Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  “I didn’t want him in trouble.” Teddy looked ahead of them and carefully followed the path of the water she desired to go toward. She expertly used the outboard motor, as if she had been using it all her life. But Fitch could see that her face was tormented. “I’ve caused so many people...trouble, lately.”

  There didn’t seem much to say for Fitch. He didn’t hold that he could convince Teddy that she was blameless, that fault had to be placed on the head of the man responsible, her own uncle. A man who had proven that he could and would murder for money. “What if they find the truck in the forest?” he asked instead.

  “It’s far enough away from the general store that they’ll hesitate in blaming Mr. Scott. But they’ll question him and he’ll tell them that two young people from California or Washington came by today to rent a pirogue they haven’t yet returned. But they won’t know who took the truck right off the bat, because they’re not searching for us here.”

  “We can’t go back there,” he said.

  “No, the bayou runs up to several tributaries. If we had the gasoline we could probably make it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Mexico,” said Fitch. “Get a tattoo and drink tequila. Plus they have these cliffs in Acapulco that are supposed to be a killer climb. Bet I could beat your ass to the top. Then we’d dive off the top into those blue, blue waters.” He paused. “Almost made you smile there, Teddy. You got a plan for getting out?”

  “Sneak in, sneak out. Before they know what’s up. Take the pirogue back out into the bayou. Simple. Precise. Doable.”

  “So what happened to the girl who was shaking in my step-mother’s deck shoes?”

  Teddy’s face tightened into a frown. “I’m getting a little tired of people trying to kill me.”

  “Me, too. We have so much in common. So if this house has got so much security going on, how is it, exactly, that you’re going to get inside?” Fitch was curious.

  “There are several ‘blind’ spots,” Teddy acknowledged. She deftly avoided an alligator and sent the pirogue down a channel heavy with water lilies and other aquatic plant life. The boat mowed down the area as if another vessel had never been this way before.

  “Including the back part of the property,” said Fitch.

  “Yes, but one has to get inside the house, too.”

  “One could let one’s...uh...boyfriend do it.”

  “One doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

  Fitch sighed melodramatically. “Friend then. Who doesn’t want his friend to get hurt.”

  “You wouldn’t know your way around the inside of the mansion.”

  “Mansion, shmansion,” Fitch interjected, waving his hand around. “How hard could it be? How big could it be?”

  Teddy turned off the outboard engine and pointed through thick trees. “That big.”

  Fitch turned to look. An expression of dismay crossed his face as he saw exactly what he and Teddy were up against. “Well, cripes. That’s a little bit bigger than I would have imagined.”

  Chapter Thirty

  August 18th

  A section from Dr. Bob’s Guide to Dino-Birds!, written by Dr. Robert Gaime, Bell City Publishing, 1997, pg. 3: Are birds dinosaurs? Birds and dinosaurs share certain bones such as a fused collarbone (the furcula), an anklebone, (the astragalus), and the shinbone (the tibia). Most also have four toes, three pointing forward and one back. The similarities between birds and dinosaurs have been noted upon for a hundred and more years. However, there are dissenters who claim that a distant, tree-climbing ancestor procreated the different strains well before the existence of either species. In either case, Archaeopteryx is undoubtedly the first bird. About 145 million years old, he was crow-sized and covered in feathers. Some of the best-known specimens of Archaeopteryx show a lovely range of feathers along the wings, body and tail, plainly evidenced in fossil record. But there are also differences that are quite striking. Archaeopteryx had teeth instead of a beak, and claws on the wings, and a long bony tail. He must have been a fierce hunter, almost raptor-like, an intriguing combination of both dinosaur and bird traits, causing more questions than answers...

  They waited until darkness. Fitch lost track of time. It had taken them most of the day to move from the minuscule airport outside of Natchitoches to the store where Teddy planned to rent or steal a pirogue through Twilight Bayou right up to their final destination, the edge of the Howe mansion. In the tiny boat they floated through the thick bayou, sheltering in the shade of the lush vegetation, occasionally brushing away gnats and mosquitoes. Flush with a dinner of ding-dongs and luke-warm Mountain Dews both anticipated the loss of daylight.

  Fitch leaned back in the small, flat boat, which she had carefully maneuvered under a leaning oak tree in the deepest shade. She had cut the engine almost a mile away from the house itself, and he remarked, “I’ve never been in a bayou before.”

  Teddy was leaning over the side of the pirogue, resting her chin across her arms and staring through the thick trees and foliage at her former home, her former prison. Her solemn gray eyes studied the house before her as if she had never seen it, looking at its plantation-like structure, with Grecian columns and pearly balustrades that lined the acreage that was the sweeping backyard. The house itself was three stories of pure antebellum-styled architecture, based on other antebellum homes of the area, but with modern amenities on the inside. With ten bedrooms, four living areas, a ballroom, two kitchens, two formal dining rooms, an exercise room, a library, and three offices, it was the palatial estate and showpiece that her mother had desired and the home that her father had needed. But there was an underlying hatred of the house now, despite its noble birth and venerable start. The truth was ugly and she didn’t hesitate in saying what she felt now, “I never wanted to come back.”

  “This plan wasn’t a spur of the moment thing,” Fitch said. “You’ve planned this.”

  “More times than I care to count,” she said slowly. The back of the Howe mansion was quiet. No one patrolled there. No signs of life were apparent. If the lush, emerald green yard hadn’t been neatly kept with its adjoining gardens weeded and tightly cut she might have thought that her uncle had deserted the place. Freshly planted, hothouse flowers lined the red-stoned walkways. The Olympic-sized pool shown clear, bright blue lights in the bottom going on automatically. The great, elaborate, white gazebo held nothing but the appearance of comfort as it sat on the lengthiest spit of land that extended into the bayou, so that one might stroll out in the evening and admire the uncommon loveliness of the bayou.

  But in truth it wasn’t up to Theron to keep the maintenance up on the residence. It would have been up to the board of directors that had been appointed to control the tenets of her parents’ wills. They would pay the bills for gardening, maid service, and the various chores that had to be performed in order to maintain a house of this stature. They would have made the decision to keep the house as it was, as it had been, until such a point came in time that it was no longer necessary.

  It was a home that was waiting. The board, not under her uncle’s thumb, would hold the house in situ, anticipating Teddy’s eventual return or perhaps her eventual demise, upon which the monies would go to her next of kin. Possessing no siblings, it would proceed next to her closest living relative, Jackson Theron, who was also the executor and her guardian.

  It was here she had spent two years, sequestered from the world, kept in isolation, watched by men who were called security guards, but were nothing more than paid thugs. A nurse dispensed drugs to her that Teddy did not take, hiding them under her tongue or in the pocket of her cheek until she could spit them out. It was here that she spent so many hours locked in her suite of rooms, sitting at her computer, using her mind to understand what it was that she could do to break loose of that confined area where there never seemed to be enough light.

  As time passed both guards and nurses grew lax. They began to believe that not only did Teddy take her medicat
ions that made her sluggish and lackadaisical but that she was not as clever as Theron would have had led them to believe. Left to her own purposes much of the time she hacked her way into the security system in order to effectively plan her route of escape. She discovered something altogether different, a manner in which she could watch the same security cameras that were positioned throughout the mansion. The cameras were digital and stored their data in the mansion’s database, a technologically advanced system that her father had installed.

  Teddy had taken approximately twenty minutes to figure out a backdoor into the database, using one of her father’s pass codes, the pet name her mother had used for him, my dear mockingbird. Eliminating the spaces in between the words, she was able to access the mainframe and view whatever she wanted. She knew that her uncle would eventually grow as careless as his employees and that when he was present at the mansion, several times a year, he might allow something to slip. He might say something that could be used as evidentiary. Something that might allow the very young Teddy to understand what had happened to her world.

  “It sounds like it was a long shot,” Fitch said as she related her reasoning to him.

  “Maybe it was.” Teddy grimaced. “No, it was definitely a long shot. He’s just as smart as anyone in the family. Just greedier. And I’ve since discovered that greedy people make mistakes. I’ve met so many of them over the last few years. Uncle Jack couldn’t cover it up by himself. In the last few days I’ve come to the conclusion that he used Gower as muscle. Jack arranged for my parents’ to be killed in a suspicious accident, and then probably arranged for the man who killed them to be killed. That left himself and Gower as the primaries. Maybe the man I shot in your house was one as well. Billions of dollars leaves a lot of room for payoffs. Conspirators, relying on each other to carry through to payday. After that, well, I wouldn’t turn my back on my uncle, considering his past characteristics. He killed his own sister for money, why not someone who worked loyally for him for years, too?”

  “So what’s on the cd-rom?”

  “He came one day, in the last year, only a week before I escaped, the impetus for my escape, if that’s the right way of putting it,” said Teddy, staring at the red and purple skies behind the mansion. “A security check, I suppose. I breached the system as a matter of habit. Daily if I could. Open a window here and there. Shorted the power system in the kitchen. I found that I could slip into the attic from the top of my closet and go almost anywhere I wanted in the house. For some reason the security system doesn’t cover the third floor; I suspect that they believed that it wasn’t necessary. I could go out the dormer windows and down the sides of the house, do just about any kind of reconnaissance that I needed to do. Anyway, Uncle Jack had to come check the place out.” Teddy smiled grimly. “Too many false alarms. Then he’d stop by my room and pretend to be the doting relative, concerned for my well-being, asking about the doctor’s visits, and whether or not I was well enough yet. As if he didn’t know it already and wasn’t actively planning my death.”

  •

  “Theodora, my dear,” said Theron, in a voice dripping with false sentiment. Standing tall in his niece’s room, he appeared every inch the impeccable leader and member of an elite law enforcement agency, a well-respected politician, in his tailored suit and with his sympathetic expression. “You’ve grown an inch.”

  Teddy turned away from her computer and viewed her uncle. Light brown hair spilled over her well-shaped face. Her uncle thought she appeared hollow-eyed and gaunt, but the resemblance to his only sibling was readily apparent. She was the living image of a fifteen-year-old Greer Theron, his sister and a woman who had always been kind to him. A pity, really, that she has to die, but money is money.

  His niece barely suppressed a distasteful expression on her lovely, if thin, face. Black rings surrounded her eyes as if she slept far too much and her arms sticking out from under a t-shirt were like sticks, only a little bit of childish muscle to indicate any kind of breadth. He made a mental note to tell the cooks to fatten up the child’s diet. He certainly didn’t want to be accused of neglect...after the fact. Then she spoke, in a tired voice, “Two inches, Uncle. It’s been three months since you’ve...visited.”

  Theron sat in an armchair near where she was sitting, playing with her computer. He carefully observed her features and then transferred his steely gaze to the computer’s screen. On the monitor was a picture of some television star. Something that was on the WB network. Something an adolescent would be looking at. It was easy to forget that she was an exceptionally clever fifteen-year-old. A child who would have gotten her bachelor’s degree almost two years before, if she had been allowed to continue with her studies. Alas, he thought, that couldn’t be allowed. She must be controlled. A year in the hospital, relearning how to use smashed limbs. Another year in physical therapy here at the mansion. She is fully recovered. No one can say I didn’t provide her every opportunity. And God knows, I want my hands on that money. I deserve it. More than she ever will. “My dear, I am a deputy director. I have responsibilities.”

  Teddy put her head down, casting her eyes to the floor. She didn’t want her uncle to see the mutinous venom that caused her to continue living day after day, expectant for the moment that she could be free of him and free of the minions who watched her like they watched the most culpable of criminals. After almost three years of consideration she had come to the inescapable conclusion that he was to blame for her parents’ deaths. That Teddy’s survival must have been some kind of uncanny fluke. There had been a last minute maneuver to cast the blame onto Teddy herself that had failed. The proof had been ill placed and even the NTSB and the FBI couldn’t make connections that simply were not present. She had concluded that he could have been the only one with such connections and know-how to pull the crimes off. And like some kind of super-criminal he might have succeeded if the pilot of her father’s jet hadn’t been a phenomenal operator. The pilot had saved her life. He might have saved them all if he’d had a closer runway. It had been a phenomenal kink in Theron’s plan.

  Teddy would have to die as well. But it couldn’t be right away. That would have proved far too suspicious. After all, who would benefit except the mournful uncle? No, he would have to wait for his fortune. But what a fortune. Plenty of money to spread around. Money to pay off confederates. And Teddy would have to wait, wait for providence to intercede.

  She finally saw that she would have to provoke him and knew that drawing him into a web of her own design was her only chance. Teddy forced herself to speak imperiously, knowing that Theron did not care for people who dared to speak back to him, those who questioned his authority. “You’re my only relative. I want to go back to school. I’m fully healed.”

  “Out of the question,” he responded promptly, only a note of aggravation in his tone.

  “Then I’ll petition the courts for emancipation,” she replied tartly. “You do know what that means, dear uncle?” She couldn’t keep the note of triumph out of her voice. She honestly thought she could outwit the older man, one way or another.

  Theron scrutinized her. “You’re fifteen, my dear. Not old enough to be able to maintain your father’s billions, much less be on your own. No court would give you the right to...”

  “I’ve fulfilled all of the requirements, Uncle. It’s only a matter of approving the paperwork for the lawyers to submit. If it’s a matter of health, then the doctors can confirm my well-being and complete recovery from the...ah...accident. If it’s a matter of ethics then the board of directors can maintain control of the money until I’m eighteen or twenty-one, if they’d rather, but I want to command my own life and not be restricted to this suite of rooms for the next three years because of whatever asinine beliefs you’ve developed because of their deaths.” She kept her voice level until the very last, whipping out the final section with most of that virulent rage that she’d been curbing for the last six months.

  Theron moved quickly, a blur of
wiry strength. He came to his feet before she could see the intent in his eyes and all Teddy could do was stare as he stepped forward and slapped her soundly across her face. Teddy’s head ricocheted off the back of her desk chair and she didn’t make a sound as she slowly turned her head back to look at the man who was her closest living relative. His voice was a rumbling snarl, and her eyes grew large with alarm, “You’ll do what I tell you to do, until a point in time comes when it’s not necessary.”

  “My mother told me you were an aggressive child,” said Teddy slowly, glad of the control over herself that she had found within the last few years, the cold shell of protective material that shielded her from the outside and all of its twisted inhabitants. She reached up and touched a trickle of blood that wound its way out of one of her nostrils. “Once she said that she found it interesting that you choose law enforcement, that using your nature in that particular environment accentuated your specific characteristics. Did you hit her, too?”

  “Your mother never crossed me, Theodora,” Theron reached up to touch the side of her face, tilting her head so that he could see the mark he’d left. “Ten years younger than I, she possessed a gentle disposition, a lamb really. So unlike your father. So unlike you.”

  Teddy brushed his fingers away, unable to restrain the loathing she felt when his digits smoothed over her cheek. “And do you beat your wife as well? Does she hide the bruises under long sleeves and high collars? Do you tell people that she’s gone to visit your in-laws for a week, when she’s really at home in bed, recovering from whatever punishment or aggravation you’ve dispensed upon her?”

  Theron stared down at her, an incendiary expression exploding across his features. He grasped her face again, clutched her about her chin, his strong fingers digging into her flesh, and growled, “The day can’t come soon enough that...”