Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) Read online

  Now that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she was able to pick out a couple of dim stars. Then she saw that they did not twinkle, they hung like tiny sequins on black velvet. Satellites, probably, she told herself. Tin cans beaming signals. Tonight’s episode of some stupid reality show. The four-hundredth rerun of Blazing Saddles.

  She stood there on the side of the road and searched from one corner of the sky to the next. Then suddenly she remembered her dream the night before the search in the woods, the shadow man who had approached her, and suddenly she was afraid standing there alone. Across the road were a few houses separated by wide, vacant yards, and behind the houses, a row of trees leading toward a ridge. She shivered with the thought of somebody rushing toward her out of that darkness. She reached into the pocket of her stadium jacket and closed her hand around the key chain and crossed quickly toward the school building and the light behind it.

  The elementary school sat at the bottom of a gentle slope, and behind, on a low plateau, were two football fields. The nearest, maybe fifty yards behind the building, was the high school team’s practice field. Then came a sharp rise of twenty or so feet, and on another plateau of sculpted land were the game field and the high school. Sodium-vapor lights at the rear of the elementary building made all this visible to Charlotte, though the two football fields themselves were unlit but for the watery, flickering glows of several hundred candles in the center of the nearest field. It seemed to her that the entire town must have been gathered there, everybody from all the little trailer court hamlets, the isolated farmers and their families, the entire scattered school district. She had not known there were so many people in the entire county.

  Her stomach lurched with every step. By the time she reached the rear of the crowd she was shivering uncontrollably, despite the heavy jacket she wore and the gray wool scarf wrapped twice around her neck. She kept both hands in her pockets, came to within two feet of the nearest people, and would have paused there, hung back, invisible at the rear, except that a man turned at her approach and smiled. He greeted Charlotte with a nod and took a step to the side. “Come on through here,” he told her. “You won’t see nothing but people’s heads from back here.”

  She wanted to tell him that that was all she wanted to see. But he kept smiling and waiting, so she continued forward, moved into the space he’d made for her. Immediately others turned to look at her, and they, too, moved aside. She continued to inch her way forward, though she could not help wondering, uncomfortably, why all of those strangers continued to make room for her to advance. At first she thought it an act of simple rural courtesy, but halfway through the crowd she became aware of people leaning close to one another, whispering, edging away to let her pass. She understood then that these strangers who had never laid eyes on her all recognized her immediately because she was not one of them. She did not dress like them or look like them, and she could only be the woman who lived in the house not a hundred yards from where the boy had disappeared. She could only be the woman who had told the sheriff about Dylan Hayes. She could only be that painter lady from the city, that outsider in their midst.

  The blood was pounding so explosively in Charlotte’s head that despite the continued singing of hundreds of voices, the music did not register to her as anything but a loud drone. Then it was as if her ears suddenly became unstopped and she heard the words, “When evening falls so hard, I will comfort you. I’ll take your part . . .”

  She came to a stop then and stared straight ahead into the broad back of a tall man, and she let the music come to her and tried to breathe more easily and allow her heart to calm. Soon her field of vision began to expand as if the tunnel she had been in was fading away, and she saw that she was well inside the crowd now, only ten feet or so from the front. Nearly every person but her was holding a paper cup with a little candle flickering inside. Some of them, men and women both, also held a can or bottle of beer, a soda can, or a cup of convenience store coffee in their free hand. Some of them whispered to one another. A few had set the paper cup and candle between their feet. A teenage boy and girl not far away were kissing.

  The woman standing next to Charlotte was a small, round woman wearing a denim jacket over a gray hoodie. She turned to Charlotte and said, “There’s candles up front.”

  “Thank you,” Charlotte said. “But I’m okay.”

  “Eldon,” the woman said to the man in front of her, and jabbed him on the shoulder so that he turned to look. “Move aside and let this lady through.”

  “Really, I’m fine, thank you,” Charlotte said, but the woman took her by the arm and pulled her forward, all but thrust her through the opening Eldon had made, at which point the person in front of Eldon moved aside as well, and the next person and the next, and Charlotte, smiling awkwardly, felt she had no choice but to be pulled forward by this tide of courtesy, no choice but to be drawn into the open circle at the heart of the crowd.

  The open space was perhaps twenty feet wide. At its center, on the ground at the base of a bamboo patio torch, was a mound of flowers, pictures, letters, and cards all stacked around a large corkboard that leaned against the bamboo torch. Two people stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind this display. The woman, Charlotte knew, could only be Jesse’s mother, a thin thirty-something woman, pretty but looking so worn, so exhausted by grief. She stood huddled into herself and stared at the ground near the mound of flowers. The fire from the torch threw flickers of light across her face.

  The man beside Livvie Rankin was one Charlotte recognized as a man she had seen on a few occasions while driving through town. Each time she saw him, he had been standing on the sidewalk, apparently locked in earnest conversation with somebody else, their conversation so earnest, on his part at least, that it always appeared to be on the verge of an argument. Each time Charlotte had driven past this scene, she had felt compelled to glance back once or twice to reassure herself that the men were not fighting.

  So you’re Denny Rankin, she thought. He wasn’t much taller than his wife, maybe five-nine to her five-seven, but he held himself as stiff as a sword and stared hard past the flame, his gaze going into the darkness just above the top of the crowd, the bill of his ball cap pulled low, his arms crossed tightly across his chest. What held Charlotte’s attention was the turn of his mouth, the full lips in a tight, one-sided, very critical smile. That’s Jesse’s mouth, she thought.

  Then a hand touched Charlotte’s shoulder. She jerked away at the touch and turned quickly.

  “Hey, it’s only me,” Mike Verner said. He had to lean close so as not to shout above the singing. “Sorry if I surprised you.”

  Beside him stood a petite, smiling woman with a pretty, slightly freckled face. She leaned past her husband to reach for Charlotte’s hand. “I’m Claudia,” she said.

  Charlotte thought the woman’s hand felt rough and dry, but it was also warm, and in an instant her other hand also closed around Charlotte’s. “It’s so nice to meet you finally,” Claudia said. She stood no taller than five feet two and had a delicate kind of beauty, a pale Irish complexion and shining auburn hair.

  Charlotte leaned close to her and said, “Your husband is a big, fat liar.”

  “Oh yes, he certainly is. What did he lie about this time?”

  “He said that you’re fat and ugly.”

  “Well, I could stand to lose a few pounds.”

  “Where? You don’t have an ounce of fat on you.”

  “Actually, I was referring to this hundred and ninety pounds standing here beside me.”

  Mike grinned as if the women’s sudden alliance against him was a personal victory. “I’m glad we found you,” he said. “So many people showed up, they had to move this thing off the front yard. I hope half this many people show up when I disappear.”

  Claudia shushed him, flashed her green eyes at him. He drew an imaginary zipper across his lips.

  To Claudia, Charlotte said, “I wish I had brought some flowers or something.”

>   “Some people are throwing a dollar or two in that little cardboard box. To help Livvie out.”

  “I didn’t even think to bring my purse.”

  Claudia looked up at her husband. He reached for his wallet, then held it open in front of Charlotte. “An interest-free loan,” he said. “But no free toasters.”

  Charlotte told him, “You’re an inveterate liar but a very nice man.” She thumbed through the inch-thick wad of bills, then extracted a twenty. “You mind?”

  “Well, I kinda had that one earmarked for a lap dance at the Sugar Shack.”

  Claudia gave his hand a little slap. “He ever sets foot in the Sugar Shack, he won’t have need for money or anything else, and he knows it.”

  “I’ll pay you back tomorrow,” Charlotte said, then immediately stepped into the open space and crossed toward the torch, six stiff steps over beaten-down grass. Her intention was to drop the twenty into the shoebox, which was already half-filled with other bills, handwritten notes, and what, as she drew closer, looked to be a St. Christopher medal. Charlotte’s knees threatened to buckle as she drew closer to the display, but she managed to close the distance finally and to let the bill flutter out of her hand. She could smell the burning oil in the torch and could hear the singing going on all around her, “How Great Thou Art” now, the lyrics mingling also with the scent of cigarette smoke, the chilled scent of the air, all of it wrapped together in a softly buffeting wave that took Charlotte’s breath away and made her feel simultaneously tiny and too conspicuous.

  She became aware of standing motionless too long and told herself to move. She lifted her gaze out of the cardboard box, looked at the mound of flowers surrounding it, mostly wildflower bouquets from the nearest Walmart, but also some florist shop roses, bunches of tulips and lilies, gladioli and sprigs of yellow forsythia, hand-printed and colored sheets of paper and cards, everything banked against a corkboard that leaned against the bamboo stake.

  Pinned to the center of the corkboard was a five-by-seven of Jesse, his most recent school picture. Pinned around this photo, framing it, were four pencil drawings. They were primitive drawings, childlike, but when Charlotte looked at the first one, then immediately at the other three, she heard her own sudden intake of breath, then the exhalation, and her chest felt suddenly empty, hollow with disbelief.

  Under other circumstances—at the school’s open house, for example; at a community picnic; at a local art contest she had been asked to judge—Charlotte might have looked at those sketches and thought, For a twelve-year-old, they’re very good. But these were Jesse’s drawings and Jesse was gone. These drawings had been made by the hand of a boy who had disappeared within view of Charlotte’s house. Under those circumstances, Charlotte was stunned.

  Pinned directly above Jesse’s photo—and he wasn’t smiling in the photo, but almost, with just a corner of his mouth in a tentative lift, while his chin was low and he regarded the camera with hooded eyes, suspicious eyes, the very same eyes with which he had once regarded Charlotte—was a sketch of a collie in profile. With a few careful strokes, Jesse had captured not only the fur hanging down from the animal’s chest, but the lifelike lilt of its tail, and even something of the animal’s dignity and intelligence. The talent was raw but obvious to Charlotte’s trained eye. The other three sketches were equally good and honest: the trailer where he and his mother lived; a hawk on a branch; and the one that broke her heart in half, the woods in deep shadow. This last one was the most impressive, because with cross-hatching and white space, he had instinctively lit up the cheap poster paper with the play of light and shadow—so real that she could sense in those lines the faint shimmer of what the woods must have meant to him, its comforting silence and hushed, breathing soul.

  Later Charlotte would remember those sketches and remember, too, the cold, desiccating wind that swept through her. She would remember that the night went suddenly black and rushed in to crush her from all sides. She would remember that the world collapsed like the closing iris of a camera until all she could see, as if at the end of a long tunnel, so painfully clear though seemingly miles away, was Jesse’s photo, his face, those sad, wary eyes and the hard line of an almost-smile.

  “Thank you,” she heard, a weak, feminine voice, as unexpected and quickly gone as the sputter of a candle. But Charlotte knew in an instant who the voice belonged to, and though she did not want to look up, did not want to have to face Jesse’s mother and her irremediable grief, she was unable to resist as her gaze rose and her head lifted, and there she saw Livvie Rankin with her small, sad smile, and Jesse’s mother told her, “He’ll be back,” in a voice so soft and hoarse that it could only be a mother’s voice, “I know he will.”

  The darkness roared in at Charlotte then from all sides; it roared inside her head, a black storm without sound of its own but demolishing all other sound. Later, alone in her bed, Charlotte would try to remember those moments but could find not the smallest trace of what had happened next, of how or when she had returned to the edge of the crowd to stand again with Mike and Claudia, of the songs they might have sung before the evening ended. She must have walked with Mike and Claudia back to her Jeep, or at least as far as the parking lot. She must have driven home, or how else would she have ended up in her own bed? A week earlier she might have considered it incredible, unbelievable, that a person could conduct herself in a normal manner for an hour or more yet have not a moment’s retention of that hour. Isolated pieces of memory were visible, individual instants, but they had no correlation to the whole, no contiguity, and drifted across the blackness of that hour like old clips of celluloid, a few frames each: Sheriff Gatesman standing off on his own, his little smile and nod; Denny Rankin with his hard mouth frowning as he looked at her; a deer in the road, a small doe, frozen by her headlights, then turning to flee, skittering and falling onto a hip, then clambering to its feet again and finally bounding into the weeds.

  Charlotte could find nothing more of the last hour of that evening, no matter how long she searched the dark ceiling. She lay on her bed, atop the blankets and comforter, still wearing her stadium jacket and knit cap, still wearing her shoes.

  23

  FOR a while in the morning, Charlotte stood before her easel, considering the lines, warming her hands with a mug of hot tea, trying, too, to warm herself with the reminder that this was just another day, a day like any other. Her eyelids felt heavy because she had slept very little, and her body weary. But it’s just another day, she told herself. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t paint. The light through the windows was soft, the gray light of an April dawn. But at least you opened the curtains, she told herself. At least you made a start.

  She saw again that the lines on the canvas were not quite right. They did not convey what she wished to convey. What she wanted was for the viewer to take in the entire canvas, the Amish boy and girl, the old biker, the buggy coming down the road, but then for the whole to coalesce around a single image, a single image that in this case was situated off to the side, the Amish buggy, so that the viewer would be drawn closer, would step up to the very side of the buggy and peer into its dark interior, see there the young husband, just a boy himself, with the reins in his hands, a few fine, long whiskers on his chin, the girl-wife beside him, and the toddler on her lap, pulling forward to see the old biker, the baby’s eyes wide with wonder. What Charlotte wanted was for the viewer to be pulled into the painting, and very nearly into the buggy itself.

  She sipped her tea and wondered, Who did you learn that from?

  From Boudin, of course, she thought. The way he makes you walk that little scrap of beach in Rivage de Portrieux. Makes you crowd onto the jetty with all the other people. Makes you stroll the dock in Rotterdam. And then there was Degas too, Monet, Cézanne sometimes. And Cozens.

  And Chase’s studio, she thought. How every time I look at it I ache to duck under the curtain and through the doorway to his easel in the farthest corner of his studio! Or to walk that wide
dirt road to Clara Southern’s Warrandyte Hotel. And Lilla Cabot Perry’s woods and barn—how could anyone not go sneaking into that dark rectangle of door, or try for a peek through the window of that little house in the woods? What sly dogs they were, she told herself. What seducers!

  She went as far as to cross to her table and set down the mug of tea. But when she reached for the charcoal pencil, when she held it between her finger and thumb, Jesse’s four sketches appeared in her mind’s eye just as she had first seen them the previous night, his photo centered between them. And she dropped the pencil and turned away and walked out of her studio and pulled shut the door.

  24

  WHEN she awoke on the La-Z-Boy, the living room was full of light. She glanced at the cable box. 8:37 A.M. A truck was rumbling down the highway, a fading drone. And there was something else, too, a memory. Claudia had said, “A couple hundred dollars dropped into a collection box is one thing. But what Livvie needs right now is to know that her neighbors care. That we’re all praying with her.” She planned to bake a few loaves of banana bread and take them to Livvie in the morning, this morning. “She’s probably not even feeding herself,” Claudia had said.

  And Mike had told her, “You go ahead and whip up a seven-course dinner if it makes you feel better. I’ll cart it over for you.”

  Charlotte heeled down the footrest and went into the kitchen.

  25

  CHRIST Almighty,” Gatesman said out loud. He was alone in his vehicle in the hospital parking lot, had only seconds earlier heaved himself inside and slammed shut the door. He never swore in front of his deputies or anybody else, but on occasion he allowed himself the luxury of a few explosive curse words delivered in solitude, never in his own home, never where the spirits of Patrice and Chelsea might be lingering, nor in the courthouse, where Tina or some citizen in the anteroom might hear. But in his car with the windows up was just fine. “Goddamn it all to fucking hell,” he said.