When the Wind Blows Page 4

  The pool was surrounded by white wrought iron, curlicued leaf furniture, big comfortable ottomans, a settee covered in floral Sunbrella fabric. Urns of seasonal flowers were spotted around the pool as well as canvas-topped market umbrellas.

  Frank McDonough was doing laps, and it astonished him that almost twenty years after he’d been a Pac-10 swimmer at California-Berkeley he still loved to swim against the pace clock.

  Dr. McDonough enjoyed his life in the Boulder area tremendously. His sprawling ranch-style house had an indelible view of the city as well as the plains to the east. He loved the bite and crispness of the air, the exquisite blueness of the sky. He had even gone to the National Center for Atmospheric Research to try and find out why it was so, why the sky out here was so blue? He had moved from San Francisco six years ago, and he never wanted to go back.

  Especially on a day like today, with the Flatiron Mountains towering in the near distance, and his wife, Barbara, due home from work in less than an hour.

  He and Barbara would probably barbecue black bass on the patio, open a bottle of Zinfandel, maybe even call the Solies over. Or see if Frannie O’Neill could be pried away from her animals out in Bear Bluff. Frannie had been a college swimmer, too, and Frank McDonough always enjoyed her company. He also worried about her, since David’s tragic death.

  Frank McDonough stopped swimming in midstroke. He halted just as he was about to reach the south end of the pool and make his ninety-first flip turn of the afternoon. He’d seen a flash of hurried movement on the patio. Near the Weber grill.

  Someone was out there with him.

  No, more than one person was on his patio. There were several people, in fact. He felt a twinge of fear. What the hell was going on?

  Frank McDonough raised his head out of the water and flipped off his dripping Speedo goggles. Four men in casual dress—jeans, khakis, polo shirts—were hurrying toward him.

  “Can I help you guys?” he called out. It was his natural instinct to be nice, to think the best of people, to be polite and courteous.

  The men didn’t answer. Odd as hell. A little irritating. Instead, they continued walking across the deck toward him. Then they started to run!

  A table went over on the deck. Votive candles broke, newspapers and magazines flopped on the deck.

  “Hey! Hey!” He looked at them in total disbelief.

  All four of them had jumped into the pool’s shallow end with Frank McDonough.

  “What the hell is this?” McDonough started to yell seriously at the intruding men. He was confused about what was happening, frightened too.

  They were on him like a pack of dogs. They grabbed his arms and legs, pinned them, twisted hard. He heard a sickening crack and thought his left wrist had been broken. The fast, powerful movement hurt like hell. He could tell how powerful they were because he was strong, and they put him down as if he were a ninety-pound weakling.

  “Hey! Hey!” he yelled again, choking on a noseful of water. They had his head pushed back so that he was looking straight up into the infinite blueness of the sky.

  Then they were forcing his head under. He tried to catch a quick breath, but got a mouthful of water and chlorine, and gagged.

  They held him under the surface, wouldn’t let him up. His legs and arms were caught in a powerful vise. He was being drowned. Oh God, it didn’t make a shred of sense to him.

  He tried to thrash.

  Tried to break free.

  Tried to calm himself.

  Frank McDonough heard his neck snap. He couldn’t fight them. He felt his life force ebbing, flowing out of him.

  He could see the figures in their soaking-wet clothes wavering before him in the sparkling, clear blue water. His eyes were pinned wide open. So was his mouth. Water flooded his throat and entered his lungs in a terrifying rush. His chest felt as if it would implode, which he actually wanted to happen. He just wanted the awful internal pressure and pain to end.

  In an instant, Dr. Frank McDonough understood. He saw the truth as clearly as he could see his own approaching death.

  This was about Tinkerbell and Peter Pan.

  They had escaped on his watch.

  Chapter 12

  IT IS ABOUT a forty-minute drive from Bear Bluff to Boulder, if you keep the pedal to the metal, if you really fly.

  I tried my best to make the drive in a semi-sane and controlled manner, but I failed miserably. Everything about the drive and the night was a ghostly blur.

  I couldn’t stop seeing Frank McDonough as I had known him for the past six years—smiling, and incredibly full of life. I hadn’t been leaving the Bluff much lately. Not for the last 493 days, anyway. Now, I had to go to Boulder.

  Frank McDonough was dead. His wife, Barb, had called me in tears. I couldn’t make myself believe it. I couldn’t bear the painful, terrifying, awful thought.

  First David, and now Frank. It didn’t seem possible.

  I tried to call my best friend Gillian at Boulder Community Hospital. I got her answering machine and left a message that I hoped was coherent.

  I tried to call my sister, Carole, but Carole didn’t pick up at the camping site where she was staying with her two girls. Damn, I needed her now.

  I heard awful, wailing police sirens before I actually arrived at Frank and Barb McDonough’s ranch house in Boulder. They live close to Boulder Community Hospital, which makes sense, since they both worked there. Barb is a surgical nurse and Frank is the top pediatrician.

  Frank was a pediatrician. Oh, dear God, Frank was dead now. My friend, David’s friend. How could it have happened?

  The Boulder police sirens were blaring at an ear-piercing level, and they seemed so eerie, so personal, as if they were meant for me.

  Just hearing the police sirens brought back so many powerfully bad memories. I had spent months bothering the Boulder police about solving David’s murder. I’d tried to solve it myself for God’s sake. I had questioned parking lot attendants, doctors who used the lot late at night.

  Now everything, all the bad memories about David’s murder, came flooding back to me. I couldn’t bear it.

  Chapter 13

  I’M DR. O’NEILL,”I said, and I pushed my way past a tall, burly Boulder policeman stationed on the familiar, whitewashed porch. “I’m Barb and Frank’s friend. She called me.”

  “Yes, ma’am. She’s inside. You can go right in,” he said, doffing his visored cap.

  I barely noticed the sprawling ranch house or Frank’s beloved Xeriscaped landscaping. Instead of lush green lawns, hundreds of small, colorful plants dotted the yard. Frank had planned everything with water conservation in mind. That’s the way he was. Always thinking about other people, thinking ahead.

  I was numb, and at least partly in denial. The McDonoughs were the couple that David and I were closest to when he worked at the hospital. They had rushed to our house the night David was shot. Barb and Carole and my friend Gillian Puris stayed the night with me. Now here I was in Boulder under similar circumstances.

  A woman burst from the front screen door of the house as I was hurrying up the stairs. It wasn’t Barb McDonough.

  “Oh, God, Gillian,” I whispered. Gillian is my best friend in the world. The two of us hugged on the porch. We were both crying, holding on to each other, trying to understand this tragedy. I was so glad she was here.

  “How could he drown?” I muttered.

  “Oh, God, Frannie, I don’t know how it happened. Frank’s neck was broken. He must have tried a shallow dive. Are you okay? No, of course you’re not. Neither is poor Barb. This is so bad, so awful.”

  I cried on my friend’s shoulder. She cried on mine.

  Gillian is a research doctor at Boulder Community and she’s a crackerjack. She’s so good she can afford to be a rebel “with a cause,” always up against the hospital bureaucrats, the admin jackals and jackasses. She’s a widow, too, with a small child, Michael, whom I absolutely adore.

  She wore hospital scrubs and a lab c
oat with her ID badge still pinned to the lapel. She’d come straight from work. What a long, terrible day for her. For all of us.

  “I have to see Barb,” I said to Gillian. “Where is she, Gil?”

  “Come on. I’ll show the way. Hold on to me. I’ll hold you.”

  Gillian and I entered the familiar house, now uncharacteristically dark and quiet and somber. We found Barb in the kitchen with another close friend, Gilda Haranzo. Gilda is a pediatric nurse at the hospital. She’s part of our group.

  “Oh, Barb, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I whispered. Words never seem to work at times like these.

  The two of us fell hard into each other’s arms. “I didn’t understand about David. Oh, Frannie, I didn’t understand,” Barb sobbed hard against my chest. “I should have been better for you back then.”

  “You were great. I love you. I love you so much.” It was the truth, and it was why this terrible moment hurt so badly. I could feel Barb’s loss as if it were my own.

  Then all four of us were hugging and consoling one another as best as we could. It seemed only yesterday that we all had husbands and would get together for barbecues, swimming games, charity gigs, or just to talk for hours.

  Barb finally pulled away and yanked open a cabinet door over the sink. She took out a bottle of Crown Royal. She cracked the label and poured four large glasses of whiskey.

  I looked out the kitchen window and saw a few people from Boulder Community standing in the backyard, out near the pool. Rich Pollett, Boulder’s chief counsel, was present. He’d been a good friend of Frank’s, a fly-fishing partner.

  Then I saw Henrich Kroner, president of the hospital, Rick to his friends. Henrich was an elitist snob who thought his narrow focus in life made him special, and didn’t realize it made him very ordinary. It struck me as odd that Henrich of all people would be here, other than that the McDonough house was so close to the hospital. But then again, everybody loved Frank.

  I had a sudden and painful flash of memory that cut like a knife into my heart. A few years back, David and I had gone white-water rafting with Frank and Barbara. Afterward, we’d gone swimming in calmer waters. Frank was as much at home in the water as an otter. I could still see his powerful freestyle stroke.

  How could he have died in his pool?

  How could Frank and David both be dead?

  As I sipped the bracing whiskey I couldn’t come up with a single answer. I felt like a top that wouldn’t stop spinning. I had another drink and another after that until I was finally numb.

  Gillian almost seemed as concerned about me as she was for Barbara. That’s the way she’s been since David’s death, especially since I wouldn’t let the murder be. It’s as though I’m her adopted child. She reminds me of how I could imagine Emma Thompson might be—smart, but sensitive, thoughtful, funny too.

  “Come home with me tonight. Please, Frannie,” she said and made a needy face. “I’ll build a fire. We’ll talk till we drop.”

  “Which would be pretty soon. Gil, I can’t,” I said and shook my head. “A hurt collie’s coming in the morning. The Inn-Patient is already full.”

  Gillian rolled her eyes, but then she smiled. “This weekend then. No excuses. You’ll come.”

  “I’ll be there. I promise.”

  I helped put Barbara to bed; I kissed Gillian and Gilda goodbye; and then I headed home.

  Chapter 14

  THE FAMILIAR, WELCOMING SIGN loomed in swirling mists of bluish-gray fog: BEAR BLUFF NEXT EXIT. I signaled for a right turn, cruised down the off-ramp, and felt the usual two lumps in the road.

  Then I zagged onto Fourth of July Mine & Run Road, a narrow two-laner that cuts through five and a half unmarked miles of woods until it reaches Bear Bluff. The Bluff is basically a drive-through town. It has a gas station, a Quik Stop, a video store, and me. We all close by dark. There’s a local saying—happiness is seeing Bear Bluff in your rearview mirror, but you better look damn quick.

  I couldn’t wait to get home. I wanted to escape into blessed sleep. I felt distant, unreal. I’d also had too much to drink.

  The unlit road looped around rocky outcroppings through the forest. Dense tree growth made reluctant way for the narrow, concrete thoroughfare, and for the dancing headlights of my Suburban.

  I slowed the car, and concentrated on getting home in one piece.

  Deer were bound to dash out at me, and I wasn’t in any shape for sudden-death decisions.

  I saw something strange, a streaking white flash in the woods to my right.

  I gently applied the brake. Slowed down some more. Peered hard into the shifting shadows of the woods.

  I hoped I was wrong, but the white flash looked like a young girl running. A little girl had no business out here in the middle of the night.

  I braked to a full stop. If the young girl was lost, I could certainly give her a ride to her home. I felt something was wrong, though. Maybe she was being chased by someone? Or she might be lost?

  I left the engine running and got out of the Suburban. The ground fog lifted some, so I walked a few yards into the woodland. My skin was prickling with apprehension.

  Stop.

  Look.

  Listen.

  “Hello,” I called in a soft, tentative voice. “Who’s out there? I’m Frannie O’Neill. Dr. O’Neill. The vet from town?”

  Then I saw the white streak again, this time darting from behind a tall, blue-green spruce. I scrutinized, looked closely, concentrated, squinted fiercely.

  It wasayoung girl, yes!

  She looked to be about eleven or twelve, with long blond hair and a loose-fitting dress. The dress was ripped and stained. Was she all right? She didn’t look it from where I stood.

  She’d heard me, seen me, she must have. The girl started to run away. She seemed afraid, in some kind of trouble. I couldn’t see her very well. The fog had returned in ragged shreds.

  “Wait!” I called out. “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself. What are you doing? Please, wait.”

  She didn’t wait. She actually sped up, tripped over a log, went down on one knee. She shouted something that I couldn’t make out from where I was standing.

  My heart started to beat faster. Something wasn’t right about this. I began to run toward her. I thought she might be hurt. Or maybe she was high on something? That made some sense to me. Maybe she was older than she looked from a distance. It was hard to tell through the scarves of fog.

  There was only the dimmest light from a thin slice of moon, so it was hard to tell, but it looked to me that her proportions were a little odd. Her arms were sheathed with something.

  I stopped running. Hard! My heart started to thunder. I could hear it.

  It couldn’t be.

  Of course it couldn’t be.

  I almost screamed. I gasped for breath, steadied myself against a tall spruce.

  The little girl appeared to have white and silver wings.

  Chapter 15

  WHAT I SAW was way beyond my abilities to imagine, beyond my comprehension, my system of belief, and maybe beyond my ability to communicate it right now. The little girl’s arms were folded back in a peculiar way, but when she lifted them—feathers fanned out.

  It wasn’t humanly possible, but there she was—a girl with wings!

  Spots jumped in front of my eyes. Colors, coruscating reds and yellows, danced. I was definitely a little high from the Crown Royal, but I wasn’t drunk. Or was I very drunk? Was I so freaked out by Frank McDonough’s death that I was hallucinating?

  Close your eyes, Frannie.

  Now open them again, slowly…

  She was still there! No more than twenty yards away. The girl was watching me, too.

  Don’t faint, Frannie. DON’T YOU DARE, I told myself.

  Go slow. Go really slow here. Don’t make any sudden noise or movement to scare her off.

  I watched as the girl awkwardly found her feet. One wing was folded neatly behind her. The other wing dragged a little.
Was she hurt?

  “Hey,” I called again, softly. “It’s all right.”

  The young blond girl turned toward me. I guess she was close to five feet tall. She gave me a fierce look with her large, wide-spaced eyes. I stood in the ferny glade in the milky moonlight. Everything around me was shifting shadows. I watched, dizzy and panting, not knowing who was more frightened, her or me.

  She shot me a grim look of horror and ran away again, into the night, farther into the woods surrounding Fourth of July Road until she was just a blur.

  I followed until it was too dark to see in the dense woods. I finally leaned against a tree and tried to review the last few minutes. I couldn’t do it. My head was spinning too fast.

  Somehow I managed to get back to the Suburban. I climbed inside and sat there in the dark.

  “I did not just see a young girl with wings,” I whispered out loud.

  I couldn’t have.

  But I was sure that I had.

  When I could manage to drive, I went to the police station in nearby Clayton, a burg of about three thousand. Actually, the station is an outpost for the main office in Nederland. I stopped the Suburban on Miller Street, less than a block from the station house.

  I desperately wanted to continue down the peaceful village street, but I couldn’t do it, couldn’t make myself.

  I had been drinking… and driving. It was already past two in the morning, way past the witching hour in Clayton.

  Now that I wasn’t actually looking at the girl… I wasn’t completely sure what I had seen. I just couldn’t tell my story to the local cops. Not that night, anyway. Maybe tomorrow.

  I went home to sleep on it—or more likely, to sleep it off.

  Chapter 16

  KIT WAS SWEATING, just like he had on the American Airlines flight from Boston. Damn it, he still couldn’t fly very well. But he had to.

  The pilot of the Bell helicopter shot a look across the cockpit at him. He didn’t bother to conceal a smirk. “You okay? Never been up in one of these eggbeaters, huh? You don’t look so good, Mr. Harrison. Maybe we should head back?”