Eyes of a Stanger

by Rachel Ann Nunes

  “Sheree. Thin, blondish hair, good-looking. Alec drew a picture. He’s good at drawing.”

  Alec, the boy’s name. Alec Hanks. “He draws?”

  Hanks hurried back to his desk and grabbed a thick sketch pad. “Quite well. He draws when he’s not busy with the lift. Here, this is it. Pretty little thing, but you can tell by the eyes that she’s up to no good.”

  Eyes. The reference startled him, as he’d so recently been thinking about Autumn and Tawnia’s shared oddity, and he was relieved to see that the girl in the pencil sketch didn’t resemble them in the least. The hair first drew his attention, so thick and long and wild—the epitome of every young man’s dream. The hair framed a small face with closely set eyes that wore too much mascara. At first glance, Bret would have called her beautiful, but upon closer examination, he saw her face was really quite ordinary, even homely. It was her hair that made her. Otherwise, she was short, with high, small breasts and a straight waist that would tend to thickness later in life. The fitted T-shirt she wore left little to the imagination; the kind of shirt that only the very young could wear well.

  Hanks was right, the close-set calculating eyes told the story, yet Alec had been duped. Strange that he could draw the feeling of the eyes so accurately without understanding what it meant.

  “Could I borrow this?” Bret tapped the sketchbook. “I’ll make some copies tonight and give it back to you in the morning.”

  “You can use the copier here. It’s out here, at the reception desk.”

  Bret watched the machine spit out five copies of the drawing.

  “I really appreciate this,” Hanks said.

  “I don’t know that I can help. I’ll pass the picture around tomorrow. But I still think you should go to the police.”

  “I will.”

  Bret wasn’t sure if he believed him, and he made a mental note to keep an eye on the situation. The last thing he needed was to be implicated in a cover-up.

  “There’s nothing more we can do tonight,” Bret said as they walked to the door. He hesitated. “I was going to be checking another of your bridges tomorrow, but in light of what’s happened, I’d rather be on hand for whatever else they find.”

  “The other bridges don’t matter now. We aren’t at fault, and we don’t have to prove anything anymore. This was terrorism, not engineer fault.”

  Bret shook his head. “But why here? I mean, terrorism should be in New York or Washington, D.C., or at a major airport. Why here in Portland?”

  “Portland has so many river bridges. Do you know what that means for travel? Once word of this gets out, panic will start. People will be afraid to go to work or shopping. Parents won’t want to send their children to school. Our entire city could come to a complete standstill. Thousands will be affected, and that will catch the nation’s attention fast.”

  Bret thought Hanks might be overestimating the impact, but he wasn’t in a position to hypothesize. “Well, now that we know what we’re up against, I’d like to do some tests to see exactly what kind of explosives might have been used and how much. That’ll give us an idea of who did it and how.”

  “I gave the FBI your name. They want to consult with engineers. And if you’re on site, you can ask about the girl.”

  “Ask the FBI?”

  “No, everyone else.” Hank shoved out a hand and pumped Bret’s vigorously. “Thanks again. I owe you one.” Before Bret could protest, he’d turned around and was gone.

  Minutes later, Bret looked at the drawing in his hands, lit by the weak interior light inside his rental car. This mysterious Sheree could be anywhere by now. If she was actually a participant in the bridge attack, she might never be found. Then again, maybe there was no girl. For all he knew, Alec Hanks was making everything up to cover the fact that he’d made a serious error in judgment with the lift.

  Bret put the car into gear and flipped on the radio, stifling a yawn at the late hour. As he drove near the Willamette River, he saw floodlights and numerous vehicles. Apparently the FBI was still at it. He felt an urge to go to them and give them Alec’s drawing, but then what? What if Alec was lying? Better to do a little checking as he waited for Hanks to find his conscience.

  If the man had a conscience.

  “We pause for breaking new about the Hawthorne Bridge disaster.” The radio announcer’s voice shook Bret from his musings. He tensed. How had they discovered the news about the explosion so quickly? Surely the FBI was keeping it under wraps as long as possible until they had answers to offer the public. Had someone leaked the information? An early announcement might set off a panic that would get in the way of the investigation.

  “Thirty minutes ago Navy Seals recovered one more body from the Willamette River, an as yet unidentified man. That makes four victims recovered today, two men and two women, bringing the death toll to a tragic thirty people in all. The other victims found today include Cynthia McFadden and Marcia Pablos, who leave behind spouses and teenage children. The other victim found earlier this evening was identified as Dennis Reid. His fiancée told reporters that they had planned to marry this fall. We will announce more information about this new victim as soon as it becomes available.

  “According to authorities, today’s discoveries leave only one person still missing. His or her identity has also not been released to the public. Our hearts go out to the families and to all the victims of this tragedy. As we’ve said before, a fund has been set up here for donations to help the victims’ families, especially for children who’ve lost one or both parents. You can donate by phone, in person, or on our website. Thank you, Portland, for the generosity you have shown thus far.

  “We’ll be taking music requests for the next hour, so if you have a special song you want played for that special person . . .”

  Bret quit listening. Another victim. Possibly Autumn’s father. He turned the car around and headed back to the river, the scene of the devastation. If it was Winter Rain, he had to find out now so that Autumn wouldn’t have to hear it from a complete stranger.

  Chapter 13

  Tawnia stretched, her neck feeling sore from her second night on a couch. Oh, she’d thought about using Autumn’s bed, but she’d been worried about not being able to hear her in the night. As it was, she’d listened at Winter’s closed door for a long time but hadn’t heard anything. She’d hoped that meant Autumn was sleeping, but she could just as well have been sitting on the bed staring into emptiness.

  How would she feel if her own father was missing? She wouldn’t like it, of course, and the idea of her mother being alone was more than a little terrifying. Her mother would hate being alone. She’d likely move to wherever Tawnia was, for the company.

  Tawnia dialed home on her cell as she made her way to the kitchen to find breakfast. It was a small narrow room, smaller even than the kitchen at her bungalow. Room enough for a round table next to the fridge, across from which stood the range, a sink, and two feet of counter space. There was, of course, no microwave. The few cupboards were painted white, though she suspected they were solid wood. Tacky, her mother would say.

  The loaf of bread on the counter was hard, and there was nothing edible in the fridge, though there was a great collection of mold growing in a pan of rice casserole and a head of green leaf lettuce that was decidedly brown. The milk showed promise, though, as did the bag of organic granola someone had left on the counter.

  “Hello?” Her mother’s voice came over the line, sounding as if she’d been awake for hours, which she had because it was two hours earlier in Kansas.

  “Hi, it’s Tawnia.”

  “Honey, how good to hear from you. Is everything okay?”

  “Fine. How about you and Dad?”

  “Everything is wonderful. I’m going out to lunch with Madge today. We’re playing bridge afterwards.”

  Bridge. Tawnia had never learned to play. “That’s great.” The tension in her frame relaxed. Her parents were safe. “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hay is
for horses.”

  Tawnia chuckled, though she knew it wasn’t really a joke. Not with her mother. “I’ve been wondering. Well . . . I . . . you see, there’s this girl . . .”

  “A girl? What are you talking about?” Suspicion laced the words.

  Tawnia shut her eyes and rushed on. “I met this girl here who looks like me—a lot like me. It makes me wonder if, well, do you have any information about my adoption? I think we might be related.”

  Her mother was silent so long Tawnia wondered if her cell phone had lost connection. Then finally, “You’re thinking about finding your birth mother, aren’t you? Do you know what that does to me? Do you know how much I sacrificed raising you? I didn’t do all that to lose you now.”

  “Mom, it’s not that. Really. It’s not about finding my birth mother anymore. I haven’t cared about that since I was seventeen. But even if I did, it wouldn’t mean I didn’t love you and Dad.”

  There was a loud sniff in her ear. “I’m sure I have the name of the adoption agency somewhere, but that’s all. It was a closed adoption, and unless the birth mother wants the records opened, there’s nothing more you can find out. Why is this suddenly so important?”

  “I told you, it’s this girl I met. You know about the bridge collapse. Well, she was on the bridge. Her dad’s still missing. Bret met her and introduced us.”

  “Bret? He’s there?” There was sudden animation in her mother’s voice. She’d met Bret once, briefly, and liked him. He was the sort of man that fit her criteria for Tawnia: young, hardworking, stable, from a good family, and no baggage. Not like Orion, who not only worked a dangerous job but had been married before and might have questionable designs on her virtue.

  “Yes, he came because of the bridge. Anyway, she looks a lot like me, and now she has no one. She was adopted, too, and her birth mother is dead. But we thought maybe her mother was a sister to my birth mother, maybe even twins. If we’re related, I thought it would help her to know that she still has family.”

  “Impossible. You’re making this all up. Do you think I’m stupid? Do you want to hurt me? Look, if you want to find your real mother, just do it. I don’t want to hear about it.” The line went dead.

  “That went well,” Tawnia said with a sigh, dropping her phone onto the table. Actually, the conversation had gone on much longer than she’d expected.

  She put granola into a bowl and sniffed the milk before pouring, her nose wrinkling at the sour smell. She dumped it down the drain and rinsed out the sink.

  “There’s always eggs.” Autumn was in the kitchen doorway, still wearing Tawnia’s jeans from yesterday. The red top half of her hair stood on end, but her face look rested. How long had she been standing there? Not that Tawnia could complain—it wasn’t her apartment.

  “I looked for eggs. There’s none in the fridge.”

  “I don’t keep them in the fridge. No need if you eat them within a couple weeks. These are fresh from a friend’s farm. Well, fresh at the end of last week. They’re from free-range chickens, which, if you know anything about chicken farming, is a lot healthier for us and more humane for the chickens. Winter sells the eggs in his store.” Her voice went softer at the end of her sentence, but besides that she showed no reaction to the reference to her father. She stood on tiptoe, opened the cupboard above the sink with her left hand, and brought down a cardboard carton of eggs.

  Brown eggs. Tawnia had never seen brown eggs before, though she knew they existed. Something about a different kind of hen or something. Maybe.

  “Here, let me.” She took the egg away from Autumn, who was trying awkwardly to crack it open into a bowl. “Have a seat, and I’ll fix you breakfast. We have to hurry, though. I have to go to work.”

  Autumn went to the table without protest. “I heard you talking to your mother. What happened?”

  “She doesn’t believe you exist. She thinks I want to find my birth mother and replace her.”

  “And do you?”

  Tawnia turned from the bowl of raw eggs. “Growing up with my parents wasn’t easy. They expected a lot from me, but I know I had a better life than a lot of children. I know they care about what happens to me. I never went hungry, I always had clothes, and I had a great education. Looking back, I think there were things I could have done to make life easier for all of us. I . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t know. This morning I woke up worried about them. That’s never happened before. I never thought much about them not being there.”

  Autumn nodded. “Death does put things in perspective.”

  “You have any margarine to cook these in?”

  Autumn blanched. “Hydrogenated oil that has been bleached and colored? No way. I do have butter, though.”

  “That’ll do.” She accepted the butter Autumn retrieved from the refrigerator. “You look better this morning. Rested.”

  “I feel better.” Autumn’s smile faltered. “At least until I start to think about everything. I mean, the idea that I’ll never see Winter again. That he’ll never walk through that door . . .” She looked to the kitchen door, as though waiting for him to do just that.

  “What was it like growing up with hippies?” Tawnia flushed as she asked the question.

  Autumn laughed. “You mean as opposed to stuffy, rich people like your parents?”

  “Something like that.”

  Autumn considered for a moment. “I think it was the best life a child could have, despite Summer dying. I mean, I suppose I could have gotten some terrible disease because I never had immunizations, and they never cared about my grades at school or if I wore the same clothes for a week. I never had to wear shoes. As a teenager, my hair changed colors more times than I washed my jeans. None of that was important. I suppose some kids could have gone wild, but Winter—and Summer, too, when she was alive—lived in a way that was well, wholesome, I guess. If someone was a danger to me, a friend on drugs, or something, Winter loved them and was in their face so much they either changed or left me alone. As for me, I never needed anything more than him and our close friends.”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  “She gave me a great life.”

  “Your birth mother?”

  “Yes. You want to see her picture?”

  Tawnia brought the cooked eggs to the table. A bagel would have made this breakfast more filling but it would have to do. “I’d love to.”

  Autumn was gone for only a minute, coming back into the kitchen with a family album. Turning to a page near the beginning, she pointed to a photo of a woman and a young girl, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The girl looked a lot like Autumn, though the eyes were both blue and her short hair was a lot lighter, nearly blonde. But the shape of the face and her build were very similar.

  This girl might be related to me. Tawnia wanted to feel moved as she looked at the picture, but she only experienced an odd lump in the back of her throat that she recognized as pity. “She’s very young.”

  “I know. When I was her age, I used to wonder how she must have felt having a child. I’m glad she felt she could trust Summer and Winter with me.”

  “If she’d lived, you’d have probably seen her again.”

  “Probably. That’s how Winter and Summer are—were. They might even have adopted her as well. We’ve had a lot of people living with us over the years.” Autumn left the book open and began eating her eggs.

  Tawnia’s attention went to Summer. Obviously older than Autumn’s birth mother but still young. She wore her brown hair very long, with the bangs braided down one side, as though to prevent them from going into her serious gray eyes. She was pretty in an earth-mother sort of way. The kind of woman who would be comfortable wearing holey jeans and no makeup. A woman who would look at home playing a guitar around a fire. She would worry about dolphins and global warming and preservatives. She would have loved to have a dozen children, but given only one, she would have made the best of it because nature had spoken.

  Tawnia ate in silence, her
appetite matched only by Autumn’s. “I should have made more.”

  “I’ll go shopping later. We’ll have a big dinner tonight to make up for it.”

  “Here?”

  “Why not? Just the two of us. Maybe I can get hold of that doctor I told you about while I’m at work today. I found the box of old papers. He’s probably moved, though, after all these years.” Autumn’s voice faltered as the doorbell rang. “I wonder who that is?”

  “I’ll get it,” Tawnia said through a mouthful of eggs. Autumn’s face had gone quite pale. “I’ll tell any neighbors you aren’t ready for company,” She jumped to her feet and hurried into the hall before Autumn could object. Truthfully, she was more worried about the police than the neighbors. After all, who’d go to someone’s house at seven in the morning if they weren’t bearing bad news? What if they’d found Winter?

  She swallowed her mouthful and peered through the peep hole, her breath catching in her throat. Bret. Great, and she was still wearing her oldest set of pajamas, which made her look distinctly like a scrawny bag lady wearing something she’d found in the bargain bin at a large-sized clothing store.

  She opened the door a few inches, but Bret took that as an invitation and pushed his way inside. “I have news,” he said. “But again, it’s confidential. Well, some of it.”

  “Winter?” she whispered.

  His voice lowered to match hers. “They did find another victim last night. Not Winter.”

  Tawnia nodded. “What else?”

  “Is Autumn around? She should hear this, too.” He hefted a set of folded papers in his hands.

  Tawnia stifled the desire to grab them from him. “In the kitchen.”

  Bret’s eyes wandered up and down her body, taking in her attire. “Don’t you have to get ready for work?”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “Yes, so get talking already.” She pointed toward the doorway into the kitchen

  Autumn was still sitting at the table when they entered. Her face brightened at seeing Bret, and for a moment Tawnia felt horribly jealous. But Bret wasn’t hers. Not now, not ever.