Bishop stepped back from the side of the mansion. If a troublesome girl had hidden some desperately needed evidence in a residence this size, and the perpetrator is aware of it, and that man couldn’t find the evidence no matter how he tried, wouldn’t he try to destroy it some other way? Perhaps with Teddy and Fitch tied up inside somewhere. Robert Wren, too?
“God,” he said, his face blanching. He tried to break the glass of the large window and discovered that it was unbreakable, some kind of bulletproof glass. He tried another one, and muttered, “Oh, dear God.”
Rose peeked into the same window, hoisting herself up by holding on the edge of the ledge of the window and asked, “Isn’t that a...”
“A bomb,” finished Bishop. “We have to find a way in.”
•
Fitch saw movement from the gazebo. He had his head cocked, listening for the sound of an ambulance or the sound of police sirens or anything that would indicate that help was on the way to them. Bob was barely conscious, muttering incoherently about white rabbits, when he grabbed the younger man’s arm. “Do you know why I like you, Fitchie?”
“I hope it’s not because you’ve suddenly developed an affinity for young men,” said Fitch.
Bob laughed. “I am devoutly heterosexual,” he slurred the words. “Women rule. My wife rules. She may be mean, but she has the body of a twenty-five year old girl. But you, I like you because you always question authority. Do you know how many of those little, rotten, mindless, followers at the U, did that? Bob says, ‘The sky is green.’ They say back, ‘Yes, Bob, we believe you.’ But not Fitchie. No, Fitchie would say, ‘Bullshit, the sky is blue. And I’ve got the statistics to prove it. Plus, I’ll build a model to show how it works.’ That’s why.”
“Thanks, Bob, you won’t remember saying that tomorrow.” Staring toward the house, Fitch strained his eyes to see who it was, and then two people came into view. One was...
“Dad!” Fitch yelled. He wouldn’t have thought that it would have happened. But the son felt a wave of emotional release course through him.
Bishop heard the voice and stopped in his tracks. Rose pointed in the direction of the gazebo.
A minute later Bishop said fiercely, “I am going to kick your ass up one side and down the other.” He had his son enfolded in his arms and didn’t want to let go. He shut his eyes and was intensely thankful for the moment he had seen his son was alive and seemingly well.
Rose was using the cell phone to call for an ambulance. She was checking Bob’s wound and talking at the same time.
Fitch twisted with his father’s arms still around him. “Teddy already called for one. You haven’t seen her, have you?”
Bishop abruptly let go. He stepped back from his son and eyes that were exactly the same shade as his son’s stared at him. “She’s not still inside, is she?”
“I think she went back to find the evidence she needed to prove her uncle’s guilt.”
That expression on his father’s face clued Fitch in. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Dad? What’s wrong?”
“We saw something inside. I think Theron is planning on burning the mansion to the ground.”
The young man’s face went as pale as salt. He turned toward the house and saw a bright flash of light from the far side of the house, the side that his father and the corporal had come around.
There was a ripple of luminescent yellow light that poured outward, not a typical burst of flames, but an undulating wave of fire that spilled out and immediately began to consume the mansion. It was straightaway followed by a rumble of sound, a rolling shockwave, that made the gazebo shake in its foundations and the three people standing there quiver with the force.
Fitch tried to run to the back of the mansion, but his father pinned his arms under his own and urgently muttered what he knew to his frantic son, “Theron has at least four pounds of incendiary material in there. Six ounces is enough to burn ten square miles of land. The house is going to be depleted in a matter of minutes and it’s too late.”
Struggling frantically in his father’s arms, Fitch said, “Dammit. It’s not fair. She doesn’t deserve this. She doesn’t deserve any of this...”
Bishop stared at the side of the house already engulfed in flames and listened as Rose added to the police operator the details of the explosion.
•
Teddy twisted around and stared, open-mouthed at her uncle. She held the book to her breast, like she would hold a child, and stepped to the side, almost as if she could evade his attention by gradually disappearing. Theron stood perhaps ten feet away, a gun in his hand, a Beretta just as deadly as Gower’s Glock. He had it pointed at the floor, but it twitched in his hand, as if he was well aware that he was carrying it.
“A little sentimental there, Theodora,” said Theron, motioning toward the book she had wrapped up protectively in her arms. “Or is it more than that?”
“It was my father’s favorite book.”
“Well, it’s going to be his favorite piece of ash, provided that anything that substantial remains,” said Theron and laughed cryptically.
Teddy glanced around her and didn’t see anything to help her. Not a weapon, or a hanging birdcage. Nor a ceramic trash can with birds on it. Not anything at all. She couldn’t leap out the window. She couldn’t go into her private hidey-hole. She could only stand here and very likely die at her uncle’s hands. And he was making some kind of vague allusion toward a fire, which chilled her even more than she was already.
Theron had an anticipatory expression on his face. Slyly anxious, he patted his jacket pocket with his free hand. “I don’t suppose you want to sign this paperwork now, do you, dear?”
Teddy hesitated. “Why not? You’re going to kill me anyway, right? At least I’ll live a minute or two more. Let me have it and I’ll sign it.” She indicated her father’s desk. “Right there. The alpha and the omega.”
Theron nodded reluctantly, trying to decipher any hidden agenda that his niece might have. “The beginning and the end. I was sitting there when I made a foolish mistake. And you’ll be sitting there when it is rectified. And there’s something more. Let’s make a deal, you and I. You’ll sign with your correct signature, and I do know what it looks like, because I’ve been thinking about it rather strenuously, and I won’t kill your boyfriend.”
Shrugging, Teddy went to the desk, and pulled out the high-backed leather chair. She saw her uncle look quickly at his watch and then back at her. He approached her slowly and said, “Don’t try to tear it up or I’ll shoot you in your kneecaps. I understand that’s extremely painful. I’ll follow that by your shoulders. Then I’ll start removing digits. Toes perhaps. And then I’ll do the same to Mr. Fitch Lee. I don’t think you’d want that.”
Teddy shrugged again. She knew that Theron hadn’t forgotten about Fitch and Bob, but he was concentrating on her. And that was a positive thing. Perhaps he was counting on his men to hunt the others down. Perhaps he had lost it, in all of the chaos, a muscle in his cheek was twitching ominously. She sat down carefully in the chair and put the copy of Routen’s Birds of North America to one side. Then she placed both hands palm down on the desk and waited.
Theron produced the documents and shoved them in front of her. He watched as she spread them out as if she sat in a lawyer’s office performing some mundane legal requirement. Her face was quietly neutral and her eyes glittered in the faint light from the one overhead light that hadn’t been broken by the fall of the birdcages.
Teddy looked up at him expectantly. “Do you have a pen?”
Patting his jacket once more and coming up empty, Theron snarled, “Look in the desk. I’ve sure your father has one with some bird motif on it.”
Sliding open the desk drawer, Teddy saw one. A plain, silver Mont Blanc pen. Black ink. Medium tipped, it was as simple and elegant as one could get, a slender writing utensil. She plucked it up and regarded the paperwork. “Where do I sign?”
Theron grunted impatiently.
He had to get these papers, then get her tied up so that she could die in agony, which was just what she deserved. Her signature was only an added bonus. “There,” he pointed with the gun.
“Where?” she asked again.
“Right, there,” he indicated irritably with the weapon. “Are you blind?”
The Beretta pointed away from her as much as it could be and it was exactly what she was waiting for. One of his hands rested on the desk, palm down. Teddy brought the pen up and then put all of her muscle behind the motion as she stabbed her uncle in that hand with the pen. The silver pen drove through the flesh of his limb and tore into the wood of the desk. Then she reached for the large book on birds and slammed Theron across the side of his face, using every bit of weight that she could mobilize at a second’s notice. Staggering, pinned to the desk, he dropped the gun and it skittered across the floor.
Not wasting any time, Teddy kept hold of the book and ran for the door, jumping over the legs of one dead man and avoiding the tangled mess of the broken birdcages. When she looked back, Theron had pulled the pen from his hand and was searching for the missing Beretta. He was oddly silent and composed in his search and that frightened her so much that she almost froze. So she didn’t look back again.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
August 18th - August 19th
Excerpt from The Flight of the Scarlet Tanager, written by Edward Morris, St. Martin’s Press, 2009, pg. 197: One might have to ask if Theodora Andrea Howe had what it takes to be a master criminal, a twelve-year-old who methodically planned to murder her parents by using an untraceable explosive device that was obtained from unknown sources. Was she a child who could have bided her time to escape when she could, to vanish into the forest like the bird that was also her soubriquet? Surely, a prepubescent child on the verge of physical adulthood, would choose another method in which to commit suicide and plausibility of such a manner in committing homicide is severely tested to any who examine it closely. After all, who could reasonably expect to survive a firestorm?
Fitch shrugged his father off his arms, saying bitterly, “There’s a man that Teddy knocked unconscious in the kitchen. Right at the door. We should get him out.”
Bishop grabbed Fitch’s shoulder again. “Just him. And we’ll have to hurry.” He yelled at Rose. “Call them back! Tell them to come faster!”
The fire had already reached the fringes of the kitchen and Fitch put the bottom of his T-shirt over his mouth to use as a filter for the smoke that had begun to fill the rooms. The man with the shotgun still lay face down on the floor, dead or unconscious. Fitch looked past the man on the floor into the depths of the kitchen and saw that this side of the mansion was already cut off from the other by a wall of searing flames. It was then that he knew that his father was right.
Teddy was as she had always been, on her own.
The two men carried the third out of the Howe mansion, one holding his arms, the other his legs. They dumped him unceremoniously in the gazebo, and when the corporal went to check the unconscious man’s vital signs, Fitch said resentfully, “Leave him alone. He’s just one of Teddy’s uncle’s paid scumbags. Just another piece of shit.”
•
Teddy darted down the long hall as if the devil himself were nipping at her heels. Her breath came in great gasps, and just as she reached the end, the mansion seemed to rock with some monstrous motion, shifting in its foundation. Lights on the walls rattled in their fixtures. The walls shuddered. She flew off her feet and crashed to the wooden floor, the book sliding away from her. “Damn,” she cursed, scrambling to her feet.
Behind her she saw Theron move out of the library doors, tripping over the broken door lying across the floor. The massive movement of the house knocked him from his feet as well, making him spend a few scant moments picking himself up. She looked back and was shocked to see a momentary flash of fear crossing his face. Then she understood the reference to ‘ash.’ The explosion had been of his undertaking. He was going to burn down the mansion, evidence and all. And hopefully, Teddy and the rest with it.
The fire unraveled down the middle wall like a rock falling from the sky. It went faster and faster, and Teddy comprehended that he must have used some kind of accelerant, something that would make the house into a large pile of sooty cinders. She didn’t have more than a moment to think about it. The fire traveled like a tornado of death, yellow and orange and red splintering in a travesty of brilliant light. She could already feel the heat singeing her flesh, tainting her with its tremendous heat.
Teddy scooped up the book and ran again. This time she was running from two devils. She exploded into the grand foyer, its domed ceiling lined with fluted panels of elaborately carved marble and inlaid with gilded Italian carvings. Angels cavorted with birds and ribbons trailed across the skyline. The fire spilled into the room from the long wall and already the doors to the far side of the house were blazing. Both the fire and Theron were both chasing her, determined to undo her very being.
The massive front doors were bolted shut, the key was missing, and Teddy cast a terrified glance over her shoulder to see her uncle stumbling into the room after her. She dismissed the doors and sprinted for the stairs. Skipping three steps at a time she forced her body to work overtime, ignoring the screaming protests of abused muscles and still-painful ribs. A gunshot ricocheted off the mahogany railing and fragmented the polished wood into a hundred pieces not a foot away from where she had been. She flinched away and took four steps at a time, stretching her legs to their maximum stride, calling forth any remaining adrenalin in her body to help her now when she most needed it.
Teddy was praying that Theron realized that he was as trapped as she was, in a mansion that was rapidly burning itself into charred remnants with all it contained. She tripped and came down hard on the second floor landing, smashing one shoulder into marble tiles. Already she could see a thick layer of black smoke pouring down the halls, obscuring her vision. She looked down the grand stairs and there were flames tickling the bottom stairs and Theron was climbing steadily behind her. He wasn’t as fast as she was, but his eyes burned with the same intensity of the flames that were consuming them alive.
She lurched to her feet and held onto the book as if it would save her life. Teddy pushed past the second floor and ran up the stairs to the third. There was a thought that she could climb back into the attic, and make her way to her old exit, possibly before the fire ate its way there. But it’s moving so fast, and he’s right behind me.
The third floor corridor stretched down one side of the house. Smoke had already begun to accumulate there, but she couldn’t see any flames. She looked down and saw only a dim shape in black smoke moving unfalteringly below her. Her consolation was that the smoke that was obscuring Theron was also obscuring her.
She passed two bedrooms and went to hers. Her hand was on the doorknob when she realized it was hot, red-hot and she snatched her hand away. The room was adjacent to the stairwell and to the grand foyer, directly in the way of the line of the fire as it rolled across the mansion. Teddy stepped back, hesitant and momentarily confused. There wasn’t anywhere to go. She looked back over her shoulder and saw more black smoke undulating down the hall and the dark figure of a man there.
For the first time she had run out of options. There was no plan. There was no one who was going to save her. And she couldn’t save herself. There was nothing.
The lights in the mansion began to flicker and then went out, leaving Teddy in a film of gray darkness. The light from the flames in the stairwell was dimly illuminating the hallway, silhouetting the figure of her uncle as he stood there. Then as the flames began to grow, she found that she could see him, and she wished she couldn’t. His breast was heaving, blood was dripping from his hand, his other hand held the Beretta, and his face was the expression of infinite fury. Here was the man who had beaten her with his own fists, the man who had murdered her parents, the man who had chased her down like an animal that needed to be pu
t down. There was no pleasant politician’s mask concealing the frightful facade beneath. It had vanished, leaving the true man. The wretched, greedy soulless man that was her closest, surviving kin. He had realized that there was no way out for him as well, and he was determined to take her with him.
Teddy trembled in her stolen canvas shoes. Behind her was only one more door, the entrance to her parents’ suite, the master bedroom that took up a full third of the top floor, and which featured large windows with graceful arched tops that overlooked the western side of Twilight Bayou. She shifted backward toward their room and carefully watched her uncle.
Theron stood in the smoky hallway, looking at her in turn. She didn’t know what he was waiting for, only that he was waiting, like some kind of massive beast who had found its next prey, calmly postponing his eventual satisfaction so that when the deed was utterly complete, that when his Achilles’ heel was finally dispatched, he would be replete with gratification. There simply wasn’t anywhere for his niece to go.
She backed into the doors at the end of the hallway and felt with one hand the knob behind her. It was cool to the touch. Opening it slowly, she didn’t dare look away from the man who was standing at the end of the hallway, silently observing her with only the force of his antagonism corrupting the smoke-filled air.
Teddy could see beyond her uncle clearly as the smoke began to fill the dome and changed its course for a few moments. The fire was licking its way up the stairs, and the grand foyer was alight. The inside of the dome was ablaze, pieces of marble and Italian creations were falling away like some horrible rain. She wanted to say to him, “Can’t you feel the heat? Don’t you know you’re going to die, too?” but the words died on her lips. She knew very well there wasn’t any escape out of the house from up here. The windows were bulletproof glass on all the floors, a security feature her father had demanded.
Flight of the Scarlet Tanager Page 44