Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  “Or maybe you’ve got that backward. Maybe the reason a good detective can read his subjects is because he’s a little bit psychic.”

  She pulls into the Gordon’s Wholesale parking lot. “This is a fishing expedition,” I tell Serenity, quickly lighting a cigarette as I get out of the car and she hurries to catch up to me. “And we are going to reel in Gideon Cartwright.”

  “You don’t know where he went after the sanctuary closed?”

  “I know he stuck around long enough to help move the elephants to their new home. And after that … your guess is as good as mine,” I say. “I assume that all the caregivers took turns coming here to pick up produce. If Gideon had been planning to run away with Alice, maybe he let something slip in conversation.”

  “You don’t know if the same employees are around ten years later—”

  “I don’t know that they’re not, either,” I point out. “Fishing, remember? You never know what you’re going to pull up when you reel in. Just go along with what I say.”

  I grind out my cigarette beneath my heel and walk into the produce stand. It’s a glorified wooden shack staffed by lots of twenty-somethings who sport dreadlocks and Birkenstocks, but there’s one old man who is stacking tomatoes into a giant pyramid. It’s pretty damn impressive, and at the same time, there’s a perverse part of me that wants to take the one from the very bottom corner of the pile and send them all tumbling.

  One of the employees, a girl with a nose ring, smiles at Serenity as she hauls a big basket of sweet corn toward the cash register. “Let me know if you need any help,” she says.

  I’ve already figured that Gordon’s Wholesale’s decision to sell at cost to the New England Elephant Sanctuary had to have been sanctioned by whoever ran the business. And it may be ageist of me, but I’m going to assume that the old guy might know more than the dude with bloodshot eyes.

  I pick up a peach and take a bite. “My God, Gideon was right,” I say to Serenity.

  “Excuse me,” the man says. “You can’t sample the merchandise without paying.”

  “Oh, I’ll buy that peach. I’ll buy the whole lot. My friend was right—your fruit is the best produce I’ve ever tasted. He said, Marcus, if you are ever in Boone, New Hampshire, and you don’t stop at Gordon’s, you are doing yourself a grave disservice.”

  The man grins. “Well, I won’t disagree with you.” He holds out a hand. “I’m Gordon Gordon.”

  “Marcus Latoile,” I reply. “And this is my … wife, Helga.”

  Serenity smiles at him. “We’re on our way to a thimble convention,” she says, “but Marcus insisted we stop when he saw your sign.” Just then, there is a crash on the other side of a beaded curtain.

  Gordon sighs. “Kids today, they’re all about sustainability and living green. But they don’t know their ass from their elbow. Excuse me just a sec?”

  The minute he moves away, I round on Serenity. “A thimble convention?”

  “Helga?” she counters. “Plus, it was the first thing I could come up with on the spot. I wasn’t expecting you to lie to the man’s face.”

  “I wasn’t lying, I was doing detective work. You say what you have to say to get the confession, and people clam up around investigators because they think they’re going to get into trouble, or get someone else in trouble.”

  “And you think psychics are charlatans?”

  Gordon returns, an apology on his lips. “The bok choy came in with worms.”

  “Hate it when that happens,” Serenity murmurs.

  “Can I interest you in some melon?” Gordon says. “It’s like pure sugar.”

  “I’ll bet. Gideon said it was a crying shame your wares were wasted on the elephants,” I tell him.

  “The elephants,” Gordon repeats. “You don’t mean Gideon Cartwright?”

  “You remember him?” I say, beaming. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. We were roommates in college, and I haven’t seen him since then. Hey, does he still live around here? I’d love to catch up with him—”

  “He left town a long time ago, after the elephant sanctuary closed,” Gordon says.

  “It closed?”

  “It was a pity. One of the employees got trampled to death. Gideon’s mother-in-law, in fact.”

  “Must have been quite a blow for him and his wife,” I say, playing dumb.

  “That’s the only blessing, really,” Gordon answers. “Grace died a month before it happened. She never knew.”

  I feel Serenity stiffen beside me. This is news to her, but I vaguely remember Gideon saying during the investigation that his wife was gone. Losing one family member is a tragedy. Losing two, back to back, seems like more than a coincidence.

  Gideon Cartwright had been the very picture of anguish when his mother-in-law was killed. But maybe I should have looked more closely at him as a suspect.

  “You have any idea where he went after the sanctuary closed?” I ask. “I’d love to reconnect with him. Offer my condolences.”

  “I know he was headed to Nashville. That’s where the elephants were going, to a sanctuary nearby. It’s where Grace was buried, too.”

  “Did you know his wife?”

  “Sweet kid. She certainly didn’t deserve to die young.”

  “Was she sick?” Serenity asks.

  “I suppose she was, in a fashion,” Gordon says. “She walked into the Connecticut River, with stones in her pockets. They didn’t find her body for a week.”

  ALICE

  Twenty-two months is a long time to be pregnant.

  It is an enormous investment of time and energy for an elephant. Add to that the time and energy it takes to get a newborn calf to a point where it can survive on its own, and you can begin to understand what is at stake for an elephant mother. It does not matter who you are or what kind of personal relationship you’ve forged with an elephant: Come between her and her calf, and she will kill you.

  Maura had been a circus elephant that was then brought to a zoo as the mate of a male African elephant. Sparks flew, but not the way the zookeepers had intended—and small wonder, since in the wild a female elephant would never have lived with a male in close proximity. Instead, Maura charged her paramour, destroyed the fencing of the enclosure, and pinned a keeper against the fence, crushing his spinal cord. When she came to us, she was labeled a killer. Like any animal coming to the sanctuary, she had dozens of veterinary tests, including one for tuberculosis. But a pregnancy test was not part of the protocol, and so we didn’t know she was going to have a calf until very nearly before it happened.

  When we figured it out—the swelling breasts and dropped belly—we quarantined Maura for those last couple months. It was just too risky to guess how Hester, the other African elephant in the enclosure, would react, since she had never had a baby of her own. We also didn’t know how much practice Maura had had as a mother until Thomas was able to locate the circus she had traveled with and learned that she had given birth once before, to a male calf. It was one of a bevy of reasons that the circus had classified her as dangerous. Not wanting to risk the maternal aggression of a female elephant, they had chained her during birth so that they could take care of the newborn. But Maura had gone crazy, trumpeting, roaring, throwing her chains, trying to get to her baby. Once she was allowed to touch him, she was fine.

  When the calf was two, they’d sold him to a zoo.

  When Thomas told me this, I’d gone out to the enclosure where Maura was grazing and sat down with my own baby playing at my feet. “I won’t let it happen again,” I told her.

  At the sanctuary, we were all excited for our own reasons. Thomas saw the moneymaking potential a calf would bring to the sanctuary—although unlike a zoo that saw ten thousand more visitors as a result of a newborn elephant addition, we would not be showing the calf off. People were just more likely to give funds to support a baby. There was nothing cuter than photos of a baby elephant, the comma of its trunk dangling like an afterthought, its head po