Sugar Birds

by Cheryl Grey Bostrom

  In the fragile light I could see young sunflowers and peas in the garden and, below my window, Gram’s side porch. The milk basket, its bottles holding their creamy contents, sat askew on the step. I craned my neck, looking for a spill, but the bricks beneath the basket were dry. Still groggy, I released the blind and slipped back between the sheets.

  The courier had picked up the hawk before I wandered into the kitchen two hours later. Gram came through the patio door. “So odd. I filled that feeder yesterday. How could those chirps empty it that fast?” She set an empty Mason jar on the counter. “How’d you sleep, dear one?”

  Kind words, but she seemed rattled. Probably irritated from whatever Daddy told her about me. I poured a glass of orange juice. “Dead to the world until I heard the milkman at the crack of dawn. He slammed that basket so hard I thought a bottle broke. Must have been heading to a fire.”

  “Something else on his mind, I suppose. He left us three quarts instead of four.” She set a bowl of oatmeal in front of me without a utensil, realized the omission and, distracted, pulled the spoon from the sugar bowl for me. “Heading to a fire.” Gram whispered the words to herself, then faced me. “Do you remember the Hayes family? Harris and Bree—and their kids? Burnaby? Aggie?”

  “Harris … Isn’t he the guy who sawed that heart-rot maple? Last time I was here? Came in for coffee?”

  “That’s the one. The arborist … He and Bree raise native trees … and heirloom seeds.” Her eyes brimmed. “They bought the Staubs’ farm back when Harris left the Alaska Forest Service. Wanted to be near family when Aggie was born.” She fanned the air. “Not important now. Their place burned to the ground night before last. I just heard.” The words choked her. “Long-time friends.”

  “That stinks. They okay?” Time to get a newspaper, Gram. Or a TV. Or to turn on the ra-di-o. How often did I beg her to get a television?

  “Not all of them. Don’t have many facts, but it was bad …” She inhaled sharply.

  I shouldn’t have asked. I last saw her cry when my granddad died, and I didn’t like it then, either.

  She held her hand over her mouth and nodded until her voice steadied. “Their neighbor was driving home from swing shift … saw flames. She called the fire department, but too late. Burnaby was milking at his uncle’s farm, so he’s safe, but they airlifted Harris and Bree to Harborview. Both burned, but Bree’s worse. Lung damage … She may not make it. A timber smashed Harris’s leg.” She lifted her coffee, brought it to her lips, then poured it down the sink. “And they can’t find Aggie.”

  “Can’t find her?”

  “They combed the rubble. No trace. Her uncle called an hour ago, beside himself. A fisherman found her boat spinning over a whirlpool in the river, at the open bend straight east of here.” She gestured toward a sunlit window. “Swamped.”

  “Is he sure the boat’s hers?”

  “Positive. Her name’s on it.”

  “You think she was in it?”

  Her tears spilled. “Oh, I don’t …” She collected herself, drew a deep breath. “It is her dinghy, and she is missing, but … Search and Rescue’s meeting here after breakfast.”

  “So you think she’s in the river?”

  “I don’t know. If not, she’s alone somewhere out there. Terrified. Maybe injured.” She stretched her fingers wide toward the woods. “She’s only nine. No, ten. Turned ten last week.” She clasped her hands and scanned the trees.

  At that moment, Aggie was one more problem added to my heap. Why was Gram dragging me into this? Still, I felt sorry for the girl, so sure, I’d help search for her. We’d have time before I caught my bus.

  A familiar, round woman almost as short as Gram rang the bell promptly at 8:00. I swung the door wide, and she flew into my grandmother’s arms, her shoulders heaving.

  “Oh, Nora.” Gram stroked her head until the woman pulled away. “Celia, you remember Nora Epping?” The woman sniffed, pulled an elastic off her copper-colored bun and rewound it tighter. She drew her sleeve under her nostrils, leaving a slug-like trail along the cloth, before she lifted her hand at me in a halfhearted wave. Gram wrapped an arm around her waist. “Nora and Loomis. Next place north of us. Aggie is their niece.”

  Nora’s eyes watered. “When we heard about her boat, the tracker—that sheriff with the German Shepherd—” She pointed at a serious, ruddy man with a majestic black dog on the front driveway. “Well, he drove straight to Bree’s.” She hesitated and dropped her chin. “The dog sniffed a trail down to the river, but the sheriff wasn’t sure it was hers. Then he found the skid. She must’ve dragged the boat. Dog tracked that path.” She wiped her nose on her hand this time. Her voice squeaked. “She’s alive, Mender. I can feel it.”

  Unless she drowned. The boat was empty, after all. Aggie may have pushed a rubber raft into the river, but could she handle the river’s surge? I imagined her fleeing that fire and her burned parents. Dragging that boat. Floating off. Falling overboard.

  Or maybe she escaped. If she wanted to get away that badly, part of me hoped she succeeded. Just like I would.

  A brick-shaped man with a shock of bedraggled yellow hair knocked on the window and signaled Nora outside. Gram and I followed. “Hello, Loomis,” Gram said. His beefy paw swallowed her hand, and he shook it vigorously.

  “Burnaby!” The man’s voice boomed, and he released Gram. A walking beanpole with hair even lighter than Loomis’s appeared from behind the horse trailer. He was about my age and at least six foot six—as skinny as Loomis was broad. Loomis jutted a stumpy thumb toward the guy. “My nephew.” A sturdy, fudge-colored dog stood between the two, her eyes on Burnaby.

  I smiled at the beanpole, but he didn’t respond. Gram withdrew a red licorice vine from her pocket and held it out. Burnaby nodded, slipped the candy up his sleeve, then gazed past us with eyes the color of my moss green paint chip. He seemed faraway, gentle. And intense, if his fidgeting hands meant anything. Quiet on the surface, but churning down deep—like the river that may have swallowed his sister.

  The dog sniffed my hand warily, then dropped her ears and tail in submission when I scratched her chin. “She have a name?”

  “Pi.” The dog nosed Burnaby’s hand. “Australian Kelpie. Part Dingo. She musters livestock.” He touched his thigh, and the animal quickly heeled, her head at his knee.

  We stepped aside to make way for two others wearing the team’s signature orange hats: a balding man with a smoker’s cough and a grim, bow-legged woman, who each hoisted ends of a long bar wrapped in chains. Hefty hooks dangled along its length. “What’s that for?” I whispered to Gram.

  “To drag the river bottom. It’s a long shot, but if Aggie drowned anywhere near here, they may snag her body. Search and Rescue is sending a boat to meet us.” Gram could have been carrying the hooks herself. Her shoulders sagged with the weight of what we were doing, searching for a lost child, the daughter of friends.

  My throat constricted.

  A paunchy cowboy in a chambray shirt and neon orange vest held the reins of a stout buckskin, whose ears swiveled to sounds of the gathering crowd. The man adjusted his straw Stetson authoritatively, tightened the saddle’s cinch, and mounted. Leather squeaked under his weight.

  “Listen up.” The rider checked his watch as he waited for the searchers’ attention. “Sheriff Tom will assign your teams down by the boat. Walkers will fan out at this end of the woods.” He bumped the horse with his heels and followed Tom and the shepherd through the grass and down the hill to the river. The rest of us fell in line. Pi flanked Burnaby like a soldier.

  Then a river skiff pulled to shore, and I forgot about the child. I couldn’t help myself. The bald man handed the chain-wrapped bar to the boat’s driver, who happened to be the best-looking guy ever. Ridiculously good-looking. I just may have gawked.

  Celia. You’re searching for a little girl. They are dragging the river for her BODY. Knock it off.

  Didn’t matter what I told myself. I was riveted. D
ark-haired and olive-skinned, like me, he was, what, six foot one? Two? A trace of beard shadowed his jaw. He was older—twenty? Twenty-one? I visually outlined muscles through his shirt. Athletic, soccer-player lean. Mmm.

  Too delicious, Meredith would say. He looked up and smiled at me. Oh, don’t blind me. Meredith would say that, too. I laughed aloud as he attached the bar to the boat’s transom.

  “Ready, Cabot?” The older man shouted.

  “You bet.”

  Cabot. So that’s his name.

  He shoved the boat into the current with an oar and dropped the chains and hooks into the muddy wash. I watched, transfixed, as they crossed to the center of the river. The engine surged against the heavy water.

  The sheriff reeled me in. “You. Team with Burnaby. He’s done this before. We’re doing what’s called a hasty search. That doesn’t mean careless. Pay attention. It’s our best chance of finding her fast if she’s alive. We’ll cover the parcel of woods between the river and those farms in pairs. The chopper will run a pattern over us, but will concentrate on the open fields. Keep your partner in sight. Observe everything: broken twigs, footprints, feces, bits of paper or clothing … everything.”

  Even broken twigs? This sounded tedious.

  Paired now, Mender and Nora, Loomis and the orange hat lady, and then Burnaby, Pi and I waited until the man on the horse turned us loose.

  “Burnaby,” I said. He faced away from me, so I touched his shoulder. “Sorry about your family.”

  When I made contact, he threw his arm back as if I’d stung him. I quickly scanned the other searchers, but they hadn’t noticed. So embarrassing. If I wasn’t his type, he could have told me a bit more discreetly.

  “Whoa, Burnaby. I’m not hitting on you. Just extending a little sympathy.”

  He acted like he didn’t hear me. My face heated. I weighed the possibility of trading places with Gram, letting her hunt with this cranky guy.

  But before I made the swap, Tom and the tracking dog receded into the brush. The cowboy nudged the horse’s sides with his heels, and the rest of us set off behind them, pushing through undergrowth.

  We’d been searching for fifteen minutes before Burnaby said a word. “I was milking, or I would have been there.” He swiped a low-hanging branch aside and Pi sniffed the ground beneath it. “I would have gotten them out.”

  My defensiveness melted. What was I thinking? Burnaby was upset, but not with me. That fire wrecked his family. Of course he’d be off.

  “Aggie climbs. If she’s not in the river, she’ll be in a tree.” Burnaby squinted into the leaves overhead. “If we find her tracks, we should look up.”

  “Where do you think she is? River or tree?” I walked toward him.

  “I don’t know. Aggie rows competently, but a diked river can’t spread out. Mountain snowmelt speeds the currents. Currents can flip boats. Drive objects to the bottom.” A muscle in his face jumped.

  Like bodies. “Well, let’s hope she’s in the trees.” Then, stupid me, I patted him on the back.

  He spun as if I’d shot him this time. “Don’t touch me.” His voice landed on me flat and calm.

  Awkward. I felt like a leper. And irritated. I raised my arms, hands uplifted in surrender. What was the guy’s deal?

  “You got it.” I almost added jerk, but restrained myself for the sake of the search.

  Burnaby walked past me as if nothing happened, so I resumed my position a little behind him and several feet to his left. We soon fell into a rhythm. He took two long-legged steps. I took three to keep up. He brushed a branch out of the way to check beneath it, then his head rotated as his eyes swept a wide circle over ground, shrubs, rocks, downed logs, and trees. Down. Side. Up. Side. Down. The guy’s gangly legs resembled ones on those cobweb spiders that lived in our garage back home. He moved like a machine. Mechanical.

  I kept an eye on him, and before long, my ire subsided. Something about the boy. He was no jerk. Just … different. Sensitive. So sensitive I didn’t dare surprise him by touching him.

  Meredith would call that a waste, not touching. I wouldn’t know. Boys usually steered clear of me. Like Josh Hebert did. I remembered exactly.

  “You’re one scary chick,” he had said, after word got out that I’d conquered that National Merit practice test. “A freshman. Geez.”

  “Good,” Daddy said, when I told him. “Keep intimidating them, sweetheart.”

  Meredith had scoffed. “You wait, book girl.” she said. “Your train’s coming. Strap in for a ride.”

  Burnaby ignored me while we searched, but I did my best to follow his lead through the woods, hunting for anything in those trees that stood out, and concentrating so hard I didn’t even think about talking. I was also listening—for girl noises and for hoots or whistles from the rest of the searchers signaling that they located a track or a clue. But after a helicopter whumped over the surrounding fields, the forest seemed almost shy in its quietness.

  At 2:00, I checked my watch, weary. If the team planned to stay out here until we found Aggie, I needed a little stamina boost. Was it against Search and Rescue regulations to talk? The guy seemed like a rules dude, so I asked.

  “Uh. Burnaby. You in school?” Step. Sweep.

  “Yes.”

  “So … what grade?” Down. Side. Up.

  “Grade twelve on September twelve.”

  “Funny, twelve and twelve. What are the odds of that?”

  We moved six feet through the brush before he answered. “In this case, the probability of the matching numbers is almost one out of thirty. One out of thirty—or zero point zero bar three.”

  Was he kidding me? Who talked like that besides me—and my school math team, when we were out of math-haters’ earshot?

  “Yep. Threes forever. Do you think—?”

  “What’s this?” Burnaby said. Bright red berries lay in slimy glops around the base of an old fir tree. He poked one clump with a stick and answered his own question. “Vomit, I suspect.”

  Pi sniffed the piles. Burnaby bent over, mulling, before he tagged a branch with a neon green strip of surveyor’s tape and blew his whistle.

  Tom’s orange hat bobbed as he and his dog wove through the woods toward us. “Whatcha got?” he asked.

  Burnaby pointed at the berries. “Can you identify?”

  Tom handed Burnaby the dog’s leash and snapped a picture before he filled a specimen bag with samples. “Don’t know. Probably nothing. Animals puke all the time. We’ll send it to the lab and see what they say.”

  The shepherd sniffed the remaining berries and wagged his tail like a windshield wiper in a downpour. Burnaby braced himself against the dog’s pull. When Tom retrieved the leash, the animal locked his nose to the ground and urgently tracked an area in a twenty-foot diameter around the mess, lingering in a depression at the base of an adjacent tree. “Something bedded down here.” Tom lengthened the dog’s leash. “Where’d it go, buddy?”

  The dog dragged him over the rise toward the house. The pair returned minutes later to a nearby maple, coursed two short loops away from the tree, and stopped at the chewed berries under the fir. The dog barked shrilly into the tree, jumped up on the trunk, then spun in a circle. Tom frowned. “He’s stymied. Trail begins at that maple and ends here.”

  “She climbed.” Tom and I traced Burnaby’s gaze into the fir tree and we all scrutinized the branches overhead.

  “You see anything?” Tom dripped condescension. “I sure don’t. I know she climbs, but honestly, Burnaby. She’s not a criminal. Why would she hide from you?” He shook his head. “Ridiculous. There’s no kid up there.” He reeled in the leash. “If she’d gone up, she’d have come down again, and there’s no trail off this location. Nobody else has found anything either. We’d be more accurate with a grid search, but with no evidence besides that boat, I’m redirecting our personnel into the next forest quadrant downriver when our second team joins us at three.” Static erupted from his walkie talkie; he pushed a button
to silence it. “We’re bringing in another boat, too. We appreciate your help, miss, but our team will hunt for her from here on out.”

  “We’re quitting? You’re sending me home?” I shouted in Tom’s face. Even though I needed some lunch, his dismissal enraged me. Burnaby pulled a leaf off a shrub and tore it into a circle shape. His lips pursed.

  Tom spat brown liquid into the shrubbery, then faced me, annoyed. “No, we’re not quitting. We’re covering a sizeable area fast, and Burnaby’s coming with us. We’ll have more teams here by evening, so if we don’t find her downstream in the next few hours, we’ll return before dark. You, Mender, and the Eppings can revisit this quadrant again. We’ll be glad if you do.”

  Oh, I was livid. How could they move on? They found her raft right under our noses. And what about those berries?

  Burnaby, his neck craned, stepped away from us, studying the trees. My detachment dissolved. I could feel his grief. Or was it mine? Such familiar pain. His family, my family: ruined. Maybe we could understand each other. And we could look for his sister. I could stick around long enough to do that.

  At least until I earned seventy bucks. Strawberries were ripening at the farm down the road—within jogging distance. They’d need pickers.

  CHAPTER 8 ~ AGGIE

  Search

  Aggie didn’t turn around until she propped the stolen milk bottle at the foot of a mossy big-leaf maple, where she bent over, her breath ragged. She couldn’t see the house. Couldn’t tell if anyone came after her. She stood watch, ready to run.

  Minutes passed, and nobody showed. Still gripping the shirt pouch with her right hand, she plucked a few platter-sized leaves from a low-hanging branch with her left and set them on the ground. She dug a shallow indentation in the forest duff, layered the leaves inside it, and emptied her cache of seed into the makeshift bowl.