Max was so unnerved, she screamed, and the two children began screaming, too.
The girl recovered first. She grabbed her brother’s hand and gave it a good, strong jerk.
“Stop it, Bailey,” she commanded. She kept her distance but didn’t back away farther. Her eyes were wide with fear. “Who are you? This is our family’s property. It’s private property. Posted everywhere on the trees. You must have seen signs!”
The girl was probably around eight. She was huffing, puffing, and her face was beet-red, but she was putting up a brave big-sister front.
Max was impressed. God, she ached to talk to these kids, to play some games with them. She just wanted to talk to somebody.
“Who are you?” the girl asked again.
That, Max thought, was a very good question. As she considered it, the girl continued to talk at her. Nervous pitter-patter, which was okay with Max.
“I’m Elizabeth Ellers, all right. This is my little brother, Bailey. He’s five. I’m nine. Now, what are you doing out here? Speak your piece.”
Little Bailey stared Max up and down, then he pulled away from Elizabeth and walked closer. He made a wide circle around Max.
Amused, she turned as he turned, trying to keep him from getting too good a look at her wings.
“What’s wrong with your arms?” He blubbered a few words.
Max hesitated. What would these little kids think of her wings? Did she dare? She wanted to. She really wanted to.
She shrugged her shoulders, locked her elbows into position. Then Max slowly extended her forearms and the joints unfolded. Her feathers realigned with an enticing, whispering sound.
Bailey’s and Elizabeth’s blueberry-stained mouths dropped open—wide. Bailey oohhed, and popped his purple fingers into his mouth.
Max knew that her wings were quite beautiful. The primary feathers were arranged in tiers of snowy-white shafts; the barbs of each shaft nestled tightly against the next, forming an airtight seal. The undersides of the wings were lined with smaller secondary feathers, and her skin glowed through them. It was rosy-pink from freshly oxygenated blood.
Ooohh!
Chapter 29
JEEZ CARAMBA!” Bailey exclaimed. Whatever was that supposed to mean? Jeez caramba? Cheese caramba? Was that the was kids talked around here in the Colorado boonies? Guess so. Jeez caramba? Okay, fine then.
Max extended her index fingers, forcing her wings out to their fullest length. Her wingspan was nearly half again as wide as she was tall.
“Ooohh!”
Bailey shrank back toward his sister. His blue eyes were bigger than ever. He was actually a little cutie, though.
“Are they real?” Elizabeth Ellers finally got up the nerve to speak again. “They look like it.”
Max grinned. She knew she was trying to get the other kids to like her. “Of course they’re real.”
“Do it,” Bailey whispered. “Please do it. Fly for us.”
Elizabeth held Max’s eyes. She whispered, too, as if this were an outdoor church or something. “We won’t tell anybody. We promise.”
The small boy nodded solemnly. Up and down, up and down, and then sideways. He made a hurried sign of the cross where his heart was. “Cross my heart and hope to die. Cross both our hearts. Please. Do it. Just do it.”
“If I do, you can’t tell. It’s just between us,” Max said. “And never cross your heart and hope to die. It could happen.”
“We won’t tell,” the boy said.
“If you do, I’ll come get you.”
“Are you a vampire or something?” Bailey asked. He looked nervous and afraid again. His eyes crossed.
“Yeah, I’m a vampire. No, I’m not a vampire. Are you a little midget Martian? Are you from Mars?”
Elizabeth finally laughed out loud and Max could have hugged her. “You got that right. He’s definitely from Mars. What’s your name?”
“Oh… Tinkerbell.”
They all shared a pretty good laugh. She wanted to show off, but she also wanted to share something about herself. She loved to share, actually. She had always been a good girl, thoughtful, kind to others. She believed that sharing was essential to a good life. There was one absolutely true thing she’d learned at the School: what goes around comes around.
Max saw that the path ahead of her was flat and free of rocks and roots. She started to run.
It only took four or five steps before the air seemed to split around the thick leading edges of her wings. The air currents lifted her, raised her aloft.
“Jeez caramba!” she yelled, wondering if the kids got the humor?
She flew straight up—then dived at Bailey and Elizabeth. Instinctively they ducked, and Max laughed hysterically. She loved to play with other kids. Loved it more than anything.
And she desperately, desperately wanted to tell them the secrets. Except if she did, they would be in danger, too. Cross their hearts and hope to die.
Max beat her wings up and down, up and down. She was free-floating now! She circled overhead, tracing the outline of a cloud. Softly banked left, then right.
Down below, Elizabeth and Bailey Ellers watched in stunned silence. They held both hands out over their eyes, staring up intently without blinking.
Soon the kids were very small below her, but she could see their upturned faces, their O-shaped mouths perfectly. Max knew they couldn’t help. They were too little; they were helpless themselves—helpless and clueless. Besides, she couldn’t bear it if they got hurt because of her and what she knew.
She waved her hand “bye-bye.” Bailey and Elizabeth waved back.
“We won’t tell!” Bailey hollered. “Cross our—nothing.”
“Come back,” Elizabeth Ellers called. “We can be friends.”
Max missed them terribly, almost before they were out of sight. Bailey and Elizabeth. Nice kids. Good people. Maybe they could have been friends if she could have hung around for a while.
And she missed Matthew of course. She missed her own little brother so much. It tore a huge, ragged hole in the center of her chest.
As she soared high across the brightly golden meadowland that adjoined the woods, she felt achy and alone. Inside somewhere, she knew she wasn’t meant to be alone.
She was just a little kid herself.
A-rumpty-rump-dump.
A-rumpty-rump-dump.
Chapter 30
DAVID’S ARMS were thrown limply over my shoulders, and I was dragging him through a desolate, bone-white desert that seemed familiar. The sun was a big clock in the sky and the second hand was ticking off the seconds between life and death. I’d been here before.
“Hurry, Frannie. Please,” David panted. He whispered hoarsely against my cheek. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but you have to hurry. We don’t have much time.”
I was tired, so tired from dragging David’s limp form, and yet I couldn’t put him down. “Hold on,” I said to David. “Please.” I felt his warm sticky blood at the back of my neck and my hair bristled. Tears flowed down my cheeks.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’ll always be here for you.”
His feet dragged in the sand. He was so heavy. I adjusted my grip, but didn’t stop moving forward. My arm muscles were incredibly sore and weary. I could feel his heartbeat against my back, but it was faint, almost gone.
As he always did, David began to tell me stories about our marriage. Joyful, happy stories that only reminded me about how full our life had been. Two successful practices; serious talk about having a child, maybe two or three kids if we were lucky.
“We should have had kids, Frannie. We shouldn’t have waited.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t, David. I don’t want to hear this.”
But he wouldn’t stop. “Remember our fifth anniversary? We stayed at that perfect little inn in Vermont, you know the one. Made love all day, Frannie. Had breakfast, lunch, and dinner in bed,” he said.
“Of course I remember, David. I’ll never forg
et Vermont.” He started to hum. It was the lovely, haunting theme from A Man and a Woman. He’d adored that movie. I had, too. We’d seen it five or six times. I stopped walking suddenly.
“Are we there?” David asked.
I looked into the distance. I saw only the glare and shimmering heat of the endless desert.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re here.”
I let David down from my back and tenderly laid him out under the sun. I stretched his strong arms straight out to the sides. His hands and feet were bleeding; so was the gaping bullet wound near his heart.
“I’m sorry for what I did,” David said. “I’m so sorry, Frannie.” I didn’t understand what he was saying, why he was sorry, but I nodded as if I did.
I took off all of my clothes and made the softest possible pillow of them. I tucked the pillow of clothes gently under his head. It was the single most heartbreaking thing I have ever done.
“Thank you,” said David. He looked at me with clear, loving eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t let me die.”
Then David died again—just the way he always did, every single morning.
The alarm on my windowsill went off. I awoke from the disturbing dream. It seemed so real, but of course David had died in a parking lot in Boulder, not in some mysterious desert.
I opened my eyes in my tiny bedroom at the animal hospital. My bare arms were stretched back and holding on to the headboard above me. My eyes were teary, my cheeks wet. My chest ached, as if I’d been struck with a hammer. I remembered that not so long ago I’d had a good life. There had been someone I loved, and who loved me.
I kicked off the jumble of blankets. An image came to me and shocked me a little. The dream, the nightmare fantasy, was starting to break up, and though I was losing the pictures, I felt steeped in shame.
I saw a man with blond hair in a denim shirt. He was wearing a smile as bright as the sun. I saw myself turning toward him.
I got up quickly from the mess of covers that was my bed. Why should I feel so ashamed?
I blinked away the unbidden image of Kit Harrison, and walked to the window that faced back into the woods. I threw it open and breathed deeply. I could almost taste the pines and grass.
A faint morning breeze brushed across my damp skin. I began to feel better. I had started to turn away from the window when I heard it. A horrifying sound that chilled me to the bone.
Chapter 31
THE LONG, WAILING SCREECH that I heard coming from the nearby woods was ghastly. It took me only a minute to throw on jeans, workboots, the same T-shirt I’d worn the day before.
I stopped in the minilab long enough to fill a syringe with ketamine, and I put the anesthetic in my knapsack. Pip was barking loudly for breakfast, but he would have to wait. I couldn’t take the time.
“I’ll be back,” I shouted as I bolted for the door and burst outside.
The continuing sound of shrill screaming pierced my eardrums. The dew soaked my shoes and I slipped a couple of times but I kept on running as fast as I could.
I followed the pitiful sound, almost certain that I knew where it was coming from and what had happened.
The woods behind my clinic slope down toward a deep stream, almost a small river. Winter runoff had cut deep gullies into the woods. In summer the gullies are dry and partially filled with woodland debris. Choice places for predators to hunt for rodents.
Choice, too, for trappers to set illegal traps.
The high-pitched yipping got louder and then stopped abruptly as the animal panted for breath. When it started up again, the sound nearly broke my heart.
I made my way across the top of a gully and finally saw the fox. The beautiful, reddish-brown animal was dangling down in the gorge by one foreleg, scrabbling futilely with the other. It was a terrible, wrenching sight.
I saw what had happened.
A trap had slammed shut on the fox. It tried to pull itself free and had backed up over the edge of the chasm. The leg was gripped by the teeth and chain of the trap, and the fox’s body banged and scraped against the gully’s wall.
My stomach balled up. This was such needless, gruesome torture. For what? Somebody’s expensive coat in Aspen or Denver? The female was in agony; she was going mad, and why shouldn’t she?
“Hang on,” I said to the fox, in a low, unthreatening voice. “I’m coming.”
Oh, God, I’m not going to hurt you, little foxie.
The trap chain was double-looped and locked around the tree. I rattled the lock hard, but it wouldn’t release.
“Damn it!”
I thought of trying to haul the fox up by the chain, but she’d bite me. Besides, I had forgotten to take my gloves, and there was the possibility she might be rabid.
I hurriedly looked for a place to climb down. The gorge wall was lined with loose shale. I found what I thought was a good safe spot and decided to chance it. No good. The shale gave way and I made the ten-foot descent on my butt.
My noisy approach sent the fox into increased fear and frenzy. She was terrified, snapping her jaws and drooling from the mouth. I saw that the leg was completely engloved. The trap’s teeth were gripping bare bone.
“It’s okay, girl.”
I stood below the fox and looked for some way to inject her with the ketamine. There was a nearby ledge on a level with my shoulders, but it was obviously too thin and too narrow. I didn’t trust myself to hang on to it and get the needle into her leg at the same time.
The fox’s continual high-pitched whine was driving me crazy. Soon she’d go into shock, and very soon after that she’d die.
I knew I couldn’t save her by myself.
Chapter 32
KIT WAS SLUGGING a long, arcing home run high over the famed “Green Monster” wall in Boston’s Fenway Park. His two boys were watching from seats along the first-base line. Suddenly he was torn from his baseball heroics, the remnants of sleep.
There was a loud, insistent banging at the cabin door. He placed his hand on the rifle he kept under the bed, slid it along the floorboards.
“Yeah? Who is it?” he called. He pushed himself to a sitting position so that he could see through the window.
He parted the curtain and saw Frannie O’Neill with the serious frown she usually wore for his benefit. She always managed to look good to him.
What now? What did she want?
He stepped into his jeans, zipped his fly, buttoned up. More impatient banging on the door. Where was a clean shirt? To hell with a shirt.
“I’m coming.”
He opened the door, but before he could ask what crime he’d committed Frannie started to speak a blue streak of fast, barely intelligible words.
“I need your help,” she said. “Please. I really need you to help, Mr. Harrison.”
Mr. Harrison? “Sure. No problem. Shoes,” he said, and ducked inside to grab his sneaks.
He followed her, bare-chested, as she sprinted ahead of him to a rocky gorge a few hundred yards back into the woods. He could hardly keep up with her. She could really move on those long legs of hers. Mr. Harrison was it now?
“What the—” He stopped in midsentence.
It took him only a second or two to recognize what it was that was hanging from nasty metal jaws and jangling chains.
“Oh, Jesus, Frannie.”
The fox was a sickening sight, and he finally understood why she hated hunters so much, why she had been so mad at him since he arrived—with a gun.
The poor animal’s reddish-brown coat was soaked and spattered with fresh blood. The fur and flesh on its foreleg had been stripped forward from elbow to paw by the teeth of the leghold trap. Its breath was coming hard. Its intermittent barking was hoarse and weak.
“I can’t reach her,” Frannie panted. She was out of breath. “I tried it by myself. No use.”
She looked as if she were going to break down, and Kit felt choked up with the same emotion. What had happened to the young fox was cruel and heartbreaking, and it made him ang
ry, too. How could anybody do this to an animal?
“What do you want me to do? How can I help?”
She held a syringe clasped tightly in her hand. “I have to get this into her leg.”
“Okay. I got you.”
Kit skittered down the steep, muddy slope. He surveyed the gorge from top to bottom. Then he climbed back up.
He squatted above the fox that was suspended about three feet below the edge. He measured and weighed the animal with his eyes. Then he quickly scanned the underbrush for a fallen branch.
“This could work,” he called to Frannie.
It was about three feet long and only a couple of inches in diameter.
She looked perplexed. “What are you doing? What could work?”
It was easier to demonstrate than to explain. Kit lowered himself until his face and shoulders were hanging over the lip of the gully.
“Please be careful,” he heard her say.
He brought the stick close to the fox’s mouth. She was spraying foam with every exhaled breath and her eyes were dulling over. Kit wondered if she could even see him.
He touched the wood to the fox’s lips.
She snapped wildly, clamped her teeth hard around the branch, tried to break it in two.
Would the damn branch hold? Kit slowly, slowly, eased the fox up, up… and finally over the edge of the embankment.
“Stick her, now,” he gasped.
Frannie was right there. She jabbed the needle into the animal’s hind leg. Pushed the plunger. The fox kicked, then collapsed as the drug took effect.
Kit caught the animal as it dropped like a furry, stuffed animal into his arms.
“Well done,” said Frannie. “God, we did it.”
She took the fox from him and gently laid it down on the ground. Kit yanked open the trap’s trigger mechanism and Frannie carefully released the animal’s leg.
“Very well done. Wow. Thank you. Thank you. You’re a great paramedic partner.”
“You’re welcome. It was nice working with you. What a team. Glad we could help Foxie Lady.”
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