Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  PRAISE FOR

  THE BOY WHO SHOOTS CROWS

  “Randall Silvis . . . presents a mystery so beautifully written and with characters so alive that the mystery itself becomes immaterial. Read it just for the prose.”

  —Thomas Lipinski, author of Shamus Award–winner

  Death in the Steel City

  “The Boy Who Shoots Crows is a real stunner. I lost an entire afternoon rushing through the final half, because I had to know—had to know—how it ended. From the opening lines, every sentence is infused with an uncanny sense of dread. With each page turn, Randall Silvis peels away yet another layer of his characters’ hidden hearts, and as he does, that sense of dread grows overwhelming. Because you become certain that you know what’s going to happen next. And pray that you’re wrong.”

  —Grant Jerkins, author of A Very Simple Crime

  “In The Boy Who Shoots Crows, Randall Silvis populates a small Pennsylvania town with richly drawn characters, chief among them Marcus Gatesman, a sheriff searching for a missing twelve-year-old boy, and Charlotte Dunleavy, a painter haunted by the boy’s disappearance and by her own dark history. Silvis writes with an artist’s eye for detail, and his story is expertly plotted, traveling along unexpected paths on the way to its devastating conclusion.”

  —Harry Dolan, author of Bad Things Happen and Very Bad Men

  PRAISE FOR RANDALL SILVIS AND HIS NOVELS

  “Randall Silvis has a well-deserved reputation as a writer of stylish crime fiction . . . [In Disquiet Heart], Silvis’s sly symbolism, intellectual play, and literary allusions make this novel an appropriate portrait of the twin-souled, enigmatic man whose detective stories have shown us both the dark motives of the soul and the power of reason to penetrate its mysteries.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “Silvis gives readers a page-turning story.”

  —New York Post

  “[A] wordsmith extraordinaire.”

  —Booklist

  “Randall Silvis is such a good writer, both for his prose and for what he doesn’t do—turn relationships into predictable scenarios.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “The story line is riveting—complex, convoluted, and compelling; Silvis engages the reader from first word to last. I couldn’t put this novel down.”

  —Los Angeles Reader

  “There’s genius in this book. The writing is like a melding of J. P. Donleavy and Lawrence Durrell. Silvis is reaching way out there . . . more innovative than ever, and expressing a depth of thought way beyond the reach of most modern writers. He may be the last of a dying species, the creative genius.”

  —William Allen, author of Starkweather and

  The Fire in the Birdbath and Other Disturbances

  “This beautiful, melancholy novella from Silvis unfolds as a timeless Central American seaside fable . . . A masterful storyteller, Silvis doesn’t waste a word in this tale about ‘the tart nectar of memory’s flower.’ ”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “My first encounter with Randall Silvis . . . left me literally spellbound . . . Silvis has a voice of his own, and what a wonderful voice! . . . I can’t recommend this book enough, an exceptional reading experience for anyone who loves solid and seductive storytelling, elegant but profound writing style, and most of all the ability to disclose the lyricism hidden behind the apparent triviality of human existence.”

  —The New Review

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2011 by Randall Silvis.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime trade paperback edition / December 2011

  Library o
f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Silvis, Randall, 1950–

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-55279-7

  1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. Pennsylvania—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.I47235B69 2011

  813’.54—dc22

  2011011691

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my sons,

  Bret and Nathan

  With gratitude to Emily Rapoport and Peter Rubie for their insights and patience. A special thank-you to Jonathan Westover, whose early enthusiasm for this story sustained my own faith in it and in my ability to tell it.

  1

  THE knock on her front door was startling despite its relative softness—three muffled thumps coming from at least thirty-six feet away, into the small foyer, around the corner and through the dining room, and finally all the way through the kitchen to the northern bay window where she sat at the pine table, occasionally jotting a word or two onto a notepad but mostly just gazing out at the pond off the far edge of her property. Just a moment before the knock, as she studied the way the mist hung over the water and diffused the shadows cast by the first slant of morning sun, she had whispered aloud, “Sfumato,” imagining the scene as her own painting, rendered with da Vinci’s famous technique applied to soften the tangerine glow and blur all edges. Other than that word, she could recall no human voice in her house for a full day or more, and even then it would have been her own. But now, at not quite seven in the morning, there was somebody standing on her front porch, waiting at the door. The sound that person had made, the knock, seemed heavy and dark and swaddled in mist, the kind of sound a lead weight would make if dropped three times onto a pillow. She wondered if she should sit very still and make no sound, or rise and go to the door. How could a visitor at this hour be a welcome interruption?

  2

  SHERIFF Marcus Gatesman wondered if he should knock a second time, louder, or if he should assume that the woman who lived here was still asleep. But who slept with the front door standing open these days—with only a flimsy screen door, unlatched, between her and a violent world—especially on a cool morning so early in April? Even here in the softly folded hills of Pennsylvania, in the small towns and mostly Amish farmlands, there was no shortage of cruelty and violence. From the porch he could gaze in any direction and name a violence that had been perpetrated there. Some of it, the worst of it, he had experienced firsthand.

  The morning was still chilly, though the day promised to be unseasonably warm. In the distance beyond the highway, a line of blue hills was rising to the sky, seeming to grow minute by minute out of the evanescing fog. “The Tuscarora Mountains,” he said aloud. It was comforting to be able to name things.

  Off to his right, just a hundred yards or so across the stubbly cornfield, crows were cawing from the trees, a tentative chorus of four or five. They would sit in the treetops awhile longer, he knew, drying their wings, then they would fly off to scavenge the countryside. It would not take them long to find a small animal or two along the highway, a road-killed rabbit or raccoon or opossum or squirrel. Dead things were always plentiful here, the detritus of every night—groundhogs and stray cats, somebody’s dog, sometimes a white-tailed deer or two. Even in winter there was never any shortage of carrion to keep the crows fed.

  He faced the door again. This unpleasant business of the morning as well as half of yesterday had engendered in him a deliberateness of movement even greater than usual. It was at times such as this that he felt unsuited for his job. He had not anticipated so much sadness.

  He knocked a second time, only slightly louder, and followed it by calling through the screen, into the foyer not yet illuminated by southern light, “Hello? Mrs. Dunleavy? Anybody home this morning?”

  3

  HEARING her name spoken aloud, misspoken in the usual way with the long e sound of the second syllable, and with the objectionable Mrs. as prefix, would have startled Charlotte even more had the unfamiliar voice been more demanding. But it conveyed a warmth and gentleness that sounded like an apology. She felt, for some reason this morning, particularly receptive to gentleness. Yesterday had struck her like one long migraine, her first since moving to Pennsylvania, and in its aftermath her spirit felt restless, unfocused, as if, like a small ship after a daylong storm, she had been torn from her moorings and was uncertain of the waters through which she now drifted.

  She stood and walked back through the kitchen and into the relative dimness of the foyer. A man she had never seen before was standing on her porch, hands cupped around his eyes and pressed to the screen door as he peered inside. The yard behind him was filled with light, and for just a moment she paused with the sudden recognition of the scene’s possibilities. Its impact would depend on how she painted the figure of the stranger. The light behind him could either contrast or accompany his intentions.

  “There you are,” he said, and lowered his hands. He smiled. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  She saw the uniform only peripherally, the beige jacket and trousers. His face filled the foreground, such a shockingly familiar face that she experienced a second soft jolt of disorientation.

  He kept smiling, though he was caught more than a little off guard by the sight of her, the nicely tight blue jeans, the loose yellow shirt hanging over the jeans. She was barefoot and wore no makeup, and her eyes held a startled, almost frightened look that made him immediately want to calm her.

  “I caught you in the middle of something, didn’t I?” He concentrated on keeping his voice soft. “I apologize for interrupting you like this.”

  “No, no I just . . . You’re the spitting image of James Dickey,” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “James Dickey. The writer. You look just like him.”

  “I guess I don’t know who that is,” he said.

  She moved a step closer and stared at him through the screen. St. Mark’s Cathedral, she thought. To the White Sea. She and June sitting near the center of the first row, enraptured by the man’s stillness and the slow melodic flow of words that bespoke a greater sorrow than the words alone. Behind him the soft yellow lights of the sanctuary. The scents of incense and candle wax. The hovering darkness in the faraway ceiling.

  And now here outside her door stood a police officer looking like Dickey’s twin. The same broad forehead and soft face, the same thin strands of hair combed over a prominent skull. The same extra twenty pounds around his belly. All this man lacked was the vague Southern accent.

  “I’m ashamed to say that I don’t do much reading,” Gatesman said.

  She could only nod. It all felt just too strange to her, and on a day so new, yet already ripe with an odd imbalance.

  “Imagine that,” he said, and smiled again. “Me looking like a writer.”

  There was such a total lack of menace in his smile, not the slightest hint of threat, that Charlotte smiled too.

  “The thing is,” he continued, the note of apology still in his voice, “we’ve got a little boy who didn’t show up at his house last night. So I’m just driving around and asking if anybody’s seen him lately. He’s about this tall,” the man said, and held his hand level with his chest. “Twelve years old. He’s got a thick mop of black hair, brown eyes, probably wearing jeans and boots.”

  “Jesse,” Charlotte said. The name came out before she knew she was going to say it.

  “You know the boy?”

  “Well it’s . . .” And then it happened again—the vague, almost distant nausea, the aura of scintillating light. She saw Gatesman as if he wore a softly burning veil of sunlight—the scotoma, June had called it, the aura that sometimes precedes a migraine and sometimes occurs independently of one.

  “I can’t really say that I know him,” she said.

  Gatesman waited, still smiling that patient, understanding smile.

  The aura was fascinating but it hurt her eyes, so she took a step backward and averted her gaze, looked into the cor
ner of the foyer. A spindly ficus in a ceramic planter. Stillness and shade. She concentrated on breathing evenly, eyes half closed. With luck she could will the aura away.

  “I’ve only seen him from a distance,” she said. “A few times this past winter I saw him cutting across the field out there and going into the woods. Every time I’ve seen him he’s been carrying a gun that looks bigger than he is.”

  A pause. She imagined that Gatesman nodded and continued to smile. He said, “Any chance we could get this screen door out from between us?”

  When the screen door swung open, she turned away at the waist, raised a hand to block the sunlight. She kept her eyes on the stairway, third step from the bottom.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, because she had felt his reaction, the sudden pause when she turned away. She released a slow breath. “I had a monster of a migraine all day yesterday. I thought it was over but . . . apparently I’m still sensitive to light.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, no it’s okay, I . . .” She lowered her hand. “How about if you come inside? The kitchen faces north. Very soft light. I’ll be fine there.”

  “Let me get my shoes off,” he said.

  The screen door closed with the dullest of thuds. She thought any other man would have let it bang shut. She retreated another step before looking toward the door again. Gatesman was bent double just outside the screen, untying his shoes. The aura had all but dissipated, leaving only a few sparkles scattered over the yard.

  “You really needn’t do that,” she told him.