Blood of the White Bear (eBook)

Chapter One

Five little toes curled around the eighth rung of a wooden ladder, leaning against the back of Rachel’s house. Five dimpled fingers grasped the ninth rung. A chin, sticky with grape jelly, pointed to the roof of the house. Rachel pulled her five-year-old body up and settled both bare feet on the eighth rung. Without hesitation, her left hand reached for the tenth rung.

Reaching the roof undetected, Rachel put her head in the space between two rungs and wiggled her skinny, pre-kindergarten body through it, until she was on all fours high above the ground. The little climber’s Uncle Henry was repairing this part of the roof. He left the ladder in place and a bundle of shingles a few feet higher up. Rachel thought the bundle would make a good seat and crawled toward it. The surface of the roof felt rough on her palms and knees, like a kitty’s tongue but with much bigger bumps.

From her seat on the roof, Rachel looked out into the tops of maples and birches and conical evergreens. She could not see the river through the branches, but she looked for it anyway. It was not the topography of her home in New Hartford that beckoned Rachel to climb a ladder and sit on the roof. She looked up, directly over her head, into the blue spring sky. Ribbons of clouds swept the horizon, like a paint brush had left them. What was on the other side of the clouds, Rachel wondered. What could she climb to get there?

“Rachel,” called Henry. The girl was out of his sight, somewhere on the roof. Henry stepped back from the ladder. He stretched his neck, until his muscles burned. “Rachel! Are you on the roof?”

Pansy stood behind Henry. They were Rachel’s aunt and uncle, her only relatives and caretakers since the death of her parents.

“I can see her,” said Pansy. Her voice was strained with both panic and relief, panic that the little girl was in danger sitting on a pile of shingles on the roof and relief that the girl had not yet fallen to her death.

Henry started up the ladder. Pansy waved her arms, trying to get Rachel’s attention. “Uncle Henry’s coming for you, honey. Just sit still, and don’t move.”

Henry crawled on all fours to the pile of shingles and helped Rachel climb on his back. Once they were safely on the ground, Pansy grabbed the girl and held her tightly against her chest. “Not today,” said Rachel, quietly. Pansy had heard these words before, in fact, nearly every day recently.

For weeks, Rachel had been fascinated with heights. It started when Uncle Henry decided to remodel the cottage on the river. With a child to raise, they had to become more sedentary. Not ready to completely give up the outdoor life, Henry decided to install a sky light in the roof, over the living room. He wanted to see the Connecticut sky. While working on the skylight, Henry realized the shingles were in pretty bad shape. He did not want to have to repair leaks in the winter, so the ladder was still propped against the gutter.

Rachel laid on the living room floor, looking up at the sky. The clouds framed in the skylight smiled and spoke to her. One day, Rachel jumped up from the floor, ran up the stairs to her bedroom, opened the window, and climbed out. She was sure the clouds were there on the roof, close enough to touch.

Pansy was working in her summer garden, behind the house and happened to look up and see Rachel pulling her legs through the open window. She raised a dirt-covered hand over her mouth, not wanting to scream and frighten the girl and ran into the house and up the stairs. Without speaking, Pansy reached out of the window, pulled Rachel back into the bedroom with one arm, and slammed the window shut with the other. Later, Henry hammered nails into the window frame, a few inches above the bottom pane. Rachel could open the window for air, but not wide enough to crawl through.

Rescuing Rachel, Pansy smeared garden dirt from her hands onto the girl’s arms and face. Washing up in the kitchen sink, Pansy said, “What were you looking at?”

“Clouds,” said Rachel. She was concentrating on the soap bubbles Pansy blew into the air and did not pick up on her aunt’s panic.

“You can see the clouds through the windows and outside from the swing.”

“I can’t hear them,” Rachel insisted. She was surprised that Pansy did not see the difference. She thought her aunt knew everything. She even knew where Rachel’s parents had gone - to Heaven.

Orphaned at age three, Rachel was adopted by her only paternal uncle and his wife. They settled in New Hartford, Connecticut, to raise their niece. Before Rachel came permanently into their home, Henry and Pansy moved around, seeing the country. Henry’s brother called him the last living hippie, though he was far from that. After the last of the fall foliage had dropped to the ground in New England, Pansy pulled her husband to the Southwest. Even before the “Me Generation” discovered Santa Fe, Henry and Pansy knew all the native artists. After Rachel’s parents’ plane crashed in New Mexico, Rachel’s aunt and uncle kept her in the east, safe in the forest, away from death in the sky.

Rachel begged for a tree house in the spring of the year she turned seven. Pansy was reluctant, but Rachel’s interest in rooftops waned in the previous two years. Henry built a magnificent tree house in a big, forked maple. All through the summer, Rachel spent hours in the tree, watching the birds build nests, catching insects and giving them a thorough examination, and reading library books by the stack. When the leaves fell that fall, Henry realized that Rachel had not spent all her time in the tree house. One afternoon, he watched her crawl out of the tree house window and onto its roof. From there, she climbed expertly up to a branch twenty feet above the ground.

It was Henry’s voice that startled her. Rachel fell silently through the bare limbs toward the ground. Henry managed to catch her, and they both collapsed into a huge pile of leaves. Henry broke his wrist. The emergency room doctor found nothing physically wrong with Rachel.

Things were quiet in the Bisette household for several months. Then, in the spring before her eighth birthday, Rachel carried her favorite baby doll, Mindy, outside. Walking through the kitchen, she opened the drawer where Aunt Pansy kept matches and removed the whole box. Rachel watched carefully as her aunt and uncle lit fires in the living room fireplace throughout the winter, and she knew how it was done.

Under the maple tree that held her tree house, Rachel collected dried leaves and small twigs. She patted them into a circle with a clear spot in the middle. Around the outside of her circle of leaves, she scraped a little ditch with a stick. She had seen Uncle Henry make a little ditch around camp fires. Rachel placed Mindy in the center of the circle, her arms outstretched, and had no difficulty striking the big wooden, kitchen match. The leaves around the doll caught quickly. In seconds, Mindy was surrounded by a circle of fire. Rachel watched the flames in silence.

Pansy smelled the burning leaves from inside the house. She was making Rachel’s bed on the second floor, stepped to the window, saw Rachel standing over the ring of fire, and jerked on the window, but it would not open past the nails Henry installed for Rachel’s protection. Pansy shouted through the narrow opening, “Rachel! Get away from the fire. Henry! Out back, quick!”

Pansy turned and ran down the stairs. She flung the backdoor wide open and jumped from the top stair down to the ground. Running as fast as she could to the maple tree, Pansy saw Rachel step over the fire, now nearly burned out but still dangerous. Standing inside the circle, Rachel grabbed Mindy and hugged her. Then, she jumped over the flames and stepped away. Pansy shouted Rachel’s name over and over, but the little girl seemed entranced by the ritual she was performing. She carried Mindy away from the flames, and taking a crochet hook from her pocket, she poked the end of one of Mindy’s fingers. “There,” she said, “I’ve saved you.”

Pansy grabbed Rachel by the shoulders. Henry had arrived in the back yard by this time. He scooped both Pansy and Rachel into his arms.

“What’s going on?” Henry shouted.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Pansy. “Well, young lady?”

Rachel looked lovingly at her aunt and uncle. “I saved her from the fire. See, she only has a scratch on her finger.”

Pansy dropped to her knees. She pulled Rachel toward her chest and sobbed into the little girl’s hair. It smelled of smoke. Rachel had a scar on one of her fingers, up near the pad. It had been there since the accident, the one that took her parents to Heaven.

“It’s a form of post-traumatic stress,” Dr. Finch said. “We’re seeing it in soldiers who served in Viet Nam. The Army doesn’t recognize it, but it’s real all the same.”

“A soldier, from combat? Rachel is a seven-year-old girl,” Pansy exclaimed. She held her purse on her lap, mindlessly snapping the clasp open and shut, unaware of the sound. Henry reached over and put his hand on top of his wife’s hand, to stop her nervous play with her purse clasp.

“Any trauma can create this condition. For Rachel, the trauma of being in a plane crash would have been enough to trigger nightmares, acting out, withdrawal, even regression of her developmental milestones. In Rachel’s case, she also lost her parents in the crash. She undoubtedly saw her parents’ bodies before they were recovered from the accident. She was a three-year-old, strapped in a seat with...