Different Dreams (22 page)

The sounds were footsteps.

Malou's heart lurched within her chest. Cam had sent Jorge on one final mission. For revenge? So that he could claim one last monkey death before he sold them all off? She imagined the hulking Jorge and felt for her flashlight in the darkness. She tested its heft. It was precious little protection, but it was all she had to defend the troop. And herself. The metal flashlight grew slick with sweat in her hand.

Which monkey had Cam instructed his hireling to eliminate tonight? To which one would he offer the lethal honeyed berries?

A beam of light leaped out of the darkness. Its circle snared the wizened old face of Kojiwa.

No!
Malou screamed to herself. Cam couldn't be so cruel as to send Jorge back to finish off the old-timer. But the orb of light traveled on, searching out another victim. It danced over several more startled faces and stopped this time on a tiny monkey picking a chunk of apple out of Kojiwa's dish. Two enormous amber eyes reflected back the beam of light.

Bambi.

Malou's mind whirred frantically as the circle of light trapping the little one grew larger with each footstep crunching through the darkness. What would the feudally loyal Jorge do to her if she tried to interfere with
el patrón
's orders? Could she risk letting him give the poison berries to the baby? She could snatch them away as soon as Jorge left. But even if Bambi had time to ingest even one or two berries, that might be too much for her tiny system.

But it wasn't any calculated thought that drove Malou when the footsteps finally halted only a few yards away from where she was hidden in the darkness. No, as she heard the dry rattle of the coyotillo branch being held out to the baby, and saw the honey-slicked berries
glistening so temptingly before the widened amber eyes, it was anger that finally moved Malou out of fear and into action.

A vision of Jorge's menacing face loomed in her mind's eye as she switched on her flashlight and turned it toward the hand holding out the lethal offering. But it wasn't Jorge's face that her beam illuminated. Her light danced wickedly over two round lenses, then was lost in a dark growth of beard.

“Ernie!”

The tableau frozen in the narrow shaft of light had a nightmarish quality that belonged to the dark illogic of the unconscious. She could make no sense of the sight of her fellow researcher squatting down on his haunches and extending the branch of death to a tiny member of the species he'd dedicated his life to studying. But this was not the slip of a half-sleeping mind. The evidence before Malou was irrefutable. Once she accepted the testimony of her eyes, Malou's reaction was one of terrible sadness. She let the beam of the flashlight drop to her side, where it cut a precise circle on the ground beside her.

“Ernie. Why?” It was all she could bring herself to ask. Why? She could think of no possible explanation.

In the darkness, her colleague's knees creaked as he slowly got to his feet. The dried branch rustled as it brushed against the ground. After several moments of silence during which Malou prayed that Ernie wouldn't
have the gall to deny what he was doing, he heaved a sigh of resignation.

“Why?” The word was a hollow echo of her question. “You have to ask why, don't you? You couldn't possibly fathom the reasons. It's always been so easy for you, hasn't it? Primatology's little princess. I heard Darden himself call you that. The little princess who could do no wrong. Getting grants, fellowships right and left. Even before you were out of grad school they started pouring in. And the awards.” Ernie gave a sharp snort of mirthless laughter. “Oh God, the awards. And the publications. Let us not forget the publications. Every journal in the field.”

“Ernie, answer my question.” A new kind of shock was replacing what she'd felt when she first discovered Ernie. This was a completely different person from the one she'd thought she'd been working beside all these months. The rancor and introverted bitterness that soured Ernie's words stunned Malou.

“No, you answer a question, little princess. How old do you think I am?”

She'd never really considered it before. She'd just assumed he was near her own age. “Twenty-seven, twenty-eight,” she guessed.

“Make that
thirty
-seven. Thirty-seven and still a field researcher at a station run by someone ten years younger than me. No awards. A few crummy, insignificant publications. Do you know how that feels?”

A surge of pity went through Malou, but it was not strong enough to obliterate the knowledge of the suffering Ernie had inflicted. “Why did you do it?”

“I needed those monkeys. Those and a lot more like them. I needed subjects with a complete genealogical history. There aren't any other monkeys like them in the world. I needed them for my myopia study to find out if the predisposition to myopia is passed down or if it's a function of living in an enclosed environment. All I was trying to do was collect some preliminary data; then, jeez, can you imagine the funding I could get for a study that might save mankind from nearsightedness?”

A manic excitement drove up the pitch of Ernie's voice, and an awful realization shivered its way into Malou's brain.

“You've been working on Jezebel back there in the lab, haven't you? You have to dissect monkeys for your study. That's why you've kept the door locked.”

“She was an outcast. In life she was worthless, but as a research subject she's contributed a significant amount of raw data. Data that I'll be able to build on.”

“No you won't, Ernie.” She spoke calmly, stating an unassailable fact. “You'll never work in primatology again.”

“What are you talking about? Sure my methods were a bit unorthodox, but I'm getting the results. That's what's important,” he insisted. “The results.” He trailed off into
a weak whine. “It's Landell. None of this would have happened if he hadn't shown up.”

“Don't keep trying to pass off the blame for this on Cam. I can't believe I ever let you twist my mind against him in the first place. Cam was your opportunity to take the subjects you'd wanted all along. He was just the scapegoat you'd been waiting for. With my unintentional help, you made him into the perfect villain with the perfect motive for poisoning the monkeys.”

“So now he's the white knight and
I'm
the villain of the piece,” Ernie said, oozing self-pity. “Even though he's the one who wants to break up the troop, and all I ever wanted to do was cure mankind of an affliction. Surely you can't fault me, Malou, for what I was trying to do.”

“I can and do, Ernie,” Malou answered evenly. The barest sliver of pearly pink was just starting to crack along the eastern horizon. “The sun's coming up. I don't want to see you in the light of day, Ernie. No matter how noble your aims were, you killed two monkeys and inflicted needless suffering on a third. If you leave, now, with no further discussion, I won't report you. But if I ever hear of you working anywhere near monkeys again, I'll tell this whole sad story to every authority I can think of.”

“Malou—”

“Not another word. Leave. Now. Before I change my mind.”

Ernie hesitated for a moment; then, in the thin predawn light, Malou saw him start to lunge forward. Her hand tightened around the flashlight, and she became acutely aware that there was not another living soul for miles in any direction. Ernie could easily overpower her, knock her down, and claim she'd met with some nasty accident. She braced herself. But the attack never came. The glass in Ernie's flashlight shattered as he let it fall to the ground. The light jerked upward in a crazy arc, strafing across his face before it blinked off forever. From that momentary glimpse of his expression, Malou knew that the danger had passed. Defeat was written on his face.

There was nothing more to say. Ernie turned, his shoulders slumped, and plodded back to the research station. Shafts of dawn light were spoking out from the east when Ernie came back out of the station, a duffel bag thrown over his shoulder. Malou watched him walk all the way out to the highway. A pickup truck pulled over for him as soon as he stuck his thumb out. And then Ernie was gone.

Malou slumped onto a boulder. There could be no justification for what he had done, but still Malou was saddened as she sat pondering the motives that propel lives, the secret gears that keep us all spinning. How often, she wondered, did people really only come to know one another at the very last moment? Just as she'd finally come to know Ernie. To know Cam.

But with Cam she had misjudged him far worse at the very end than she ever had in the beginning. How could she have been so blind? Like Ernie, she had erred, and erred tragically.

In the gathering light she saw Kojiwa stir, prop himself up, and begin eating from the bowl. The return to his troop had worked its miracle; he was rallying. Malou felt little cause for celebration. Kojiwa would live for only one more week of freedom before he had to end his days in a cage in a lab somewhere.

Sure now that the venerable macaque would pull through, Malou felt relieved of the last of her immediate responsibilities. She headed for the compound gate, pushed it open, and kept on walking. She had to keep moving. If she stopped or even slowed down, the regrets would pile themselves upon her in a suffocating heap. But none weighed so heavy as the terrible knowledge of how she had wronged Cam and exiled herself from his love.

She let her feet take her where they would. She wanted nothing but to be an unthinking passenger for a few hours. Sunlight poured in around her with a glaring brightness that taunted her sorrow. She cut into the woods that lay beyond the cleared fields where cattle and monkeys were fenced. She rushed into the shadowy gloom, grateful for the respite from the mocking sunlight. She walked on, oblivious for once in her life to the symphony of birds and
insects calling to one another. To the fawn poking its nose out of a thicket to watch her passing. To the jackrabbit scampering for cover at her approach.

She walked on without seeing or hearing or thinking, but none of these were needed to bring her to the destination her heart had chosen. It was the song of the canyon wren, the crystal notes tumbling through the air, that first penetrated the numb fog of her misery. Next she noticed the creek whose serpentine trail she had been following as it wended its way beneath rocky bluffs and through grassy meadows alive with wildflowers and finally back to this dark, enchanted spot. Malou felt the presence of the stone cabin before she actually saw it, and knew instantly that she had instinctively sought it out as the sanctuary it was. A place beyond time, beyond the sadness that pounded at her.

She stood still and listened to the chattering of the creek running clear and sweet. It was cool in the shade of the great spreading oaks. As cool and as serene as she'd always imagined it had been for the monkeys on Storm Mountain hundreds of years ago when the samurai had brought their mistresses to the piney retreat. Malou stood listening for many minutes more before the connection was made. When it finally was, she wondered whatever had taken her so long.

This place could be a sanctuary not just for her but for the monkeys as well!

The instant the idea occurred to her, Malou started working out the details. As Cam himself had pointed out, the whole area around the stone cabin had been left as a shrine to Stallings's love, with no improvements made in half a century. They could move the troop down here, sell off the more valuable, fenced-in pastureland, and Cam would probably have enough to pay off his note. Excitement beat through her. Then Cam would be happy, the monkeys would most certainly be happy, and she . . .

She. She was the stumbling block. Cam wouldn't speak to her much less go along with a scheme she'd devised. Her excitement abruptly switched off. In its place came a weariness unlike any she'd ever known. She stumbled to the stone cabin absolutely drained, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

She pushed open the back door and stepped back in time fifty years. Fifty years to a night that had passed just slightly more than a week before. The night Cam had loved her. Brushing aside the ghosts of love that populated the small dwelling, she made her way to the bed where she had awakened on that one, most perfect morning of her life in Cam's arms. Only utter exhaustion saved her from regret's now-familiar sting, and she collapsed into sleep.

The sun climbed high in the sky to beat down on the tin roof over Malou's head, then sank back into the western distance, and still Malou slept. The canyon wrens
awoke singing, fanned out over the open fields to seek food, and returned back to the rocky bluffs above the twining creek, and still Malou slept. She slept until the phantoms of regret she had temporarily exhausted regained their strength. Then they all joined forces to swirl images of loss and horror across her troubled mind.

In her sleep Malou battled the phantoms, striking out at bedsheets that were ropes binding her to a boulder sinking beneath black waves as she screamed at the malevolent creatures forcing her down.

“Calm down, Malou, darling. It's a nightmare. You're only dreaming.”

She had banished the nightmare and was dreaming the dream of her choice: to be there in the stone cabin, with Cam's arms sheltering her, wrapping her in love. She snuggled into this exquisite moment of wish fulfillment she had created for herself, this delirious intermission between nightmares. She sighed contentedly, breathing in a fragrance that was like no other on earth, the smell of Cam's body. In a distant corner of her sleep-fuzzed mind she asked herself if dreams had smells. The answer was no. The deep chest and strong arms cradling her were gloriously real. She sat up with a start.

“Cam, what are you doing here?”

I
happen to own the
place, Goldilocks. A more appropriate question might be what are
you
doing here?”