Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  Days later she had understood that there had been an accident, but that no one called it that. They told her that her parents had died, in short, cold terms that clearly indicated their dislike of her. One well-meaning attendant had said they hadn’t suffered, but Teddy had started to remember by then, enough to know that he was lying through his yellowed teeth. The pitiful screams of her mother as she’d died still lingered in her mind, remembered as a nightmare tinged with black blotches of night and flickering flames of burning jet fuel, fuel that seemed to burn forever, something that could not be forced away with words that were only polite fabrications.

  But it was the way the hospital staff had cast their glances over their shoulders when they thought she wasn’t looking. They had gazed at her oddly, and gone back to whispering. It wasn’t long before the gist of it came through her fogged brain. She began to understand. And it was worse than awful. It was worse than anything that the cruelest human could devise. She had been in a plane crash. She was the only survivor. She had been unconscious for weeks, lost to the world in a coma brought on by injuries to her head. The pilots and various crewmembers were dead. Her parents were dead. There were hints of blame for the crash that floated back to her, little insidious rustling noises that blamed and suggested. “She’s only twelve years old.” “Have you seen the way she looks at people? Cold. Sure, she’s responsible.” “They say they found certain items in her room. A diary. Internet stuff on bomb-making.” “But she’s only twelve.” “She’s already in college. She’s smart. They say she’s a prodigy.”

  And Teddy, short, skinny, with knob-knees, and a silent determination borne of necessity, submitted to three surgeries to realign broken bones, and an intensive regimen of physical therapy that she felt sure was intended to torture, rather than restore. She used to have friends, but now had no one. The funerals were long since over. Nurses and candy stripers alike spoke a dearth of words to her. Weeks of being in a coma had allowed the publicity to die away, but it quickly regained a meager force with her awakening. The suggestion of guilt had been the kiss of death. The relatives that remained did not visit. There were lawyers, and social workers who came to her, followed by a few law enforcement people, and Teddy became proficient at playing stupid. A head injury that had induced a coma provided an excuse. Instead she gathered information and learned that her silence was the only way that she could survive.

  The physicians had suspected brain damage and performed certain tests. Teddy read old People and Newsweek magazines in the office while she waited, articles with innuendo about motives to murder, about speculation over wills and mechanical expertise. A nurse accompanied her who was also was an obvious bodyguard, whom she suspected was not just a bodyguard, but also a jailor. She understood that she was the primary suspect in an NTSB investigation into the crash of the privately owned Learjet that had been one of three that transported her father, Thomas Zachary Howe and his staff to various destinations all over the world. It would be months or years before they would be able to ascertain the cause of the crash. Publicly, speculation was rampant, ranging from a UFO attack to an alcoholic pilot who went off the wagon shortly before the flight commenced. Even the most respected newspapers hinted at possibilities of sabotage, only narrowly avoiding being libelous.

  And every day that she woke up in the hospital was like another weight being placed upon her chest. They stared at her. They judged her. No one was willing to give her any benefit of doubt. After all, even a twelve-year-old girl could lust after billions of dollars. And even if she had been in the same crash, then perhaps she was merely an unhappy little girl with far too much intelligence, intent on committing suicide in a dramatic manner.

  So when Teddy woke up in the small bedroom, she felt for a single moment all of the panic and alarm that she had felt years before, pressing down upon her. Then she realized that she was not in a hospital room. She was, instead, years beyond that other time she had woken up, afraid, and utterly alone, with darkness compacting her and no escape in sight. And she took another inventory. All limbs present. Breathing. No ropes or chains. God, my mouth is dry.

  There was an abrupt pain as she twisted her face, and she recalled the stitches above her eyebrow. She touched her face with a hand that felt like more weights were attached to it, and looked around the tiny room. It was a guest bedroom, with cast-off furniture that someone had piled into the room over an extended period of time. A dark room with the blinds pulled. Dim light filled with dust motes trickled in through the slats of the blinds, causing strange, horizontal shadows.

  Teddy pulled herself into a sitting position and rediscovered painful ribs, as well as distressed muscles that screamed with protest. Two days ago she had been happily working the whale watching boat, speaking nicely to tourists, thinking about moving up the coast to Seattle, where teenagers blended easily, and feeling pleased that she finally seemed to have eluded the ones who had been chasing her for years. She could sleep an entire night through, and she was considering ways of attaining a legal identity so that she could return to some sort of normal semblance of life.

  She had been at a point where she had momentarily forgotten. Forgotten what she was. Who she was. Where she was. Forgotten. She had almost been happy.

  Then, she was running again. And it was not just the running. It was that the threat had slammed down upon her head like a relentless mallet belonging to a savage Norse god. They would never let her go. She could have agreed with them, signed some kind of legal paperwork with them, confessed to murder in front of them and every American who had cable, and they would continue to seek a way to eliminate the menace that she posed.

  They’d proved it before, in the form of Eddie Morris, but she’d still held a glimmer of doubt. It was possible it had been an accident, but even trying to justify that car wreck in the dead of night hadn’t washed away her fears. The evidence she’d given to him had vanished in the fire that had consumed his car. Or it had been taken long before he’d died. And although poor Eddie’s wife did not want to believe the worst of her deceased spouse, she also had not been one to subscribe to theories of conspiracy and whodunits. She’d politely listened to Teddy’s warnings about danger and disregarded the threat. Her ignorance likely saved her life, the last that Teddy had heard she’d remarried seven months after the death of her first husband, and she wasn’t screaming at lawyers, congressmen, or the police about faked alcoholic accidents. To her credit, she had maintained that Eddie didn’t drink and that he didn’t see well enough at night to drive. But she had let it go, allowing her own doubt to discolor her mental image of her husband, a man who in fact possessed principles. And it was Teddy who gave Mrs. Morris the benefit of her own doubt; perhaps she’d received a late night phone call suggesting that silence was golden, and that accidents happen to all types of people, including widows.

  Teddy looked up and saw the girl that she was reflected back at her from an ill-used mirror on the wall, the silver flaking off the back, scratches from children and repeated movements causing an odd mirror image. She blinked again, and put her hand up to her face again. It was repeated in the mirror, and then she swore expressively.

  The face of her mother gazed back at her. Clear gray eyes, gently tilted at the outer edge sat above a heart shaped face, cheek bones starting to emerge from curving apple cheeks, bow-shaped lips full and the color of freshly ground cinnamon. Only the scarlet colored hair didn’t fit in, laying across her head flatly, heavy from sleep and traveling hard in the last twenty-four hours or more. Contained in her reflection was the image of Greer Howe, her mother, the wife of Thomas. Lost in the world that had become hers, Teddy hadn’t realized how much she resembled her mother. On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, it was patently obvious that she was her mother’s daughter. And there was another realization. One that was far more bothersome.

  They’d washed off her face, taking every bit of makeup off, to better see what she really looked like. The two of them. Fitch and what did he call hi
m, F-Bob? They washed off my face. And took off the eyebrow ring and the nose stud. She looked at herself in the faded, damaged mirror and saw the girl she had been there. Innocent. Naive. Young. And how was it that they’d managed to do that without waking her?

  She suddenly remembered that she had some coffee, intent on staying awake until she could find some kind of leverage with which to keep Fitch alive, then her eyes had grown heavy, so heavy she couldn’t keep them open, and her brain had dulled with the alacrity of cotton balls stuffed into an empty cavity.

  The coffee. The fucking coffee was drugged! Those dirty, rotten, low-down bastards!

  Surging to her feet, the room spun for a moment. Teddy looked down. She still wore Edana’s sailing gear. White shirt. Blue jeans. White boat shoes. Everything was the same and yet everything was different. She glanced around the room slowly. The Glock was nowhere to be found. Peeping out the slats of the blinds she saw that it was late afternoon outside, shadows from huge pine trees had moved across the needle-strewn ground to cover up bits and pieces of the house. The Ford Explorer was gone. There was a tiny bathroom connected to the small bedroom. She used it with a dull sense of foreboding, relieving herself and washing her face and hands with scented soap that suggested a woman lived in F-Bob’s world as well. She thought that if they had gone to the police then it wouldn’t be long before they would be here, and Teddy was tired of running. But the stretch of light that filtered across the bed in horizontal shapes from the slats told her that she had been lying in the bed most of the day.

  Teddy had dealt with any number of types of people in the world she’d seen. From the poorest people she’d ever seen to those who had gotten wealthy on the illegal labor of others. She had seen people on the edge of sanity and some who had fallen far past it. There had been those who were ruthless liars and those who had scrupulous honesty. She had learned not to trust because there was rarely a second opportunity to come out of a situation in one piece.

  But I trusted Fitch yesterday, she grumbled to herself. Could I have let him get shot? Could I have stood there and waited for the dark-haired man to come after me next? She shook her head. No more than I could have watched Danby Shelton drown. But I didn’t have to trust Danby did I?

  There was a comb in the minuscule medicine cabinet that she borrowed and she managed to put her hair into some semblance of order, working it into a French braid down the back of her head and securing it with a purple Scrunchy that was also in the cabinet.

  When she emerged into the living room she found Fitch sitting on the couch. Tall, and blonde, so patently unlike the other man. Only in his early twenties perhaps. Not even four years older than she was. With those funny golden eyes so full of energy and sarcasm. Those odd eyes flickered up to her as she entered and then went back to the laptop propped across his knees, his fingers fluttering over the keyboard. She saw immediately that not only had he changed clothing, but that he’d bathed and slept. His hair was clean and curled off his forehead. His eyes were bright and there weren’t blackened rings underneath them. And he had probably had something to eat. Probably a pizza with anchovies and pineapple.

  Teddy’s stomach growled loudly. Even a pizza with anchovies and pineapple was beginning to sound good to her.

  Fitch looked back up at her. His eyes skimmed over her figure and almost nodded approvingly. She looked a lot better than she had that morning. The frightened expression was nearly gone. Sleep had chased it away. Rest had taken most of the paranoia away with the fatigue. He hadn’t sanctioned F-Bob’s drugging the cute little fugitive with the expertise of a Navy Seal and the interesting inability to drive, because he thought that she might not have been able to take it. She had been injured in her rescue of the kid. The stitches in her head and the way she’d favored her side had shown that she had suffered from the incident. Not to mention that she had been terrified beyond belief, even while she shot dead a man who had been about to shoot him.

  He must have wandered into the back bedroom a half dozen times checking to see that she was breathing regularly and hadn’t quietly slipped away in her sleep.

  F-Bob had scrounged up some like-minded friend from a natural food store down the road and set off to disappear the Explorer until the air was cleared once more. “The cops,” he announced solemnly to his former student, “will be looking for it.”

  “Uh, Bob,” Fitch said, reluctant to allow the Halford’s Ford to be taken to some chop-shop for the benefit of his old professor’s hippie friends. “I might actually have to return it to the people we, ah, borrowed it from.” Of course, he knew he was going to have to return the Explorer. His father was going to demand it.

  Bob clapped a hand onto Fitch’s shoulder knowingly. “I understand. We’ll hide it. They’ll never find it.”

  Fitch’s eyes rounded into the size of golf balls. He had the strangest feeling that F-Bob was enjoying this immensely, that this was the great adventure of his life. It gave the seventy-two year old, retired professor an air of vitality that he had seemed to misplaced before. He had even called his wife in Portland to tell her to extend her stay with her sister a few more days. “She’ll shit bricks,” he told Fitch out of the corner of his mouth, while he covered the phone with the palm of his hand.

  But it was Theodora Andrea Howe who held Fitch’s attention now. She stood about five foot four inches and weighed a hundred and ten pounds in a heavy downpour, but she radiated strength. She hadn’t cried, or whined, or protested that life was treating her unfairly. She had done what she’d had to do. Fitch admired her, and when the makeup had come off, it was undeniably her. Classically shaped features, with her hair drawn back into some kind of braid, tiny tendrils escaping on the sides.

  But words suddenly eluded him. He said, “Whassup?” drawling it out, and even adding the tongue waggling for effect.

  Teddy remained in the doorway, her gaze concentrated, not amused. “You know, when I hear people say that, I want to reach out and rip their tongues out of their heads.”

  Fitch abruptly brought his tongue back in his head. Clearly he wasn’t James Bond today, all charm and beguilement. All commonsense had filtered away with the sight of Teddy rested and ready to rip once more. So the first thing out of his mouth was, “Did we wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”

  “We shouldn’t have been in bed at all,” she said calmly.

  Shrugging, Fitch said, “F-Bob didn’t care for a gun pointed in his face. So he dropped a few Valium in your coffee. Actually, it could have been worse. He has acid around here. You know, for those psychedelic mood-changing flashbacks that they seem to like.” He didn’t add that he almost slugged Bob in the side of the head for doing just that, while defending her, saying, “She’s just a scared little girl. People are trying to kill her and besides she’s hurt.”

  Bob had chortled at Fitch and returned with, “A scared little girl with a very big gun, Fitchie. She shot some fibbie about a dozen times in the chest. Boom. Boom. Get a grip, kid.”

  “Tell me where the gun is,” Teddy demanded.

  “Trash can.” Fitch pointed. “Right over there.” He watched her retrieve it and go through the motions of checking it. The clip was ejected. She brought the sliding mechanism on top back and ejected a round of ammo that was inside the barrel. He almost winced, not realizing that there had been a round chambered. She reinserted the clip, finally looking up at him again. She carefully put the Glock on the table, the barrel pointed away from both of them. She abruptly changed her mind and put it back into the garbage can.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked quietly.

  “Feed you something?”

  “I mean,” she repeated even more quietly, “about me.”

  Fitch chewed on his lip, and made a face. After a moment his expression relaxed and he said, “F-Bob thinks that you’re the Patty Hearst of our generation.”

  Teddy considered this carefully. After another long moment, she chuckled. Then she laughed. Then she wiped a tear out of the
corner of her eye.

  She stopped when Fitch swiveled the laptop toward her and on the flat screen she saw a broad banner title that said, ‘Elvis Didn’t Die-He Ran For Congress! And other conspiracies!’ Below that was a large portrait of a girl. Next to that were several paragraphs of text. She didn’t need to read these to know what they said. She didn’t even need to look at the picture. She’d seen it many times. It was the last photograph that had been taken of her. Her hair had been light brown. Her eyes dove-gray. Her cheeks had been scarlet flags running across parchment-colored skin. And she had been skinny from years of living in the den of a cobra.

  That same picture had been the impetus of much change. She’d looked at it several times over the last thirty-six months and was almost positive that she didn’t resemble that haggard, sunken-eyed fifteen year old. The first thing she’d done on the run was to alter her appearance. Although she hadn’t needed money, she spent two weeks running, then another two weeks begging in New Orleans and turned herself into a dirty urchin named Audrie. Two homeless men named Perry and Charlie-Six had befriended her. Both were Viet Nam veterans who were sympathetic to someone with a hard luck story. Both were more concerned that she was a runaway. They had shared some information with her. Cover and concealment, they’d said. Even the most obvious items can be changed. Slumping one’s back. Dirt on one’s face. Changing clothing. Dye your hair. A fake birthmark. Hide in plain sight.

  A month passed before Perry had decided that money for crack was worth more than the grateful thanks of a teenager, calling a hotline one night from a payphone. Charlie-Six had hurried back to let Audrie know so that she could run.

  “It is you,” said Fitch. He stared at her, his expression blank. “One of the receptionists at work said you looked familiar. So did F-Bob, but the makeup, the face itself. You’ve grown up. They said you were dead. Because otherwise they would have found you long before this.”