Chapter 16: Marilee

“She’s come to stay with us, at least for a while,” Ken explained as he worked, fluffing a pelt that he was getting ready for a mount.

“She” was a shy, almost fearful girl about a year younger than Graydon who was now living with Ken Granger and his wife at their home with the rolling lawns and huge tree-lined pond.

“She’s so frightened. I tried to introduce myself and she ran into the house, crying.”

“She’s not much better with Helen and me. It’s hard for her right now. She’s been through a pretty rough time, I’m afraid. She ran away from her parents and she refuses to go back. She’s agreed to stay here, but only because she has nowhere else to go. We talked to Frank, my brother-in-law, and Helen’s sister Madeline, and they’re not happy about this. But they’ve agreed to go along with her wishes. And that, young fellow, has me very puzzled. Frank is not a man to give in to something like this, so easily. I can’t get him or Madeline to talk about it, either. They can’t—or won’t—explain what’s behind all this, except they’ve agree to let Marilee say here. They admit that it’s probably for the best that she won’t go back to Kansas City.”

“How did she get here?”

“Greyhound bus to Wenatchee. She called us from there. I drove down to pick her up. All she had with her was a suitcase and her purse.”

Ken’s shop was lined with shelves holding an array of taxidermy stuff: plaster molds which he’d carved for laying up paper-mache heads and bodies for his animal mounts, boxes of chemicals and fittings, racks of hand tools, jars filled with glass eyes of all sizes and molded claws, partially finished paper heads for jobs in progress. A huge bear skull, pinkish and mottled gray paper maché glued up from torn paper strips formed in a plaster mold, stared down at Graydon through a pair of glass eyes set in clay that filled its eye sockets. It was the skull form for an Alaskan Kodiak brown bear mount. A Chicago executive ordered it mounted as a head and pelt to fill a wall in his upstate Michigan hunting lodge. The raw pelt, huge and frost covered, had arrived by air freight direct from Juneau several weeks earlier. Ken’s skillful work attracted a wide following, especially among the Alaska hunters.

“Give her a few days. We’ll let her settle in. Then I’d like you to come Saturday to spend the day. We’ll have a picnic and you two can get better acquainted. She’s going to need a friend her own age who she can trust. It will be hard for her, starting over in a new school here, so different from her big city home.”

“Sure, no problem. I’ll be here mid-morning. What can I bring?”

“Just yourself and a good appetite. We’re planning a big picnic feed for the four of us.”

Ken briskly combed the heavy pelt, fluffing around the scruff of its neck, down the sides of both cheeks and the jaw, then between the ears and eyes. He’d already set the ear formers in place, glued inside the delicate skin. He had opened each ear, removed its cartilage and very gently scraped the interior lining. This one detail, forming and shaping the ears, was an essential part of creating a life-like mount. Ears are an important part of an animal’s “gesture,” Ken had explained, just as facial expressions are an important part of human expression. Ken had an magic touch with his mounts. They looked alive.

Saturday was warm and brilliant, a perfect day. Gentle breezes riffled the pond where a pair of white swans glided along its birch-sheltered banks. A gaudy peacock strutted about while a flock of busy-body Guinea fowl chattered and chased down insects along the sagebrush fringe of the upper lawn by the tool shed.

Ken, Graydon, and the girl, Marilee, sat in lawn chairs on the patio, enjoying the view and relaxing after a bountiful picnic lunch. Helen was inside making tea.

She had loosened up a little since her arrival the week before, but Graydon could count on one hand the words she’d said to him today. He sensed great turmoil and hurt in her but she was otherwise closed off, her mood dark and frightened.

He felt a small presence in the grassy fringe bordering the flower beds. He focused his mind and called. A shy cottontail rabbit appeared, unafraid, peering directly at the girl, swinging its small ears forward, taking small hops toward her.

“Be still; don’t move. It wants to visit for a moment,” Graydon whispered to her as she watched, wide-eyed, looking from the rabbit to Graydon and back. Ken watched. A grin twitched the corners of his mouth.