Dance for the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

food
cups from their slots on the bars and filled them with bird feed,
then ran thin jewelry wire from the cups to the sticks. She balanced
a stone on the open wall of each cage so it would come down fast and
stay shut. She sprinkled a handful of bird feed over the carpet of
fallen eucalyptus leaves in front of the cages, and went for a walk.
She used her sense of the geography of university campuses to find
the Student Union, and sat at a table in the shade of a big umbrella
at the edge of a terrace to drink a cup of lemonade.
    Even
at this time of year, Southern California seemed to her to be parched
and inhospitable. The broad lawns in public places like this were
still a little yellow and sparse from the eight-month-long summer,
with its hundred-degree stretches. Back home people would be telling
each other stories about years they remembered when the snow didn’t
stop until May, and wondering if this would be another one. When her
lemonade was finished she walked back across the campus to the row of
eucalyptus trees. Before she turned the corner of the science
building she heard a squawk, and then some fluttering, and she
thought about the difference between birds and human beings. No
matter how many times it had been done, each new generation of birds
flew into the trap as though it had never before happened on earth.
Maybe they weren’t so different.
    She
approached the traps, but they didn’t look the way she had
expected. One of them was just as she had left it, and the other one
had two big blue scrub jays in it together. When she moved closer she
could see that one was a male and the other female, slightly smaller
with more brown on top and less blue. As she stepped to the cage, the
questions began. “Jree?” asked the male. “Jree?” The female scolded, “Check check check!”
    They weren’t like the
birds at home, but they were quick and greedy for survival, so
territorial and aggressive that they had probably crowded in together
without hesitation. It was too late in the year for them to be
feeding hatchlings, and having one of each seemed right. They were
already mated.
    She poured in some more seed to
give them something to think about, lifted the cage, put it in the
back seat of the car, and covered it with a silk blouse from her
suitcase.
    Jane
drove to the county office building and wiped her face clean of the
thick makeup she had been using to hide the bruises, then walked to
the Department of Children’s Services. The people in the office
were busy in a way that showed they had given up hope of ever doing
all they were supposed to do but were keeping on in the belief that
if they worked hard enough they would accomplish some part of it.
There were two empty desks for each one that had a person behind it,
so they moved from one to another picking up telephones and slipping
files in and out of the piles like workers tending machines in a
factory. She waited for a minute, then saw a woman hang up her
telephone and pause to make a note in a file.
    Jane stepped forward. “Excuse
me,” she said. “I need to leave something for Nina
Coffey.”
    The woman’s eyes rolled up
over the rim of her glasses and settled on Jane; her head, which was
still bent over the papers on the desk, never moved. Jane could tell
that her bruises had identified her as an abused mother. “How
can I help you?”
    “It’s this teddy
bear,” said Jane. “Timmy Phillips left it in my car.”
    The woman showed no recognition
of the name. She snatched a gummed sticker out of the top drawer and
put her pen to it. “Spell it,” she said.
    “P-H-I-L-L-I-P-S.
I’d appreciate it if you got it to
her, because it’s important to Timmy.” Jane handed the
woman the small, worn brown teddy bear.
    The woman turned her sharp gaze
through the glasses at the bear. “I can see that,” she
said. “Don’t worry. I’ll give it to her.”
    “Thanks,” said Jane
warmly.
    The telephone rang and the woman
held up one finger to