Wild Spirits. Rosa Jordan

whispered back, “Shut up!”

      “It’s Mrs. Armstrong you want to shut up,” Ellen snickered. “But maybe by her asking, you’ll find out something.”

      Kyle, red-faced, tried to inch away without seeming rude. “Gee, Mrs. Armstrong, I don’t know. I just finished college, and I’ve only been on the force a few months, and … uh, ’scuse me, ma’am, but my partner’s waiting outside in the patrol car. I only got a minute to tend to business”

      “Monkey business, if you ask me,” Mrs. Armstrong said, and called back to Wendy. “Honey, don’t you put up with him giving you the runaround. Men’ll do that if you let them.” And off she hobbled, one hand wielding her cane, the other stroking the pocket of her safari vest.

      “Sorry,” Wendy sympathized, when Kyle reached her window. “Looks like you picked the wrong time to do your banking.”

      “I’ll say.” Kyle rubbed the palm of his hand across his sweaty forehead. “I’d rather be grilled by the toughest cop at the station than Mrs. Armstrong. She makes me feel like I’m back in first grade.” Then he smiled. “But it’s worth it, I guess, to see you for a minute.”

      “Worth it, you guess?” Wendy teased.

      “Worth it for sure if you’re up for going to the movies Friday night,” Kyle grinned.

      Wendy smiled. “Given what you had to go through to get here, I just about have to say yes, don’t I?”

      4

      THE ORPHANS

      For Wendy, the best time of the day was when she went home to her apartment, the one she’d rented after she got the job at the bank. It was a duplex on the ground floor, with a back porch and small back yard. The porch and yard were important to Wendy, because she needed a place to put the cages of any wild animal she had rescued, or ones somebody else had brought to her for care.

      Looking after injured wildlife was something Wendy had been doing since she was seven or eight years old. The first were ones her father brought home from his hunting trips — baby squirrels that had fallen out of the nest, or a burrow of baby rabbits whose mother had been killed by dogs. Knowing they’d die if he left them, he would take them home to Wendy. He figured she would play with the harmless babies the way other girls played with stuffed animals and dolls. When they died, as they probably would, she could put them in a matchbox and bury them in the backyard with a little funeral service. In his view, it was a good way for a child to learn about the harsh realities of life, and the harsher realities of death — the fact that nothing lives forever, especially not frail baby animals with no mother.

      Surprisingly, most of the animals he brought home didn’t die. “It’s her patience,” Wendy’s mother said. “She’ll spend a flat hour trying to get a few drops of milk into one of those baby squirrels. I just wish she’d be half as patient with her little brother!”

      Patiently caring for orphaned baby animals, getting up every few hours all through the night to feed the youngest ones, was the easy part. The hard part was recognizing which ones she could not hope to save. Even if she had an animal in her care for only an hour, she often cried when it died. But as she gained more experience, it got to where she hardly ever lost one unless it was terribly injured. Uninjured orphans usually survived, and as soon as they were old enough, she would release them back into the wild.

      Wendy’s neighbours soon heard about what they called her “hobby,” and started bringing her broken-winged birds or animals that had been hit by a car and looked as if they might live. And then, when she was eleven, she discovered a whole new source of wildlife in need of care: the local animal shelter.

      Like most animal shelters, the one in Wendy’s town dealt mostly with cats and dogs. People did bring in wildlife, but none of the employees knew anything about wild animal care, and the place was not equipped to do the kind of every-three-hours feeding that something like a baby bunny might need. In poking around the shelter, which Wendy often did just to visit the animals confined there, she discovered, to her horror, that wild animals were often killed rather than cared for. Shelter employees gently explained that this was more humane than letting them die a lingering death from not getting the right kind of care.

      One day, when Wendy happened to be at the shelter when someone came in with a possum that had been chewed up, but not killed, by dogs, she persuaded the director of the shelter to let her take it home.

      “This is probably totally against the rules,” he muttered. “But I do hate putting animals down.”

      A month later, Wendy dropped by the shelter to let the director know the possum had survived, and been released back into the wild. From that time on, when someone came in with a wild animal that needed special care, the director advised the person to take it to Wendy.

      By the time she was thirteen, she was known around town as someone who had a healing touch with wild animals. Even though she was now nineteen and working in a bank, people still thought of her when they came across a wild animal that had been orphaned or injured.

      That was why it was no surprise when Danny Ryan came into the bank one day lugging a cardboard box taped shut with duct tape. The air holes punched in the top told Wendy that he had something alive inside. She looked around in dismay. In her previous job as receptionist in a doctor’s office she had often smuggled baby animals to work and kept them in her desk drawer or in the broom closet, so she could feed them every few hours, as the very young ones often required. But here at the bank there was no place she could stash an animal — certainly not when Mr. Smart was watching her, as he was now.

      “What have you got there?” she asked Danny.

      “’Coons,” he said. “Little ones.”

      “You didn’t take them away from their mama, did you?”

      Danny shook his head. “Mama’s dead. She got in our garbage last night, and Butch — that’s my stepdad — he set the dogs on her.”

      “Oh dear!” It upset Wendy that some people put their garbage out at night. If a raccoon smelled something it liked coming from the garbage, it would overturn the can and scatter garbage all around. It wasn’t the animal’s fault — how could it know that it wasn’t supposed to have the thrown-away food? But that didn’t stop people from getting mad when they saw the mess. “How is it that the dogs didn’t get the little ones?”

      “The garage door was open,” Danny explained. “They hid in there. I found them this morning. They couldn’t stay there. When Butch gets home …” He didn’t finish the sentence, trusting Wendy to understand what his stepfather would do if he came home and found the raccoons he hated in his garage. “They’re too little to be on their own.”

      Wendy cast an anxious glance toward Mr. Smart, whose stare had turned to a frown. “Listen, Danny,” she said hurriedly. “I can’t help you right now. But I’ll be off work in an hour and a half. If you want to come back then — in fact, why don’t you ask your mom if you can ride out to my house when I get off work, and help me fix a place for them?”

      As Danny left the bank, Kyle came in. He walked quickly, looking harassed.

      “What’s up?” Wendy asked.

      “Can’t do the movies tonight,” Kyle told her brusquely. Lowering his voice, he said, “They’ve put me on a stakeout. Drug bust, we hope.”

      “Oh well,” Wendy said. “Business before pleasure.”

      “You’re not mad?” he asked anxiously.

      “If I was going to get mad because you had to work overtime and break dates, would we still be going out?” She grinned ruefully. “It’s not like this is the first time.”

      “Guess not,” Kyle said sheepishly. “See you later, then. Maybe tomorrow?”

      “Sure,” Wendy said, and looked past him so he’d know another customer had got in line behind him.

      Wendy