mother said. “Do you want some company?”

“That would be okay … I guess.”

“It sounds as if you’d rather be alone but are being too polite to say it.”

I nodded. “Sometimes I just like to be alone with my thoughts.”

“And that’s okay. Most people aren’t comfortable being on their own.” She stood up, walked over and placed a hand on each of my shoulders. “Sarah, you’re very special, and maybe I don’t say that enough.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“You’re welcome. I know this growing-up stuff isn’t easy sometimes. Not for you and not for me. We’ll all keep learning. Part of what I have to keep reminding myself is that you’re not a little girl anymore.” She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead.

•

I could feel fall beginning to give way to winter. The air was crisp and cool and traced a path down into my lungs as I breathed in. The temperature was dropping as quickly as the sun was falling toward the horizon. It was only seven-thirty and it would be dark soon. I wanted to get safely home before that happened.

I turned off the road and onto a path that ran along the fence separating our land from Mr. McCurdy’s. This route was rougher, but it was a lot shorter. The last thing I wanted was to be out here alone in the dark.

I walked along the stone fence. Actually, it was more like a long line of rocks that had, over the past hundred years, been pulled out of the fields of both properties and piled up as a fence. I had to fight the urge to climb over the divide and walk on the other side — on Mr. McCurdy’s property. In one way it would have felt good just to have his soil under my shoes. On the other hand, I wasn’t supposed to be there and I always tried to keep my word. What if somebody saw me or —

“Hi, Sarah.”

I shrieked, jumped into the air and spun around. Frantically, I looked around. There was nobody there!

“Up here.”

I still didn’t see anybody, but I knew the voice. It was Nick’s. “Up where?”

“Here,” he called out.

I followed his voice and then caught sight of movement in the limbs of a tree. He was sitting high in the branches, his feet dangling down.

“What are you doing up there?”

“Just sitting and watching.”

“Watching what?”

“The house.”

“You can see our house from here?”

“Not our house. Mr. McCurdy’s house.”

“You’re joking.”

“Nope. Why else do you think I’d be sitting up here?”

“I can hardly ever figure out why you do anything,” I said.

“Come on up here and see the house for yourself.”

I didn’t like heights and I certainly didn’t go around climbing trees anymore, but I did want to see the house, even from a distance.

Glancing up at the branches, I tried to map a route to where Nick sat among the very top limbs. It didn’t look that hard. I reached up and grabbed the lowest limb, pulling myself up until I could throw my leg over. Slowly, testing each branch before I put my full weight on it, I worked my way up the tree until I was just below Nick.

“That was certainly interesting,” Nick said. “It was sort of like watching a slow-motion replay.”

“Better safe than sorry,” I said.

“I don’t know. The way you climb actually is sorry.”

“Excuse me if I’m not a monkey.”

“Or a chimpanzee,” Nick said. “But I wish you were. Do you miss Calvin as much as I do?”

“If he was here,
I’d
kiss
him
.”

Nick burst into laughter, teetered and almost toppled over before he grabbed the branch to steady himself.

“Be careful.”

“I am being careful. Even if I fell, it isn’t that far down. I couldn’t get very hurt.” He glanced down. “Well, not
really
bad.”

“So where’s the house?” I asked.

“You have to look through the gap between the two big branches.”

I pushed myself up and peered through the opening. I didn’t see anything … except for the lane leading to Tiger Town.

“Now if you see the driveway you can follow it along to the right until —”

“I see it!” I cried. “I can see the front door! And over to the side I can see part of the barn and a little bit of Peanuts’ pen.”

“Can you see Peanuts?”

I tried to focus on that little section of his pen poking around the side of the barn. He wasn’t —

“Peanuts!” Nick screamed, practically shocking and shaking me out of the tree. “Peanuts!” Nick yelled again.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling my elephant.”

“He can’t hear you from here. The barn’s a long, long way off. All you did was practically scare me out of the tree.”

“Did you hear that?” Nick asked.

“Hear what?”

“Shhhhhhh!”

There was a low, long, rumbling roar.

“Hear him? And look!” Nick said, pointing into the distance.

I stared at the barn again. Peanuts was in the corner of the pen that I could see, gazing in our direction, his trunk in the air. Then I heard the elephant call out again.

“Elephants have big ears and big lungs,” Nick said. “He heard me yell his name and then he called back. Isn’t he a good elephant?”

“The best one I ever met. I just wish I could communicate with Kanga and Roo the same way.”

“You must really miss them,” Nick said.

I was surprised. Nick usually didn’t show much sensitivity.

“It’s hard being away from Peanuts,” Nick said. “It’s hard being away from things that are important to you.”

I wondered if he was really talking about our father, but I knew I couldn’t say that. “It’s hard. But you have to figure that even if you’re not around that they still think about you and miss you, too.”

“I guess so,” Nick said.

We sat in the tree, not talking, just watching the farmhouse. Actually, I wondered again if Nick was focused farther away from there — maybe thinking about our father on the other side of the country. As we sat there silently, the sun continued to sink lower until it was a red ball on the edge of the horizon.

“We should get down and go home before it gets any darker,” I suggested.

“You’re right. Let’s climb down before — look, there are headlights coming down the lane!”

There, along the lane of Mr. McCurdy’s farm, was a pair of headlights.

“Do you think it’s Mr. McCurdy?” Nick asked.

“Could be or — there’s a second set of lights!”

“And a third!” Nick called out.

“That’s one more vehicle than the farm has.”

“I can’t even see if it’s a truck or a car,” Nick said.

“It doesn’t matter. Whoever it is they shouldn’t be there, anyway.”

“It could be somebody else who’s already had the disease, too,” Nick said.

“Could be,” I agreed. “Don’t you think it’s strange, though, that the only three people at the farm have all had the disease?”

“Coincidences happen.”

“That’s a
big
coincidence.”

“Even big coincidences happen,” Nick said. “Let’s go home.”

I jumped from page to page, moving the mouse and clicking on the websites I’d marked. I’d spent hours — no, I’d spent
days
 — searching, reading, marking, studying, researching. I’d been through the pages, following the links as if they were stones along the Yellow Brick Road, hoping they’d finally lead me to Oz. Instead they’d just spun me around and around as if I were Dorothy inside the twister.

I was at the point where I was an expert on parrots. I was a walking, talking encyclopedia on parrots. Then again, an encyclopedia of parrots
should
probably talk and walk and even fly. I knew about the different species, habitat and every aspect of their life cycles. I knew everything. Especially everything about illnesses and diseases. I knew the most common ailments and sicknesses and the treatments. I knew diseases that parrots got from people and diseases people got from parrots. The worst of the latter could cause people to get really sick, even suffer temporary paralysis, but there was nothing that could kill somebody, nothing you could catch from kilometres away, nothing like the thing that was supposed to be in Tiger Town.

“This is useless!” I yelled, slamming my hand against the tabletop.

“No luck, huh?”

I looked over my shoulder. It was Nick.

“Lots of luck,” I said. “All bad.”

“Can’t find anything about the disease?” he asked.

“Nothing. But why should something turn up now? I’ve been through this information a dozen times.”

“You shouldn’t exaggerate.”

“I’m not. That was my twelfth time through. I kept thinking I’d find something that I missed if I just kept on looking.”

“You were just wasting your time,” Nick said.

“And what was it you were doing with your time?”

“I was sitting in a tree.”

“Again? You’ve spent a lot of time in that tree the past week. More than I’ve spent in front of this computer.”

“About the same,” he said. “But I wasn’t wasting my time.”

“How do you figure that sitting in a tree is a better use of time than surfing the Web?”

“I knew there was a chance I might find something,” he said.

“There was a chance I could find something, too, you know.”

“No, there wasn’t. You can’t find something that doesn’t exist.”

“What do you mean?”

Nick didn’t answer right away. “If I tell you, you might think I have a screw loose.”

“I’ve always thought you had
a lot
of loose screws, so this won’t make any difference. Just tell me.”

He seemed hesitant to answer, but I knew if I waited him out he’d start talking. Nick hated silence.

“Three weeks ago, when this all started, I was positive everything we were being told was the truth,” he finally said. “Last week I was pretty sure. Now I’m positive most of what we’ve been told isn’t true.”

“You don’t think there’s a disease?”

“If there was, you’d have found it on the Net. Besides, if there was a quarantine, how come people are coming and going at the farm?”

“You mean that extra set of headlights we saw when we were sitting in the tree?”

“I mean those and all the other cars and trucks I’ve seen coming and going over the past few days. I’ve spotted eleven vehicles.”

“That many?”

He nodded. “And those are just the ones I’ve seen. I’ve been in the tree a lot, but not all the time. If I saw that many, think of how many I must have missed.”

He was right.

“Why would so many vehicles be coming and going?” Nick asked.

“Maybe they didn’t know the place was quarantined and drove in without knowing.”

“The big yellow quarantine sign posted at the driveway is hard to miss,” Nick said.

“There’s a sign?”

“Big and yellow and right there by the driveway.”

“When did you see it?” I asked.

“Yesterday. I took a stroll past the entrance.”

“Still, maybe some people missed the sign … just didn’t see it.”

“Even if they did miss the sign, why weren’t they turned back when they arrived instead of staying for hours?”

“They stayed?”

“Some of them. For hours.”

“That is strange,” I agreed.

“And there’s one more thing,” Nick said. “It’s about Anthony.”

“What about him?”

“You’ll think I’m strange for even thinking this,” Nick said.

“Nick, I think we’ve already established that I’ve always thought you were strange. Spit it out.”

“Don’t get mad at me because of what I’m going to say.”

“I’m getting mad at you for what you’re
not
saying.”

“Fine. Do you know who Anthony reminds me of?”

“You better not say me, or I really am going to be mad at you,” I said.

“Actually … he does … a bit. But I was thinking that he really reminds me of Dad.”

“Dad? He reminds you of our father? I don’t see that at all.”

“Not like Dad was before, but what he was like the last few months before he left,” Nick explained.

“Go on.”

“You know how he was really, really friendly. Too friendly. And it was like he knew something was going to happen, something bad — the separation — but he was trying to keep it from us.”

“I remember.”

“And that’s what Anthony’s like. He was always real friendly, at least to me, but he was hiding something.”

“He was trying to hide the fact that he was a jerk,” I said.

“I didn’t say he was a jerk, just that he was hiding something from us.”

“Doesn’t that make him a jerk?” I asked.

“Not necessarily,” Nick said. “Dad was trying to hide the marriage problems from us to protect us.”

“And he did a great job of that!” I snapped.

“He tried.”

“He tried and failed. Besides, when somebody’s trying to hide something, it isn’t something good.”

“Probably not.”

“Do you think he’s fooling Vladimir and Mr. McCurdy, too?” I asked.

“I hope he is.”

“Why would you hope that?”

“Because if he isn’t fooling them, then they’re in on his plan, too.”

“What plan?” I asked.

“Well, there are some other things I didn’t mention to you.”

“What sort of things?”

“Things like I saw that truck come back … the truck that man drove … the man who tried to buy Kushna.”

“They might have been buying more animals from him,” I suggested.

“That wouldn’t explain why there are empty cages now.”

“There are empty — how would you know that? You can’t see the enclosures from that tree.”

“Not from
that
tree.”

“And just what other tree were you in?” I asked.

“Before I answer, can I ask you a question?”

“Are you trying to worm your way out of being in trouble, or is this a legitimate question?”

“Both.”

I shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“If we were supposed to stay away because of some disease but there really isn’t such a disease, is it wrong for me to go on Mr. McCurdy’s property?”

I knew what he was getting at. “How far onto his property did you go?”

“You know that little stand of trees by the pond beside the barn?”

“You went that close?”

“I had to get that close or I couldn’t see what I needed to see,” Nick explained.

“And?”

“I saw empty cages. Kanga and Roo’s pen was empty.”

“Are you … are you sure? Maybe you couldn’t see them in there.”

“Sarah, I was practically right there. I could see the whole pen, and they weren’t in it. Do you think they brought them back inside again?”

“Why would they do that?” I asked. The two kangaroos had been moved outdoors three weeks ago — they were big and strong enough that they didn’t need to live inside anymore.

“Maybe they just needed extra attention,” Nick said. “Maybe they were sad because you weren’t around.”

“That could be it,” I agreed — more hoping and wishing than really believing.

“If they miss you as much as you miss them, then that could be it,” Nick said. “It could be other things, too.”

“What sort of other things?”

“Look, I have some ideas about this whole business. That doesn’t mean they’re right ideas, but I really, really have been thinking about things, trying to figure it all out.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know how you do it all the time — thinking, I mean. I’ve been thinking about it so much it’s made my brain go numb.”

“Fine, whatever,” I said. “Just tell me what you’ve been thinking.”

“I’ll tell you, but I don’t really want to. I was just wondering. Do you think it’s possible the kangaroos aren’t in their pen because they’ve been sold?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. “No way they’ve been sold. There’s no way Anthony could get away with that without Vladimir and Mr. McCurdy knowing. It isn’t like there are dozens of kangaroos around.”

“That’s the other part I’ve been thinking about,” Nick said. “What if … what if Mr. McCurdy and Vladimir are part of it.”

“Part of what?”

“Part of selling off the animals. What if it isn’t just Anthony but all three of them working together?”

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “There’s no way they’d ever do that. They’d never do anything to harm any of their animals.”

“They might. You remember when I was listening in on their argument about you? I heard them saying things about
sacrifice
, and
making choices
, and sometimes you have to make the
hard
decisions. What if they weren’t talking about you and me being in Tiger Town, but about selling off some of the animals?”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “Crazy!”

“Is it? If selling one tiger could let them get enough money to save a dozen tigers, don’t you think they’d at least consider it?”

“They’d never … would they?” I tried to think things through. “I just don’t know.”

“I don’t know, either,” Nick said. “Maybe I’m just letting my imagination run away.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s only one way we can know for sure. We have to go over and investigate.”

“It’s not that easy, Sarah, believe me.”

“Easy or not we have to do it.”

“I almost got caught. They almost saw me.”

“We’re not going to get caught and nobody’s going to see us,” I said. “It’s going to be way too dark to be seen.”

“You mean?”

I nodded. “Tonight. When Mom’s asleep and everybody at the farm is asleep. Then we go.”