“From what Dr. Leonard said, they’ve been busy as hell getting ready to move Dorothy into the house. Or maybe Daisy figured she’d get caught eventually and that it wouldn’t do her any good. Sometimes people want to get caught.”
“Right up until they hear the iron door of the slammer.” Big Al observed. “Then they chicken out.”
I heard his words and felt the gut-wrenching pain I always feel when something reminds me of the past I keep trying to forget. Al had no way of knowing how his words affected me. He wasn’t my partner then. We barely even knew each other. If he had heard about Anne Corley at all, it was only peripherally, but his casual comment there in the buzzing zoo lobby jarred me good.
Making a pretense of checking out the children’s slide show, I walked away from him. I wandered into the Discovery Room and stood for a long time peering over the shoulder of a little girl who was engrossed in trying to reassemble the skeleton of a long-dead turtle. Eventually I got myself back under control and returned to the lobby just as Rachel hurried into the room. She was frowning, shaking her head.
“I don’t understand it-Daisy isn’t officially scheduled to be here working at all. I was sure she told me she was leading some of the behind-the-scenes tours. She always does that, but her name isn’t on the list.”
“What did I tell you?” Big Al muttered under his breath. “This whole thing is nothing but a wild-goose chase, if you ask me.”
“I’m sure she’s here,” Rachel insisted. “Where else would she be?”
“Try Mexico, maybe,” Big Al suggested dourly. His remark wasn’t lost on Rachel, who gave him a withering look as she marched away, leaving us no choice but to tag along behind her.
She led us around to the back of the building where a waterproofed notebook hung by a chain from a peg in the wall. Rachel lifted it down. When she opened it, I could see that the notebook contained a volunteer sign in/ sign-out sheet. Rachel made a notation after her own name, then scanned up the list until she located Daisy’s.
“See there?” Rachel announced with a sharp glance in Al’s direction. “She’s here. I told you she was.”
He shook his massive head. “All that means is she signed in. She could have done that any time-yesterday or the day before, for that matter. There’s no time clock, no way to check it. And it doesn’t mean she’s still here, either.“
“So where do we start?” I asked, wanting to begin the search before Big Al could think of another reason to call the whole thing off or bring in reinforcements.
“The north meadow,” Rachel answered. “That’s where the tents are. Maybe she’s helping set up for the dinner or the auction.”
Finding a lost person at the Woodland Park Zoo would be a tough assignment on any ordinary day, but on the day of the Jungle Party, it was a joke. The Jungle Party is an annual affair, the zoo’s one big fling of a fundraiser. The place was a madhouse.
Rachel left the building and set off in a bee-line for a huge white-and-yellow-striped tent that had been erected in a clearing northeast of the activities center. To one side of the main tent were two smaller ones.
“They’re for the silent auction,” Rachel explained as we passed the smaller tents. “The big one is for the dinner and the live auction.”
The large tent must have been at least 150 feet long by 80 feet wide. One side and one end were open. A raised stage ran the length of the open side. On it auction items were being displayed. Behind the short closed end, a caterer’s caravan of trucks was setting up shop.
Inside the cavernous tent itself a small army of workers erected tables and covered them with brilliant wine red underskirting and plush white table linen. Tall stacks of wooden chairs with padded seats were scattered here and there around the area, waiting to be put in place once the tables were dressed. The end result looked far more like the huge dining room of a fine hotel rather than the interior of an outdoor tent.
Rachel beckoned for us to follow her as she threaded her way through various groups of workers. Now and then she stopped to ask someone if they had seen Daisy. The answer was always negative. We searched through all three tents to no avail.
“She must not be working on setup.” Rachel admitted at last.
“So what now?” Al asked.
“Keep looking.” I said. “Rachel, you lead the way.”
Big AI grunted an objection, but he trudged along behind me as I followed Rachel out of the last tent. We moved north and east, leaving in our wake the three tents and all their feverish activity.
I have no idea how many people were at Woodland Park Zoo that afternoon. Hundreds for sure, maybe even thousands. It seemed like that many.
Aside from the people directly involved in preparation for the banquet, the place was alive with Parks and Recreation personnel putting a spit-and-polish face-lift on the grounds for the mayor’s annual obligatory visit. Add to that the regular zoo staff members plus a whole wad of uniformed docents. All told, it made quite a crowd before you got around to counting the ordinary zoo-viewing public.
The zoo-viewing public is a world unto itself.
By the middle of July, frantic mothers all over the city had finally realized just how long they had to hold out before being able to send their little darlings back to schools and teachers, where they belonged. Desperate to get their children out of the house, even at the cost of going out in the rain, mothers by the hundreds had flocked to the zoo with their broods that soggy afternoon.
The animals were locked up. Believe me, they should have been grateful. Hordes of children, very few on leashes or under voice control, were running loose and tearing the place apart. They were everywhere at once- in, over, under, around, up, and down-playing tag and war and screaming at the tops of their lungs.
Evidently, Big Al was thinking much the same thing. Two howling children darted between us and one of them landed squarely on his toe.
“These goddamned kids are the ones who ought to be in cages,” he fumed. It was a private exchange, meant for my ears only, but Rachel picked up on it.
She glanced back over her shoulder. “We don’t call them cages here,” she chided. “They’re exhibits.”
If the situation hadn’t been so serious, it might have been comical. I had to take my hat off to whoever was in charge of docent training. It was brain washing of the first water since Rachel’s docent background was still fully alive and functioning on automatic, despite the grim circumstances.
It was four by the time Rachel led us past the bison, wolves, elk, and deer. As she walked, she continued to regale us with a running commentary on the animals and the zoo as well. Al was impatient and wanted to shut her up, but I understood and encouraged her with questions. The constant chatter was a reflex, a defense mechanism that allowed her to move through the process without thinking too much about exactly what we were doing. Or why we were doing it.
It started misting as we passed the snow leopards and the feline house, making me painfully aware that my lightweight summer jacket was neither water- nor weatherproof. The rain was falling harder by the time we got to the bear grotto, and it turned into a wholesale downpour before we reached the gorillas.
We were all soaked to the skin and Big Al was surly as hell by the time we reached the inside of the gorilla exhibit and huddled under the roofed-over part for shelter from the rain.
“This is stupid,” Al muttered. “We’ve walked all over hell and gone and still no sign of her. Aren’t you ready to give up yet?”
“No,” Rachel insisted. “Please don’t quit looking, not yet. I’m sure we’ll find her.”
Al shook his head in disgust while I kept my mouth shut. He had slipped off a shoe and was standing balanced on one foot while he massaged the sole of the other.
“What say we call in some troops now, Beau,” he began. “That way we can at least get some coverage on the gates. Doing it this way doesn’t make sense.”