Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

The woman had shock-red curly hair and freckled skin. She wore a big smile with slightly crooked teeth. Her cheeks had a rosy flush, and alcohol wafted from her breath.

“Are you Frankie?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“A guy outside asked me to give you this.”

She extended an envelope in her hand. Frankie could see her own name written in black ink on the outside.

“Where’s this guy?” Frost asked immediately, but he didn’t wait for the answer. He bolted to the street. Frankie could see him on the sidewalk, scanning the late-night pedestrians in both directions. He ran across the MUNI tracks to the gas station, but he was too late. Todd was already gone.

Frankie stared at the envelope in her hand. She didn’t open it. The woman with the red hair left to take a seat halfway down the counter, and she flirted loudly with the waiter. Five minutes later, Frost came back and took his seat again. His hair was mussed and wet, and he looked frustrated.

“I couldn’t find him.”

Frankie pushed aside the dirty plates and put the envelope down on the counter. “Should I open it?”

“That’s what he wants,” Frost said.

She hesitated and then tore open the flap. A greeting card was inside, but as she extracted it from the envelope, something loose fluttered to the ground. Frost bent down and retrieved it and held it up for both of them by pinching the corner with his fingers. It was a photograph, four inches by five inches.

“A choir,” Frankie said with a question in her voice.

The picture showed the members of a student choir. It had to be a high school singing group, based on the ages of the kids.

“Is this the same choir, the same space, that you saw in Todd’s video?” Frost asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

“What about the kids? Do you recognize any of them?”

Frankie looked closely at the photograph. The group shot made the faces small, so it was hard to pick out the details. Kids all looked the same in student photos. Same smiles. Same hair. Same school uniform. Then her eyes focused on a tall boy in the back row. She recognized the feminine line of his jaw and the faraway expression. None of that had changed in the years since the picture was taken.

“That’s Todd,” she said, pointing with her finger.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She focused so tightly on him that she didn’t immediately pay attention to the pretty black girl next to Todd. Then, when she did, she couldn’t take her eyes off her. The face was familiar. Not someone she knew. Not even someone she’d seen. But she recognized that same high school smile from other photographs.

“Oh my God,” she murmured. “That’s Merrilyn Somers.”

Frost leaned closer and swore. He flipped the picture and saw what was written on the back. “The Nightingales. Reno.”

“They sang together in choir,” Frankie murmured.

Frost shook his head. “I’m guessing it’s a lot more than that. Jess said Merrilyn was engaged to a boy from her high school. Look at the two of them. They’re two kids in love.”

Frankie felt a sickness all the way into her heart. “Darren murdered his fiancée. No wonder Todd did all this. He must have been insane with grief. He wanted revenge against Darren in the worst way.”

“Not just Darren,” Frost reminded her softly. “Against you.”

Frankie remembered the card in the envelope. She slid it into her hand. The cover showed a watercolor painting of the California coast, with waves tumbling onto sand and bluffs looming over the strip of beach. She opened the card and saw one sentence written inside.

“Frankie?” Frost asked.

She couldn’t tell him anything. She couldn’t form the words.

“Frankie, what does it say?”

She felt as if her world had come full circle. Everything that had gone wrong in her life lay inside that card in one sentence. One sentence, burning her eyes. One sentence, meant only for her. Todd knew the truth. Todd knew everything that she’d forgotten.

Don’t you want to know what happened to your father?

She knew where to find Todd. She knew he would be there, in the morning, waiting for her.

The rain had passed away overnight, leaving the early daylight clear and cold. Under her feet, the ground was soft. Far below her, waves thundered against the cliffs, casting up angry white spray and eating into the headlands bit by bit with each season. As she passed in and out of the trees, wind hurtled across the trail. It slapped her face until her cheeks were raw and shoved her so hard with its gusts that she could barely walk.

Her father had taken this same trail. He’d never come back.

Frankie shoved her hands deep into her jacket pockets. She was alone, but she wasn’t really alone. Frost talked to her through the microphone secreted in her ear, under the protection of her fleece ear warmers.

“Any sign of him?”

“No,” she murmured.

“Sorry, you’re breaking up. The wind is causing interference.”

“No,” she repeated. “I don’t see him.”

Todd could be anywhere. He had miles of empty parkland in which to hide. She’d already hiked for an hour after sunrise, waiting for him to confront her, but if he was here, he was watching her silently. Even so, it was only a matter of time before he stepped from the shelter of a tree and blocked the trail.

“You don’t have to do this,” Frost told her again. He’d been urging her not to go to Point Reyes all night.

“Yes, I do.”

Frost didn’t say anything more. He and Jess were half a mile behind her on the trail. Another team of officers, dressed like ordinary hikers, scouted the land to the north. A police helicopter waited on an open hillside two miles away for an order to lift off. The trailheads had been closed; the overnight campgrounds had been evacuated. The police were laying a trap, but Todd knew perfectly well that they were coming for him.

Todd was his real name. Todd Farley, not Todd Ferris. Until last summer, he’d worked for a video production company in Reno. He was three years older than Merrilyn Somers, but the two of them had dated since she was in eighth grade. They’d sung together in the Nightingales choir at their local high school. They’d gotten engaged the summer after Todd graduated from college. They were in love the way only young people can be in love, with no dark clouds hanging over their future.

Until Darren Newman.

Todd had stayed at his job in Reno while Merrilyn went to SF State. He drove over the Sierra Nevada mountains one weekend a month to see her. They had everything planned. Money. Jobs. Children. According to their friends, Todd knew he had something special in Merrilyn. He counted the days until her graduation. He lived and died for her.

Until Darren Newman.

After Merrilyn’s murder, anger filled him up. He raged against Newman. He raged against Frankie. He raged against the police who’d let it happen. Weeks later, with no note or warning, Todd disappeared from Reno. His friends and family had no idea where he went. They only knew that something had broken inside Todd’s soul. He was officially a missing person, according to the Reno police, and the expectation in his hometown was that he’d gone off to a remote spot in the mountains and killed himself, because he couldn’t live without Merrilyn.

But that wasn’t the truth.

He’d gone to San Francisco. Todd Farley had become Todd Ferris. The Night Bird was born.

“He might not come,” Frost said in her ear.

Frankie shook her head, although no one was around to see her. “He’ll be here.”

She struggled against the wind up the coastal trail, following the path along the jagged inlets of the headlands. Low brush clung to the cliff side twenty feet away, where the sharp wall dropped off to a ribbon of beach. Waterfalls spilled down the rocks. Huge stones made islands in the surf. Overhead, the cloudless sky stretched in a swath of azure until it met the midnight blue of the Pacific at the horizon.