in the closet for years. But Wendy suspected it was something the animal had learned from its previous owner, when it was much younger. As far as Wendy knew, she was the only person who knew Mrs. Armstrong carried Tripod around with her — always in the vest except on Sunday, when she had a special handbag she used to sneak him into church.
Mrs. Armstrong sometimes petted Tripod during prayer. When Wendy teased her about it, she said, “God knows, and He doesn’t care. I pet Tripod so he and God both know how thankful I am for him.”
Mrs. Armstrong gave Wendy an “I hope you can keep a secret” look, and said, “I’d just as soon folks don’t know about Tripod. You know how quick some are to accuse old people of being senile. Can you imagine what they’d say about me if they knew my best friend was a ferret?”
3
LOVER BOY
Mrs. Armstrong waited until Wendy was back behind the teller window, then deposited her social security check, taking out only what she needed to buy food for herself and Tripod. She was halfway back across the bank lobby when she encountered Kyle, who had just come in.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Armstrong,” Kyle said politely to the old lady who had been his first-grade teacher.
“Kyle Collins!” Mrs. Armstrong stopped short and peered up at him. Lifting her cane to tap him on the chest, she said in the voice teachers use with disruptive children, “I’ve been wanting to have a word with you, Lover Boy.”
Mrs. Armstrong had spent too many years yelling at unruly first graders to have a soft voice. Standing in the middle of the lobby, tapping one of the police department’s newest recruits on the chest with her cane, there was probably not a person in the bank who couldn’t hear her. Their smiles turned to chuckles when Mrs. Armstrong said, in her strong schoolteacher voice, “I know you’re stepping out with our Wendy. Nearly a year now, isn’t it?”
“Uh, about that,” mumbled Kyle, casting a helpless glance in Wendy’s direction.
“Well? When are you going to ask her to marry you?” the old lady demanded.
Ellen tittered and whispered to Wendy, “That’s what you’d like to know.”
Wendy scowled at her, and 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
