Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) Read online

  “Maybe he just didn’t come inside the house,” Gatesman suggested. “Maybe he just pulled up out front and beeped the horn.”

  “I guess,” she said.

  “Because you walked those woods yesterday. And then so did I.”

  “But then why would Jesse take his hunting coat and the gun and those old clodhoppers he wears out there? That’s the only other thing I can’t find, those old cowboy boots he picked out at Walmart last year. The only place he wears those is out into the woods. Because when he wore them to school a couple of times, he just got made fun of.”

  Gatesman sat silent for a few moments. Then he asked, “But this wouldn’t be the first time he and Denny took off together for a couple of days.”

  “No, but Jesse always leaves me a note if I’m not here. He always makes sure I know what’s going on.”

  “And they’ve gone crow hunting in other places before, you said.”

  “All over,” she said. “But I only ever find out exactly where they’ve been when Jesse comes home and tells me. And in those cases they’re only gone for a couple or three hours. Not overnight like this.”

  “Okay,” Gatesman said. “So it’s not like this is something entirely new for them. The only difference here is that you didn’t get a note this time.”

  “It feels different,” she said.

  “I’m sure it does.” He patted her hand again, let his own hand linger for a moment, one finger tracing the ridge of her knuckles. He told her, “So what I’m thinking happened is this. Some time early yesterday morning, after Jesse had had his breakfast and packed his backpack, but before the bus came by, Denny showed up. Then he and Jesse just decided to go off somewhere and shoot themselves a few crows. Jesse got excited and forgot to write a note. And I’m betting they’re going to show up in a day or two with a couple of big grins on their faces.”

  “The only problem with that,” Livvie said, “is that every last stitch of Denny’s clothes is still here. Everything except what he was wearing when I went off to the generating plant two nights ago. He was sitting right there, watching the TV, and I asked him why, after he got his shower, did he put his jeans and a clean shirt back on. Usually he just walks around in his underwear until he goes to bed. And I told him, you better not be going out anywhere after I leave for work. You better not go and leave that little boy here alone.”

  “And what did Denny say?”

  “He said all he was doing was he was going to run over to Glenn Paulsen’s and pick up an old barbecue grill Glenn was letting us have. Glenn’s working the afternoon shift this week and wouldn’t get home till a little after midnight.”

  “And you’ve spoken to Glenn about this?”

  “Did you see a barbecue grill outside anywhere?” Gatesman forced a smile. “That still doesn’t rule out the probability that Jesse is off with his dad somewhere.”

  She shook her head. “Denny waited until I went to work, and then he took off for who knows where, and he hasn’t been back here since. Jesse woke up in the morning, ate a bowl of cereal, packed his backpack, and then for some reason decided he was going to ditch school again. He put on his hunting coat and his boots and he at least started out for those woods up the road there. Whether he made it that far or not is another question.”

  “Maybe his dad came along at just the right time. Let’s say Jesse’s still walking up along Metcalf, hasn’t cut into the woods yet. Along comes his dad, says, ‘Hey, buddy, hop in.’ And off they go together. That’s what I think happened.”

  Livvie sat huddled into herself, slowly rocking back and forth now. After a while she nodded her head. “I don’t know. Maybe that is what happened.”

  Gatesman offered a smile. And thought to himself, I need to talk to Dylan Hayes the minute he gets home.

  8

  THERE were eight bars within a ten-mile radius of Belinda, exactly twice as many as there were churches. Gatesman’s suspicion that the boy was with his father had been weakened by Livvie’s logic, and he wasn’t able to dismiss the unquantifiable veracity of a mother’s intuition. Unfortunately it would be nightfall before Dylan Hayes could be questioned, so the sheriff thought it might be worthwhile to spend an hour or two piecing together a clearer picture of Denny Rankin’s movements at the time of his son’s disappearance. He knew little of Rankin’s history prior to his and Livvie’s arrival in Belinda some fourteen years ago, but during that time, twice as a deputy and once as sheriff, Gatesman’s office had received paperwork from the magistrate’s office—arrest orders bearing the name of Dennis Rankin. All three incidents in which Rankin had been charged with assault had involved alcohol, in Gatesman’s opinion the world’s most common lubricant to violence, especially when mixed with an equal measure of testosterone. In the first incident, Rankin had allegedly been “staring and grinning” at a college girl for a half hour or more at the Wayside Grill one Saturday night. When Rankin allegedly cupped “his groin area,” the girl’s boyfriend, who was half a foot taller than Rankin, suggested that Rankin “turn around and mind his own fucking business.” Rankin turned on his bar stool and faced the mirror, but several minutes later, when the boyfriend left his table to visit the men’s room, Rankin followed. What happened inside the men’s room became a matter of dispute, since there were no other occupants at the time. Rankin denied the use of a hunting knife, and none was found on his person at the time of his arrest, nor could the one in his trailer be identified conclusively as the one allegedly pressed against the boy’s anus as he stood at the urinal. So the magistrate had had no choice but to warn both participants of the future consequences of rutting behavior in public and to send them on their way.

  The second incident had cost Rankin four hundred and eighty dollars, this time for slamming a Weber charcoal grill loaded with burgers and brats against a tree trunk in response to losing a game of horseshoes at the town’s annual Labor Day picnic held in the oak grove. Rankin had been found guilty of public drunkenness and destruction of private property.

  The third incident, the most serious of the three, involved the alleged attempt to steal an air compressor from a construction site just off Exit 201 of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The night watchman, sixty-seven-year-old William Ladebu of Porters Side-ling, just north of Hanover, had been awakened at three A.M. by the sounds of “scraping and banging” just outside the foreman’s little trailer. Ladebu emerged with a baseball bat to see Rankin with the coil of rubber hose already looped over a shoulder and the four-hundred-pound compressor already pushed up against the padlocked cyclone fence where Rankin’s pickup truck waited on the other side. Ladebu had the good sense to step back inside the construction trailer, lock the door, hit the switch to the floodlights, and call the police with a description of Rankin’s truck. Ladebu later told the magistrate, “As far as I can figure, he must’ve thought he was going to hoist that compressor up over that fence all by hisself. But then when the lights hit him, he had a change of plans.” Rankin’s plea of not guilty was refuted by the fact that the twenty-five-foot length of compressor hose was located in the weeds only fifteen yards from where the state police came upon Rankin’s pickup truck saddlebagged in a drainage ditch alongside Pennsylvania Route 419. During Rankin’s twenty days of incarceration at the county jail in Carlisle, Sheriff Gatesman had made a point of visiting Rankin on four separate occasions, each time to remind him of his duties as a father and husband and to impress upon him the ephemeral nature of youth and the lasting effects of bad choices. In each case, Rankin had accepted the advice with a meek and sober contrition.

  Through this experience Gatesman had come to know Rankin as a contradiction. He was, by all accounts, a very hard worker, whenever he worked. He claimed to love Livvie and little Jesse more than life itself, but Gatesman doubted that the man had ever displayed this tenderness or voiced the same sentiments to his wife and son. He was, according to those who knew him best, domineering with his family, but generous and forgiving toward his friends. When sober, he te
nded to respond to life’s tribulations with a crooked smile. At all other times, he could be counted on to behave with belligerence, furtiveness, guile, malice, sabotage, explosive violence, or any combination thereof.

  All this, and not much more, Gatesman knew about Denny Rankin. From this knowledge he had deduced that if Denny was not currently employed or with his family, he was in all probability in or near a beer-dispensing establishment. Gatesman gave some thought to the eight bars within a ten-mile radius of Belinda. He could not picture Denny Rankin paying five dollars for a microbrewed glass of beer, nor could he picture him bellied up to either the old Colonial Hotel’s polished mahogany bar flecked with light from golden wall sconces or in the sanitized, too-bright, mojito-dispensing lounge at the Ramada. Any of the others, however, all shot-and-beer facilities where a man could quench his thirst without having to change out of his work clothes first, were likely candidates.

  The bartenders in the first three, two females and a male, all knew Denny Rankin but claimed to have seen nothing of him in the past seventy-two hours. The fourth place, the one Gatesman had been hoping he wouldn’t have to visit, was a squat cement-block building called the Mustang Bar, but known locally as the Harley Hilton because the wide dirt lot behind the building filled with hundreds of motorcycles every Wednesday night from late spring through September. A cardboard sign in the window read “Open 11:30 Daily,” but now, at not quite nine in the morning, there was a silver Nissan Altima parked close against the side of the building, and when Gatesman tried the front door, it swung open onto a spacious, dimly lit room.

  Gatesman stood in the doorway, surrounded by morning light as he surveyed the room. He finally located the owner, a thin, once-pretty woman named Bonnie, alone at one of the two booths overlooking the three pool tables. A newspaper lay spread out before her on the table, a mug of coffee near her right hand. A push broom leaned against the corner of the nearest pool table, the blue plastic dustpan balanced on the edge of the table.

  She had looked up from the newspaper but said nothing when the front door swung open and Gatesman stepped inside. Now she watched him find her in the empty room, watched a smile form on his mouth when he saw her smiling across the room at him. He crossed to her and sat facing her and clasped his hands atop the small table. She continued to look at him and smile. Finally he nodded toward the paper spread open before her and asked, “Any interesting news this morning?”

  “There is,” she told him. “Apparently hell has frozen over.”

  He reached out and put a hand atop hers and squeezed her fingers. Her hand was rough but warm. “How have you been, Bonnie?”

  She turned her hand against his and returned the squeeze. “Older by a decade,” she said. “And you?”

  “Pretty much the same. But it hasn’t been that long since I’ve seen you.”

  “Oh, you’ve seen me,” she said, “and I’ve seen you seeing me. But this is the first time in ten years you’ve come close enough to say hello.”

  After a few seconds he withdrew his hand. His gaze shifted away from her momentarily, and when it returned, she saw that something had shifted in his eyes and that his smile had become tired at one corner.

  “So this is a business call,” she said. She sipped her coffee and watched him.

  He asked, “Has Denny Rankin been in here lately?”

  “What do you mean by lately? Past week or so?”

  “Last night or the night before.”

  “Not to my knowledge,” she said. “But I only spend my days here now. Judy and Joanne will show up in about an hour. You want some coffee?”

  “I’d love some, but no. I’ve got this little hypertension thing I need to watch out for. Who are Judy and Joanne?”

  “My bartenders. Twins. Judy’s a redhead and Joanne’s a bottle-blonde.”

  “That should be good for business,” he said.

  “And I’ll tell you what else. Those two can defuse an argument faster and with far less blood than a SWAT team. They’ve been working here not quite a year, and what a godsend they’ve been.”

  “I’ve always heard that women make the best bartenders.”

  “The best everything,” she said. “Now about that blood pressure of yours. I was just reading in here about how important it is for men your age to have a good love life.”

  “Show me that,” he said. “I’d like to read it.”

  She smiled. The steadiness of her gaze made him look away for a moment. “Ten years,” she said. “I can still remember it like yesterday. Do you?”

  He leaned away from the table and looked at the ceiling. “Tell you what,” he said. “How about we don’t go there right now, okay?”

  “Not now or not ever?”

  “Bonnie, please.”

  “So you’re still not over it yet,” she said.

  “Are you?”

  “I mean the guilt. That’s the one thing I never felt. You still dragging that little red wagon around with you everywhere you go?”

  “I’ve got a child turned up missing yesterday. That’s what I need to concentrate on right now.”

  “Denny Rankin’s little boy?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Missing how?” she asked. “Like abducted?”

  “Just not at home, that’s all we know. I’m betting he’s off with his dad somewhere. But Livvie’s worried sick.”

  “How could she not be?” She slid to the edge of the booth, stood and looked down at him. “I’m going to throw some eggs and hash browns on the flat top.” She collected the broom and dustpan and started toward the kitchen. “Judy and Joanne will know if he’s been here or not. You want a glass of juice while you’re waiting for the eggs? I’ve got orange and I think pineapple.”

  “All I need is some information, Bonnie.”

  She turned, came back to him, stood so close that the tip of the broomstick hovered only inches from his head. “What you need is to start taking care of yourself. You look like roadkill, you know that? It’s been twelve years, Mark.”

  “I don’t need anybody to remind me how long it’s been.” He heard the resentment in his voice then and pulled it back. “All I need to know is if Denny Rankin’s been in here the last couple of nights or not.”

  “You think that’s all you need to know.” She turned and walked away then. “Scrambled wet with Swiss cheese and hot sauce, as I recall.”

  “Bonnie, for God’s sake.”

  She turned hard and glared at him across a pool table. “Take a fucking breath once in a while, why don’t you? I’m making scrambled eggs and hash browns and you’re going to eat them, or else I’m going to hunt you down and cram them down your throat.”

  Only after she had disappeared into the kitchen did he allow his smile to return. He called out, “Eggs are bad for my cholesterol.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. A refrigerator door banged shut. “Eggs are incredible, they’re edible, and they’re nature’s perfect food.”

  “That’s just advertising,” he said.

  “What isn’t?”

  9

  FOR most of the morning that January, the morning following the day she had first approached and spoken to Jesse Rankin, Charlotte seethed. The previous afternoon, she had returned to her farmhouse, kicked off her boots in the mudroom, and peeled off the sodden socks, then sat in the kitchen by the window and tried to warm and calm herself with a cup of tea. She was still tense when she climbed into bed that night, and the hours of restless sleep did nothing to relax or refresh her. The next morning, she went into her studio and stood in front of the painting and tried to see the scene come alive again, tried to imagine it filling with color and the tension of movement. But she could not shake from her mind the image of a dead crow splayed across a field of blood-specked white. When she stared at the canvas, she imagined that scene showing through from underneath the other one. Those woods, she told herself. Those beautiful woods—as if they were forever gone now, her cathedral woods blasted asunde
r. All the preceding summer and fall and the first weeks of winter, she had enjoyed gazing out a window and imagining some quiet woodsy scene: the young Hemingway fresh from the Italian front, camping within earshot of the Big Two-Hearted River; Thomas Moran’s dark tunnel of autumnal woods with their portal into blue splendor; hoary old Robert Frost out there astride his plow horse, watching the slow flutter of snowflakes and pondering all the miles yet to travel. She had imagined that those woods and fields and distant mountains would become her Abiquiu, that here she would discover her own Black Place, her own White Place, and in the intersection of the two, she would relocate her soul. But how could she sustain that romance now, when all she could see in her mind’s eye was a dead black bird on blood-speckled snow?

  Maybe in the spring, she had told herself. Maybe when all the snow is gone. The sunlight would come slanting down in long narrow shafts then, spears of green poking up pale and eager through leaf-matted earth, the canopy a whispering sky of new leaves. Maybe then she would be able to stroll through those woods again, again sit with her back to rough bark, her legs splayed out across soft ground. Maybe in summer when the woods and their coolness became a world of its own, sibilant with the breeze, lush and all-enveloping.

  But then the anger surged in her again, the sorrow. She stared out the window and said aloud, “You might as well have come in and taken a shit on my carpet.”

  What kept coming back to her that morning was the look on the boy’s face. Unafraid. Disdainful. Contemptuous. And so, so familiar.

  All of the hard work of the previous two years seemed suddenly for naught. All of the sobbing and sniffling in June’s office, the sisyphean struggle to find herself again, to resuscitate everything Mark had crushed with his smug, disdainful smirk. Suddenly she was that woman again, untethered by a look.

  Neck stiff, shoulders aching, all she had wanted to do that morning after her first meeting with Jesse Rankin was to fling paint at the canvas. Any other possibility seemed lost to her. The long, deliberate strokes, all lost. The sensuality, the organic curves of nature, the graceful sweeps of the palette knife, her muscles could not execute them now, her hands would betray her. She wanted the music again, but there was only percussion now.