Wild Heart by Patricia Gaffney Page A

ethology."
    Sydney could barely hide her elation. "You have to stop experimenting on him, you mean? And he can stay here with us?"
    Papa looked up and smiled. "He'll be a sort of country cousin come to visit. You'll like that, won't you, Sydney?"
    She liked it very much. "Can he stay in the house?"
    "Hm? Don't know about that."
    "Sir, won't he still be needing a guard? What if he tries to escape?"
    Sydney snorted. "Heavens, Charles, he's not a prisoner," she said, trying to laugh. But inside, she was torn. The idea of anyone keeping watch over Michael repelled her now—but what if he ran away? "I don't think he would try to escape," she declared with more conviction that she felt. "After all, where would he go?"
    "Anywhere," Charles argued.
    "Where? He can't go back to Ontario, and that's the only home he knows. Besides ours. Really, Papa, I think he would stay here. I think he wants to."
    "I still say it's too risky, sir."
    "And I still say he's not a prisoner." Again Sydney took the snappishness out of her voice with a laugh. "Who's guarding him right now? No one, and I'm quite sure he's sitting quietly in his room, nursing his wound and waiting for somebody to bring him his tea. Well, Papa?"
    Above all things, Sydney's father hated making decisions. His hand strayed to his pipe and hovered over it on the desktop. Once he took it up, she knew any hope of a resolution would be lost.
    "He could stay in the guest room on the first floor," she put in hastily. "We'd all be around, not guarding him exactly, but watching him. Looking after him."
    "But that's—" Charles's mouth snapped shut, but she knew what he had been going to say: That's my room. She'd taken the mental leap that he would be moving out, now that his project had been canceled. She watched his face darken; his eyes glaring at her behind his bifocals contained not a hint of affection.
    A lot of things became clear to her in that moment; it was as if a moving blur had suddenly been caught in a clean, sharp photograph.
    "Hm. Hmm." She waited, as tense as Charles, for her. father to make up his mind—or not, put off the whole bothersome subject to another time. "Suppose he could stay in the house. Sort of like having a guard. Estie's a bit of a guard, isn't she? Ha. University's done with him, Charles, on any formal basis. Means he's free. Can't hold a man against his will."
    "But," Charles sputtered, "he's not a man."
    "Hm! How's that? 'Course he's a man. Point is, he's only good for magazine stories now, not anthropology journals. Got to give him up, West. Writing's on the wall. Time for us to move on."
    Charles had to turn away and look out the window to keep from showing what he thought of that.
    * * * * *
    Sydney ran into Inger in the hallway. "Are you taking that down to Michael?" she asked, eyeing the maid's laden tea tray.
    "Ya, to Michael." Her smile faded when Sydney reached for the tray and took it from her.
    "I'm going down myself. I'll take it to him, shall I?" Inger, she noticed before she turned away, looked bereft.
    The front door to the guest house stood wide open. "Michael?" She crossed to the inner room; that door was open, too. "Michael?" She poked her head inside. Nobody there.
    She set the tray on the neatly made bed and wheeled around. The wooden bar, still nailed over the window, blocked half the light. At first the room looked completely empty, as if he had packed up and left. But then she saw that his possessions, what there were of them, were here. He had one change of clothes in the large, black-painted wardrobe. A heap of blankets lay in a corner of the room, and something about their shape, the long, telltale curve among the folds and wrinkles, told her that that was where he slept. Not in the bed but on the floor, on those blankets. She turned away, uncomfortable with her discovery.
    The paper tablet and pencils she had given him lay on top of the room's only table. Half the tablet was ruined, as if water had gotten spilled on it.