Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  Teddy sat down in F-Bob’s La-Z-Boy recliner and crossed her arms over her chest, wondering if she could bring herself to tell Fitch that they wouldn’t have a choice but to kill him now, just like they were going to kill her. Ultimately, she said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  August 16th

  From Dr. Amy’s ‘Ask the Vet!’ column, August 15, 2008: The parakeet, or budgerigar, sometimes called ‘budgies,’ is a great pet! Inexpensive, entertaining, they’re a great intro to bird ownership. Budgies can and will sing, can be trained to do tricks, and even talk. And if treated correctly these amazing birds are also affectionate. Budgies are a member of the parrot family; Melopsittacus undulatus is the Latin name for these great little guys. They have a life span of about five to ten years, depending on their care and diet, and eat birdseed, fruits, vegetables, and a good pellet mix from the pet store to ensure proper nutrition. Keep in mind that these guys are social animals and they want to hang out with the rest of the flock, be it humans or another budgie. So if they’re kept isolated they may develop anti-social habits. The best thing to do is to buy two male budgies or a male/female pair, as two hens will just glare at each other from opposite corners of the cage. Budgies are friendly, easy to train, and easy to care for! But if you keep them locked in a cage all day, all by themselves, you can expect that they might not be the pets you wanted!

  “It’s an urban legend,” Fitch remarked with amazing enthusiasm. He spent half his time staring at Teddy as if she was some kind of demi-god, and the other half looking at the laptop, which was plugged into Bob’s telephone and logged onto the Internet. “Everyone knows the story. Like Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, or Judge Crater. I mean, my God, they wrote books about you.”

  “You know,” said Teddy. “Some hacker guy told me that if they really wanted to they could keep tabs on the websites that mention my name and keep a record of the cookies of the people who go there. Of course, he didn’t know who I was. He thought I was into conspiracies.”

  Fitch checked the counter of the site he was logged on with. “Over five hundred thousand hits since 2009. That’s a lot of people and places to track down. It wouldn’t do them much good. We’ll be long gone before they get around to checking on the prof.”

  She shrugged, saying volumes about what she thought about that. “I want something to eat. I’m very hungry.”

  After Fitch had found something in F-Bob’s fridge, he brought it back in the form of a roast beef sandwich, dripping with mayonnaise, mustard, and assorted relishes. He balked at the peanut butter, and covered the whole deal with Swiss cheese, and presented it to Teddy with a flourish, accompanied by a large glass of iced tea. “First, you kidnap me, then you make me cook. It’s a terrible, terrible thing you’re doing. They’ll probably have to execute you for the cooking part.” He grimaced wryly. “That wasn’t the best comment I ever made.”

  Teddy had moved to the couch and had the laptop sitting across her legs. She turned it toward him as he sat beside her on the couch, showing him an infamous mysteries website. “I always liked this one better. It’s got pictures of me doing things in the last three years. Look, there I am, gardening. Tomatoes. You know I hate tomatoes.”

  He looked closely. “That’s not even you,” he muttered, scandalized. “That woman looks like she weighs three hundred pounds. And she’s got to be fifteen years older.”

  “Hey, what am I going to do? Sue them?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” He stared at the screen. It was a blurred photograph of a woman who might have been a sumo wrestler in another lifetime, wearing lime-green polyester pants and a flower-printed Hawaiian shirt, carefully trimming tomato plants in some unknown garden.

  “There’s a long diatribe in here about the UFO angle. First, aliens caused my parents plane to crash, and then they came back three years later to finish the job by abducting me. So if you see me it’s because I’ve beamed down for the afternoon for a stroll on the beach or a bout of mountain climbing. You know, just to rile up the national tabloids. But I never get to go to the mall, though.” She saw his confused expression and happily explained, “Too much aluminum plating around malls. The aliens can’t keep their hypnotic rays on me in a mall.”

  “So, it’s a) you killed your parents in an attempt to get some big bucks for yourself, or b) you killed everyone on board the plane in an attempt to kill yourself.” Fitch settled back into the couch, sitting slightly sideways to better observe Teddy. He thought, Might as well cut to the chase. And if she slugs me, then I guess I shouldn’t have said it.

  Teddy logged off the computer with methodical movements and expeditiously closed the lid of the laptop. She traded Fitch the hardware for the plate with the food and he took the computer back with a wary face. “Did I stick my foot into my mouth again?” he asked.

  She took a bite of the roast beef sandwich and sighed. When she had finished that bite she announced, “I guess you really don’t have anything to complain about. I did force you to drive the Jeep away from the hospital. I did get you almost killed by that guy. And well, as for the rest, I suppose you’re feeling sorry for me. Maybe you’re thinking, how could someone who saved a little kid from drowning have possibly killed her parents?”

  Fitch snatched a piece of roast beef off her plate. His golden eyes didn’t really leave her face. He discovered that he liked looking at her. She wasn’t just cute, she was bordering on drop-dead gorgeous. And clever. Pretty and smart. What a combination. Didn’t complain. She simply did. And if she had killed her parents then he’d eat his Nikes with Tabasco sauce.

  “That’s crap,” he stated bluntly. “I read over about twenty other websites. Some a lot more comprehensive than the last two. They found some evidence in your room. The speculation is based on circumstantial evidence. It seems that even the NTSB couldn’t get enough evidence to indict you. They couldn’t prove that the plane went down deliberately. There was a strong indication that there might have been some sort of incendiary device planted near the fuel lines, but instead of blowing the plane up, it only ruptured the lines and the electrical system, causing the fuel to leak away. They said your pilot could have saved everyone on board if he’d been closer to a runway, but since he wasn’t, well...I guess you know that.”

  Teddy studied the sandwich. Eating food seemed like a waste of her time. Each time she had to stop and eat she wondered what would happen if she simply did not eat again. “This is a really good sandwich. What kind of bread is this?”

  Fitch put the computer onto the coffee table, and asked in a baffled tone, “What kind of freaking bread is it? It’s potato bread, I think. It’s whatever Bob had in the breadbox. He’s cheating on his diet, anyway. He’s not supposed to have bread, or cheese for that matter. Low carbs-high protein. But what does that have to do with it?”

  “Sometimes,” she said and her voice was eerily serene. “I have to focus on life outside of a previous life. Small things do matter. The taste of a good sandwich. Sunshine on my skin.” She raised her head and looked outside the window, where the last bit of light flowed inside and touched her cheek. “Pine sap in the middle of a forest. A gentle breeze across my neck, making my hair move.” Then she looked back at Fitch, took in his handsome features that were so unlike that other blonde-haired man. A young man who had some interesting notions of what it meant to be a human being, but at least he was compassionate and open to possibilities that others had automatically closed off. “Because it means something, too. If I look exclusively at what has happened to me, frustration mounts. And it won’t go away. And then I’m looking at ways to kill myself, because I can’t bear to live another moment in my life like that.”

  There was a moment full of pause where they were simply examining each other. Each was wondering what it took to make such an individual, what it would be like to be in the other’s shoes for even a single moment in time. Then it abruptly passed. Teddy took another bite of the sandwich and sai
d with a full mouth, “That’s why I asked what kind of bread it is.”

  “It’s potato,” replied Fitch slowly. He analyzed her face, and added nonsensically, “Some homemade stuff F-Bob buys at the market five miles down the road. Some sixties rejects like him. Aging flower children. Makes it from scratch.”

  “Good bread.” When she was finished with the sandwich she drank the tea, and asked politely, “Did you disappear the Explorer?”

  “Bob hid it,” he said, lost in his own thoughts. He wanted to hear her say the actual words. He wanted her to deny that she had killed her parents. But he was speculating on how many times she’d had to listen to accusations and innuendo about what had to be the single-most, impacting event of her young life. And he was wondering why they were willing to kill someone to get to her. It wasn’t that she had simply committed murder. As if anyone with half a brain would go for a twelve-year-old, no matter how smart, committing murder in the most obtrusive manner possible, as if anyone could look at Teddy Howe’s life and say that she had been capable of it, as if those were the only issues. “There’s something else,” he stated baldly. “If it were just about your parents, they would have let the local cops handle it, but they practically have a hit squad out scoping your location. They want something, and God, they’ve got to want it bad.”

  Teddy raised her head so that the last bit of sunlight hit the flesh of her forehead. She gloried in its warmth because she knew it would be gone after a moment. “I suppose that they could probably trace you to here, hmm?”

  “Probably,” he agreed, wincing at the note of insincerity. “Eventually. It’ll be awhile before they put two and two together. I think we missed any sightings on the way over. Too many gold Ford Explorers running around. It doesn’t stick out. My brother knows I pop in to see the prof from time to time. So does Ma. My...uh...father knows about Bob, but I don’t think they’re going to ask him. But it’ll come to them eventually, and they’ll think to call up here to ask him.” He pointed a finger at her. “But I’m right, aren’t I? You’ve got something they want.”

  Turning her head to examine her kidnapped victim, Teddy smiled, almost indulgently. Some victim. Some kidnapee. He was smart, and smart-mouthed. Easy to like. Not easy to manipulate. She wasn’t sure she wanted to try. “Yes, I have something they want.” She pursed her lips. “Or at least they think I do.”

  “What I can’t figure out is why the Feds are involved in it? Your father was some kind of industrialist. He made his first million by the time he was twenty-five. And his first billion by the time he was thirty. What in the name of God does that have to do with the FBI?”

  “Not really anything,” she answered. “No, it’s my uncle.”

  “Your uncle?”

  “Yeah, he killed my parents.” Then she drank the rest of her iced tea and asked for more.

  •

  Theodora Andrea Howe spent almost a year of her life in a special hospital, while she silently calculated the majority of her loss. A guardian had been appointed by the courts, parts of her parents’ wills had been disregarded as if they hadn’t existed. As a matter of fact, Teddy had discovered by reading a tabloid magazine that a nurse had left in her room that her parents’ remains had been cremated and strewn over their Louisianan estate, contrary to their wishes. She wondered what would happen to the crypts that had been reserved for them in the Howe mausoleum in Baton Rouge, where four other generations of the family had been laid to rest.

  Then her uncle came back into her life. He had never been one to be a part of the family. He’d had his own agenda. Teddy hadn’t understood it, nor had she wanted to understand it. Her mother was quietly indulgent. Her father was passively disapproving. She clearly recalled a conversation between Thomas and Greer Howe, months before their deaths. In Teddy’s mind it was the motive for murder. A simple one that other people could have distinctly understood, had the finger not been pointed directly at her, muddying the waters more than they had been.

  Her father said, “Why doesn’t he stick to what he’s good at?”

  Her mother replied in her soft, cultured, southern voice, “Darling, we all have to have hope. If you had a billionaire brother-in-law, wouldn’t you consider asking him to finance some venture or such?”

  “I didn’t have to ask my brother-in-law. I went out and made my own money. Good God, it’s not like he’s poor white trash. He lives in Georgetown. His house is quite extensive, furnished with Victorian antiques. Nothing to be ashamed of. Have you seen the pictures of the house I grew up in?”

  “Yes. Yes. The little boy whose mother lived on food stamps and unemployment checks. No one is questioning your meteoric rise to wealth and your innate intelligence. I worship you daily, of course, bowing to your visceral being and presence on earth. But my brother, well, he aspires in his own ways.”

  “I know that, but when he came to see me last week, he seemed...distinctly at odds with himself. Perhaps angry with me. I don’t have a problem saying no to him, but I know that it will probably come back to haunt you.”

  There had been a golden tinkle of laughter that came from her mother’s beautiful lips. She loved her older brother despite his more obvious flaws, but loved her husband more. She replied easily, “He’s a big boy, my dear mockingbird. Let him handle his own affairs.”

  Teddy emerged then. She had finished with something upstairs in their northern Louisiana mansion and was skipping down marble steps to tell her mother that she was ready to go roller-blading. Her mother agreed to go with her, and was, in fact, much more accomplished at the sport than Teddy. Their only child heard their voices from the top of the twisting stairs with the mahogany banister and listened as she made her way down, not placing any kind of emphasis on the conversation. When her parents came into sight she’d stopped for a moment, looking at them, excited with herself over a grade she’d received, happy that she was going to be outside in a moment, pleased that her parents seemed to get along so well when so many of her friends had parents who had long since divorced.

  “Teddy,” her father exclaimed cheerfully, a tall handsome man with brown eyes, and a luminous smile, a smile which had graced the cover of Time magazine, extolling his accomplishments as an industrialist, a man who had brought more advanced technologies to factory methodologies, making his fortune from simple ideas incorporated at apt times. “The little scarlet tanager herself. How long have you been standing there, and what have you been doing this week in your calculus class?”

  Her thoughts slid forward to two days past the first anniversary of their deaths. She had been in the hospital for all of that time. She underwent three surgeries, and months of painful physical therapy. She could finally walk without limping and her shoulder didn’t ache anymore. She also understood that she didn’t need to be in the hospital any longer and that the nurse that stayed in her room was almost certainly not a nurse. The woman read magazines, and did not speak to her, sitting in a chair across from the bed in the private room, glancing up at Teddy periodically, as if the child was going to slither off like a common criminal.

  Consequently, it was her uncle who strode into her room on a bright day in July. A lean man with a wiry frame, he dressed in suits that complimented his dark hair and dark eyes. Teddy wondered how her mother had come out with gray eyes and light brown hair, but their features belied the dissimilarities. They intelligibly showed that they were siblings. Their faces were well shaped, the features of brother and sister, with an agreeable smile, and eyebrows that were formed as if struck from the same mold. He beamed at Teddy as if he had seen her the day before, and opened his arms up like he would enfold her there. “Theodora,” he greeted her animatedly. “You wouldn’t believe the agonies that we’ve all had to undergo.”

  Teddy believed very well. She had to grieve for her parents by herself. She had woken up in a sterile hospital room with only suspicious, gossiping nurses to look at her, and her erstwhile private nurse standing guard over her, like some kind of guard patrolli
ng the fence of a maximum security prison. She replied as simply as she could, “Uncle.”

  “Good, good,” he said, and his arms slowly dropped as if she had rejected him all the time. Then he glanced over his shoulder at the nurse, and with a single glance, sent her out of the room. Teddy mentally filed that information away under the heading of who-actually-employed-the-gestapo-nurse for future reference. “I’m told the lawyers have been in to see you several times, explaining the terms of your father and mothers’ wills.”

  “They have,” she affirmed. In fact, copies of the wills sat on the bedside table, where she had pored over them, making notes with a pen, and not allowing the nurse/guard to see what she was writing. Nor had she allowed the nurse to be present when her father’s lawyers were present, taking the time to make sure the attorneys understood that although she was only thirteen years old, she was in charge. Consequently, her uncle had no idea of what occurred in those closed sessions. It was considered privileged information. Teddy had known this because she had specifically asked. At that point in time she wasn’t so naive as to place complete faith in the loyalty of those same attorneys, because of the enormous amount of money involved, but she felt confident that the jurists were privately appalled at the lack of familial support for young Theodora. It was enough to raise her confidence in them.

  “I realize that after all this...unpleasantness...that you have ill regard toward members of your family,” he said, his dark eyes staring down at her. She suspected that he remained standing so that he could tower over her, thus attempting to intimidate her in some manner. Teddy had prepared herself and was not intimidated. She was her father’s daughter.

  “That could be one way of putting it,” she said. “Since I haven’t seen you for close to a year and a half. One of them spent here in this room.”