Search Party by Valerie Trueblood Read Free Book Online Page A

would go sighing back to her desk, where she would pick up the phone and call whoever was sitting with Randy in the ICU. She herself began and ended each day with a visit to the hospital where he had been lying in a coma since before she started working for Ann.
    â€œI admire that about her,” Ann said to Todd, who was telling her that if she couldn’t face firing Casey she ought to get her transferred out of the office right that minute, before she wormed her way in any further. Ann thought about that and because it raised the question of exactly where, at work, her obligations lay, she said, “I think she’ll get down to work when her brother gets out of the hospital.” But the day after they had that talk, Randy Clare sank deeper and died of his injuries.
    H ALF the people who had arrived from the funeral were standing in the rain, mud oozing into their shoes. They were smoking, drinking wine from plastic cups, and watching two llamas.
    They had trooped out of the house where the wake was going on—or not wake, reception, or whatever the church the Clares belonged to called such a gathering—off the sagging porch and down the path, really a pair of ruts, to see Randy’s much-loved pets. Two wet animals as tall as camels stood by the fence. One of them, head high, had apparently walked as far forward on its front legs as the back legs, stationary in the mud, would allow. The other stood with its four feet—pads with toenails were not hooves, were they?—close together. That one was almost tipping over, like a tied bouquet. Then the stretched-out one raised a delicate bony leg and then another, and stepped a few paces away from its mate—if it was a mate—and the mate sprang loose and planted its feet on a wider base in the mud.
    Ann said, “Does it seem to you like they’re posing?” All the while a soaking rain fell on their thick, wormy-looking coats and on the long faces both supercilious and gentle. One of the women said, “Those poor things aren’t rainproof like sheep,did you know that?” and people answered her, as they had not answered Ann. Some of them knew that piece of information and some didn’t.
    The eyes of the llamas were glazed and gentle. But the heads were poised atop those haughty necks. A face came vaguely to mind, someone looking around with a sad hauteur. Who? An actor. Somebody gay.
    The woman, an older woman with a smoker’s voice, knew something about llamas, though no one, she said, could hold a candle to Randy Clare on the subject. Randy had explained to her, as he would to anyone with an interest, the spitting behavior of llamas. Llamas spat when they were annoyed and what they spat was chewed grass, a kind of grass slop brought up from the gut and carrying the smell of that region.
    â€œSee the pile of dung over there? That’s their bathroom. They all use it. They don’t just go any old place.”
    A wet dog trotted up and crouched, head down, licking its lips and yawning with eagerness as it peered under the fence. Ann thought it might suddenly slip under and give chase, but it did not.
    Even so, the two heads of the llamas swung around and the big dark wet eyes rested on the dog and then moved back to the group at the fence. Certainly there was some emotion there, in those eyes. Did the llamas know they were bereaved?
    â€œAll right,” Casey said. “You’ve seen ’em. Bootsy and Baby. His darlings, except for Baby isn’t so darling. Let’s get back inside and get dry and get drunk.”
    They waded back to the house. Nobody said anything about caked shoes and muddy pant legs, though the women fussed with their dripping, flat hair. They piled their wet raincoats onto a top-loading freezer in a room off the kitchen just big enough to hold it and leave space to pass through the back door. “Deer meat?” Ann asked Casey, indicating the freezer, proud of herself for