Novellas
The Number 6
Next ("The Cages")
Shoreline Drive
Photophobia
Precipitation Likely, Chance of Sun (“The Might and the Will”)
A Better Place (“The Calling”)
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Next (“The Cages”)
A Novella
Summary
Anna, twenty-eight, has gone missing. For the third time.
Maribel has every reason to be worried but somehow knows that Anna will be back when she is good and ready. As a chimpanzee that pretends to belong to the Summerfield Zoo, Anna clearly has a mind of her own about captivity. Where she goes and what she does during these disappearances have always been a mystery. All the zoo can do is search in vain, and wait.
Maribel Lumm, a part-time assistant veterinarian for the zoo, knows what it is like to go missing. Her widowed father has Alzheimer’s and has been known to wander off without a trace. Even when he is safe at home, Maribel is missing for him and he for her. Unable to cope, she abandoned him to the care of her domineering sister and set off on a career as a zoologist, tracking and studying wildlife throughout Canada. The free-roaming life left Maribel lonely and unfulfilled and she returned to civilization and began working for a zoo in Vancouver. There, while attending a lecture by a biographer of Jane Goodall, Maribel met Evan, the man she would marry and follow to Summerfield.
Evan is the perfect husband, and theirs is the perfect marriage. As a successful information technology entrepreneur, Evan makes enough to support them as Maribel devotes herself to the decidedly less lucrative veterinary sciences. He is attractive. Patient. Kind. Supportive. She wants for nothing and she loves him desperately.
And yet…
Evan does not know that Maribel’s job at the Summerfield Zoo is only part time. He does not know that during the hours he thinks she is working, she is actually nowhere near the Summerfield Zoo. Maribel disappears for hours at a time with other people. People she does not know and will likely never see again. Who are these people? Maribel only knows her names for them:
— The Dingo Man.
— Lady Ocelot.
— Mr. Bird.
And they are only the most recent of so many others. Their lives are mysterious, seedy, cruel, and beautiful. Driven by curiosity, compulsion and guilt, Maribel wrestles with why, given the improbable blessing of Evan, she does the things she does. Leaving Evan, setting him aside for even a few unaccounted hours, is unthinkable. And yet, in her caged heart, Maribel fears that unless she leaves, she can never return.