Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (25 page)

W
HEN Gatesman first purchased his cell phone several years past, the salesman had shown him how to download various ringtones, and together at the kiosk in the mall, they had listened to one after another until “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” played like a tinny little carillon in the salesman's hand and Gatesman told him, “That one.” Gatesman soon learned that it was fine to be reminded of Patrice and Chelsea when in the mall, but not when Tina was relaying some urgent message to him in the field, or when one of his deputies called to ask how to handle a tenuous situation. It was not good, then, to be taken back in time to a place you wanted to stay forever, back to those feelings you were sure you would never feel again. It was not good to let the ringtone keep playing so that you could stay wrapped for a while in that sad blanket of memory. So, after less than a week, he had changed the ringtone to sound like an old-fashioned telephone. Unfortunately, even now, several years later, each time that quick trill of notes sounded, inside his head he heard Patrice singing, “Raindrops keep falling on my head, but that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turning red . . .” And usually, each time he reached for the phone to snap it open and shut off the memory, he told himself, with some mix, depending on the situation, of amusement and annoyance,
Pavlov's dog
.

On this night he heard the phone ringing in the distance, and in his sleep he saw himself in the bentwood rocker with Chelsea asleep on his chest, while there across the room in a long rectangle of sunlight, Patrice in a yellow sundress danced inside the box of light, her legs and arms and feet bare, and the image was so painfully clear that he could see the soft, blond hairs on her forearms and he could feel the warm little breaths and heartbeats against his chest. Patrice kept singing and dancing, but the ring kept getting louder, and he could feel it pulling him away from her, he could feel them slipping away.

And then he was awake in a dark room and he could hear the cell phone ringing and vibrating on the night table. And this time, he said something other than
Pavlov's dog
to himself as he rolled over and reached for the phone.

Charlotte Dunleavy's voice echoed his own breathlessness, a strained and frightened whisper. “There's somebody trying to break in!” she told him. “I can hear him down on the back porch!”

He sat up quickly, looked at the clock on the other nightstand: 2:27. “Are your doors locked?” he asked.

“Yes, but I can hear him walking across the porch!”

“Sit tight,” he told her. “I'll have a deputy there in a few minutes.”

“You're closer, Marcus. Can't you come instead?”

“Maybe a minute closer. But the deputy's already dressed, I'm not.” But by now he was standing by the chair in the corner, already reaching for the trousers he had hung over the back of the chair. He almost asked, “Are you sure it's not an animal of some kind?” But he knew what the answer would be. Frightened people
always
know that it isn't an animal, even though it usually turns out to be just that. So instead he asked, hoping, “Do you think it might be Dylan?”

“God,” she said, “I don't know. I suppose it could be. But it's so dark outside, I can't see anything.”

“You haven't heard from Dylan since before he disappeared?”

“No . . . no, not a word, why would I? Marcus,
please!
There's somebody down there!”

He shoved his right foot and then his left into his shoes. “Listen, I'm on my way to the car right now. But here's the thing. If it is Dylan, I don't want to frighten him away. So I'm going to be very quiet when I get there, okay? Are you in your bedroom?”

“Yes,” she told him.

“Bedroom door locked?”

“Yes!”

“Okay. Watch for me out your window. I'll park at the end of your driveway. I'll blink my dome light on and off once so you'll know it's me.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Then you blink your light for me to let me know you're okay.”

“I have a flashlight here,” she told him.

“Even better. Once I know you're okay, I'm going to be sneaking around your house for a few minutes. If you hear any noises, I'll probably be the one making them.”

“Okay,” she said. “Are you on your way yet?”

“I'm headed for the car, Charlotte. A few more minutes.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“But listen. If I don't see you blink back at me when I get there, I'm going to come bustin' in.”

“You'd better,” she said.

F
IFTEEN minutes before Charlotte made her call to the sheriff, a loud clank had brought her out of a light sleep. Again that night, she had fallen asleep on the recliner in the living room, had taken to the recliner a few hours earlier with the intention of watching an old movie with Charlton Heston and Orson Welles fighting and causing corruption in Mexico, but she had kept turning the volume lower and lower until the sound was completely muted, and then the light from the television bothered her, she had shut the television off. The clank awoke her suddenly a couple of hours later, and she sat upright and wondered who had turned the television off. Then a scraping sound across her porch boards told her that the raccoons were back, so she had climbed out of the chair and walked softly but quickly to the mudroom without turning on any lights.

A few days before Charlotte had moved out of New York, she had met with her former therapist and current good friend, June, for a final lunch at the little sidewalk café on West 48th they liked. As usual they split a half bottle of pinot grigio while waiting for their grilled chicken salads. It was then that Charlotte had said, “I have something to show you,” and pulled her purse into her lap.

“You know how you've been insisting that I get some kind of protection?” Charlotte had said.

“And you finally did?” June asked.

“Not that I believe Pennsylvania is the wild frontier you seem to think it is.”

To June, whose idea of roughing it was a Victorian bed-and-breakfast on Cape Cod, rural Pennsylvania was the Old West, a place filled with lawless men, rattlesnakes, and wolves. Now June said, “Look, you're a beautiful woman and you'll be living alone. You need to be cautious.” She leaned closer around the side of the table. “What did you get?”

Charlotte opened her handbag and, without lifting it off her lap, leaned it toward her friend. “It's called a nine,” she said.

June's eyebrows went up at the sight of the black pistol tucked into the purse with Charlotte's mascara and hairbrush. “Very nice,” she said. She made a move to reach for it, but Charlotte pretended not to notice and clamped the bag shut again, then hung it over the side of her chair, close to her body.

“Weapon of choice for all us gangstas,” Charlotte said.

What June did not know was that Charlotte only appeared to have taken her friend's advice. She knew that if she did not accede to June's wishes, at this final lunch and incessantly afterward, June would harangue her about the single woman's need for protection. So, for forty dollars plus change, Charlotte had armed herself with what appeared to be a nine-millimeter handgun. But Charlotte's model had a little cylinder of compressed gas concealed in the butt, and the magazine was filled with tiny copper pellets.

Ironically, after just a week on the farm, Charlotte was glad she had made the purchase. The first time she heard the rattling noises on her back porch, the previous summer, she had lain cowed and shivering in bed, with one finger poised on her cell phone's Call button, the 9-1-1 already punched in. She had told herself that if she heard glass break or wood splinter, she would jam down the button, then scream so loud to the dispatcher that, Charlotte hoped, the burglar or rapist or serial killer would be sent running. But all she heard was the garbage can lid hitting the porch floor.

She reasoned that a burglar or rapist or serial killer would probably not pause to rummage through her garbage. Her ex-husband might, however, for whatever demented reason he might have. So she had climbed out of bed, dug around in the closet until she found the pellet gun, then crept downstairs and into the mudroom. When she switched on the porch light, a pair of ring-tailed raccoons went scampering off into the darkness. Charlotte spent the next fifteen minutes scooping garbage up off her porch.

The next night, the raccoons were back. They skipped the following six nights, probably because, she told herself, they were busy picking pellets out of their butts. After being peppered a second time, the raccoons returned only once a month or so during warm weather. It seemed to take them approximately thirty days to forget that there was a big rock on the garbage can lid and a trigger-happy Dirty Harriet lurking behind the mudroom door.

After that first incident, Charlotte had kept the pellet gun on the narrow shelf of a coatrack near the back door. But now when she reached for it, on that dark night in April, the pistol was not there. She ran her hand back and forth along the shelf but felt nothing. The panic bubbled up in her as she wondered if somebody was already inside the house, and if somebody now held the air pistol and maybe had crept up behind her from the kitchen. It only added to her panic to remember suddenly why the air pistol was no longer on the shelf. In an instant the mudroom seemed sucked dry of all oxygen. Raccoons were no longer a possibility. Something or someone had come after her, the shadow from her dreams perhaps, the coalescence of all her fears.

She moved back through the mudroom and kitchen as quickly as she could but felt as if she were struggling to surface from an impossible, airless depth. She pulled herself up the stairs and into her bedroom. She seized the phone and took several deep breaths as she tried to get some air into her lungs. Then, using the light from her cell phone, she opened a drawer on the night table, took out the card Marcus Gatesman had given her, and, with a heavy, unnecessary pressure on the buttons, she entered his home number.

T
HE night was starless when Gatesman's car entered Charlotte's driveway and came to a soundless stop. He shut off the engine and extinguished the headlights. A half-moon hung pale and low in the sky. Through his half-open window Gatesman could smell the damp air; it carried a vague scent of wood smoke from somebody's chimney, a scent he had always liked. He waited a moment, turned his interior light on for just a second, then off again. A light in an upstairs window flashed once, then was gone.
There she is,
he told himself.

Gatesman climbed out of the vehicle and softly closed the door.

He stayed off the gravel driveway, kept to the soft grass. The only weapon he carried was a long, black flashlight, but he did not turn it on. Right now he wanted the darkness unbroken. The moon was weak tonight but sufficient to shade the world with different levels of darkness. The yard and the buildings were black; he was charcoal but carried or wore small bits that would catch the weak light and throw it back. His eyes, his belt buckle, the flashlight lens. He walked lightly around the west side of the house and kept his eyes narrowed, flashlight lens pointed at the ground, the hem of his sweatshirt pulled over and tucked under the belt buckle. He listened for the slightest of sounds, any moving glint of light or shadow.

Nothing. The back porch was empty. So, too, the yard. In his mind's eye he reconfigured the darkness—clothesline poles fifteen yards out, one metal cross just to his left, the other thirty feet to his right, two taut lines of plastic-coated wire traversing the sky at forehead level. A metal burn barrel farther left and another ten yards beyond the clothesline. Charlotte's garden plot at a sixty-degree angle to his right, between him and the farthest clothesline pole. No movement. No sounds.