Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  “Truck!” she hollered back, not taking her eyes away from the trailer, which was clearing out all the trees and debris above them like some huge broom, pushing it aside, gaining momentum. “Maybe it’ll stop,” she murmured to herself. “It’s not going to stop.”

  “Yeah, I know, I almost hit the truck!” Fitch screamed. “My bad!”

  “GO SIDEWAYS, DAMMIT! IT’S GOING TO HIT US!” she finally found the right words and Fitch tossed his head back to look.

  He almost lost control of the bike then, because he kept his spellbound gaze on the sight of the long trailer moving down the side of the hill after them, as if they were tied to it and dragging it. He downshifted and the back of the bike came up. Teddy leaned back and held on to the back of the seat, having a prime viewing opportunity of the rapidly increasing tractor trailer that seemed to be aimed just for them. It wasn’t just going to smash into them; it was going to fall right on top of their heads. Fitch switched his view forward just in time to avoid another stand of pine trees and the bike started to fishtail in the loose gravel and debris of the incline. He leaned to one side and backwards and got it under his control again. “When I said, my bad!” he yelled. “That wasn’t what I had in mind!”

  “SIDEWAYS, FITCH! SIDEWAYS!” Teddy screamed again. The trailer was beginning to speed up, plowing through trees and dirt like a hockey puck sliding across an ice skating rink.

  Fitch had had to slow down to go down the steep incline, and there was no path here, no road to follow. Only the deep tread of the dirt bike’s tires and his control held the bike upright and under check. The trailer didn’t have that problem. Its weight increased its speed down the incline, and Teddy suddenly lost all ability to think. They were going to be smashed into little Teddy and Fitch pancakes and there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

  Yanking the handlebars to the left, Fitch slanted left, and they abruptly went into a controlled skid. The side of the bike bit into the dry earth, and suddenly they were sliding down the mountain, dirt flowing into their clothing, over the bike, angled into the very embankment. They could both feel rocks and earth and brush scraping their flesh. They were lying on the ground as it slid by, and Teddy looked up again.

  The trailer loomed over them, only feet and seconds away. Fitch didn’t waste his time looking up. He braced a leg into the steep incline and pushed them up. The wheels screamed along with the engine and there was a sudden burst of speed as they broke loose of the earth. Teddy spit a mouthful of dirt out of her mouth and glanced over her shoulder just in time to see the back end of the trailer slide by them. It came so close that it nudged the back wheel of the bike and then they were away.

  “Missouri!” she screamed inanely, craning her neck to watch, horrified as it slid past them, shoving Mother Nature out of its way. She saw it tip over another edge and vanish, and it didn’t occur to her to wonder why she could no longer hear the crack of the trees as the trailer broke them into pieces, as it would have careened over them.

  Fitch screamed back, “What?”

  “That truck was from Missouri!”

  There wasn’t a reply because Fitch didn’t know what to say to that. But by that time it didn’t matter because he ripped through another stand of trees where the ground had leveled off a few degrees, and was inordinately surprised to discover that there was a fifty-foot high cliff there. They’d found the lake.

  Teddy looked down and saw the splash where the trailer had gone down, and understood why there had been unexpected silence.

  And both of them were so shocked that there was a fisherman in a bass boat just below them that neither of them screamed as the motorcycle dropped into empty space.

  •

  The cell phone rang and Gower allowed a hint of disapproval to cross his face before he pulled the trim item out of his coat pocket. He flipped the unit open and answered it concisely. He stood at the edge of the road, gazing downward at where a boy and a girl on an insignificant dirt bike had vanished, and where a tractor-trailer had plowed the earth after them. It had left a path that the hand held spotlights from local law enforcement followed with incandescent beams of light.

  Behind him, he could hear the driver of the big rig arguing with a sheriff’s deputy about the accident being the motorcycle driver’s fault. The agents were spread out and ascertaining the situation, while the truck driver’s voice grew somewhat frantic in his assertions. Gower didn’t need to ascertain the situation. It was plainly obvious what had happened here.

  Somehow, someway, she’d managed to get the upper hand. By taking chances that normal people wouldn’t take. His lips almost curved into an involuntary smile of approval. If she had been easy and stupid, he would have caught up to her years before. Instead, even in the worst of situations, she was still ahead of him. She’d enlisted the aid of another resourceful individual and was attempting to flee in the only way she could.

  “Gower,” he said simply into the cell phone.

  Jackson Theron said on the other end, his voice detached, “This is getting out of hand.”

  “I agree. The situation is no longer under my exclusive control.”

  “With General Bishop Lee involved...”

  “This line is unsecured, sir,” Gower said. The media was known to scan cellular frequencies listening for key words. The news had slipped out about Fitch Lee, but his connection to the National Security Agency’s director was only just beginning to be noticed. Combine it with the old story about Theodora Andrea Howe, and it would become a headline story, beating out issues of the stock market and spies revealed in the American government.

  “I know that,” Theron snarled, detachment melting away. “I think we can’t afford this to proceed. Do you get me, Gower?”

  “You mean, the alternative plan,” Gower said.

  “Of course I do,” Theron said. “Both of them.”

  “And the missing...information?” Gower asked. That bit of substance that’d had Theron shaking in his boots which had prompted him to pay out millions in dollars to men like John Gower and Burke Redmond to track down one little teenage girl to retrieve it.

  “We’ll have to assume that it will stay below board.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Well, if she’s not around to dispute its authenticity,” Theron answered quietly, “it will hardly matter.”

  Gower didn’t need to hear anymore. He knew exactly what Theron was telling him. It was a pity, really. He had been looking forward to talking to the young woman about her adventures. He was interested in how she had eluded him time and time again. Speaking to her about that would have given him an enormous amount of insight into future investigations of this nature. Not that anything like this would ever come to pass again.

  The scarlet tanager had to die. Along with her little counterpart. And in that Gower was reminded of a proverb: All flying birds sometimes fall.

  Chapter Twenty

  August 16th

  An old and oft repeated English proverb submits that: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

  Waldo Newman loved to fish. After retiring from civil service, he lived to fish. With part of his retirement and part of his savings he purchased a small boat and traveled to various Oregon lakes in illustrious pursuit of his endless enthrallment with fishing. The short, gray-haired man could not have explained his fascination with the hobby, but might have mentioned that it was on the water, with a pole in one hand and a Coors in the other that he felt most at peace. He could sit all day long in the boat, floating across the cool waters of Suttle Lake, thinking about nothing at all.

  Sometimes he would catch his limit. The lake was full of kokanee salmon, brown trout, and whitefish. Occasionally the lake was stocked with rainbow trout. It didn’t matter if it were an eight-inch brown trout or a twenty-inch kokanee taking a nip out of the bait. Sometimes, when he was in a benevolent mood, he threw his catch back in, explaining to the fish at length about the process of being out in the bright sun, enjo
ying all that there was to be had, the sheer joy that was fishing. It wasn’t about what he caught, but about the act of fishing.

  Part of the experience of fishing was to contemplate Mother Nature at its most glorious. The magnificent range of snow-capped mountains towered splendifiorously. The line of deepest green trees that ringed the lake, glorious in their proud arrogance, tall and majestic defying all elements, resisted convention. There was the wonder of the naturally formed lake itself, forged 25,000 years before by a glacial drift, causing Link Creek to fill up the deep crevice that was the bottom of a pass through the mountains.

  Waldo took great pride in knowing about the area in which he devoted his time. With an area of 253 acres, Suttle Lake averaged a depth of 44 feet, sometimes as deep as 75 feet. Glacial waters melted from snows far above him, had an exquisite blue-green appearance in the brightest light of day that appeared so clear as if a single man could reach down and touch bottom.

  Sometimes Waldo would forget about trolling for the large trout and kokanee that lurked in the depths and simply watch hawks and eagles floating the winds above him. Sometimes he would lose himself in developing new methods of baiting his lures, with flashers, snubbers, triple teasers, wedding rings, or plugs. Or he would try bait itself, using night crawlers dug fresh from his garden at home, red eggs, perrywinkles, white corn, or his personal favorite, which almost never failed, Velveeta Cheese. When he wasn’t using his boat to troll or still-fish, he went fly fishing, and spent time knotting his own lures, including nymphs, black woolly worms, dark nymphs, and kokanee fingerling imitations.

  Waldo sighed deeply with the reflection of all that his life had become. His mind had wandered a little away from his physical self, even as he held his pole and considered that darkness was putting shut to a good day of fishing. Coming back to the present and the forefront, he thought about what was one of the most perfect days of his life. He’d caught his limit of brown trout, not a one under eight inches in length, and one a whopping fifteen inches. The fifteen-incher had gone back into the drink with an admonishment to be careful of night crawler/red egg combination bait lures in the future. “Mr. Trout, nibble around the hook,” he had gravely advised the large trout before cautiously depositing it back into the water.

  Later, he would eat a lovely dinner of trout this evening and the rest would be frozen in the cooler for the trip home. And since it was Sunday, most of the other fishermen had left the lake for home earlier in the day, preferring to make their respective trips home before the onslaught of darkness and the rush of travelers returning to their suburban homes. The lake was almost his and his alone.

  How could life be any more perfect? Waldo asked himself with a silly smile plastered across his genial face. He started to reel in his pole, having determined that he had caught his last fish for the day, and there was a tremendous crashing noise above him. He looked up curiously, and heard the faint screeching of tires on pavement. The highway that ran through Santiam Pass was far above where his boat sat in the water. Fully a football field’s length and change up a steep cliff, and then up an incline the road passed around the lake and meandered toward the western half of the state.

  Because the deep shadows of the mountain kept the waters on this side of the lake cool enough for the brown trout, this was a favorite location for Waldo to park his boat, spending hours here. They often came to the surface during the late afternoon, seeking out the bugs that flocked to the top of the waters. In the meantime, he fished for the other occupants of the lake, or simply enjoyed his solitude. Occasionally, when the wind was blowing in the right direction, or the sound was loud enough, a car traveling the road could be heard.

  Bringing his gear in, Waldo finished reeling the line and stowed the large pole on the side of the boat, listening to the odd, caterwauling sounds issued forth, far above his head. Looking up, the screeching abruptly stopped, and he heard instead what he thought was the buzzing of a large lawn mower’s engine. What the hell is that?

  Then the trees started to crack and the earth itself seemed to protest. Waldo stood up in the boat, and considered whether or not he should motor over to the ranger’s station to report that something mighty odd was happening up on Highway 20. Whatever it is, it’s right above me. I mean, what the hell is... “Oh, sweet Jesus,” he said when the tractor trailer came scooting across the ledge far above him, teetered for about two seconds and tipped over. It was a huge black shape in the darkness that loomed above him, and he identified it with growing horror, “That’s a...that’s a...that’s a semi-trailer!”

  Waldo put his arms over his head and prayed for divine intervention. When he heard the great splash as a mound of metal and tires hit the lake, he peeped through his arms and saw that the trailer had missed the boat by about five feet. Then the surging crash of water threatened to dump him over and he abruptly sat back down in the boat and held on to the sides, while the water moved with great protest, forcing the small boat up a half dozen feet. The undulating wave was washing roughshod over the sides when he heard the lawn motor engine noise again, and saw the pair of young people on the motorcycle come flying over near the same ledge that the trailer had gone over. They flew into the air, floating for an eternity of a moment, the engine of the dirt bike suddenly screaming with power because it had nothing to focus on. He watched them as they fell into the lake, on the side opposite to where the trailer had hit the face of the water, only feet from where he sat dripping water.

  •

  Teddy had that same abrupt feeling that she’d had when the bike had gone over the side of the road. For a few seconds they were airborne, but she could see that they were coming down fast, their combined weights and physics deeming it impossible to do otherwise, and Fitch had been in control of the bike. He had clearly shown his expertise. Whatever his grandfather had been, a man with secret passages through closets and knowledge of bomb making, he had also been an expert instructor in the art of driving a dirt bike.

  By the time they tore over the ledge, there wasn’t anything below them except a dark lake and an open-mouthed man in a fishing boat, sitting there, staring up at them as if they were angels come flying down from heaven. As they fell, she had the oddest sense of deja vu, and it crazily crossed her mind that she had only jumped off a bridge the day before yesterday, and taken head-first it had been a much greater fall.

  Then they came crashing down into the frigid water, and Teddy finally let go of Fitch.

  Fitch himself tried to keep from swallowing his tongue in shock. He knew that the lake was below them, but had misjudged the distance from where he’d turned off the highway above, mistakenly believing they could skirt the lake and make their way across one of the tiny bridges that spanned the stream that flowed down from the lake. When they scooted out of the last stand of trees and flew into thin air, he was out of options, belatedly realizing his mistake. The descent only lasted a moment or two, but it felt like forever to Fitch.

  There was a jarring sensation as bike met the resistant surface of the lake and then they were both under. He felt Teddy let go of his body and they instantly floated apart. The bike sank away and although he had his eyes open under the water that felt colder than rubbing ice cubes across sweaty flesh, he could see nothing but black darkness. Bubbles cascaded out of his nose and he kicked once, then twice. His head popped out of the water, and then he gasped, “Jesus Christ!” A moment passed and he could see the fisherman still stunned, still sitting shock-still in the boat, his little vessel bobbing angrily in the rolling waves.

  “Teddy!” Fitch bellowed, turning in the water, looking around him to see if he could catch a glimpse of her scarlet colored hair.

  The fisherman started to move. Surging to his feet he tossed a life jacket to Fitch. “Hang on to that, son!” the elderly man called. “I’ll get my spot out and see if we can find your friend!”

  “Teddy!” yelled Fitch again. He flipped wet hair over his head and urgently considered whether the motorcycle could have hit
her head, whether or not her injuries caused her to not be able to swim to the surface. He twisted urgently around in the water. “Teddy! Dammit!” Then something touched his foot and she bobbed up, tossing her own wet hair up and out of the way. Fitch sputtered water out of his mouth for an indeterminate time before he hauled her up against him in the water and pressed her head against his shoulder. “Dammit,” he said again. “I thought you’d drowned.”

  “You know I’ve been in the water too much lately,” she said into his neck and shivered. They sank halfway down, ducking their heads again, and Teddy struggled against him for another moment before he let her go.

  The fisherman called out to them, “Best get out of the water. Cold enough to freeze your gizzards, children.”

  Fitch grasped the edge of the boat and arranged Teddy at the side, then with a heave he tossed her up, using the fisherman’s hold on her for leverage. She muttered, “I wouldn’t have thought that it would be so damned cold. I think the bay was warmer.”

  “It’s a mountain fed lake, sweetie,” said the fisherman, who introduced himself as Waldo Newman. “You...uh...mind me asking how it is that a tractor-trailer and you both ended up going over the side of a cliff?”

  Teddy firmly grabbed Fitch’s hand while Waldo grabbed the other one. With much combined grunting and swearing they pulled him into the boat, and Waldo thought they looked like two half-drowned rats. Their shocked faces, dripping with water, silently stared at him. The fisherman added, “Well, it sounded like a hell of an accident. Those darned eighteen-wheelers want to own the road.”

  Casting an odd look at Fitch, Teddy almost winced. She knew whose fault the accident was, and on top of everything else she was feeling inordinately guilty.

  Fitch could read it in her eyes. “He’s still up there,” he said, referring to the driver of the truck. “Alive and kicking. He lost his trailer but he’s up there, alive and well.”