Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

“I’ll go alone. I can get there faster.” Her voice was insistent.

  “No.” Fitch lost all note of teasing amusement. He didn’t like the way he sounded with her. He didn’t like the rascally baiting that came effortlessly out of his mouth because he knew what was going to happen. “I’m coming with you.”

  Teddy slid out of the pirogue and pushed it into a growth of honeysuckle and Virginia creepers. She sank into the black pool of waters, clogged with water lilies and other unidentifiable aquatic plant-life and did not even make the slightest sound. “You going to get into the water, then, Fitch?”

  Fitch eyed the water mistrustfully. “Alligators active at night?” he asked, warily.

  “If I scream, then uh-huh, yep, they are.” She suppressed a giggle. “I don’t know. The quicker we’re out of the water, the less likely they’ll be using us as snack-packs.” She started wading toward shore, leaving him wrinkling his face in dismay.

  Finally, when they stood on dry ground, Teddy murmured, “Look back in the bayou.”

  Fitch glanced back, paused, and glanced back again. There were a dozen pairs of glowing eyes staring at them, yellow orbs of intent predators, seeking out their next meal. “What the freaking flipping flopping heck are those?” he squeaked.

  “I lied, Fitch,” she said solemnly. “Those are alligators, and yes, they’re nocturnal.”

  “Great. Man, if you think I’m wading back out to the boat again...”

  “Remember, follow me, and don’t make a lot of noise.”

  Teddy skirted the gazebo, pausing to point out a closed circuit camera mounted on one side, situated to show people approaching and leaving the main path that led out onto the spit of land that the delicate structure sat upon. She kept to the far sides of the tongue of land, almost stepping into the bayou itself, casting a glance back over her shoulder to see how they lined up with the camera. Her voice floated back to him, a mere rustle of noise, “It doesn’t seem like they’ve changed the set-up. Possibly because they didn’t know exactly how I got out.” Fitch didn’t say anything. Although the stars were bright above, and the moon was just a faint sliver past being new, a few lights from the mansion cast dark and mysterious shadows and caused various eyes in the bayou beyond them to reflect eerily back, pools of yellows and reds that blinked oddly and caused his stomach to clench uneasily.

  Looking up at the mansion instead, he wondered how anyone could have been confined to this place for two years without leaving. He pictured in his mind a beaten, terrorized Teddy and his stomach clenched like a piece of lead pipe in a vise grip.

  The estate was spread out over a huge acreage of land, probably lushly green in daylight, like tenuous streamers of black darkness at nighttime. Lights illuminated several downstairs windows. Back lights from a main patio in the center of the home were lit, showing a cleverly designed, beautifully built terrace, constructed of red stone, faintly glowing in the yellow light. Off to one side sat the luxurious pool, its blue depths illuminated by internal lights, beckoning to anyone to come take a swim. Then there were three stories of opulent glory, built by a man who had loved his family.

  Teddy slid into the bayou once more and waded along the edge, up to her knees, pausing again to look back at Fitch. She indicated several camera locations, keeping completely quiet. Then she sidled over the side of the bayou, right up the lawn and began to quickly and softly creep past rows of Japanese boxwoods, cut into neat rectangles of leafy green foliage.

  Fitch followed her, keeping one eye on her and one eye on the sleeping waters of the bayou as he sank up to his ankles in mud and decomposing debris. He clambered out of the water with a bitten-off groan of relief, and kept his head down as he trailed after his smaller cohort. He couldn’t help the remark that issued forth as he came into close contact with her posterior as she hesitated again, “Still with the nice ass...”

  “Shut up,” she hissed.

  His eyes went large with amazement as Teddy did the completely unexpected. She abruptly waggled her butt at him. One of his hands went out involuntarily and almost pinched her but he pulled it back before temptation overcame him.

  Suddenly, she froze into place, on her hands and knees, inside the shade of a hedge, and Fitch froze behind her as his eyes went up and saw the man walking through the garden, quickly passing the pool, threading his way through the hedge-lined paths. His footsteps echoed oddly on the slate tile, a tapping of noise that brought chills to both of them again. It was a tall man with blonde hair. The one he’d seen at F-Bob’s house, staring out the window at them, the one with the dark, menacing voice, who had spoken to Theodora over the police band, and threatened her so eloquently, the one who Teddy actively feared. He strode into the gardens as if they belonged to him. He went down the spit of land toward the gazebo and stopped at the end, looking out into the blackness of night and bayou, intermingled together.

  Teddy’s eyes followed him and she broke her rooted immobilization, shaking herself, wondering frantically, How could that man know that I was coming here? How and why? Somehow, somewhere she had discovered that the intense darkness no longer frightened her as much as it had before. In the furious days that had passed, she had learned that there were worse things. She checked Fitch again, her eyes reflecting the fear that was coursing through her blood, and he mouthed, ‘What now?’

  She jerked her head toward the house and he wavered, deliberating. Then he nodded.

  Teddy made the side of the mansion in less than five minutes. The darkness of the bayou made the blonde-haired man all but imperceptible, and he had vanished into the night, leaving Teddy and Fitch tense and edgy, because they didn’t know exactly where he was at that moment. She stood up at a corner of the house and pointed upward. Fitch crawled through the bushes and realized that Teddy had carefully plotted a route through a series of security cameras, in which she would be undetectable. If she strayed into the path of the lens, then she might be discovered, but she had practiced a thousand times while she was trapped in her upstairs suite of rooms.

  The young man swallowed uncertainly, not sure of himself. Then, while he watched, Teddy performed an intricate climbing maneuver, using her back and legs to brace herself as she clambered up between the corner of a wall and the frame of a window. The house made a ninety-degree angle here, where some unknown room jutted outward, and a strong individual could climb the walls here, if they knew what to do. Teddy knew exactly where to place her hands and feet, angling her body up into a specific tactic. Her moves were rough, but now Fitch understood why she hadn’t had that much trouble going down the cliff face; she had scaled herself up and down the side of the mansion so that she knew the moves that she needed to make in order to make proper assents and descents. It wasn’t a hard graded climb, but a twisting motion was needed just past the second floor to get past a facade that stuck out, and he watched her with admiration.

  When Teddy was poised on the edge of the third floor she looked down at him and motioned with her hand. Then her eyes scanned the area around her. Wherever the blonde-haired man had vanished to, he didn’t seem to be in their vicinity anymore. She watched as Fitch gracefully made the same motions as she did, using his upper body strength and longer limbs to his advantage. When he reached the top, he hung off the edge of the roof and stared at her challengingly. Her breath was coming in pants. Being injured and frightened and sleeping poorly wasn’t conducive to staying at one’s peak of performance.

  Hanging in space with his muscles only slightly trembling, Fitch hitched himself up onto the roof, carefully bringing his body up behind him, making not a sound, as he elegantly completed the correct movements. His legs swung out in space, with nothing for his feet to rest upon, and then he vanished. It was an eternity later that his head reappeared and a strong arm reached down to help her. Teddy procrastinated and shut her eyes tightly. Trust him, she told herself. Trust him!

  Fitch’s strong fingers grasped her shoulder, bracing her as she was propped between the wall of the mansion and
the precipice of the secondary roof. She made a sound and then bit it back and he hauled her up, using only the muscles of his upper body to make the transition. He watched her collapse on the tiles of the roof and whispered, “So how’d you make that when you were younger?”

  “I was about twenty pounds skinnier,” she snapped at him, keeping the words soft. “And I didn’t have cracked ribs, at least I didn’t have them going up.”

  Fitch rested beside her, crouching on bent knees while she gathered herself and her panting slowed. “I forgot about your ribs.” He laughed. “It doesn’t seem like you’re injured.”

  Teddy slowly raised her shirt, the shirt that had belonged to his stepmother, Edana, and Fitch almost held his breath, until he realized that she stopped below her bra line and that she was simply showing him the bruises where she had hit the water of Sullivan’s Bay. In the dim light that filtered up from the rooms below and refracted onto the roof, he saw the black and blue marks that lined her ribs and he couldn’t help the gentle fingers that touched the contusions. She made another soft noise, and he stopped abruptly, pulling her shirt down for her. She said, “And this is what you get for being a Good Samaritan.”

  Then he couldn’t help himself. In the peculiar position they found themselves in, where the blonde-haired man could glance up at a moment’s notice and see them perched there, ready to break into her own home, where killers waited for them, he couldn’t help himself. He leaned down and kissed her again, pressing grubby, wet hands around her face, angling toward her lips, anxious to find that spark of passion that he had felt before, and had felt in return from her.

  Teddy murmured. She had simply wanted to show him the bruises and let him know it was simply because she wasn’t in tip-top shape, but then he had touched her, and it was like nothing she had ever felt before.

  This time it was she who broke away, pulling back so that she was almost lying flat on the roof, and with her eyes glittering, she said softly, “Maybe that’s what I should get for being a Good Samaritan.”

  “Now what?” Fitch’s question was husky. He looked down at her and he’d lost the smile in his face.

  “Now we go inside,” she whispered and she was suddenly as insecure as she had been before.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  August 18th

  A Japanese proverb professes: The wise hawk conceals his talons.

  “They used to have a system of laser beams crisscrossing the roof here.” Teddy pointed out the sighting apparatuses on the decorative escarpments. Cleverly constructed instruments that were set flush into the exterior of dormer windows, the laser eyes were dead and black, only barely discernable. She went slowly across the angled hip roof, careful not to let her feet pound upon the gray slate tile. Fitch followed her leisurely, intent on being silent. “Except that pigeons and grackles kept setting off the alarms. It’s not like birds give a doodly-squat about laser beams and security. But they did like the seed I used to put out for them,” she said.

  “So they turned it off permanently,” said Fitch, figuring out the end of her spiel. He ran his hands through his hair, brushing blonde tendrils away from his forehead, and surveyed the area. The entire event was like a complicated climb. There were many intricate movements to be made, in successive, graduated levels, and one had to watch his partner carefully. “Who’s going to come in by the roof, anyway? Besides didn’t you say they didn’t secure the third floor?”

  “They didn’t. But they did the roof. At least, they did at one point in time.”

  They paused at the top where ornamental gables showed an elaborate frieze below dormer windows. It didn’t fit into the Greek temple front architecture of the rest of the house, but the roof was almost invisible from directly below and the attics needed some air circulation. Although the windows were functional, they were mostly decorative, fitting into the scheme of what Greer Howe had desired. There had been some thought of finishing the attic for other purposes that she hadn’t followed through with. But her daughter had found a use for the attic. Teddy stopped directly in front of the left most dormer window and studied it carefully. She had to narrow her eyes in the dim light but she finally lifted a hand and pried around the edge of the window with the fingernail of her right hand.

  Fitch stared over her shoulder. He put a hand on hers and directed her attention to a little mechanism attached to the bottom of the window, just an inconspicuous, tiny, cream-colored box that was almost indiscernible. She nodded at him, saying, “Yes. If I lift the window up, it breaks the circuit and it goes off. But there’s another little surprise here, too. If I break the window another mechanism goes off. Here’s where we have to be extremely careful. We can speak softly. But no loud noises. For God’s sake, keep your feet on the studs and don’t put a foot through the ceilings of the rooms below. I don’t know who’s down there or where they’re at.”

  “If you can’t break the window then how are you going to...” he trailed off as he watched her expertly slip the glass out of its setting. Sometime in the past Teddy had spent several hours picking away the putty that held the glass in place, prying away the little metal clips that propped the glass in its sash. She had left one, so that the glass wouldn’t arbitrarily fall out, and she plucked it out, cautiously tilting the piece of glass toward her body, without scraping wood or paint. She placed it on the side of the dormer and made sure it wasn’t going to slide down the edge of the roof. Fitch realized that the reason the little triangle-shaped piece of metal that held the glass in place was on their side was because it was exactly where she had left it, three years before, on her way out of this house.

  Teddy smiled grimly and motioned for Fitch to follow her. She moved into the window headfirst, diligently putting her limbs into the places where she didn’t knock against wood or the walls inside the dormer. After a moment she stuck her head out and whispered to her companion, “Looks like I just left it. Come on.”

  The young man folded his body up and entered the window like he would have entered a cave. He had been spelunking a few times in his life as well, but found the sport not as extreme as he would have liked. Fitch was too large and broad to follow some of these skinnier people to the hair-raising narrowest bends and curves. But this wasn’t a cave and there was much more at risk.

  Abruptly, he felt hands upon his limbs in the darkness, and jumped before realizing that Teddy was guiding his movements inside the attic of the Howe mansion. She helped him inside the window and all he could see was the faint shape of the dormer, with the stars sparkling outside and nothing at all inside.

  Teddy covered his lips with something and he felt an unaccustomed surge of delight that she was kissing him of her own accord before he understood that it was her hand over his mouth. There was an odd clicking and light spilled into the tiny area in which they sat. He probably would have made a noise if Teddy hadn’t prevented him. She held a flashlight in her hand, a large green flashlight that illuminated the area all around them. She aimed the light away from his face and showed him the inside of her world.

  Motioning toward another small, cream-colored plastic box attached to the top of the window sash inside the dormer, Teddy showed him the device that was designed to set off an alarm at the sound of breaking glass. She gestured with the flashlight at the floor, which was not finished, simply bare studs of wood, in between which were rows of insulation that stretched away through the emptiness of the attic. She began by moving toward the opposite end, keeping her feet on the studs, keeping the flashlight on the area where they both were.

  They appeared like oddly formed marionettes, goose stepping across the bones of the attic, keeping their feet soundly on the solid parts. The air inside the attic space was oppressive, filled with dust motes and floating bits of insulation that they had disrupted. Teddy kept her speed down, glancing over her shoulder at Fitch occasionally, keeping the pool of light from the flashlight around both of them. She looked back once, her ruination, and tripped.

  There was a
hush of breath as Fitch sidled forward, an awkward crab-like movement, attempting to prevent her from plunging through the ceiling of the third floor. His long arm sliced through the darkness, stretching out to catch her before she could tumble into the ceiling below, and missed. His other arm flailed outward. Teddy’s trim form fell forward, the flashlight hurled out of her hand, she had been too worried about Fitch making a noise, that she forgot to concentrate on what she was doing. She bit back a startled gasp and threw her hands out, catching herself on another stud in front of her, banging her knee on a support beam.

  There was a sudden hush of silence as both fought to keep words and curses from flowing from their lips. Fitch had a hand on the waistband of her jeans and was holding her almost in midair, one of his arms propped on a cross member. The flashlight flew into the air, turning over and over, a crazy circus of dancing lights, and came down a few feet away, landing in the soft forms of layers of hot-pink insulation.

  “Close, Teddy,” he breathed, letting her down the rest of the way.

  Teddy tried to catch her breath. Her ribs burned with effort. Days of exertion and trial did not assist in the recovery process.

  Fitch carefully made his way to the flashlight and found himself next to the tallest part of the attic, under what should be the highest peak of the roof. There, there was a partially finished floor. Bare plywood that had been laid across the studs, just big and wide enough to support a small human being. He scrutinized the area and decided that he was looking at another aspect of the life that Teddy had been forced to live. She had made herself a sort of shelter up here, in the confines of a hot, muggy attic, without air circulation, without light, except for the flashlight. He frowned to himself and let his imagination wander. He saw a skinny, little girl, the image of the photograph on the Internet, sitting alone in the darkness, turning off her only flashlight to conserve the energy of the batteries, solitary and abandoned by everyone she’d ever trusted. Now all that was left was a newspaper dated from three years before, some empty bottles of water, the desiccated core of an apple, and some photographs she hadn’t taken.