He nodded and began slathering himself with Rose Noire’s ointment.
I strolled back to the main part of camp.
Grandfather was sitting in the mess tent by himself, sipping from a Blake Foundation mug.
“Coffee, at this hour?” I didn’t sit down, but I leaned against the table.
“Single malt Scotch,” he said. “Macallan, to be precise. If I drink it in a glass, I get lectures about alcoholism and setting a bad example for youth. If I drink it in a mug, I get lectures about caffeine. I can’t win.”
“Drink it in a teacup,” I said. “Everyone will assume you’re having an herbal tisane to help you sleep.”
“Good idea,” he said. “Sipping tea at bedtime—is that something normal people do?”
“How would I know?” I said. “So what’s on tap for tomorrow? Any strategies for rounding up the emus more efficiently.”
“Tomorrow should go better,” he said. “I’ve put out a call for my wranglers.”
“Wranglers?” I echoed. “What do you mean, wranglers?”
He didn’t explain—he never did—just tossed back the last swallow of his Scotch and stumped off to his trailer. He nodded goodnight to the guards occupying the lawn chairs on either side of the door—I recognized Jim Williams as one of them—and disappeared, presumably to sleep. I probably wasn’t the only person in camp who went to bed wondering if the emu roundup was doomed to failure.
Or the only person less than thrilled when the wranglers arrived shortly before dawn.
Chapter 19
“Mommy, horsies!”
Josh was following the letter of the rule that he wasn’t supposed to leave the tent before daylight without a grownup, but only just barely. At least half of him was hanging out the back flap of the tent.
“Mo-sickles!” Jamie exclaimed. Like his brother, he was leaning out of the tent so far that any second I expected him to topple over.
From the loud vrooming noise I could hear outside the tent, I assumed that Jamie had a better understanding of what was happening outside. Then I heard a definite whinny, and decided perhaps I needed to stick my head outside as well.
The field between our tent and the emu holding pen now held half-a-dozen horse trailers and at least a dozen motorcycles. The motorcycles weren’t the large, heavily chromed kind you usually saw tooling down the highway—they were leaner, lighter, simpler looking. Dirt bikes rather than motorcycles. They were all parked in a row on the left side of the field, near the road, and the riders were gathered in little clusters, taking their helmets off and chatting. They were dressed not in scruffy leather and denim but in brightly colored racing outfits with lots of reflective silver on them, so that they looked a lot like the drivers I’d seen when we took the boys to see a car race several months ago.
At the other side of the field, several people were leading horses out of their trailers, feeding and watering them, and saddling them. The horses didn’t look thrilled at the occasional sound of motor revving from one of the motorcycles, but they weren’t panicking either. I also saw Thor standing near one of the horse trailers, blinking sleepily. Good. Maybe if the equestrian part of our crew settled down that near to Miss Annabel’s house tonight, Thor would trust their presence to keep her safe.
“So that’s what your Grandfather meant when he said he was calling in the wranglers.” Michael was at my side, peering out at the new arrivals, and holding onto Jamie’s pajama top to keep him from falling into a nearby puddle.
Michael and I hurriedly dressed ourselves and the twins. He collected Natalie from her neighboring tent and they took the boys off to enjoy the twin attractions of horsies and mo-sickles. I heard Grandfather’s booming voice from over in the dining tent, so I headed that way to see what I could learn.
“Excellent!” He was beaming with delight as he waved around a mug of coffee—this time I could see that it actually was coffee, and unlikely to contain any dangerous additives because Grandfather wasn’t a big fan of diluting alcohol with anything. “I wasn’t expecting to get both the horses and the bikes on such short notice.”
“Well, we knew you might be needing us,” said the leader of the bikers—who, to my surprise, was Clarence Rutledge, Caerphilly’s holistic biker vet. I wasn’t surprised to see him at the rescue, of course—Clarence was a sucker for any animal in trouble, and had been known to foster litters of abandoned puppies or kittens so young that they needed hourly feeding with an eyedropper. But I was surprised that he wore the same sporty racing outfit as all the other bikers. His had to be at least a size XXXL. At six five, he was an inch taller than Michael, and considerably wider, and I’d never before seen him out of his faded leather and denim biker gear—in the office he merely topped them off with a lab coat the size of a small tent.