When the Wind Blows Page 12

  A downy little bird-girl nest with a four-poster bed and an extensive Barbie doll collection?

  Kit came up behind me. I smelled oranges and sweat. “Frannie,” he said softly. He really did have a nice voice. A smooth baritone. I could listen to him for hours, and I had just the night before.

  “Yeah?”

  He was pointing toward the steepest part of the slope. “Look. Up there. Isn’t that something?”

  I turned my head in the direction of Kit’s pointing finger.

  Just over a clump of fir trees and boulders halfway up the slope above us was a large flying thing.

  Not a hawk. Not a turkey buzzard.

  It was something, all right.

  The girl with wings!

  She was soaring high above us, like a majestic eagle, only better.

  “Oh God,” Kit couldn’t stop repeating as he watched her fly in slow, wide circles above us. “She’s for real.”

  Chapter 47

  KIT WAS ALREADY in shock, and flat-out awe, and maybe even in denial at what he had seen. He and Frannie started after her—a young girl, who looked normal in almost every way, except that she had wings and she could fly.

  She was flying, and she was up about five hundred feet above them.

  They climbed the hills after her.

  They crawled up rocky inclines at times.

  And they quickly found out that the shortest distance between any two points is—to fly.

  Kit stared up at the sheer face of the cliff and wondered how Frannie was able to find usable toeholds when he saw nothing but slick rock and possible death, or at least major broken bones. He had put his T-shirt back on, as if that would protect him if he fell.

  He was no Neanderthal. It didn’t bother him when a woman did things better than he did, but this was getting a little ridiculous. Frannie wasn’t just in good shape—she was in great shape. She was nearly Olympic-quality at this climbing hill-and-dale-and-mountain thing.

  He appreciated that she wasn’t rubbing it in too much. Actually, she was helpful and encouraging most of the time.

  “Don’t look down,” she said to him. “Look at me.”

  “I can do that,” he said. “I like doing that. Thanks for the tip. That actually helps some. Look at Frannie. Do as Frannie does. See? Frannie isn’t falling to her death. You shouldn’t either.”

  He pulled himself up the ledge toward where she stood above him. His hand found a thick root and he grabbed it. His toe found a narrow crack and wedged in. He was doing okay.

  Then he slipped.

  He slid down several feet toward a rocky chasm. Oh no, Jesus no.

  He grabbed at a whip of a tree, bent the sucker almost double.

  It held, thank God.

  “C’mon, L. L. Bean, you can do this,” Frannie called to him from above. “Just be careful. Don’t lose your focus.”

  Panting, afraid of becoming a bleeding pile of flesh and shattered bones, he slowly inched his way back up again. That was the thing about Kit… he didn’t give up easily. He heaved himself over the lip of the rocky ledge. Normally, he’d have managed a snappy comeback, but he didn’t have enough wind left in him to answer her.

  “What’d you just call me?” he gasped eventually.

  “What do you mean?”

  Kit achieved a crawling position, then stood up. He lurched over to where Frannie was sitting on a rock, massaging her toes. Nice toes, long and lean and very flexible.

  “Why’d you call me ‘L. L. Bean’?”

  She squinted up at him, shrugged her shoulders. “Your clothes, I guess. They’re brand-spanking-new, city boy. L. L. Bean–type.”

  “You’re hurting my feelings.”

  That cracked Frannie up. She bent at the waist and hugged her sides and laughed hard. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Kit looked at her and started laughing, which only compounded his wheezy, exhausted whoops into hysterics.

  “It wasn’t that funny,” said Frannie, when she could finally speak again.

  “I know,” he managed to say. “It wasn’t half that funny. But it is. Look at the two of us.”

  Which sent them both into hysterical laughter again.

  It was Frannie who recovered first. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Then she hunted around in her pack, pulled out a first-aid kit, and tossed it to him.

  “Your stomach. There’s blood on your shirt. Ooohh. I can’t stand the sight of blood,” she kidded.

  He doused the abrasion on his belly with alcohol without wincing. Frannie watched him. A cool expression on her face. After he was finished with the alcohol, he said, “Ouch,” and grinned.

  Kit looked around, searched the surrounding hills with his eyes. “Well, we sure didn’t catch up to her. She’s gone again.”

  “I keep wondering who her parents are,” Frannie said. “Where the heck did she come from? Where does she live?”

  There was no comment from Kit. Only dead silence.

  Frannie stared hard at him.

  “Wait a minute. You already know something about her, don’t you?”

  Kit blew out air. “I knew something was going on. I uh, I am an FBI agent, Frannie. I told you that last night. That’s also why I’m here in Colorado. I’ve been working on this case for three years.”

  Frannie turned pale and stumbled over her words. “What? What case is that? Am I part of a case now?”

  “Don’t go crazy, stay calm. Listen to me. It started in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at least I think that’s where it started. A doctor named Anthony Peyser was performing experiments, trying to speed up human development, or so we believe.”

  “You mean he was trying to effect human evolution, Kit? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Something on that order. We don’t know for sure. I don’t know for sure. Peyser and a team of students he handpicked were into something important. There was a breakthrough of some kind. Then they got in serious trouble in Boston. They were accused of experimenting on humans—vagrants, street people, occasionally a student who needed extra cash. The end justifies the means sort of thing. You’ve probably read about small labs, even university research centers, accused of the same thing recently. The army has done some pretty bad things.”

  “Yeah, I have heard about it. Who hasn’t? So you knew about this outlaw group of doctors all along. That’s why you believed me about the girl, isn’t it?”

  “I trust you—period. That’s why I believed you. How about trusting me a little now?” he finally said. “Deal?”

  “We’ll camp here for the night,” Frannie answered.

  She was tough when she had to be. But he sort of liked it.

  Chapter 48

  I NEEDED TO THINK about it some more, but I already suspected I was all right with what Kit had told me so far. Basically, I did trust him. I liked what I saw in his eyes.

  “I’m going to the grocery store,” I told him, as I started back into the woods near our camp. “Want anything?”

  “Denver Post, M&Ms with peanuts, Prozac,” he joked.

  “You’re in charge of the fire.”

  Kit nodded, made a grunting caveman sound, then gave me another of his patented smiles. I continued to be a little amazed at how well we were getting along.

  There was a stream less than a hundred yards from camp. I strung a line on the portable fishing rod I carry in my pack. The stream was bubbling and boiling down the rocks. It eddied into a little pool I knew from another time up here. Maybe a hike with David.

  Worms were thick in the leaf mold near the stream. I hooked one, tossed the line out onto the dark water. Waited for dinner to swim along.

  It took only a few minutes for me to catch a good-sized rainbow trout. I cut and tied my line, left the fish in the water, then restrung the pole. The fish was only about fourteen inches, but a half hour later I hadn’t caught another, and it would be dark soon.

  One medium-sized trout would have to do for dinner. I’d brought along a couple o
f tomatoes and potatoes, so it wouldn’t be too bad.

  I had an eerie, sixth sense that the girl was close by. When she’d shown herself before, it almost seemed as if she were teasing us, maybe even leading us up here. Why? Did she want to be found? Or maybe show us something? What, though? Where she lived? How she lived? Some other secret she needed to share?

  I took the trout out of the cold stream, killed it quickly with a rock, refilled the canteen, and headed back.

  I found Kit at the campsite. The FBI agent. Out here on a big case that he wouldn’t talk very much about. Well, somebody could definitely hide a lab up here. Stoned-out hippies had been hiding in these hills for years.

  “Nice fire,” I said. It was a beauty.

  “No Match-light either.”

  He’d taken the potatoes out of the pack and they were already baking in the coals. A domesticated man—what fun! I handed him the canteen of water and showed him the fish. He whistled his approval. A frontier woman—what fun!

  I was gutting the fish on a flat rock with a Swiss Army knife and Kit was licking his handsome chops when I said, “I might be willing to share my trout with you—on one condition.”

  I had his attention. Also, his smile was turned on again. At least I amused him.

  “You tell me, no crap, more of what’s going on, and you get to eat.”

  “Fine,” he said. “You win, Dr. O’Neill. But I want to see half of that fish on my plate before I talk.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  I put the trout fillet into a pan. Set the pan onto the red-hot coals. The aroma was incredible, mouthwatering.

  I walked over to where Kit was sitting and hunkered down next to him so that I could see the view. As if on cue, the sun set. Great brush strokes of salmon and plum and whiskey colored the sky.

  “Damn,” he whispered. “They don’t make them like this anywhere around Boston.”

  I felt as strangely pleased as if I’d painted the sunset myself. For the moment at least, this was a really great adventure, a truly amazing one. Everything about it was appealing.

  The fish was done in no time. I took the potatoes out of the coals, and sliced the tomato. Kit put everything on plates.

  He and I ate and watched the breathtaking scene from our dinner table in the sky, talking quietly, but pretty much nonstop. The fish bones were in the ashes and we were sipping hot coffee. Kit, as he had promised, began to tell me what he knew.

  He repeated what he had already told me, adding some information. He still kept it a little sketchy, which he said he had to do. The current crisis emanated from an outlaw biology lab. It had started with MIT students and a few professors in the late 1980s. It had definitely involved experiments with humans back then. The man who ran the radical group was named Anthony Peyser. I told Kit that I’d never heard of him; I’d have remembered the name. Besides that, I didn’t think I knew anyone who fit the description Kit gave me.

  “There were charges in Boston, but the police couldn’t prove anything significant. The group moved to San Francisco, then to New Jersey, a short stint in England, maybe to get European financing. Then back to Boston again.

  “The second time they came to Boston I nailed them, at least I thought I had. They were experimenting on homeless people with fatal diseases, or so they convinced them. They helped a couple of them die sooner than they would have. Somehow, everyone involved managed to get bail—and then they disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  “Until now?”

  “Somebody in the group contacted a couple of past associates. Maybe they’d been in contact all along. I think that whoever it was might have been having attacks of morality and ethics. I wonder why. Anyway, Dr. James Kim in San Francisco and Dr. Heekin in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were contacted, and then ended up dead. They really don’t like witnesses, Frannie. They’re thorough, too, as you might expect scientists to be.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that, but I sure got the point.

  Kit stopped talking abruptly. He just stared out as the sun finally slipped below the horizon. I knew there had to be more to his story.

  It struck me as funny, peculiar, strange, but I knew it was all over for me. Just like that! I liked looking at his strong face, the hard-chiseled cheekbones and chin. I liked the softness I saw in his eyes, too. It had never happened to me like this before, not even with David. I could intellectualize about it all I wanted to, but I was falling for Kit Harrison. Falling, or flying? I wondered.

  “And that’s all you know?” I asked him. “You swear it is?”

  “That’s what I know for sure, Frannie. It’s what you get for half a trout dinner.”

  “All right, I guess that’s fair. How’s that scrape on your stomach?” I asked.

  “I used to play rugby at Holy Cross, then in the Boston and D. C. beer leagues. I think I’ll pull through.”

  I frowned a little at the tough guy posturing. “Did you put antibacterial gunk on it?”

  “It’s not that bad, Doc. It’s a scratch, a scrape.”

  Fireflies flashed intermittently in the gathering dark. Once upon a time I knew a lot about fireflies, but I couldn’t remember any of it now. I was thinking about the tufts of gold hair on Bean’s chest and the abrasion roughing up his perfect skin. I was remembering the softness of his lips, and his gentle touch.

  I was turning myself on. He was turning me on. Oh boy!

  There were no sick animals to distract me, nothing to clean or jump up and do. I wished for a cigarette, although I don’t smoke. I could have used a drink.

  “I think I ought to take a look at it,” I finally said. I don’t know why, but I spoke in a whisper.

  I didn’t think he was going to answer me, he was so quiet. Then Kit cleared his throat.

  “Would that be in a medical capacity?” he asked.

  “No. It would be in a fellow traveler capacity,” I managed to croak.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m in your able hands. Let me get this shirt off.”

  “Oh goodie.”

  His blue eyes twinkled again. “Dr. O’Neill? Did you just say ‘Oh goodie’?”

  “You can call me Frannie. I told you that before. And yes, that’s what I said. Oh goodie.”

  Chapter 49

  MAX WAS WATCHING THE TWO OF them from a safe distance, at least she hoped she was safe. Her mind was going about a million miles an hour.

  Warm tears streamed down her face and she couldn’t make them stop. That got her angry. She hated to show any weakness, and she almost never did, but so much had happened in such a short time. She was on the run. No, she was in flight.

  Max knew it was stupid, but she just couldn’t keep the tears from flowing. She couldn’t shake a particular image out of her mind. She’d been shocked when she saw the rock come down on the head of the poor fish. The woman doctor had been so cold when she did it. Just the way they were at the School. Cold, cold, cold.

  How could she kill that fish? Put it to sleep?

  It had been a living thing.

  It probably had babies and a nice place to live in that beautiful stream back there a ways.

  Now it was dead because the doctor had put it to sleep.

  Max sat on a branch, shivering and crying softly to herself. She was never going to be safe out here in the world, and she felt terribly alone and sad. She missed Matthew so much that she couldn’t even bear to think about him. The world outside the School was as scary as Uncle Thomas had always told her it was. Only he’d never scared her half as much as she’d been in the last few days.

  At least she had found a safe, high place where she could see the man and woman and their roaring, blazing campfire. She didn’t like to admit it, but the cooking fish did smell awfully good. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her how long it had been since she’d put anything solid in it.

  She wished she had someone to talk to.

  The woman doctor and her friend were sitting on the edge of the hill watching the sunset. The sun, as it w
ent down, was pretty, like orange marmalade and grape jelly mixed together. F-O-O-D, she thought. J-E-L-L-Y. Sitting here, watching the same sunset they were watching, made her feel she was with them. Was she getting them all wrong? If she went to them and asked politely, would they help her? She liked to think that life could work that way. But no. She knew better.

  She spied on the man and woman as they sat and talked around the fire. She could tell they liked each other.

  She was having conflicting thoughts about the woman doctor. She wanted so badly to trust her. That was her instinct. She just couldn’t see how all the gooey, soothing, don’t worry I’m not going to hurt yous in the world could be believed.

  Then the couple were eating their dinner, and watching that made Max ravenously hungry. She listened as they talked and laughed, even caught a few words. “… Thorn in the side… over the hill… antibacterial gunk….”

  She wished she could sit with them and eat a baked potato at least. Potatoes were living things, too, but she could handle that.

  She scrunched forward to watch, to see them better. What’s going on now? What are they doing?

  As she watched from the tree limb, the doctor went and squatted next to the man. She began to take off his clothes, his shirt first. The man was bigger than the doctor and he overpowered her! What was he doing to her?

  He lay down on top of the pretty doctor, but she didn’t push him away, didn’t fight him at all. They were laughing, smiling, and then they began to kiss.

  “They’re mating,” Max whispered.

  Chapter 50

  I HAD A FIRST-AID KIT in hand as I knelt down beside Kit. I carefully opened the buttons of his shirt. When I got to the one closest to his waist, I had to pull the bunched-up shirt out of his pants. He winced from the friction of cloth against raw skin.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Frannie. I live for pain.”

  I stared at firelight playing over taut chest muscles and a mat of bright curls. I reached for the tube of ointment, fumbled, and almost dropped it. The lid spun off into the dirt.