glad to have Danny with her. Naturally, she would rather have had Kyle there — now that would have made her feel safe — but a boy was better than nobody. And fixing up a place for the animals was a welcome distraction.
She peered in at the two young raccoons, wondering what to do with them. She had a small pen in the backyard, but it had some half-grown rabbits in it that were not quite old enough to set free. The only other place she could put them was in a pet carrier. It was too small for them to live in, but it would do for the night and be more secure than Danny’s cardboard box.
Wendy had Danny carry the box into the bathroom where, if one of the raccoons got loose when she was trying to move them from box to carrier, it would be easier to catch them. Then she put on a pair of heavy leather gloves that she used for handling wild animals. “When I lift the first one out, you quickly close the lid so the other one doesn’t get out till I’m ready to take it.”
In less than a minute, they had both raccoons secure in the pet carrier. “Good! Wendy said, pulling off her gloves. “I’ll go out to the kitchen and see what I can find for them to eat. Us, too,” she added, smiling at the boy, who did not smile back.
Danny stayed in the bathroom a long time. Wendy guessed he was doing what she had done many times herself; just watching the animals. Raccoons were pretty common in the area, but he had probably never been able to observe them close up.
“Danny!” she called. He came out at once. Wendy pointed to three tuna sandwiches lined up on the table. “That one’s yours, this one’s mine, and this one,” she picked up the two halves of the third sandwich, “is for our furry friends. After we eat, we’ll put their cage out on the back porch and feed them there.”
Later, as he and Wendy sat on the back porch watching the young raccoons tear into the tuna sandwich, Danny said, “I’d like to keep them for pets, but I don’t think I’d be allowed. Maybe if they lived here …” He looked at her hopefully.
Wendy shook her head. “Wild animals don’t make good pets. They belong in the wild.”
“But if I tamed them —” Danny began.
“The problem,” Wendy explained, “is that even if you tame one, it still thinks like a wild animal. I tried to make a pet of a raccoon once, when I was about your age. Bandit, I called him, because of the black mask markings. He would ride on my shoulder and everything. You can’t imagine how much trouble he caused.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Wendy laughed ruefully. “You see those little paws? Just like hands. Not only can they pull lids off garbage cans, they can also open cupboard doors. My raccoon used to get into all the cupboards. He would dump boxes of cereal on the floor and spill the flour and rip open loaves of bread. Also, raccoons like their food wet. Bandit always took his food to the sink and turned on the water to make it wet. Can you imagine the mess?”
Danny laughed. “Really? They can turn on a water tap?”
Wendy nodded. “Living with humans, I guess they learn how to turn on faucets. But here’s another thing: they never learn to turn them off. My mother was constantly yelling at me to turn off the faucet in the kitchen or bathroom. It got so bad that she threatened to shoot my raccoon. And my mother doesn’t even like guns!”
“But why can’t they be trained?” Danny insisted stubbornly.
“I told you. Because even if you tame one, it still thinks and acts like a wild animal. Besides, there’s another, worse problem.”
“What?”
“You can’t train people to leave wild animals alone. If a raccoon, even a tame one, comes around somebody’s chicken coop or raids the garbage, most people would do just what your stepdad did. Either they set the dogs on it, or shoot it. Or they call Animal Control, and they kill it.”
Slowly Danny nodded, and Wendy thought he was beginning to understand the problem. Still, it seemed that he wasn’t quite ready to give up the fantasy of keeping the two raccoons as pets. “I could build them a pen,” he said. “I can take some of my money out of the bank and buy wire and build them a cage like this one. Only bigger.”
“You could do that. But think about it, Danny. Would you like to spend your whole life in a cage? Or would you rather live in a place where you could run around and climb trees and maybe go fishing in the creek?”
He looked up at her in surprise. “Raccoons fish?”
“They do,” Wendy told him. “I’ve seen them.”
Danny was silent for a long time after that, watching the young raccoons nosing the corners of the pet carrier, looking for an escape.
“They want to get out,” he said at last.
“Yes,” Wendy said. “And we should let them out. Not right away, because they’re too young to be on their own. But in a few weeks we can let them go.”
“Where?”
“There’s a state park not far from here, where hunting’s not allowed,” Wendy told him. “That’s where I let my raccoon go.”
“If we let them go, and I went back there sometime, do you think they’d remember me, and not be afraid?” Danny asked wistfully.
“Maybe,” Wendy said. “But it’s better if they don’t. It’s better if they remember that people can be dangerous.”
7
THE WITNESS
Wendy slept poorly that night, half dozing, every sound bringing her wide awake. Once it was noise made by the raccoons scrabbling in the pet carrier on the back porch. They were nocturnal animals, and nature was telling them that they should be out and about. They were probably missing their mother, too. Wendy went into the kitchen, cut up an apple, and took it to them. But when she heard a car out on the street slow down, and thought it stopped, she hurried back inside and locked the door.
When morning came, after she had fed the animals and had her own breakfast, she drove to the hardware store to get a roll of wire and a few other things to build a pen for the raccoons. Just as she pulled into a space in the hardware parking lot, a car with two men pulled in beside her. She froze. Were those the same men who had held her up? Were they following her?
But no. The men barely noticed her. They got out of their car, laughing and talking, and went into the store. Wendy waited until she stopped shaking, then she went in, too. But the same thing happened when she turned down an aisle and saw a man standing there, examining an electric drill. The way he held it, at the end of an arm stuck straight out, made Wendy think of the way the robber had held the gun. Again she felt her heart thudding. Then a woman walked up, probably the man’s wife, because she said, “If it’s what you want, honey, go ahead and buy it.”
Wendy forced herself to continue shopping until she had all the items on her list. At the checkout, she got in line behind a man who turned and looked at her. It was just an ordinary look, the sort of mildly curious look you might give anybody in the checkout line. But when he waved to another man who had got into the line behind Wendy, once again she felt a sense of panic.
Don’t be silly! She told herself. Nothing can to happen to you in the checkout line in a store full of people! At the same time, another part of her mind was saying, But
