“I am the police,” Kit had argued. He was definitely against the move. “And for the moment, I’m not certain who else we can trust. I’m working on that, Frannie. Please give me another day or so to check out some things.”
His reaction wasn’t very reassuring, but I had my own misgivings about the local authorities in Nederland, or even Boulder. I didn’t feel they were quite up to this. I hadn’t from the beginning.
So Max was behind Door Number One, waiting for me to give her a full physical exam. She had already told me it was no big deal to her—she was used to them.
Well, it was a big deal for me.
I left Kit on the front deck, making calls around the country. He had a couple of notebooks filled with information about the outlaw group of scientists who might have settled somewhere in the area. He’d already interviewed dozens of doctors who knew someone in the group. He told me the investigation was like trying to cross the country by way of a network of blind alleys. He sure wasn’t wearing his million-dollar smile today. He admitted that he was frustrated and nervous about what would happen now. Neither of us really knew what it was that we were getting into. How could we?
I knocked gently on the door. I heard Max say, “Come in.”
I opened the door and walked in, carrying my black medical bag, trying not to appear as nervous as I was.
Max put down People magazine, which she said she read every week, and since we’d discussed the physical exam beforehand, she started to take off her clothes without my having to ask. I kept wondering who had examined her before this?
What I saw now squeezed the breath out of my body. I felt exhilarated, but also more nervous than ever, and afraid. I felt as if I had suddenly been recruited onto the National Bioethics Committee. This was definitely medical history. This was a miracle.
The young girl standing before me had no nipples, no vestige of breasts. The massive depth of her chest was incredible. The drape of her smock when I first saw her and the bulk of Kit’s shirt had disguised a rib cage fully two times as deep as mine.
That was understandable, I was thinking, as I prepared to examine her. Max had to pack an awful lot of musculature into that chest in order to fly. Also, her flight muscles had to be anchored into something very solid. Perhaps a superheavy breastbone, or a Y-shaped collarbone. How had this happened? Who had created her—and why? It made me dizzy and weak-kneed.
I moved closer. “Stethoscope,” I said, and she nodded that it was okay with her.
Her shoulders were broad, and her pectoral muscles were anchored to an oversized breastbone called the pectoral crest. Absolutely extraordinary. As I pressed my stethoscope to her back, or “sternal keel,” she took a deep breath and then released it.
She knew exactly what she was supposed to do. She was accustomed to physical exams. By whom? For what reason? What was the School all about?
“Is the stethoscope too cold?” I asked Max.
“No,” she said. “Toasty warm.”
She spoke very well for a young girl. Her language could be colorful and descriptive. I’d heard her use both humor and irony. She was bright. Why? How? Who had taught her to speak? How to act? To be polite and considerate, as she certainly was.
“Would you take another deep breath,” I said. Max nodded. She did as she was asked. She was being very cooperative, and she was almost always polite. Max was a very sweet young girl.
I couldn’t believe what I heard inside her chest. She didn’t have the billow-type action of mammal lungs. Hers were relatively
small, and from what I could hear, attached to air sacs, both anterior and posterior. What lungs! I could write a book on her lungs alone. Man, oh man! I was having a little trouble breathing now myself.
I couldn’t be sure, but it followed logically that her bones were hollow, that some air sacs intruded into her bones.
“Thanks, Max. That’s great.”
“It’s okay. I understand. I’m a freak.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“No, you’re just special.”
I turned her to face me and placed my stethoscope over her heart. Jesus. It was at a resting rate of sixty-four beats a minute, but it was booming.
Max had the heart of an athlete, a great athlete. The organ was huge. I figured it weighed a couple of pounds. She had the heart of a good-sized horse.
A large, powerful heart could pump a lot of blood. The connecting chain of air sacs indicated a one-way flow of air. A big pump and a lot of air surface made for a very efficient means of exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen. This was understandable to me. It made good sense. It would give her the endurance she needed to fly long distances and would also keep her cells saturated with oxygen at high altitudes, where the atmosphere was thin.
As if she’d read my mind, Max began to beat her wings.
Chapter 62
YOU HAVE DONE THIS BEFORE,” I said and smiled. I couldn’t help myself. She was such a cool little girl. Relaxed, well mannered, and funny.
“Millions of times,” Max said.
She lifted a foot off the ground and hovered there.
I stood on a footstool and pressed the stethoscope to her chest again and listened to her heart as it pounded far too fast for me to count. I stopped listening and looked at her. I marveled at Max. My mind was in the process of being completely blown away.
“I can get it up to two hundred beats a minute without straining,” she said. Then she winked. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“Very cool,” I said. I placed my hands on her hips. “Okay,” I whispered. “That’s enough of this for right now. Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
Max stopped beating her wings and dropped to the floor. I measured her from head to toe. I was trying to regain my composure.
“Fifty-seven inches,” she piped up.
Right. She was exactly four foot nine. Her arms and legs were slightly disproportionate; the legs were longer. The ring and pinkie fingers of both hands were partially fused, but it wasn’t noticeable unless you looked closely. There was tiny webbing between her toes.
These adaptations allowed her to use her hands and feet as a kind of rudder mechanism in lieu of a tail. There was also some feathering down the back of her legs. That would help in flight, too. Provide more rudder.
Her neck was very flexible. Her reflexes were much, much better than mine—or anybody else’s. Her distance and peripheral vision were acute. No, they were extraordinary. She was superior in almost every way—the best of humans, the best of birds.
As I’d already suspected, her feathered wings were perfectly jointed. Blindfolded, I’d have thought they belonged to a large bird that did some serious long-distance soaring; hawks, for instance, or birds that fish the ocean. Was Max part human, part hawk? How, how, how had this happened?
I put my tape measure to a wing tip and, without my asking, Max spanned her wings.
“One hundred and ten inches,” she said with pride. Her soft voice had a rustling sound, like wind blowing over dried cornstalks.
“Thanks,” I said. “A little over nine feet of wingspan.” Biggest wings I’d ever seen on an eleven-year-old girl.
I asked Max to please lie down on the bed. I palpated her abdominal cavity, got a fix on her organs, which were in the expected places, but small.
Again, this was logical and understandable. Flight was only possible if the wings could lift the body. So, strong chest muscles, small organs, and, unless I was way off the mark, her bones would not only be lightweight and hollow but also very strong in order to cope with the considerable stress of flight.
A perfect design, I thought.
She had been designed, hadn’t she?
“Are you going to give me a pelvic?” Max asked.
She’d been given pelvic exams? I was shocked, but I didn’t allow my discomfort to show.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“Oh. Well, I can tell you, anyway,” she said, putting on her pants. She gri
nned. “I’m oviparous.”
Oviparous, indeed. That explained why Max had no breasts. If reproduction were possible, she wouldn’t be delivering live offspring. And she wouldn’t be nursing them.
Her babies would hatch from eggs.
Chapter 63
MY THOUGHTS at this point in the physical exam were flying fast and furious. I felt as if my head had actually taken off and gone into permanent orbit. I had been aching for the chance to find out who or what this magical creature was. Now that I had examined her, I could hardly absorb what I had learned. She was supergirl, wasn’t she?
A perfect design.
But who was the designer? Or designers?
I needed an X-ray machine. I needed blood analysis equipment. I needed medical and zoological experts to help me interpret the data. I had more questions now than ever before.
“So tell me, where do you come from, Max?” I said, as I put my stethoscope back in my medical bag.
She gave me one of her mischievous smiles. “A cabbage patch,” she said. “I was left there by a stork.”
Then her green eyes narrowed. “How come I have wings and you don’t?” she asked.
“I don’t know. That is the big question, though.”
Max looked hurt. Did she think I was lying to her? Withholding? From the sudden pained look on her face, I could see that she’d really wanted me to give her a good answer. “They” had kept her in the dark about herself, hadn’t they.
“I’m going to try to find out,” I said. “Give me some time. This is all new and overwhelming to me. Please, trust me a little, Max.”
“I trust no one,” she snapped. I saw a spark of anger, bitterness, and a lot of hurt in her eyes.
Had she been living with medical researchers? Young people? Lab techies? I’d noticed that her language could be very colloquial, and young. I kept testing her with figures of speech.
“You think grown-ups are full of it, don’t you?” I said.
Max shrugged. “Whatever. I’m going to play with Pip, okay? May I? Is that allowed? Or do I have to stay inside—now that you have what you want from me.”
“No, Max. Go play.”
She bolted from the room. She was angry. Was it with me, or something I’d said? Whatever it was, she was starting to cry. Max was able to cry, and that was stunning to me. I imagined an eagle soaring over the land that man was so obviously wasting, and being able to cry about it. Or a mother robin crying over an injured chick she couldn’t help.
I found Kit out on the deck where I’d left him earlier. When he saw me, he hung up his cell phone.
“What happened in there? She looked like she was crying.”
“Well, she didn’t tell me where she lives,” I said softly. “But what I learned from examining her completely knocks me out. Kit, she’s medical history. However it happened.”
“Tell me,” he said. His eyes became intense, probing. I am the police.
“I don’t know where to start exactly. I think she’s a human being who was born to fly. Max is definitely human. She’s got a human brain, emotions, but the rest of her is an amalgam of human and avian pieces and parts. The human parts seem to dominate. And this “school” she’s talked about, whatever it is, has scientists attached to it.”
Kit looked grim. “How do you know for sure?”
“She’s accustomed to being examined. Max knows a lot of medical terms. I don’t know how or why. She told me that she’s oviparous. She’s an egg layer.”
There was a silence between us, broken only by the sounds of Max and Pip playing across the yard.
“Are you saying she’s actually some kind of cross between a human and a bird? Is that possible?” Kit muttered.
“No. I don’t think it is. Except for one small and very convincing detail…”
Kit finished my sentence. “We’re looking at it,” he said. “My God.”
We watched as Max scooped Pip up into her arms.
There was the sound of beating wings, and then she was airborne. She was flying above the treetops with Pip, who didn’t seem to mind in the least.
Chapter 64
DISCRETION was absolutely critical. Nothing could go wrong from this moment on. The serious mistakes of the past day were already being rectified. Damage control was being done.
The important “visitors” had began to arrive in the greater Denver area as inconspicuously as possible. Painstaking thought and planning had gone into every facet of their individual journeys, but especially into keeping their presence here a secret, not only from the world at large, but from their business associates, even from their families.
Each of them knew what was at stake. Each understood that this was a profound moment, and that they were privileged to be a part of it, even by their high standards of privilege. And each knew the tremendous personal risks if they were caught. There would be convincing denials, but ultimately, they would be left out to hang.
Two of the principals came as a married couple, which was the simplest, and the best possible disguise. The largest group comprised four German males who claimed to be enthusiastic freshwater fishermen bound for fly-fishing along the Continental Divide.
Two travelers came from a major corporation in Tokyo. If anybody asked, they were here to see the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. They were staying at the Boulder Victoria Historic Inn, and taking roll after roll of photos like stereotypical tourists. Another man represented one of the largest and most important corporations in France. According to his story, he was there to visit the Chautauqua Music Fest and also the Niwot Ragtime Festival. The visitors had agreed to stay in small, surrounding towns, with names like Lafayette, Nederland, Louisville, Longmont, Blackhawk.
The married couple, who were from London, camped out, “roughed it” American-style, in a tent at Rocky Mountain National Park, about fifty miles to the northwest of Boulder. An important CEO from Bernardsville, New Jersey, stayed at the splendid and quite beautiful Gold Lake Mountain Resort.
Each visitor had been assigned to a specific Colorado town. They had been requested to dress and act like vacationers; to stay in smallish lodges and inns like the Black Dog Bed & Breakfast, the Hotel Boulderado, the Briar Rose. As important as all of the visitors were in their own sphere of influence, they did exactly as they were told.
They could see the larger picture: the history of humans was about to change.
Chapter 65
THERE COULD BE NO EVIDENCE.
There could be no witnesses.
Harding Thomas led a dozen hunters walking “the grid” from Rough Rider Road out toward the Peak-to-Peak highway. They had dogs now, hounds stoked on the scent of the winged girl. The paired men and dogs were spaced ten feet apart. They marked off parallel lines as they cut back and forth through the woods. They were mostly former army officers. They chose to believe this exercise was in the spirit of national defense, and maybe even America’s survival.
When they had walked the full length of the grid they stepped out of it. Then they would mark the next section. They methodically searched grid after grid for any traces of the missing girl.
They didn’t speak or joke around or even light up smokes today. The only sounds were their heavy boots trampling the underbrush, and the constant snuffling of the frantic, overtrained hounds.
On the other side of the Peak-to-Peak were the impressive foothills of the Rockies. Two choppers were presently scouting up there. They were equipped with infrared equipment that could scan wide swaths of the landscape below. It reported back on a view screen every warm-blooded creature that it passed over. Deer, moose, bears, rabbits, birds, all creatures great and small.
The girl wouldn’t get away now. There was zero chance; zero possibility. She couldn’t hide from the infrared for much longer. Or from the hunters, the methodical trackers, the trained dogs.
But somehow, that’s exactly what she was doing so far. The girl seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
They’d been
out here for several hours. The sun was going down in a hurry. It didn’t matter. The intense search would continue through the night if necessary. More help had already been called in—very worried and concerned doctors and researchers from the Denver and Boulder area. Men and women who worked at the School, and could be trusted with the truth.
They already had a cover story, and it was the best kind because it happened to be true—they were searching for a young girl who was lost in the woods.
Max was now a threat to everything.
Chapter 66
I FELT as if I desperately needed to come up for air. I simply couldn’t breathe. Kit had suggested that I go about my normal business for a couple of hours, take a break, and I figured that was a good idea.
Gillian and I had agreed to get together again soon, anyway. We’d made plans the night Frank McDonough drowned in his pool. Gillian had even made me promise to come. The circumstances of Frank’s death still upset me terribly. I just couldn’t imagine Frank drowning.
One of the reasons I don’t go to her house more often is that it’s about an hour ride. On the trip there, I started to have some really bad thoughts. First, David had died; then it had been Frank; now, I started to worry about Gillian. There wasn’t any logical reason for my fears, but I had this feeling she might be in danger.
As I drove, I had the unwelcome fantasy that I might arrive at her house and find police cars and EMS. The only saving grace was that I knew it wasn’t likely. But then, neither was David’s death. Or Frank’s.
I put my mind in a more positive place. Mind over paranoia. Visiting with Gillian was always one of the high points in my week. After David’s death, no one had been more supportive, more of a friend, not even my sister Carole. I could talk to Gillian for hours, even over the phone, but in person was always the best. Gillian had lost her husband about two years earlier. That was part of our bond—but it was so much more now.
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