forget about all of us up here. You’re too busy. Too important. I’m surprised you even remember where you came from.”
Birdy stayed planted, thinking that if she stood her ground her mother would calm down a little and take back what she just said.
It was a stalemate and not the first one. “Are you waiting for something?” Natalie asked.
Birdy’s heart was racing and her stomach was in knots, but she didn’t want her mother to know that she’d gotten to her-like she always did. She’d seen a gentle side of her mother in the past and she craved it again. Didn’t every child?
“I’m waiting for you to be a mother,” Birdy said, her voice soft as though it was too much to even ask. “That’s what.”
Natalie laughed. “You don’t need a mother. And I don’t need a daughter like you. Why don’t you go on now? I’m watching
Birdy wasn’t a crier. If she had been, she would have dissolved into tears right then. But not now. Not in front of her. Not with her mother’s seeming indifference, or outright hostility.
“What’s that, Mom?”
Natalie turned the sound up on the remote.
“Don’t mention Tommy again and don’t go see him,” she said. “Leave it be. Let the past fade away. Leave it.”
Birdy Waterman slumped in her car in front of her mother’s house. All visits home were bad, but on the scale of their relationship, this visit had been particularly disastrous. Natalie Waterman had come up empty-handed if she’d sought a reason to be happy. Few on the reservation would argue that she had many reasons to be happy. She was an alcoholic. Her husband had died in a fishing accident off the Pacific coast. Arthritis had taken its toll on her joints. Natalie was angry at the world and maybe rightly so. Knowing all of that didn’t make the pain pass any easier.
Somewhere in the time line of her mother’s downfall were the murder of Anna Jo and the subsequent conviction of her nephew Tommy for the most reprehensible of crimes.
Birdy pulled out of the muddy drive way and drove west toward the trail along the coast. The sky was clear and sunlight jabbed downward through the thick covering of spruce trees that contorted away from the ocean. She parked her car and started down the trail, each step taking her back twenty years to the day she’d seen the unimaginable.
CHAPTER THREE
Summer weather along the Pacific is governed by a kind of strange roulette wheel, one that makes anyone with concrete plans on the all-but-certain losing end of things. Not until the moment one ventures outside to experience the world of nature is it apparent if it is sunny or rainy or a mix of both. Its unpredictability is the only sure thing.
Three days after her fourteenth birthday, Birdy Waterman dragged a wagon down the coast trail to gather kindling. This was something she did nearly every day in the summer, and most weekend days during the school year. In the rain. In the snow. In the most blustery of autumn days. It didn’t matter. Birdy’s family heated their little aluminum box of a house with a woodstove. Wood was free if one was skilled with a chainsaw. She wore two layers of clothing, a T-shirt and a sweatshirt that she’d undoubtedly peel off once she got down to the business at hand.
Birdy was small for her age, fearless when it came to the noisy saw, and just hungry enough to help her mother and father in any way that she could. Helping each other was not only the tribal way, but the way of the Watermans. Natalie made money doing what she considered bogus crafts for the tribal gift shop, and Mackie Waterman fished for salmon up and down Neah Bay and over to West Port. Tribal fishing rights didn’t always guarantee a good income-no matter what the non-Native fishermen said. So there, on that summer day, Birdy did what she always did: forage for deadfall along the coast trail that wound its way from the hillside down to the rocky beach populated by sea stacks and smelly sea lions.
She was on the east fork of the trail when she first heard the noise. It came at her like a locomotive, pushing, huffing, and puffing. Each breath was a gasp for air. At first, it didn’t seem human. Birdy idled her chainsaw, then shut it off. She turned in the direction of the noise.
“Hey!” a familiar voice came at her. “Birdy!”
She looked through the tunnel-like pathway and strained to see who it was.
“Birdy!” It came again.
Coming toward her was her cousin, Tommy Freeland. He was in the darkness coming toward her. The ground thumped under his frantic feet. She set down the saw. Then, like a strobe light, his face was suddenly illuminated. It wasn’t the handsome face of a much loved relative, despite the familiar flinty black eyes and handsome broad nose.
The twenty-year-old’s face was dripping in red.
“Tommy!” Birdy cried out, and moved closer. “Are you okay?”
“Birdy!” he called again, stopping and dropping his elbows to his knees. “Help me.”
By then she was close enough to see that the coloring on his coffee skin wasn’t just any red. It was the dark iron red of blood. Tommy’s T-shirt had been splattered with what instinctively Birdy Waterman, only fourteen, knew was human blood.
“Are you hurt?” she said, almost upon him.
His eyes were wild with fear. “No, no,” he said as he tried to catch his breath. “I don’t think so…. I think I’m okay.” He looked down at his bloody hands and wiped them on his blue jeans, also dark and wet with blood.
Birdy shook a little as fear undermined her normally calm demeanor. “What happened? Who’s hurt?” she asked.
Tommy, breathing as hard as a marathon runner at the finish line, swallowed. He started to cry and his words tumbled over his trembling lips. “Anna Jo. Birdy, I’m pretty sure Anna Jo’s dead.”
Anna Jo was a beautiful young girl, the kind other girls of the reservation aspired to be. She had a job, her own car, and she was kind. No one thought anything but the best of Anna Jo Bonners.
“Hey,” he said. “I won’t hurt you. I was trying to stop you from falling. Don’t be afraid of me.”
“What happened to Anna Jo? What did you do to her?”
Tommy blinked back the recognition of what his cousin was undoubtedly thinking just then.
“No. I never. I just found her. Honest. She was at Ponder’s cabin. She was already dead. I promise. I never hurt anyone.”
Birdy found her footing and got up from the damp, dark earth. Her heart was pounding so hard inside the bony frame of her heaving chest just then, she was certain that she’d have a heart attack. She didn’t want to die and she didn’t want to find out what had happened to Anna Jo. She was too scared. Instead, she turned and ran, leaving the wagon, the chain saw, and her bloody cousin on the trail.
Twenty years later, as she walked down that same trail, the scene played in her head. Birdy hadn’t thought about what she’d felt that summer day and the role fear had played in what she testified to at trial. She was the witness who had put Tommy on that trail covered in blood. She was the one who had provided the time line that connected the victim to the killer. While it was true that Tommy Freeland had had blood all over his hands and chest, and it was true that he and Anna Jo had had a bitter fight a few days before she died, he’d denied any part of the brutal stabbing that had killed her.
One of the last things Birdy remembered Tommy saying before they hauled him away after sentencing was, “I loved her. Doesn’t anyone remember that? I loved Anna Jo. I would never have killed her. I didn’t do this.”
