1
Teancum Leon was sitting on his balcony in the morning dark, staring across the Salt Lake Valley, when the knock came. The May air was cool. Dawn had just outlined the spine of the Wasatch Mountains. The peppermint tea trembled in his hand as he jolted upright and stumbled inside. Scipio, his black Lab was barking furiously—probably with the expectation that whoever was standing in the hallway had treats and was desperate to give them to him, if only that damn door weren’t in the way.
When Tean answered the door, Mrs. Wish was standing there. His neighbor from down the hall, she was normally a specimen of starch and hairspray. Right then, though, she looked like a ball of yarn after her army of cats—nicknamed the Irreconcilables—had really gotten going: her long white hair stood out in a million directions, and her housecoat was misbuttoned, exposing white calves and blue veins.
“It’s one of the babies,” Mrs. Wish said and began to sob.
Tean stared at her for a moment. Then, pressing the mug of peppermint tea into her hands, he said, “Let’s go take a look.”
As a wildlife veterinarian for Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources, Tean had to be an expert on a wide variety of animals. More than that, he had to be capable of learning what he needed to know quickly so that he could understand and address problems in the state’s diverse ecosystem. On any given day, he might have to deal with elk poaching, complaints about the steelhead population, or a California condor struggling to hatch her eggs. Maybe all three, in fact. To date, nothing had come anywhere close to the challenge that Mrs. Wish presented.
When they got to the end of the hall, Mrs. Wish fumbled with the mug of tea, still sobbing, and tried to open the door. Tean gently nudged her aside, took her keys, and let them both inside. The apartment was sixty-percent cat dander, thirty-percent potpourri, and ten-percent livable space. From one wall, a larger-than-life President Woodrow Wilson stared down at them from his portrait. He looked just as worried about the Irreconcilables as Mrs. Wish.
After settling Mrs. Wish at her small dining table and making sure she took a long drink of the peppermint tea, Tean headed for the closet where they had set up Senator George H. Moses’s birthing box. Tean had been here for several hours in the middle of the night, doing what Mrs. Wish insisted on calling ‘supervisorial vigilance,’ although Tean hadn’t really done anything except eat store-brand chocolate chip cookies straight out of the package, listen to Mrs. Wish’s rambling invectives against Teddy Roosevelt’s mustache, and let the Senator handle her own business. Barring an emergency, the cat knew better than Tean how to deliver her litter; she was biologically programmed to do it. And she’d done it just fine. Once the Senator and the kits were settled in the birthing box in the closet, Tean had given some basic instructions and caught a few hours of sleep.
“Not in there,” Mrs. Wish said through her tears, waving him away from the closet. “I moved them.”
Tean frowned. “I told you to leave them alone and keep an eye on the other Irreconcilables.”
Coloring faintly, Mrs. Wish said, “I had to make sure the babies were all right. And it’s a good thing, too. I woke up to the most horrible noises. By the time I’d gathered the courage to get out of bed and turn on the light, one of the kits was gone. You have to help me find her.”
“Why don’t you wait here?” Tean said. “I’ll take a look. The birthing box is in your bedroom?”
Mrs. Wish took a sip of tea and nodded. Through more tears, she said, “This is very weak, you know. You’re not brewing it correctly.”
At the end of the hall, Tean paused at the door to Mrs. Wish’s bedroom. Senator Poindexter, a nasty, brutish Siamese who started pretty much every scrap in the apartment, was lurking in the doorway across the hall. He hissed when Tean looked over.
“Watch out,” Tean said. “If she says the word, I’ve got a pair of nail scissors that’ll go through your balls like they’re butter.”
“What’s that?” Mrs. Wish shouted.
“Nothing,” Tean called back.
He let himself into the bedroom, barely closing it in time to prevent Senator Poindexter from squeezing past him. Lace, especially lace doilies, were a prominent part of Mrs. Wish’s overall decorating scheme, but she had taken it to a new level in the