The Flight of the Scarlet Tanager
By
C.L. Bevill
Dedicated to the aunts, Duffy, Maggie, and Nancy! Great, wonderful women who have always been supportive. May Duffy rest in peace. Thanks to Detective Brett Beene, Duncanville Police Department, for his assistance in the area of police procedure (any mistakes are mine not his!), to Palma Beckett and Marcy Harris for reading the draft, to Amy Bevill for letting me borrow her name and reputation, and to my husband, Woody (who rules!), for his continued affectionate support.
The Flight of the Scarlet Tanager
Published by C.L. Bevill at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Caren L. Bevill
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
About the Author
Other Novels by C.L. Bevill
Chapter One
The Oregon Coast - August 14th
Excerpt from The Flight of the Scarlet Tanager, written by Edward Morris, St. Martin’s Press, 2009, pg. 3: The scarlet tanager, Piranga olivacea, is an American tanager, any of numerous songbirds of the New World family Thraupidae. In particular, the scarlet tanager is an example of one of the most striking and vibrant specimens, with its bright red coloring with black wings and tail. For the average bird enthusiast, or even the typical hiker or individual sitting on the back porch, it remains fairly common a sight, despite its glorious markings, and outrageous contrast to typical New England greenery...
Carlton Edward Tully, commonly known as Carl, was having a grand time. At age thirty-three, with a cute wife named Tess, and two exuberant children, Carl Jr., seven, and Angelica, six, he was on his first real vacation. With the family in tow he had flown from El Paso, Texas, to Portland, Oregon, rented a car, and made a determined trek to the ocean. Not only had he never seen the ocean before, but neither had his children. And he had brought along what he privately considered his most prized possession. Life was good.
He abruptly changed his mind. Life wasn’t good. It was great.
His most prized possession was clutched in his hands like a newborn baby, valued and deeply loved. It was a brand new, glossy, silver-colored JVC Mini-DV Camcorder, with its lens glinting in the bright morning light, and its battery packs fully charged, ready and able to film whatever struck his fancy. It had its own case, which was strapped across Carl’s back, and zipped securely so components didn’t go spilling to the ground, while he was shooting what he thought might very well be the most splendid moments of his adult life. And Carl hadn’t even noticed that Tess had reached the point where she was resisting the urge to jerk the camcorder out of her husband’s hands and cheerfully toss it over the cliffs into the swelling and careening blue-green waves.
This was the thing of Carl’s dreams. A real vacation. A real camcorder. Beautiful August weather, and the ocean. As brilliantly turquoise as the fictitious seas of any movie he’d ever wistfully watched and consequently envied. The smell of brine on the winds tantalized his nostrils. The sound of water moving swiftly through the channel below them into the bay, crashing against the rocks, was music to his ears. It was twice as good as any movie he’d ever seen.
He focused the camera on the two-lane bridge they stood near. Made of rock and stone like a prop out of one of those movies he loved to watch, it spanned an ocean-filled channel bordered by rugged rock cliffs. Fifty years old and more, the bridge allowed highway 101 to slide across the tiny town of Sullivan’s Bay so that a million tourists could drive the length and breadth of the Pacific Northwest coastline. They could wonder at the exquisite beaches, magical rock formations, and the marvel that was the Pacific Ocean.
On one side of the bridge the sea was wide and blue, boundless and mysterious, drifting innocuously and vanishing wistfully into the horizon. On the other side was a tiny bay, carved by nature out of volcanic stone, a perfect shelter for fishermen and tourists alike. On the north side of the bridge, where Carl was perched on a stone wall connected to the bridge, he panned back and showed that the town’s main drag was a series of antique stores and ocean-related collectibles. In one shop a tourist could buy a menagerie of kites of every size and shape to fly in the strong winds of the Pacific Ocean. In another one could purchase postcards of Cannon Rock near Astoria or a close up of the sea lions sunning themselves off the rocks near the Sea Lion Caves or spectacular shots of every phenomenal mountain in the Cascade Range.
Carl smiled to himself as he brought the camera about. Every part of Oregon inspired the hidden poet in him. It was as different from El Paso as night is to day, from the moisture in the air to the moderate temperature that required a light jacket in the morning spray that blew in off the brisk face of the ocean. He brought the camcorder about again and focused on the face of his wife, who was tapping her foot lightly.
Tess smiled grimly at him and reached out to yank Angelica away from the edge of the bridge where she had been staring into the breaking swells that pounded between the narrow walls underneath highway 101. “You could watch our children, too. Carl,” she remarked.
“But sweetums,” he protested idly, fiddling endlessly with his elaborate tinker toy. “I’ve got the camcorder on.”
“No shit,” she muttered but he had already turned away, focusing on crowds of people lining the streets of Sullivan’s Bay. Some basked in the sunlight. Some peered over the walls of the ocean break at the surf that eternally ate away at the rock, forming Byzantine shapes that whirled and circled and dripped with ocean debris. Others shopped in interminable stores, content to spend their vacations simply near the ocean.
“No shit!” screamed Angelica and Tess winced. She caught the eye of another mother who shrugged sympathetically and went to tug her similarly aged son away from the bridge’s walls before he could tumble into the chasm below.
Tess found her other child, Carl, Jr., avidly watching the young woman who was taking in money for tickets to a whale watching tour. The young woman’s hair was the color of red that no one ever would be fooled into thinking was natural, and Tess thought, Maybe that’s the point. Scarlet spiked hair that had been accomplished through the expedient use of excessive hair gel and a powerful blow dryer could only be an attention grabber. She also had a glittering diamond stud in the side of her nose and an obtrusive gold ring that twinkled at the crook of her eyebrow.
Having just finished buying tickets from the very same woman, Tess couldn’t help a little flinch when she saw the eyebrow ring. Then the young mother glanced down at Carl, Jr.’s absorb
ed face. She knew he wasn’t interested in the young woman as a woman, although clearly she was attractive. Her clear gray eyes, trim figure, and finely shaped face were all appealing, even if she had caked on makeup with a trowel. But what the seven year old did find thought provoking and unceasingly fascinating was the scarlet colored hair and facial jewelry.
Tess called to her husband, “Carl, let your son take some shots.” She smiled to herself, sure that she had managed a coup d’état, felling two birds with one solitary and well-aimed stone. Anything to get that camcorder out of his hands. He’s carrying it into the bathroom with him when we stop for breaks, for God’s sake. People were hurrying out of rest stops like he had propositioned them in the bathroom. She knew she was going to have to edit the film judiciously before any of her relatives could see it, much less her own children.
Carl eyed his son suspiciously, as if by handing the boy the camera he was giving away part of his own soul. Tess was relieved that he reluctantly allowed the boy have the camera and thus averted Carl, Jr.’s attention from possibly asking for a diamond stud for his nose for a Christmas gift this year. She could hear the kid’s words as if they had already been spoken, “But Ma, that lady at the beach had one!”
His father busied himself with instructing his son on the intricacies of the camcorder. Tess tuned it out as she surveyed the scene about her, waiting for the whale watching boat to begin boarding for their trip. Carl’s voice droned, “It’s got a 3.5 view screen, and a color viewfinder with a 250X zoom feature. Basically it’s a digital camcorder and we can hook this bad boy up to your computer and do all the editing ourselves. We can even add music...”
“Like Seether?” asked Carl, Jr., enthusiastically.
“Uh, maybe,” said Dad doubtfully.
Hell, no, added Tess silently.
“Look, the birds,” cried Angelica.
Carl, Jr. focused obediently on the birds, landing near the tide pools where the ground was marshy. These birds with their distinctive extended beaks fought off a couple of large gulls for the prime real estate. The gulls moved closer to where a group of people were throwing bits of bread out to them, shrieking like a marauding horde of Mongol invaders. The young boy centered on the more unusual birds and framed them properly in the LCD window of the camcorder.
“Long-billed Dowitchers,” said Tess. The snipe-like bird was considered a shorebird, using its long bill to probe in marshy areas of land for food. “See the long bills.”
Her family turned to her with blank looks on their faces as if she had announced she was an alien from Planet X. Tess shrugged. “I was watching the Discovery Channel last night. It’s got a dark band on the tail that makes the white part more conspicuous. It breeds on the tundra in northwest Alaska.” They still looked blank. “Well, I thought it was interesting.”
After a few moments of filming the birds Carl, Jr. lost interest in the camcorder and turned it back over to his father. Carl gave Tess a triumphant glance that clearly signaled the winner of that particular squabble over parental techniques.
Tess merely wrinkled her nose delicately. The sea had a certain smell, after all.
Carl went back to being an amateur film director, intent on filming his own private Blair Witch Project and there wasn’t a haunted wood or a witch in sight. He even narrated as he focused in on things that interested him, “Young boy doing a balancing act on the bridge’s wall. Pissed off mama yanking him off.” He turned away, after the blonde haired mother had secured her child, saving him from certain death, and continued his private monologue, “Young woman with flame-red hair in spikes selling tickets so the masses can witness heaving leviathans in their natural oceanic glory. Has more make-up on than a group of transvestites at a Rocky Horror Picture Show showing at midnight.” He moved a little as he zoomed in on the eyebrow ring. “Ouch.” Then he moved back to the bridge. The whale watching boat called the Mary Celeste was coming back in, its bow moving up and down with the undulation and rise of the choppy sea. “Mary Celeste,” he chortled, happy to have gotten someone’s idea of a morbid joke, and then lifted his eye from the viewfinder for a moment to see if his wife had gotten the joke.
Tess had not. She had seen the small ship bobbing up and down in the water and turned green. She was digging through her purse for Dramamine.
A slew of people moved a little closer to watch the ship come through the passage, lining up against the stone railing of the two-lane bridge. Carl captured the ship squarely in his viewfinder, and the camcorder bobbed up and down in time with it. The ship passed under the bridge with a group of people on the bow waving up at those watching from the bridge above them. The ship caused waves to pound furiously against the jagged rock cliffs below, and the spray found its way up to the audience above.
As the Mary Celeste passed under his feet, Carl turned to follow the people as they gathered to go down the stairs to the ship’s wharf, but a movement out of the corner of his eye stopped him. “Young boy again. Just about Angel’s age. Same kid. Determined and ready to do a nose dive off the side of the bridge.” Carl stopped, lifting his head, looking for the mother who had yanked him off the side of the bridge not two minutes before. He caught sight of her yellow hair as she queued up for the whale watching tour. He turned his head back and saw the bright blue jacket of the six-year-old boy slip over the side of the bridge.
“HEY!” yelled Carl.
Later, people would ask Carl if he had made the decision to just film the tragedy instead of going to the boy’s rescue. But the truth was more simple that all of that. He’d forgotten that he had the camera. In fact, he wasn’t even sure for a moment that he had seen what he had seen, much less that he had filmed it all on his camcorder. It shouldn’t have happened. It couldn’t have happened. The boy, with hair as fair as corn silk, and a mischievous glint in his determined eyes, had climbed onto the bridge’s wide stone partitions, and slipped off.
Carl held the camcorder in his hands, not even daring to move for a moment, not believing that someone could take their eyes off their children long enough for such a terrible thing to happen. Not a minute before he had looked down off the bridge into the narrow crevasse with thundering, breaking waves and known that it was fifty feet or more down to the surface of the water.
For a little boy who probably weighed not even fifty pounds it might as well been a thousand feet. If he hadn’t hit the rocks on the side, then he had gone into the water, that chilled Pacific Ocean water, which could make flesh as cold as ice within minutes, and which people were warned against swimming even in the middle of summer. How a little boy could live through the fall, much less exist in the frigid waters?
Time paused as all these things roared through Carl’s mind at the speed of light. There wasn’t sound, there wasn’t wind, there wasn’t the smell of brine, there was only the side of the bridge and the faint afterimage of the brightly colored windbreaker of a boy. Then with a roaring rush of sensation it abruptly resumed. There was another blur of movement from beside him as someone moved past him, leaping fluidly onto the bridge abutment as if it were only two feet high.
Carl couldn’t have said that happened for sure, except that he still had the camcorder pointed in that direction and caught every bit of it on tape. It was the young woman who had been selling tickets in the whale watching booth. Her scarlet colored hair was like a beacon as she moved unhesitatingly to the side of the bridge. She didn’t look back. She didn’t look at Carl’s camera. She didn’t scream for help. She didn’t do anything except what she must have felt she had to do. She moved to the bridge, gracefully attained the side of the wall with a jump an athlete might have envied, and looked down below her for about two seconds before she made an elegant dive into the tempestuous waters below.
The only noise that Carl seemed to hear was the gasp that emanated out of his own mouth. He moved forward and leaned over the bridge in time to capture the young woman’s descent into the water. And then he found his voice, “Hey! Help! Help! Someone
’s gone over the side!”
Behind him there was an appalled scream as the yellow-haired mother discovered that her son had suddenly vanished and people were charging to the other side of the bridge to see what was happening. A group of people crushed against the wall and there was the sound of an automobile horn as the bridge was abruptly blocked by foot traffic.
Carl caught sight of the young woman in the water below. The tide must have been moving out to sea because her wet red hair was already twenty feet away from where she had gone into the water. She was sputtering water and fighting to keep her head up, clearly in some trouble. But she cast her head about wildly and caught sight of something under the water that the people from above couldn’t see. Then she went ass over teakettle into the blue-green water and her feet kicked once at the surface.
There had been a mutter of words behind Carl as he kept the camera’s LCD window trained on where the young woman had disappeared. Water churned by the constricted cliffs and the pressure of the tide forcing it out to sea made it impossible to see what was happening. A long moment passed. There was a ship’s whistle that blared loudly in the bay behind them.
Someone said, “Someone’s going out after them. Looks like that same ship that just came in.”
“Get out of the FUCKING way!” screamed someone and a large woman parted the crowd like Moses had parted the Red Sea. Carl recognized her as another worker for the whale watching booth, taking tickets on one side while the scarlet haired young woman had done the same thing on the booth’s other window. She cleared the area with her not-inconsiderable bulk, swung her arm back and threw a life preserver out as far as she could. Its round shape sliced through the air, making a noise like a Frisbee, and came within feet of where the young woman had vanished under the water.
Another moment passed. Carl began to think that neither one of the two were going to make it back. The young boy and the young woman who had tried to rescue him. Neither was going to return to the surface and a special ship with special equipment was going to have to drag the turbulent ocean bottom for their bodies. If they ever were found.
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