When She Flew (6 page)

“Where’s Fields? I asked for Officer Fields,” Everett yelled, shaking his head.

“He was out on a DCS—a big one, eighteen kilos. He couldn’t get back in time,” Greiner said. “They said you wanted a good shooter.”

“Get over here. You’re four minutes late.”

“My fault,” called the other cop, the K9 officer, as he swung the driver’s-side door shut. “Larry here got into some chicken bones last night and he’s been crapping about every five minutes. I think he’s okay now.” He reached a hand through the small opening in the back window and patted the large German shepherd sitting there, pink tongue hanging like a slice of bo logna in the heat. “Aren’t you, Larry boy? You’re good, huh?”

“He’d better be good,” Everett said.“What’s your name, boy?”

“Zusmanovich, sir.”

Everett shook his head. “Ah, Christ. I don’t have time to learn that. We’re calling you Zoo, dog man.”

Jess studied the younger cop walking toward them; he didn’t seem to take offense. “I’ve been called worse,” he said. He sported a close-shaved scalp even though his dark hairline went right to the front of his head—no signs of premature baldness. Probably ex-military, Jess decided, then changed her mind when she saw the blue ink on the tops of his knuckles. Ex-gang, with a name like Zusmanovich? She looked at his hand as she reached to shake it. The homemade letters spelled out “WWBD.”

“What would . . .” She tried to figure out what the “B” stood for.

His cheeks colored. “ ‘ Batman,’ originally. I was an idiot when I was fourteen. Now I go with ‘Buddha,’ or ‘Bozo,’ depending on what the situation calls for.”

She laughed, loudly, then felt embarrassed and crossed her arms across her chest as Everett began to speak.

“Listen up. There’s a little detail I didn’t want to be too loosey-goosey about in front of too many people. This is for the search team only at this point, and I don’t want any of you letting this out, not yet. Not till we know what’s going on.”

“What little de—” Jess began.

“Gee-yawd, Villareal, I’m getting to it already.” He shook his jowly face and Jess took a deep breath, holding it till he began again.

“One of the bird-watchers gave chase to the juvenile. Didn’t get very far, being a goddamn bird-watcher, and he probably helped run her off, but he found this. Said she dropped it.”

From his chest pocket he extracted a folded half sheet of paper with “Condo for Sale” information on one side. He flipped it over and handed it to Jenkins next to him.

Jess could see that someone had drawn pictures of flowers and birds, much in the style Nina had in years past—everything curlicued and sweet. There was writing on the page, and Jess would have bet that the “I’s” were dotted with tiny circles.

Jenkins drew a deep breath and handed the paper to Jess.

Her heart stopped. Mixed in among the flowers and birds were sweetly drawn swastikas and stars of David and Christian crosses, decorated with flowers, and yes, hearts. And there were discomfiting words:
Pater loves me, I love Pater. Crystal loves me, I love Crystal.
Crystal was meth. What was Pater? A title used by Nazis? Skinheads?

“Holy sh—” she said.

“You’re right, holy shit,” Everett said. “So, Villareal, we’re gearing up in case something goes shitty. Which it won’t. Right, Takei? Right, Greiner?”

Both men nodded.

“But if it does go shitty, commit.” Everett paused, looking each officer in the eye. Jess nodded when he looked at her. “If a shot’s fired,” he said, “we shoot until we’ve got the situation under control. We don’t back off until then. Right?”

“Right,” they each said.

Jess had never been involved in a shooting, but she knew Sergeant Everett had. Twice, one fatal. Nine years earlier, he’d killed a kid who was trying to run him and two other officers down with an Oldsmobile. Broke a femur on one of the offi cers, but Everett and the other cop were okay. Turned out the kid had enough crack in his system to fuel Oregon Gas & Electric for two days. The problem was, he was only fifteen and his only weapon was the car. After two years of media mudsling ing, Everett had been cleared, but his name was forever sullied in the public forum. “Columbia police sergeant William Everett” was equivalent to everything from “bad cop” to “white-establishment pig who kills black kids.” It wasn’t fair, necessarily; it just was.

Everett continued. “Our goal is to find the girl, whatever that takes, and make sure she’s safe. However long it takes. Now, luckily we’ve got light for another five or so hours, but it’s late in the day to be starting out. So, mount up. We’ll take three vehicles, including the dog man’s, and meet the birders at the wildlife sanctuary parking lot. Let’s go.”

Jess’s heart began to thump. She sent a prayer to her dad. She didn’t know if she believed in god even though she pretended she did to her mother, but she prayed every once in a while, when she knew she was no longer in control of anything.
Please
, she prayed now,
keep everyone safe, and help us do the right thing.

 

 

 

BY 17:00 HOURS, THE GROUP of officers marched along the hiking trail with the bird-watchers, a stout older woman and her quiet REI-clad brother. Jess knew she was thinking what every other police officer was; this was going to be like trying to find a tiny silver needle in a, well, in a densely overgrown forest. The search helicopter orbited loudly overhead, but the canopy was thick and vigorous. Jess wondered how they’d ever see anything from up there.

Even though the sun shone hot white in the city, the light in Joseph Woods State Park was filtered down to green-hued murkiness, close with humidity from the lush plant life and creeks, laced with spiderwebs. Jess stifled each shriek when she walked through them, even when the spider’s dead-bug prey stuck to her clothes, in her hair. She put her cap on, though it made her scalp sweat, along with the rest of her.

The regimented regularity of so many boots hitting dirt and gravel felt comforting. Larry panted beside Zoo at the front with Everett, alongside the woman chattering and worrying that they wouldn’t find the girl. The other witness, her brother, was silent. Jess looked at him more closely. His face remained impassive, his cheeks hollow and body gaunt, but he strode purposefully.

“It’s very soon now,” the woman said, holding a rumpled tissue to her nose. “Oh, I wish she’d just let us talk to her. Why did she have to run?” she asked, not seeming to expect an answer. “And that heron, my land, it was so unusual to see it here, and then the girl, and to think she might be . . . well, living like that, among those kind of people, and she’s so young, and . . .” She went silent, and when Jess looked up, tears streamed down the woman’s ruddy face.

Jess closed her eyes against the immediate heat she felt behind them.
Don’t
, she thought, blinking, clearing her throat. Stealing a sideways look at Jenkins, she saw his lips tighten, his Adam’s apple rise and fall. She turned her eyes back to the front. He had kids, too, young ones, five and seven. A girl and a boy.

“Here,” the brother said, stopping. “It was here.”

“No, was it?” The woman palmed her face. “It wasn’t a little farther? Weren’t there maidenhair ferns? I seem to remember maidenhair ferns.”

“Sheesh, they don’t have a clue,” Jenkins whispered.

“It was here,” the brother said again. He was soft-spoken and dressed in the too-pocketed khakis of a safari hunter, but Jess believed him. “Come stand over here; you’ll see the ferns.”

His sister moved to his side. “Yes,” she said, sighing and leaned her head against his bony shoulder. “I’m sorry I’m so emotional,” she said to no one in particular, wiping her eyes with her tissue. “I lost a daughter thirty-two years ago.”

He put his arm around her, then pointed with the other hand into a small clearing, a narrow shaft of sun creating diamond light in the water of a slow-moving stream. “The bird was right there, next to that big rock in the crik, see, and then all of a sudden the girl stepped out from behind that cedar, sparkling like a fairy or something. Damnedest thing. Then the heron flew straight up to roost in that hemlock, right there in front of us. See that big branch? Right there. Still had his mating plumage. Quite a sight.”

It was the most they’d heard from him and he seemed as mesmerized by the memory of the bird as the girl.

Officer Greiner shifted his AR-15 on his back and kicked his boot in the packed dirt. “Sergeant,” he said, but stopped when Everett shot him a look.

The sergeant took off his cap and wiped his forehead with his sleeve, pushing sweat into his graying hairline. “And the girl, what exactly did she do?”

“She just looked at us,” the woman said, “like she’d never seen people before. She looked so frightened. And I said something to her—lord knows what—and she turned and ran like a little deer back up that hill. Just scampered over those rocks, even in that big silver dress. Just bunched it up in her hands. I tried to run after her, but my baby brother here stopped me on account of my knees, and took off through all this brush you see here. Well, you can see, where the maidenhair is flattened out, all the way down to there.” She pointed at the ground. “And he crossed the clearing quick as a wink, jumped the creek, but she’d already disappeared.” She turned to her brother again, gave him a hug. “I didn’t know you still had it in you, you old son of a gun.”

She stopped and drew a breath, voice starting to shake. “And when he came back all out of breath and white as a ghost and showed us that piece of paper, my land, I’ve never been so scared in my life. That’s when I called you folks. That poor girl. Do you think she’s being held hostage by Nazis or something? Do you think it’s that fellow that’s been taking young girls?”

Everett snugged his cap back on. “Does no good to speculate, but we’re going to find her. And if she isn’t safe, we’re going to make sure she will be. Now, do me a favor and don’t go spreading this around, not until you hear from us again. All right? Especially not to the media.” He looked at her sternly. “And tell all your bird-watching buddies the same. We don’t want anything getting in the way of finding her.”

The woman nodded, looking worried, and began to cry again.

Everett softened. “Now, can you two get back to the wildlife sanctuary, or do you need someone to go with you?”

“No, mercy, no, we walk these trails all the time. We’ll be fine.” She reached up to hug the sergeant, who turned stiff as a two-by-four and blushed.

Then the brother and sister turned to walk back the way they’d come, her shoulders heaving. He put his arm around her. Her sobbing silenced the twittering birds.

6

T
he worst thing I’ve ever done in my life was to steal the dress from Crystal. I was in a panic, trying to gather up all my clothes and toys, my toothbrush and comb and barrettes, my books and school supplies. We were in such a hurry, and Pater was upset like he gets, especially when he first came home from the war, and I wanted to have something of Crystal’s so that I would never forget her. I loved that dress, because it made her beautiful, even after she lost her tooth and would only smile with her mouth closed. Even when her face got scarred from the sores. I grabbed the sparkling silver from the hanger in the back of the closet and stuffed it down deep in the plastic bag that was my suitcase until Pater bought us each a backpack at the Army Surplus. I put my snow boots in the bag and Pater said I wouldn’t need those boots where we were going, so I pulled them back out and left them in the middle of the floor. The room was a mess anyway.

Crystal and her friend Jack had left the motel after a big fight with Pater. Pater had told her he knew what was going on, had been going on the whole time he was gone, serving our country for crying out loud, and here she’d turned into a tweaker and a lying, cheating whore, not taking care of their daughter, exposing her to all of this. It was the only time I’ve ever heard him use foul language. He was crazy. His eyes were a mix of fire and hurt feelings, and his arms were all veiny as he flailed them at the mess of pizza boxes and beer cans, other people’s clothes and cigarettes and liquor bottles, blankets and pillows everywhere for everyone to lie on or sleep on after they’d been smoking their glass pipes and cigarettes and drinking their liquor all night. I didn’t want to tell Pater that people did other things on those pillows, mostly under the blankets but not always. I was worried he was going to hurt Crystal.

Fine, she yelled at him as she grabbed her fake fur coat. You take her then. You see how easy it is to raise a kid by yourself. And then she looked at me with eyes crazier than Pater’s and said, I’m sorry, kitten, but I just can’t do it anymore, and ran into the snowy night after Jack, who’d run out already.

I knew she didn’t mean it, not really—it was just the way she got sometimes—because she sent a letter to Pater’s mother a few months later, saying she wanted me back and she’d sue him for every red cent he had, even though it wasn’t much. His mother said we should come back home. That was the last time Pater called her. He said we didn’t need any more bad news in our lives.