Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  The sprinkler system suddenly went on, spraying water over the halls, over Teddy, and over Theron. She looked up and blinked water out of her eyes. Part of the price that her father had paid for having bulletproof windows was that a sprinkler system was necessary to prevent fires. But her father hadn’t counted on someone using some kind of accelerant to decimate the mansion. The fire dried up the water with a series of hissing noises as the heat evaporated it. It continued to flare up in the grand foyer, beginning its terrible trip down the hallway toward her uncle and to where Teddy was backing up into the master suite of bedrooms that had been her parents’. Then the pipes began to sizzle with heat, expanding with the pressure of boiling water, and there was a series of minor explosions as the metal failed.

  “Where are you going, Theodora?” called Theron. “There’s no place to run anymore. I’ll just shoot through the doors. This way I get to see you burn to death. It won’t be quick and it won’t be painless but you’ll go to join your parents.”

  Teddy didn’t waste words. She slammed the doors shut and enclosed herself in a muted darkness, water dripping down her flesh. The flames from the outside had caused an eerie glow that refracted light inside the rooms. It was reflected in the waters of the bayou and the world seemed trapped in a peculiar sort of dusk, half in the land of night and half without. She locked the doors with a fumbling motion that betrayed the fear that was surging to the surface.

  Tucking the book under her arm, Teddy systematically scanned the room. The large four-poster bed was the same. The decorative gold and white that her mother had enjoyed had not changed. A window seat sat at the base of the arched windows. All of it was soaked in the water from the sprinkler system, but it was the same as it had ever been.

  There was a gentle thud at the door. Theron was tapping at the door. “Theodora?” he called. “Theo-dora! Why die alone? We can die together. You and I, where we belong. If I can’t have what I want. Then no one will.” He tapped at the door and Teddy was reminded of the dream she’d had at the hospital in Lincoln County only days before. The raven was tapping at the window like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe story.

  Teddy rushed to the window and looked out to see a police car driving up the winding drive. She could see the gazebo where Fitch and Bob must be waiting for her off to the south end of the property, and her mother’s gardens below her. The fires that continued to grow unchecked started to overwhelm the far side of the mansion and its exotic colors were dancing lights in the waters below, showing the Olympic-sized pool in which she had learned how to swim. If the windows were glass she could simply jump out into the pool, but beating on the bulletproof glass was like using one’s fists against a cement wall. Little damage could occur to the laminated layers that prevented the passage of deadly missiles and one would never break through.

  A flock of snowy egrets took flight in the golden light of the flames, startled by the boom perhaps, frightened by the smell of the billowing smoke.

  And the dream came to her again. The dream was as it ever was, the same. A raven was pecking at the glass of the window. But in the land of nod it was not a bird with feathers as black as the darkest pitch from the bleakest tree in the most dismal forest, it was, instead, Teddy’s father. He was the raven and the raven was he. His long-fingered hands with well-manicured nails stroked the glass of the window of her bedroom and tapped. First the index finger and then the middle. Tap. Tap. Then it repeated. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Theron was tapping on the door. Teddy jerked her head away from the windows. Then he was kicking at it, and the wood almost immediately cracked with the pressure. The doors were smaller and simpler than the library doors.

  And although she didn’t want to, Teddy looked over her shoulder again.

  •

  John Henry drove up to the Howe mansion with horror in his eyes. After knocking the gate open with the Bronco, he drove as fast as he could, only hesitating when he heard the boom of an inexplicable explosion. Then a sheet of flames seemed to course over the house like someone pouring a pitcher of water from the bottom up. He keyed his microphone again and listened to the cool police operator relay the information to the fire department of LaValle.

  The two Army sedans had followed him inside the Howe estate and one of the lieutenants motioned at him, yelling, “What do you want us to do?”

  John Henry pointed futilely at the mansion, engulfed in threads of white-hot fire. “What can we do?” Finally, he pointed around the house. “Fan out, see if anyone made it out. Help them if you can. One of you drive back to the gate and get it out of the way of the fire trucks!”

  John Henry tossed his Stetson into the Bronco and set about going around the other side of the house. He yelled at the MP who was accompanying a lieutenant, “And be careful! They said shots had been fired!”

  The MP sergeant held out a shotgun retrieved from the sedan and gestured at the lieutenant to follow him.

  •

  Bishop could hear the sound of sirens. He turned to the rest and said, “Let’s get Mr. Wren around to the front of the house. I think his bullet wound gets precedence over the fractured skull. We’ll come back and get the other guy. Or the paramedics can.”

  The three people put Bob on a cushion that had been on one of the gazebo seats, a long cushion that would adequately double as a stretcher. Bob came half awake and said, “Fitchie, did I tell you why I like you?”

  “Yes, Bob,” said Fitch. “You told me. Have you met my father?”

  “Sure. In jail the other day. Then I talked to his little captain on the phone.” Bob sighed melodramatically. “He’s a hard guy to convince of a conspiracy.”

  Bishop vowed solemnly, “I swear I’ll never disbelieve you again, Mr. Wren.”

  “Please, God,” replied Bob piously. “Don’t call me that. Call me F-Bob.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” asked Rose.

  “Where’s the cute little redhead?” Bob asked tiredly. “Not that you’re bad, my little dusky beauty.”

  Fitch looked toward the house and his mouth was set into a grim line.

  They began carrying the man through the garden and Bob said, “Hey, there she is.”

  Bishop dismissed it as talk from a man who was in shock from the wound and from loss of blood. Rose looked around for the infamous heiress, and Fitch followed Bob’s pointing finger up to the third floor windows that overlooked the western edge of the bayou.

  There was a figure in the windows. Someone with a vivid shock of red hair. Fitch said, “Oh, no. Oh, no.”

  •

  Teddy turned her head to look at her uncle. He had kicked in the door with two tries. Nope, that door isn’t like the library door, that’s for sure, she thought inanely.

  Theron glared at his niece. He spread his arms wide and she saw the flames eating their way down the hall, not more than mere yards away from him. “We’ll die together, my dear,” he told her. “There’s nothing left for you. No escape. No theatrics with a motorcycle or a boat or a plane or climbing down a cliff. No hunky boyfriend to save you.” He bared his teeth in a grimacing smile reminiscent of the specter, Death. “I’ll even put my gun down, so you think you actually have some slight chance to survive. But you can see the fire behind me. A chemical compound that is highly flammable. It burns like Napalm. It will be painful.”

  The book, Routen’s Birds of North America, was heavy in her hands. She wanted to hold it with her, forever, but there was that wretched tapping in her mind, the sounds of a dream she’d had, the sounds of her subconscious trying to tell her something. She took a single step toward her uncle, holding the book out, “Don’t you want the last copy of the cd-rom?”

  He smiled in genuine amusement. “It’s going to burn up, Theodora. They’ll all burn up. And besides, it’s certainly a moot point, now.”

  She flipped the book over and opened it for him, showing him the makeshift hole and the cd inside. “Here it is, though.” She slammed the book shut with a loud thud and she
remembered what it was that her subconscious was trying to tell her. Teddy glanced down at the book and then up at her uncle. She stopped about ten feet away from him and saw that the fires were so close that at any moment they would run through the door and ingest her uncle like some little combustive morsel.

  Then she looked at the windows again. On the window seat was another pair of binoculars, trimmed in silver. Those windows, she thought. Her mother had loved the view. Her father had built the mansion just for her, using the best materials, planning carefully every bit that her mother wanted, a home meant for them and their only child to enjoy for the rest of their lives. But the bulletproof glass made for a rotten view of the sunsets over the bayou and her father liked to sit at this window and watch birds with his binoculars as well. The laminated material was thicker than regular glass. One couldn’t see through it as clearly and she could hear her mother’s voice so clearly, ‘But Thomas, who’s going to shoot at us from the bayou? A swamp rat? Some idiot hunter in a pirogue? That’s really ridiculous. It’s why we have a security system. It’s why we have men on the property. Please, please, just humor me, my dear mockingbird.’ So only weeks before the decisive plane trip Thomas Howe had the grand arched windows replaced with real glass windows. Real glass. Breakable glass.

  “I can feel the heat, Theodora,” said Theron smilingly. “It’s so close. It’s so close.”

  Teddy cocked her arm with the heavy book in one hand and said, “Take the book, Uncle. I really want you to have it.” And she threw it at his face. As she threw it she yelled, “And I hope you burn like hell!”

  Theron ducked the heavy manual, but Teddy didn’t know that. She had already spun on her heels and dashed headlong toward the middle window, the largest one, the one she was counting on being centered on the pool below. She heard her uncle cry out her name in desperate, angry protest, even as a burst of flames enveloped him, just as he screamed out in agony. Just before she reached the window seat, her foot centered on the cushion, poised for her flight out the window, she flung her arms protectively over her head and plunged through the glass.

  •

  Fitch watched the figure and then Teddy turned away from the window and moved off. He couldn’t see what was happening. Bishop said, “Come on, we’ve got to get Bob around to the front.”

  “Just a minute,” resisted Bob, staring upward. “Why doesn’t she break the window?”

  “It’s all bulletproof glass,” Fitch said dully. He was certain he was about see Teddy dying before his eyes, unable to do anything. Abruptly, he looked around anxiously. “But there’s a gardener’s shack around here. We can take a chainsaw to it. There’s got to be a ladder that can reach up there. We can...”

  “Look!” yelled Bob.

  Then Fitch dropped his side of the cushion as he saw what Bob was seeing.

  The glass of the arched windows where Teddy had been broke in a cascade of incandescent glass splinters, exploding out, with the force of the small figure that careened outward and then tumbled downward. A split second later she hit the pool with a fantastic splash. The water burst upward as she went into the water and disappeared.

  Fitch couldn’t move until Bob pinched his leg. “That wasn’t bulletproof glass. And you dropped me, you silly bastard. Go see if she’s hurt.”

  John Henry came around the corner with his weapon drawn and he took in the scene with an open mouth. “Anyone else hurt?”

  There were more sirens in the background and Bishop watched his son fish Teddy out of the pool. Fitch pulled her up into his arms and held onto her as if he wouldn’t ever let go.

  Bob said, from the ground, “I sure like those kids.”

  Bishop sighed. “Well, you can visit them in jail.”

  “Stuff of nonsense,” Bob snickered. “They’re gonna be heroes. You’re gonna have to hire an entertainment lawyer for them. Like Audie Murphy or John Glenn or that guy who stopped Squeaky Fromme from shooting Ford. Although I think he should have let her shoot Ford.”

  They looked on the pair until the flames began to grow in size, and Fitch dragged Teddy away from the mansion. Then all of them except Bob and the man whose head had been fractured by Teddy’s cast-iron skillet watched the Howe mansion burn to the ground. Those two had been taken away in an ambulance, with Bob protesting vehemently the entire time. The fire trucks could do little to save the mansion. The chemical compound that Jackson Theron had used had been too virulent.

  An hour later Teddy was sitting on the top of a grassy hill, with a blanket from a police car wrapped around her. Fitch was next to her with another blanket, holding her hand. Bishop sat nearby and drank coffee that one of his lieutenants had drummed up. She said, “You know, Gower was gone from the library, when I went back. I bet they won’t find his body.”

  Fitch grumbled. “And why is it that you went back?”

  “To get a copy of the M-PEG,” she replied honestly. “Why else?”

  “I don’t know. To commit suicide,” Fitch said irritably. “If you think this is the way our relationship is going to be in the future, then...”

  “Relationship?” repeated Bishop thoughtfully.

  “Relationship?” repeated Teddy. “I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. We’ve got a lot of explaining to do, and there’s the little issue of Gower.”

  “There’s cops everywhere,” replied Fitch reasonably. “He’s not going far.” He puckered his lips. “Give me a kiss.”

  Teddy stared at him and his lips irately. “Who said we had a relationship?”

  “I think I’ll go talk to the sheriff, again,” said Bishop, but neither was listening.

  After a while, Fitch stopped kissing Teddy and said, “Happy birthday, Teddy.”

  She looked at the burning mansion and said, “Some set of candles there.”

  “Let’s go to town. We’ll hitch a ride in the sheriff’s car. My father seems to like the guy.”

  Teddy shrugged innocently. “As long as we don’t steal it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  October 19th

  A Danish proverb avows that it is: Better to be a free bird than a captive king.

  Teddy was standing on the beach. It was called Agate Beach and the sand was white with tiny, sea-smoothed rocks, a blanket of polished creamy stones among the gray sands. She plucked up a few in her hand to keep and stood, a smile on her face, looking out to sea. In her other hand was a framed photograph. It was the same one of her and her parents that Fitch had taken from the attic of the Howe mansion. He’d given it back to her, framed in burnished oak, just that morning.

  Fitch came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “I still think we should have stolen the sheriff’s Bronco. It was ready to go four-wheeling in the bayou. After all, we’d already chalked up quite a record.”

  The curve of her smile increased. Teddy lifted her head to a southern breeze that brought the smell of the ocean flowing over them. She likened it to the smell of freedom. “I just wanted that M-PEG. I wanted them all to see the truth. After all the pool ruined the recording that Bob made.”

  Rubbing her shoulders, Fitch looked out to see what she was watching. He knew what Teddy meant. At the time she hadn’t known that Bishop’s adjutant had found enough proof to cast considerable doubt on Theron’s innocence in the deaths of her parents. She also hadn’t known that the sheriff of Lincoln County had found enough proof to issue an arrest warrant for Gower. She had simply had enough of running and wanted to clear herself. She had wanted to stop being afraid, to stop having to look over her shoulder every time she stopped to rest.

  “There was a call on the answering machine,” said Fitch. “The FBI director. Urban. Nice to be getting calls from him. But then we’ve been getting a lot of calls from bigwigs lately. Barbra Walters. Matt Lauer. My personal favorite is the girls from The View.”

  Teddy wrapped her hands over his and took a deep breath. “No one’s called in a week, Fitch. Thank God. What did he want?”

  “Som
ething about Eddie Morris’ widow. She found the cd-rom disk that you gave him. Found a safety deposit box key somewhere, and went to the bank to see what was in it. Found a letter of explanation and the disk. Gave it to her congressman. Seems that the former Mrs. Morris didn’t trust giving it to the FBI themselves.” Fitch chuckled. “I guess she thought some of them might be crooked.”

  “Really?” Teddy turned toward Fitch and looped her arms around his neck. “Gower didn’t say anything about Eddie’s copy. I guess they thought it burned up with him or that he didn’t really have a copy. Only that he knew too much.”

  “Trust that to make you happy,” lamented Fitch, grabbing hold of her waist. He stared down at her clear gray eyes, and made note of her short hair. In the early morning sunlight about an inch of the hair closest to her head was aflame with golden-red highlights, all completely natural, the first time in years she had seen what her hair looked like. The scarlet color had been cut almost entirely off, only a few inches remained. “You paid back everyone, including the fisherman for his boat, and the trucker for his rig. His letter said he likes his new one a lot better, by the way and Mr. Newman said he got a bigger fishing boat, with sonar on it, by the way. Mr. Halford’s Ford is back in its garage without even a scratch and a case of Snickers bars to boot. We worked out a good deal with the cops here and in Louisiana. My probation officer didn’t even frown when I went to see him. F-Bob’s all right and recovering nicely. And you got every dime that was left in your father’s estate. The FBI got another big, fat black eye from all of this for not investigating the plane crash properly to begin with. You’d think all of that would make you happy. Not the former Mrs. Morris finding your illicit proof.”