Birds of Summer (16 page)

Summer wound up having to help as she’d known she would if she wanted to get the room back in order any time before midnight. Sparrow was willing enough, but she was so disorganized that most of her effort was wasted unless someone was right there directing things. Of course she was only seven, but Oriole, at thirty-four, was just the same. With people like Oriole and Sparrow, everything depended on who was doing the directing.

When the living room area, which was enough of a disaster without a knee-deep sea of magazines, was back to its normally cluttered condition, Sparrow hugged and kissed Summer and headed for the bedroom. In the doorway she suddenly stopped and looked back. “Good night,” she said, tilting her face upwards and quivering her chin, like a tragic heroine in the movies. “Now I’m going to cry myself to sleep.”

Summer grinned at her. “Be my guest,” she said.

It was only a couple of hours later, perhaps a little before midnight, when Summer awoke suddenly and sat straight up in bed, certain that she’d heard a loud noise. She listened, holding her breath, her heartbeat a series of shuddering explosions against her ribs. There was silence, but somehow she knew it was not an empty, harmless silence. Someone was there, somewhere in the trailer, waiting and listening.

Beside her, curled against the wall, Sparrow stirred and sighed and settled again into deep regular breathing. Summer slipped from the bed, and moving quietly to the door, she slid the thin wood panel an inch to the right. Putting her eye to the crack she peered through into a blinding beam of light. The door moved again, in a sharp jerk, and a rough hand grabbed her shoulder and pulled her forward into the living room.

There were two of them. Two men carrying flashlights and pistols. The one who was holding her shone the flashlight into her face, and as she jumped back, blinded and terrified, his grip tightened. “Hey. Hey,” he said. “Calm down. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Who else is here, in the trailer?”

She struggled again, but the man’s grip on her forearm was firm and strong. “Cool it, kid,” he said. “Just answer my question. Are you alone?”

“Yes,” she gasped. “Alone. I’m alone.”

He went on holding her while the other man crossed into the hallway that led to the bathroom and Oriole’s bedroom. In a moment he was back. “No one there,” he said and headed toward Summer’s room.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t go in there.” He paused for a second and then he raised his gun and disappeared into the bedroom. Summer was still struggling, trying to follow him, when he reappeared, grinning. “Just a sleeping kid,” he said. “Thought you said you were alone, little lady.”

“I am. Except for my little sister. We’re here alone.”

“They must be up the hill, with the others,” the man who was holding Summer said. “Looks like we’re on a wild goose chase.”

It wasn’t until then that she noticed what she must have seen before and was too much in shock to understand. The two men were wearing uniforms. For a brief moment the terror subsided, but an instant later it returned, in a smothering surge of fear. It was a raid. The men were narcs, and they were looking for Angelo. They would go on up the hill and find him, and there would be the narcs with their guns and Angelo with his. And Oriole. She clawed at the fingers holding her arm, trying to break away to run out the door and up the road, to run and run until she found Oriole.

“Hey, cut that out,” the narc said, but she went on struggling until Sparrow appeared in the doorway, Oriole’s black nightgown sliding off one shoulder, her eyes wide with fright.

“Summer,” Sparrow’s wail was a counter-force, stemming the dark tide.

“It’s all right,” Summer told her. “They won’t hurt us. They’re looking for someone else.” She held out her arms, and Sparrow threw herself into them sobbing.

Comforting Sparrow, trying to tell her everything would be all right, Summer was only vaguely aware of the rumbling voices of the intruders until one of them, a big, heavy man with a saggy face, came out of the bedroom with Sparrow’s shoes. “Hurry up, ladies,” he said. “Get some clothes on. We’re taking you with us.”

On the path one of the men walked ahead and one behind, the heavy tread of their booted feet loud in the midnight stillness. Between them Sparrow trudged obediently, clinging to Summer’s hand and occasionally shuddering with stifled sobs. It was Sparrow’s hand, small and cold and shaking, that held back the dark wave and kept the tightness in Summer’s stomach from turning into sharp, burning pain. Holding on tightly, Summer kept whispering, “It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right,” a desperate invocation against fear, her own as well as Sparrow’s.

A patrol car was parked on the Fishers’ road, near the beginning of the path—white and black, lights flashing from the roof, an iron grill between the front and back seats. One of the men got into the driver’s seat while the other opened the back door and boosted Sparrow in. It was then, in the moment that his back was turned, that her fear surged up—and she ran.

Barely aware of the shouts and the thudding feet behind her, she sped up the road to the first break in the heavy underbrush. A few feet into the clustering bushes and saplings she threw herself to the ground, crawling under the sprawling branches of a huge rhododendron. When the sound of pursuit had retreated, she ran again.

She was scrambling up a footpath between switchbacks when the noise of a motor warned her, and flattening herself between boulders on the steep slope, she watched as the patrol car went by below her, rounded the sharp turn and passed by again above her head. Back on the roadway, she went on running.

It was not long afterwards that she heard the shots—a single sharp report and then three or four more in rapid succession. For a moment her stride broke and she stumbled and fell. She struggled to a sitting position, and vaguely aware of the pain in her hands and knees, she strained to hear over the noisy rasp of her breath. Silence. Back on her feet, she ran again, slower now as she fought the painful exhaustion in her lungs and legs.

Not far beyond the switchbacks, the sound of another approaching car drove her off the road again, quickly this time as the noise swelled rapidly to a threatening roar. Someone was driving fast, ignoring the danger of sharp turns on slippery gravel. With barely time to find cover, Summer darted behind a spindly sapling, hoping desperately that its thin branches would block the probing headlights. Rounding the last turn the vehicle accelerated quickly and sped past, a large white van with flashing lights, and large blue letters across its doors. An ambulance.

“Oriole.” The name was a pain that throbbed through her head as she began to run again. “Oriole. Oriole.”

The gate was wide open. The yard in front of the house was full of cars and people. Patrol cars were everywhere. Near the veranda steps the ambulance was parked, its rear doors open. Lights were blazing—glaring, blinding light—spilling from the windows and from the headlights of all of the cars. A group of people were clustered near a van, and the air was full of the sound of voices, talking and shouting. Inside the ambulance a white-coated figure was bending over a blanket-draped figure on one of the litters. Summer had started forward when two men came out of the house and down the stairs carrying a stretcher. “Oriole. Oriole.” Her lips shaped the words, but her throat refused to respond as she lurched into a staggering run. But the person who lay on the stretcher, his face contorted with pain, was Adam Fisher.

“Watch it,” someone said as Summer’s knees weakened suddenly and she clutched at the edge of the stretcher. And then, “Hey. Where’d you come from? Christ! Looks like we got another wounded. Joe! Joe! Can you take care of this one.”

“It’s all right,” Summer said. “I just fell down.” The blood on her arms and legs seemed unreal, faint and far away. The white coated man was receding, too, even as he walked toward her, his voice growing soft and distant. As the world reeled past, blurred and fluid, only one small segment of the fading scene came through sharp and clear—the sight of Oriole coming down the veranda steps. Oriole, upright and unbloodied, smiling up at the big policeman who was leading her down the stairs. Then the darkness closed down.

“W
ELL, SO MUCH FOR
Charlie Brown.” Fritzie, a twelve-year-old child-abuse case from Willits, threw her comic book across the room and sat up. “They never get anything worth reading in this dump, like
Zaps
or
Slow Death.”
Getting off her bunk she came over to peer down at the beat up copy of
The Diary of Anne Frank
that Summer was reading. “You like that?”

“It’s okay,” Summer said. “I read it before, a long time ago. But I couldn’t find anything else that looked good, so I thought I’d read it again.”

“It’s sad, isn’t it? I was supposed to read it last year in school, but I didn’t because I don’t like to read sad stuff.”

Fritzie, who was in a children’s shelter home for the third time because her father had beaten her up, had pale, empty eyes and a big bruise on her left cheek. Last night, after Sparrow and Marina were sound asleep, she sat on the side of Summer’s bunk for a long time, comparing the various children’s shelter homes and the beatings that had caused her to be in them. She went into a great deal of detail about both, her pale eyes inward and unfocused. Summer felt she could get up and walk away, or even turn into some kind of grotesque monster, and Fritzie would go right on talking without noticing. It seemed that the beatings, as well as the foster homes, were gradually getting worse. The food was a lot better where she’d been last time, she said, than here at the Jensens’, and the Jensens were real uptight about TV watching—no sex or violence. Fritzie liked violence on TV.

“They’re going! Jerry and Galya came and they’re going to take Marina and Nicky away.” Sparrow burst into the room, slammed the door behind her and stood leaning against it, staring at Summer accusingly—as if it were somehow her fault. Fritzie went back and flopped on her bunk. Leaning on one elbow she listened openly, but with limited interest, as if she were watching a dull soap opera.

Summer shrugged. “Nicky told you,” she said. “He said their lawyer had arranged for bail and they would all be going home today.”

“What’s bail?” Sparrow asked.

“It’s money somebody pays; they don’t get it back if the person who got arrested doesn’t show up in court when they’re supposed to. So then the person who got arrested gets to go home until time for their trial.”

“Will somebody pay bail for us so we can go home?”

“Not for us, silly. We didn’t get arrested.”

“Yes, we did. When those two policemen came. Wasn’t that arrested?”

“No! They just took us into protective custody. Nicky and Marina, too. Only now Jerry and Galya are out on bail, so Nicky and Marina get to go home.”

“Oh. I get it.” Sparrow drifted across the room, obviously deep in thought, and collapsed on the bed next to where Summer was sitting. She was on the track, now, and Summer could guess what would be coming next. The question came—right on schedule. “When is Oriole going to be bailed?”

Across the room Fritzie was still listening. “I don’t know for sure,” Summer told Sparrow. “But it’ll probably be pretty soon.”

“Today?”

“Well, maybe not today. But it might be tomorrow. I kind of have a feeling it might be tomorrow.”

“Really?” Sparrow looked delighted. Jumping to her feet, she ran for the door. “I want to tell Marina. Maybe they haven’t gone yet. I’m going to go see if they’ve gone.”

When Sparrow had gone, Fritzie sat up. “Hey kid,” she said, “what’s your old lady in for anyway?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Okay?” Summer turned her back and picked up her book. But Fritzie wasn’t easily squelched.

“It must have been a real big one if they won’t let her out on bail. When my dad put my mom and me both in the hospital, they let him out on bail.”

“I thought you didn’t have any mother.” Summer said.

“Well, I did then. A stepmother anyway. But she split, too, after that. But what about your mom? Was it murder? Did your old lady kill somebody?”

This time Summer didn’t say anything. Holding her book in front of her face, she tuned Fritzie out and thought about the reasons the Fishers had been released on bail, and the possibility that Oriole might not.

Oriole’s situation wasn’t at all the same as the Fishers’. For one thing they were landowners and that made a big difference. And then there was the fact that the Fishers had tried to get out of the pot deal and had been forced to continue because Marina was being held as a hostage. At first Summer had wondered if the police would believe the Fishers’ story about the hostage thing; but yesterday when Nicky had talked to the lawyer, he’d heard some good news. First, there had been a test that proved that the bullet in Adam’s shoulder had come from Angelo’s gun, and then Jude had broken down and told the truth about Angelo’s threats.

So the bail had been reduced, and the Fishers had been allowed to go home, which meant that Nicky and Marina could leave the children’s shelter. But Oriole’s bail had not been reduced, and in spite of what she’d told Sparrow, Summer wasn’t at all sure when the McIntyres would be going home. As far as the police were concerned, Oriole was Angelo’s girlfriend and, as such, one of the criminals who was being charged not only with growing pot, but also of hostage-taking, resisting arrest and because of Adam and a wounded policeman, attempted manslaughter. The Fishers might be able to help by testifying that Oriole wasn’t really involved, but according to Nicky, Jerry and Galya felt that Oriole had betrayed their friendship by taking up with Angelo. So the chances that Oriole would be released soon didn’t look at all good.

There was a knock on the door, and Mrs. Jensen came into the room carrying a big cardboard box. She put the box down on the foot of Summer’s bed. “Mrs. Fisher,” she said, answering Summer’s unspoken question. “She said to tell you she went by your house and picked up some clothing for you and Sparrow. And they’d like to see you before they go.”

Summer got to her feet slowly. Under the heavy bandages, her knees were still stiff and painful, but there was more than physical discomfort behind her lack of haste. She felt very strange about seeing Galya and Jerry again. Although there were a lot of questions she desperately wanted to ask them, she knew she wouldn’t have the nerve. How do you ask someone about a close friend who turned out to be a traitor, particularly if the traitor happened to be your mother?