Black Feathers (18 page)

He drove them to a coffee shop a short distance away, and hurried a couple of steps ahead of her to hold the door open.

He didn’t give her the backpack. It dangled at his side, where he held it by the loop. He seemed to have forgotten that he had it.

Cassie didn’t take her eyes off it.

She stood with him while he ordered a coffee, a hot chocolate and a breakfast sandwich at the counter, despite his suggesting that she should get a table. She went with him to the self-serve bar, watched as he put cream and sugar into the largest coffee she had ever seen.

She didn’t let more than a few feet come between her and the backpack. She had lost it once, she wasn’t going to lose it again.

But Harrison wasn’t letting it go.

When they sat down, he set the bag on the floor, tucked between his feet.

He slid the breakfast sandwich across the table to her.

“Here,” he said.

She wanted to argue. Instead, she devoured the sandwich so quickly she barely tasted it.

For a long time, then, neither of them said anything. She stirred the whipped cream slowly into her hot chocolate with the wooden stir stick. He sipped tentatively from his coffee.

“So,” he said finally. “Are you all right?”

For some reason, the question struck Cassie as bizarre, if not outright hilarious. She had to hold in the bubble of laughter that rose in her throat.

“Am I all right?” she asked, realizing only as she heard the words that she sounded like Skylark.

Thankfully, he smiled too. “I just meant, after this morning. Is there someplace you can go?”

It took her a moment to connect things, to realize that by “this morning” he was referring to the police attacking the camp. She considered for a moment.

“I’ve been thinking about going to Vancouver,” she said.

He nodded. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “Things are a bit hairy out there right now.”

She thought about the stories in the newspaper, and she was about to speak, but then she thought of Sarah, her body in the dry fountain, the blood on the snow.

She could feel the knife in her hand, the stuttering hesitation as it cut into Sarah’s throat.

Then she thought of Skylark.

“I don’t know, though,” she said instead. “I don’t want to leave quite yet.”

He nodded again, more slowly this time. “Okay,” he said, drawing out the syllables. “Did you want me to take you to a shelter? I know—”

“No,” she said flatly. “I’m not going back to the shelter.”

He wasn’t surprised by her words. “You’ve said. But I know some people—” His face drew in on itself with concern. “Did something happen?” he asked, leaning forward slightly, bridging the distance between the two of them.

“Nothing
happened,
” she said, emphasizing the second word. “Exactly.”

He didn’t say anything. He took a slow sip of his coffee, set the cup carefully on the table, and all the time he just looked at her.

She knew what he was doing: waiting her out, knowing that she would eventually say something, anything, just to fill the silence.

So she took a sip of her hot chocolate and set the mug slowly, carefully, back on the table, all the time looking at him.

“So what,” he said, “do you mean by ‘nothing happened exactly’?”

She had tried not to think about it. It was what, a week ago, at most? But she had done everything she could to put it in the past.

“Nothing,” she said, looking down at the pale wood tabletop.

“Cassandra?” Her name in his voice was startling. “What happened at the shelter?”

She sighed. “Nothing really happened. I just never felt safe. Some of my stuff got stolen, and I reported it, but they didn’t do anything, they just told me that I needed to be more careful. And there were these guys …”

“Did someone hurt you?” For a moment she had a flash of him in his uniform.

“No one hurt me.” She thought of that afternoon, the three men in the stairwell, the animal smell of them as they had closed around her, their hands on her. “Not really.” The way the leader, the toothless one, had smiled when he said they knew where to find her, the way they had all laughed when she tried to pull away. “But I never felt safe, you know? I figured that if they didn’t do anything when my stuff got stolen, well, what if something else happened? They weren’t exactly …” She shook her head. “I just didn’t feel safe.”

He nodded. “There are other shelters,” he said, testing. “But yeah, I get that. Listen—” He shifted in his chair. “Cassandra. About your options.” Reaching down between his feet, he lifted up her backpack and held it on his lap.

She couldn’t help staring—it was so close. She had thought she would never see it again, and here it was, just out of reach.

It was strange: she knew that the bag was hers. She recognized everything about it, from the scuff up the left side to the piece of yarn tied around the handle, but there was a strangeness to it, an unfamiliarity. Perhaps it was because she had given up hope of ever seeing it again, or because she was seeing it now, for the first time, separated from her, with someone else holding it.

But none of that mattered. She just wanted it back.

Harrison held on to it as he asked, “What about going home, Cassandra?”

The question rang like a slammed door, and she leaned back in her chair, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the cop without running out of the coffee shop.

“No,” she said.

“I talked to your mom again this morning,” he said. “She—”

Cassie jerked forward. “You talked to my mom?”

Harrison nodded and started to reply, but she cut him off. “How could you?”

“Cassandra.” He held up a hand.

“I’m not going back there.”

“Cassandra.”

She shook her head. “I won’t. I’ll just—”

“Cassandra.” Loud enough this time to make people in the coffee shop turn. Loud enough to get her attention.

She leaned back in the chair again, her mouth a tight line.

Harrison turned his head slowly around, meeting people’s curious gazes. When he made eye contact, he didn’t look away: everyone else broke the stare first, turning back to their tables, their cups, their conversations.

Turning back toward her, he leaned forward, over the table.

“I talked to your mom this morning,” he said, his voice pitched low. It was as if her outburst hadn’t happened. “They’re worried about you.”

Cassie didn’t say anything, forced her face still to not give anything away.

“And they miss you.”

A realization crawled up Cassie’s spine, insinuated itself in the back of her mind, whispered to her.

“They’d like you to come home.”

It’s over,
the voice whispered. Her own voice.

“Why did you run away?” Harrison asked, settling back in his chair a bit, giving her space. “Why did you leave the hospital?”

Cassie shook her head.

Harrison sighed. “Cassandra, if you won’t tell me, I can’t—”

“It doesn’t matter now anyways,” Cassandra muttered, loud enough for him to hear.

“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”

“You’re gonna send me back,” she said. She looked around the café, trying not to meet his eyes. “You’ve talked to my mom, you’re holding my stuff—you’re gonna send me back. It doesn’t matter why I ran away.”

“I’m not sending you back,” he said, lifting the bag across the table and handing it to her. “Here. I just wanted to know why you left.”

She took the backpack by the handle and held it, staring at him. “You’re not?”

He shook his head, and she slowly lowered the bag to the floor, tucking it between her own feet. She kept one hand wrapped around the handle. “But—” The voice in her head was silent, but she was afraid to breathe, in case she had misunderstood.

“I couldn’t, even if I wanted to,” he said, half-shrugging and lifting one hand in a gesture of helplessness. “You’re sixteen years old. Legally, you have the right to decide where you want to live.” He leaned forward, planting both elbows on the table. “Besides,” he said, his voice lowering, “if I were to put you on a bus, or deliver you myself, you’d just run away again, the first chance you got, right?”

She could feel her face flushing.

She nodded.

“So I want to know why you left.”

He left the words hanging in the air as he took another swallow from his coffee.

She tightened her grip around the handle of her bag. She didn’t have to tell him anything; she could just walk out. He might try to come after her, but he had already told her that there was nothing he could do. She could just leave.

But she didn’t.

“I had to,” she said, looking down at the grain of the table. “I had to go.”

“Why?”

She didn’t want to say too much. She couldn’t tell him everything, but she wanted to tell him something. He’d been looking out for her. He had found her and returned her bag. She had to tell him something.

“It wasn’t safe,” she said, pausing on each word. “I couldn’t stay there.”

“Did something happen?” he asked. “Did somebody hurt you?”

She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t anything like that. I just …” The words were bringing tears to her eyes, and she had no idea how to continue. “My father …”

Harrison laid both his hands palms-down on the table. “Cassandra,” he said firmly, but with undertones of understanding. “Cassandra, look at me.”

She lifted her head, willing herself not to cry.

“You didn’t kill your father.”

The crow alighted on one of the weathered, rusting tables along the front window of the café, next to the ashtray and its two cigarette butts.

It hopped across the table, onto the chair back closest to the window.

It craned its head forward.

It watched.

You didn’t kill your father.

The words echoed in her head, and she sobbed in a sharp burst.

She leaned forward, rested her forehead on the cool edge of the table and tried to be as quiet as she could. She breathed through her nose with a wet rasp, squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her lips tight.

She couldn’t stop, but she didn’t want to make a scene. She didn’t want anyone looking at her anymore.

“It’s okay.” Harrison’s voice was faint and indistinct against the roaring in her ears. “It’s all right.”

No
, she argued silently.
It’s not.

Everything about that night, everything that she had tried to push down, came rushing back.

It was like she was there again, right there: the cool of the basement, the way her steps creaked on the next-to-bottom stair, the softness of the rags as she piled them, the acrid smell of the turpentine as she poured it into the loose pile of cloth, the sulphur tang of the match as she struck it.

She had dropped it into the pile of rags, watched it pinwheel in slow motion. The air and the rags had seemed to pop, bursting into a hot blue flame that wavered and roared, licked up the bare wood beams …

“It’s all right,” Harrison said again.

“No,” she said, this time out loud. “No, it’s not. The fire—”

She lifted her head from the cool table and looked across at him. He was blurry through her tear-muddled eyes, but she saw enough to take the napkin he extended toward her.

He waited in silence while she dabbed her eyes and blew her nose, handed her another napkin without being asked.

“Cassandra,” he said. “I talked to your dad.”

The world roared in her ears. “You … My dad?”

He nodded. “That first morning, after we met you at the bookstore. I called your place.”

So dizzy, so suddenly, she felt like she was going to throw up.

“I know that … you were seeing a doctor. And what you wrote—”

Then it came to her, all in a rush.

“You read my journal,” she snapped. “You …” She reeled at the unexpected anger. “What gives you the right?”

He looked at her for a moment as if not understanding the question. “My badge?” he said measuredly.

Cassie snorted.

“Look,” he said, elbows on the table again, gesturing with his hands. “Your bag was abandoned property. No ID, no tags, no card saying, ‘If found, please call.’ Do you know how much stuff I had to go through this morning when we got back to the station? How do you think I knew the bag was yours? From your name inside your journal.”