Donny looked over his shoulder at me. Wacko, he mouthed. “And your daughter, Dr. Metcalf? Where was she when you walked in on your wife?”
“Asleep,” he said, his voice breaking. Turning away from us, Metcalf cleared his throat. “It’s blatantly clear that the one place my wife is not is in this study … which begs the question—why are you still here?”
“Officer Stanhope,” Donny said pleasantly, “why don’t you go tell MCU to wrap it up, while I ask Dr. Metcalf just a few more questions?”
I nodded, deciding that Donny Boylan was the unluckiest son-of-a-bitch on the police force. Somehow, we’d come to certify a reported death caused by elephant trampling and instead had uncovered a domestic dispute between a nut job and his wife—one which may or may not have resulted in two missing persons and maybe even a homicide. I started walking toward the area where the crime scene investigators were still cataloging useless crap when suddenly all the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
When I turned around, the seventh elephant was staring me down from the other side of a very flimsy portable electric fence.
She was huge, this close. Her ears were pinned back against her head, and her trunk dragged on the ground. Sparse hair sprouted from the bony ridge of her brow. Her eyes, they were soulful and brown. She bellowed, and I fell back, even though there was a fence between us.
She trumpeted again, louder this time, and moved away. Then she stopped, after a few steps, and turned to look at me. She did the same thing two more times.
It was almost as if she was waiting for me to follow.
When I didn’t move, the elephant returned and reached delicately between the electric lines of the fencing. I could feel hot breath huffing from the end of her trunk; I could smell hay and dust. I held my breath, and she touched my cheek, as gently as a whisper.
This time, when she started to move, I followed, keeping the fence between us, until the elephant made a sharp turn and started to walk away from me. She moved into a valley, and the moment before she disappeared from view, she glanced back at me again.
In high school, we used to cut across cow pastures as shortcuts. They were protected by electric fences. We’d leap, then grab the wire and soar over. As long as we let go before our feet touched the ground, we wouldn’t get a shock.
I started to run, hurdling the wire. At the last moment my shoe dragged on the dirt and my hand was shocked numb. I fell, rolling in the dust, and then scrambled upright, racing toward the spot where the elephant had disappeared.
About four hundred yards away, I found the elephant standing over the body of a woman.
“Holy fuck,” I whispered, and the elephant rumbled. When I took a step forward, her trunk shot out, whacking me on the shoulder and knocking me down. I had no doubt that was a warning; she could have swatted me halfway across the sanctuary if she’d really wanted.
“Hey, girl,” I said softly, making eye contact. “I can tell you want to take care of her. I want to take care of her, too. You just have to let me get a little closer. I promise, she’ll be okay.”
As I kept talking, the elephant’s posture relaxed. The ears pinned against her head fluttered forward; her trunk curled over the woman’s chest. With a delicacy I would never have imagined in an animal so big, she lifted her massive feet and stepped away from the body.
In that moment I really got it; I understood why the Metcalfs had started this sanctuary and why Gideon wouldn’t blame one of these creatures for killing his relative. I understood why Thomas would try to understand the brains of these animals. There was something I could not put my finger on—not just a complexity, or a connection, but an equality, as if we both knew we were on the same side here.
I nodded at the elephant, and I swear to God, she nodded back at me.
Maybe I was naïve; maybe I was just an idiot—but I knelt beside that elephant, close enough for her to crush me if she wanted to, and felt for the woman’s pulse. She had dried blood matting her scalp and her face; her features were purple and swollen. She was totally unresponsive … and she was alive.
“Thank you,” I said to the elephant, because it was clear to me, anyway, that she had been protecting this woman. I looked up, but the animal had disappeared, slipping silently into the fringe of trees beyond this little valley.
I hauled the body into my arms and started to sprint toward the MCU investigators. In spite of what Thomas Metcalf had said, Alice hadn’t run away with his daughter, or his precious research. She was right here.
Once, when I went on a bender, I had a hallucination that I was playing poker with Santa Claus and a unicorn that kept cheating. Suddenly the Russian mafia burst into the room and started beating on St. Nick. I ran away, climbing up the fire escape before they could get me, too. The unicorn was right beside me, and when we got to the roof of the building, he told me to jump off and fly. I came to at that moment because my cell phone rang, and I had one leg over the edge, as if I was freaking Peter Pan. There but for the grace of God, I thought. I poured all the booze in my place down the sink drain that morning.