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"Eight gray birds, sitting in dark.
Cold wind blows, it isn't kind."
The small yellow school bus crested an abrupt rise on the highway and for a moment all she could see was a huge quilt of pale wheat, a thousand miles wide, waving, waving under the gray sky. Then they dipped down once again and the horizon was gone.
"Sitting on wire, they lift their wings
and sail off into billowy clouds."
When she paused she looked at the girls, who nodded approvingly. She realized that she'd been staring at the thick pelt of wheat and ignoring her audience.
"Are you nervous?" Shannon asked.
"Don't ask her that." Beverly warned. "Bad luck."
No, Melanie explained, she wasn't nervous. She looked out again at the fields that streamed past.
Three of the girls were drowsing but the other five were wide awake and waiting for her to continue. Melanie began again but was interrupted before she'd recited the first line of the poem.
"Wait, what kind of birds are they?" Kielle frowned.
"Don't interrupt." From seventeen-year-old Susan. "People who interrupt are philistines."
"Am not!" Kielle shot back. "What is that?"
"Crass dummy," Susan explained.
"What's crass?" Kielle demanded.
"Let her finish!"
Melanie continued.
"Eight little birds high in sky,
They fly all night till they find sun."
"Time out." Susan laughed. "It was five birds yesterday."
"Now you're interrupting," lean tomboy Shannon pointed out. "You Philadelphian."
"Philistine," Susan corrected.
Chubby Jocylyn nodded emphatically as if she also had caught the slip but was too timid to point it out. Jocylyn was too timid to do very much at all.
"But there are eight of you so I changed it."
"Can you do that?" wondered Beverly.
"It's my poem," Melanie responded. "I can make as many birds as I want."
"How many people will be there? At recital?"
"One hundred thousand." Melanie looked quite sincere.
"No! Really?" offered enthusiastic eight-year-old Shannon, as a much older eight-year-old Kielle rolled her eyes.
Melanie's gaze was again drawn to the bleak scenery of south central Kansas. The only color was the occasional blue Harvestore prefab silo. It was July but the weather was cold and heavily overcast; rain threatened. They passed huge combines and buses filled with migrant workers, their Porta-Potti's wheeling along behind. They saw land-owners and sharecroppers, piloting their huge Deeres, Masseys and IH's. Melanie imagined they were glancing nervously at the sky; this was harvest time for the winter wheat; a storm now could ruin eight months of arduous work.
Melanie turned away from the window and self-consciously examined her fingernails, which she trimmed and filed religiously every night. They were coated with faint polish and looked like perfect flakes of pearl. She lifted her hands and recited several poems again, signing the words elegantly. Now all the girls were awake, four looking out the windows, three watching Melanie's fingers and chubby Jocylyn Weiderman watching her teacher's every move.
These fields go on forever, Melanie thinks. Susan's gaze follows Melanie's. "They're black birds," the teenager signs. "Crows."
Yes, they were. Not five or eight. But a thousand, a flock of them. Looking down their black glossy beaks, they watched the ground, they watched the yellow bus, they watched the overcast sky, gray and purple.
Melanie looked at her watch. They weren't even to the highway yet. It would be three hours before they got to Topeka.
The bus descended into another canyon of wheat.
She sensed the trouble before a single clue registered in her conscious thoughts. Later she would conclude that it was no psychic message or premonition; it was Mrs. Harstrawn's big, ruddy fingers flexing anxiously on the steering wheel.
Hands, in motion.
Then the older woman's eyes narrowed slightly. Her shoulders shifted. Her head tilted a millimeter. The small things a body does that reveal what the mind is thinking.
"Are girls asleep?" The question was blunt and the fingers returned immediately to the wheel. Melanie scooted forward and signed that they weren't.
Now the twins, Anna and Suzie, delicate as feathers, were sitting up, leaning forward, breathing on the older teacher's broad shoulders, looking ahead. Mrs. Harstrawn waved them back. "Don't look. Sit back and look out opposite window. Do it. Now! The left window."
Then Melanie saw the car. And the blood. There was a lot of it. She shepherded the girls back to their seats.
"Don't look," Melanie instructed. Her heart pounded fiercely, her arms suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. She had trouble making the words. "And put seatbelts on."
Jocylyn, Beverly and ten-year-old Emily did as instructed immediately. Shannon grimaced and peeked while Kielle blatantly ignored Melanie. Susan got to look, she pointed out. Why couldn't she?
Of the twins, it was Annie who'd gone still, hands in her lap and her face paler than usual, in sharp contrast to her sister's nut-brown tan. Melanie stroked the girl's hair. She pointed out the window on the left side of the bus. "Look at wheat," she instructed.
"Totally interesting," Shannon replied sarcastically.
"Those poor people." Twelve-year-old Jocylyn wiped copious tears from her fat cheeks.
The burgundy Cadillac had run hard into a metal irrigation gate. Steam rose from its front end. The driver was an elderly man. He lay sprawled half out of the car, his head on the asphalt. Melanie could now see a second car as well, a gray Chevy. The collision had happened at an intersection. The Cadillac had had the right of way and seemed to have slammed into the gray car, which must have run a stop sign. The Chevy had skidded off the road into the tall wheat. There was no one inside; its hood was twisted and steam plumed from the radiator.
Mrs. Harstrawn brought the bus to a stop, reached for the worn chrome handle of the door.
No! thought Melanie. Keep going! Go to a grocery store, a 7-Eleven, a house. They hadn't passed anything for miles; but surely there was something up ahead. Don't stop. Keep going. She'd been thinking those words. But her hands must have been moving because Susan responded, "No, we have to. He is hurt."
But the blood, Melanie thought. They shouldn't get his blood on them. There was AIDS, there were other diseases.
These people needed help but they needed official help.
Eight gray birds, sitting in dark. . . .
Susan, eight years younger than Melanie, was the first out of the school bus, running toward the injured man, her long, black hair dancing around her in the gusting wind.
Then Mrs. Harstrawn.
Melanie hung back, staring. The driver lay like a sawdust doll, one leg bent at a terrible angle. Head floppy, hands fat and pale.
She had never before seen a dead body.
But he isn't dead, of course. No, no, just a cut. It's nothing. He's just fainted.
One by one the little girls turned to gaze at the accident; Kielle and Shannon first of course — the Dynamic Duo. The Power Rangers. The X-Men. Then fragile Emily, whose hands were glued together in prayer. (Her parents insisted that she pray every night for her hearing to return. She had told this to Melanie but no one else.) Beverly clutched her chest, an instinctive gesture; she wasn't having an attack just yet.
Melanie climbed out and walked toward the Cadillac. Halfway there she slowed. In contrast to the gray sky, the gray wheat and the pale highway, the blood was so very red; it was on everything — the man's bald head, his chest, the car door, the yellow leather seat.
The roller coaster of fear sends her heart plummeting toward the ground.
Mrs. Harstrawn was the mother of two teenage boys, a humorless woman, smart, dependable, solid as vulcanized rubber. She ripped the tail of her blouse into an impromptu bandage and wrapped it around a deep gash in the torn head. She bent down and whispered into the man's ear, pressed on his chest and breathed into his mouth.
And then she listened.
I can't hear, Melanie thinks. So I can't help. There's nothing I can do. I'll go back to the bus. Keep an eye on the girls. The roller coaster levels out. Good, good.
Susan crouched too, stanching a wound on his neck. Frowning, the student looked up at Mrs. Harstrawn. With bloody fingers she signed, "Why bleeding so much? Look at neck."
Mrs. Harstrawn examined it. She too frowned, shaking her head.
"There's hole in his neck," the teacher signed in astonishment. "Like a bullet hole."
Melanie gasped at this message. The flimsy car of the roller coaster drops again, leaving Melanie's stomach somewhere else — way, way above her. She stopped walking altogether.
Then she saw the purse.
Ten feet away.
Thankful for any distraction to keep her eyes off the injured man, she walked over to the bag and examined it. The chain pattern on the cloth was some designer's; Melanie Charrol — a farm girl who made sixteen thousand, five hundred dollars a year as an apprentice teacher of the deaf — had never in her twenty-five years touched a designer accessory. Because the purse was small it seemed precious. Like a radiant jewel. It was the sort of purse that a woman would sling around her shoulder when she walked into an office high above downtown Kansas City or even Manhattan or Los Angeles. The sort of purse she'd drop onto a desk and from which she'd pull a silver pen to write a few words that would set assistants and secretaries in motion.
But as Melanie stared at the purse a tiny thought formed in her mind, growing, growing until it blossomed: Where was the woman who owned it?
That was when the shadow fell on her.
He wasn't a tall man, or fat, but he seemed very solid. Muscled the way horses have muscle, close to the skin, rippled and defined. Melanie gasped, staring at his smooth, young face. He wore a glossy crewcut and clothes gray as the clouds speeding by overhead. The grin was broad and showed white teeth and she didn't believe the smile for a second.
Melanie's first impression was that he was a fox. No, she concluded, a weasel or stoat. There was a pistol in the waistband of his baggy slacks. She gasped and lifted her hands. Not to her face but to her chest. "Please, don't hurt me," she signed without thinking. He glanced at her moving hands and laughed.
From the corner of her eye she saw Susan and Mrs. Harstrawn stand uneasily. The second man, striding up to them, was huge. Fat and tall. Also dressed in overwashed gray. Shaggy hair. He was missing a tooth and his grin was hungry. A bear, she thought automatically.
"Go," Melanie signed to Susan. "Let's go. Now." Eyes on the yellow skin of the bus, she started walking toward the seven unhappy, young faces staggered in the windows.
Stoat grabbed her by the collar. She batted at his hand but cautiously, afraid to hit him, afraid of his anger.
He shouted something she didn't understand and shook her. The grin became what the grin really was — a cold glare. His face went all dark. Melanie sagged in terror and dropped her hand.
"What's...this," Bear said. "I'm thinking we...about that."
Melanie was postlingually deaf. She began losing her hearing at age eight, after her English language skills were honed. She was a better lip reader than most of the girls. But lip reading is a very iffy skill, far more complicated than merely watching lips. The process involved interpreting movements of the mouth, tongue, teeth, eyes and other parts of the body. It was truly effective only if you knew the person whose words you were trying to decipher. Bear existed in a different universe from Melanie's life of Old English decor, Celestial Seasonings tea and small-town, Midwestern schools. And she had no idea what he was saying.
He laughed and spit in a white stream. His eyes coursed over her body — her breasts beneath the high-necked burgundy blouse, her long charcoal gray skirt, black tights. She awkwardly crossed her arms. Bear turned his attention back to Mrs. Harstrawn and Susan.
Stoat was leaning forward, speaking — probably shouting, as people often did (which was all right because they spoke more slowly and their lip motion was pronounced when they shouted). He was asking who was in the bus. Melanie didn't move. Her sweaty fingers gripped her biceps. Bear looked down at the injured man's face and tapped his booted foot lethargically against the head, watching it loll back and forth. Melanie gasped; the casualness of the kick, its gratuitousness, was horrifying. She started to cry. Bear pushed Susan and Mrs. Harstrawn ahead of him toward the bus.
Melanie glanced at Susan and shot her hands into the air. "No, don't!"
But Susan was already moving.
Her perfect figure and runner's body.
Her one hundred and twelve muscular pounds.
Her strong hands.
As the girl's palm swung toward Bear's face he jerked his head back in surprise and caught her hand inches from his eyes. The surprise became amusement and he bent her arm downward until she dropped to her knees, then he shoved her to the ground, filthying her black jeans and white blouse with dust and mud. Bear turned to Stoat and called out something.
"Susan, don't!" Melanie signed.
But the teenager was on her feet again. Bear was expecting her and turned around. When he grabbed her his hand found her breasts and lingered there for a moment. Suddenly tired of the game, he hit her solidly in the stomach and she dropped to her knees, clutching herself and struggling for breath.
"No!" Melanie signed to her. "Don't fight."
Stoat called to Bear, "Where...he?"
Bear motioned toward a wall of wheat. He had a curious expression on his face — as if he didn't approve of something but was afraid to be too critical. Melanie followed his eyes and looked into the shafts of wheat. She couldn't see clearly but from the shadows and dim outlines it appeared to be a man, bending down. He was small and wiry. It seemed that his arm was raised, like one of those Nazi salutes. It remained poised there for a long moment. Beneath him was the naked form of a person, pale.
The woman who owned the purse, Melanie understood in a terrible flash.
No, please, no...
The man's arm descended leisurely. Through the undulating wheat she saw the dull glint of metal in his hand. Melanie gasped.
Stoat's head bent slightly as if he'd heard a sudden noise. He winced. Bear's face broke into a smile. Mrs. Harstrawn's hands rose to her ears, covering them. Horrified. Mrs. Harstrawn could hear perfectly.
Melanie stared into the wheat, crying. She saw: The shadowy figure crouching lower, over the pink mound. The elegant movement of the tall wheat, swaying in the intemperate July wind. The motion of the man's arm rising and falling slowly, once, twice. His face studying the pink body in lying in front of him.
Mrs. Harstrawn fixed Stoat with a stoic gaze. " ...us go and...won't bother you. We won't..."
Melanie was comforted to see the woman's defiance, her anger. The sturdy set of her jaw.
Stoat and Bear laughed and ignored her. They herded Melanie, Susan and Mrs. Harstrawn toward the bus.
Inside, the younger girls huddled in the back. Bear pushed Mrs. Harstrawn and Susan inside and gestured toward his belt, where his gun bulged. Melanie was the last person inside before Stoat, who shoved her into the back. She tripped and fell on top of the sobbing twins. She hugged them hard then gathered Emily and Shannon into her arms.
The Outside...Caught in the terrible Outside.
Melanie glanced at Stoat and saw him say, "Deaf as... All of them." Bear squeezed his fat torso into the driver's seat and started the bus. He looked in the rear view mirror and frowned, spun around.
In the distance, at the end of the ribbon of asphalt was a dot of flashing lights. Bear pressed the pad on the steering wheel and Melanie felt the vibrations of the horn in her chest.
Bear said, "What the fuck's...think we..." Then he turned his head and the words were lost.
Stoat shouted toward the bushes. He nodded when, apparently, the man answered. A moment later the gray Chevy sped out of the wheat fields. Badly damaged but still driveable, it rolled onto the shoulder, paused. Melanie tried to glance into the front seat for a glimpse of the man from the wheatfield but there was too much glare. It appeared there was no driver at all.
Then the car accelerated fast, fishtailing onto the asphalt. The bus followed, easing forward into the faint clouds of tire smoke, gray as the sky overhead. Bear slapped the steering wheel, turned for a moment and barked some words to Melanie — angry words, sharp words — but she had no idea what they might be. * * * The brilliant flashing lights grew closer, red and blue and white. Like the Fourth of July fireworks over the park in Hebron two weeks ago, when she'd watched the streamers of color criss-cross the sky, felt the explosions of the white-hot flash-bangs against her skin.
She looked back at the police car and knew what would happen. There'd be a hundred squad cars all converging up ahead. They'd pull the bus over and these men would get out. They'd put their hands up and be led off. The students and teachers would go down to a stationhouse somewhere and make statements. She'd miss the Theater of the Deaf performance in Topeka this time — even if they still had time to make it — but there was no way she'd get up on stage and recite poetry after this anyway. That's okay, that's okay.
And the other reason for her trip?
Maybe this was a sign that she shouldn't go, shouldn't have made those plans. It was an omen.
All she wanted to do now was go home. Back to her rented house, where she could lock the door, have a cup of tea. Okay, a hit of blackberry brandy. Fax her brother in the hospital in St. Louis, tell him and her parents the story. Melanie fell into a nervous habit, twining her blonde hair around her bent middle finger, the other digits extended. This handshape was the word for shine.
Then there was a sudden jolt. Bear had turned off the asphalt and was following the gray car down a dirt road. Stoat was frowning. He asked Bear something Melanie didn't hear. The big man didn't answer but just spit out the window. Another turn and another, in hillier country. Getting close to the river.
They passed under a wire covered with a hundred birds. Big ones. Crows.
She looked at the gray car. She still couldn't see him clearly — the driver, the man from the wheatfield. At first Melanie thought he had long hair, then a moment later he seemed bald or crew-cut, then he seemed to be wearing a hat.
With a skidding turn the gray car spun to the right and bounded down a narrow weed-filled driveway. Melanie guessed that he'd seen the dozens of police cars up ahead — the cars racing toward them to save them. She squinted and looked. No, there was just a gray strip of driveway. The bus turned and followed the Chevy. Bear was muttering, Stoat was looking back at the police car.
Then Melanie turned back and saw where they were headed.
No, she thought.
Oh, please no.
For she knew her hope about the men surrendering to the trooper who was fast approaching was just a fantasy. She understood where he was going.
The worst place in the world.
The gray car suddenly broke into a large, weed-filled field a quarter mile around. At the end of the field, on the river, squatted a red-brick industrial building, long abandoned. Dark and solid as a medieval fort. The field in front of the plant still held a few of the fences and posts from the animal pens that had subdivided the area long ago but mostly the field had been reclaimed by the Kansas prairie of mid-high grass, sedge, bluestem and buffalo grass.
The Chevy raced right for the front of the building, the bus following. Both skidded to a stop just to the left of the door.
Melanie peered at the ruddy brick.
When she was eighteen, and a student herself at the Laurent Clerc School, a boy had taken her here once, supposedly for a picnic but of course to do what boys of eighteen will do — and what Melanie too wanted, she believed at the time. But once they'd snuck inside, carting a blanket with them, she'd looked at the gloomy rooms and panicked. She'd fled and had never seen the perplexed boy, or the building, again.
But she remembered it. A place that was hard and sharp and dangerous.
And dark. How Melanie hated the dark. (Age twenty-five, and she had five night lights in a six-room house.)
Stoat flung open the bus door, dragged Susan and Mrs. Harstrawn out after him.
The police car — a single trooper inside — paused at the entrance to the field. He leapt out, pistol in his hand, but he stopped short when Bear grabbed Shannon and put a gun to her head. The eight-year-old surprised him by spinning around, kicking his knee hard. He flinched in pain then shook her until she stopped squirming. Bear looked over the field at the trooper, who made a show of putting his gun back into his holster and returning to his car.
Bear and Stoat pushed the girls toward the slaughterhouse door. With a rock Bear broke through the chain that bound the door closed. Stoat grabbed several large bags from the trunk of the gray car, where the driver continued to sit, staring up at the building. The glare still prevented Melanie from seeing clearly but he seemed relaxed, gazing with curiosity at the turrets and black windows.
Bear yanked open the front door and he and Stoat pushed the girls inside. The place stank of cave more than building. Dirt and shit and mold and some sweet-sickly decay, rancid animal fat. The interior was a maze of walkways and pens and ramps and rusted machinery. Pits surrounded by railings and parts of old machines. There were rows and rows of rusted meat hooks overhead. And it was just as dark as she remembered.
Bear herded the students and their teachers into a semicircular, tiled room, windowless and damp. The walls and cement floors stained dark brown. A worn wooden ramp led to left side of this room. An overhead conveyor holding the meat hooks led away from the right side. In the center was a drain for the blood.
This was the room where the animals had been killed.
Cold wind blows, it isn't kind .
Kielle grabbed Melanie's arm and pressed her head against her teacher. Mrs. Harstrawn and Susan embraced the other girls, Susan gazing with raw hatred at whichever of the men happened to catch her eye. Jocylyn sobbed, the twins too. Beverly struggled for breath.
Eight gray birds with nowhere to go.
They huddled in a cluster on the cold, damp floor. A rat scurried away, hunched-back, his fur dull gray like a piece of old meat. Then the door opened again. Melanie shielded her eyes against the glare.
He stood in the cold light of the doorway.
Short and thin.
Neither bald nor long haired but with shaggy, dirty blonde strands framing a gaunt face. Unlike the others he wore only a t-shirt, on which was stencilled the name L. Handy. But to her he wasn't a Handy at all — and sure not a Larry or Lou. She thought immediately of the actor in the Kansas State Theater of the Deaf who had played Brutus in a recent production of Julius Caesar.
He pushed inside and carefully placed two heavy canvas bags on the floor. The door swung shut and once the ashen light vanished she could see his pale eyes and thin mouth.
Melanie saw Stoat say, "Why...come here, man? No fucking way out."
Then, as if she could hear perfectly, Brutus's words sounded clearly in her mind, the phantom voice that deaf people hear sometimes — a human voice yet with no real human sound. "It don't matter," he said slowly. "Nope. Don't matter at all."
Melanie is the one he looks at when he says this, and it is to her that he offers a faint smile before he points to several rusty iron bars and orders the other two men to wedge the door tightly shut.
Excerpted from A MAIDEN'S GRAVE © Copyright 2002 by Jeffery Deaver. Reprinted with permission by Signet. All rights reserved.
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