Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (3 page)

She nodded but he did not see it. When he looked up at her again he saw that she was staring at his upper arm, squinting slightly. She said, “I thought you were with the state police.”

The patch sewn onto his sleeve said
Cumberland County
at the top,
Sheriff
at the bottom.

“You know what,” he said, “I never introduced myself, did I? I'm sorry about that. I'm Mark Gatesman, the county sheriff.”

She took a step away from him, stared into his face, blinked. “Your name is Mark?”

“Is that not okay?”

“That was my ex-husband's name.”

“Whoops,” he said. He nodded toward the vacant chair. “Any chance you'd care to sit down before you start swinging at me?”

She moved with the slowness of a much older woman, someone brittle, afraid of a fall. “You're going to have to forgive me,” she said. “I'm more than a little out of it this morning. Are you familiar with migraines?”

“Only in theory.”

“They always leave me feeling so spacey and . . . logy, you know? You know that word?”

He nodded. “My dad used to use it.”

“That's where I got it too. It seems to have died out with their generation, though.”

He sipped his coffee. It was black now and exuded a strong, rich scent, but the deep, acrid bite was missing. “So me having your ex-husband's name, on a day when you're already feeling not so good . . .”

She smiled now. She liked his unhurried way, the soft, gentle sadness in his eyes. “Quite a shock to the system,” she said.

“Actually my name is Marcus. The last person to call me that, though, was my mother. And she's been gone a good while now.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“You're not going to hold it against me, are you? My name being the same, I mean.”

“We'll see how it goes.”

He grinned, then looked away from her face. Looked down at her hand again. He said, “You hurt both hands in the same place.”

She looked down at her hands, one and then the other. “Blisters,” she said. “Working in my garden a couple days ago. Anxious to start planting.”

He said, “You turned the soil over by hand? Is it a big garden?”

“Not huge,” she said. “Maybe ten by fifteen.”

“That's a lot of dirt to turn by hand.”

She nodded. “Sometimes I start things and then . . . don't know when to stop.”

Again, that flutter of weakness in his chest. He slid his gaze to the notepad. The third word was
feta
. The fourth was
Nutella
.

He said, “It looks like I interrupted you in the middle of your grocery list.”

“More of a wish list, actually. Things I can't buy around here.”

“May I?” he said, and held out his hand. She shoved the pad toward him. He turned it right-side up and read through the list of eleven items.

He chuckled. “Half this stuff, I don't even know what it is. The sushi, though . . . I happen to love sushi.”

“You don't.”

“There's this place in Harrisburg. A couple of places, actually, but the best one is a block or two off the main drag. The best spicy tuna rolls I've ever had.”

“God, how I miss spicy tuna rolls.”

“It's not that far, you know. Forty-five, fifty minutes. An hour if you don't break the speed limit.”

He smiled softly and slid the notepad back to her.

“In any case,” he said. “I didn't mean to take up so much of your time. You said you've seen Jesse sometimes on his way into the woods? But you've never talked to him, is that right?”

“That's right,” she said.

“Because I was just wondering,” he said, “how is it then that you know his name?”

“Oh. Sure. Well . . . I've seen him out there on school days, you know. I mean at times when he should have been in school. So I asked about him once at the post office. Cindy told me . . . No, I think it might have been Rex. Yes, it was Rex who told me Jesse's name.”

The sheriff nodded. “From what I hear, the boy plays hooky a lot. According to his mother, he spends a lot of time in those woods. You know why, don't you?”

“I've heard the gunshots. And I've seen the crows come flying out.”

“As long as he sticks to crows and not people,” he said. Then, a few moments later: “You didn't hear any gunshots yesterday, by any chance? Or this morning, even? Or see Jesse at all in the last, what, twenty-six hours or so?”

She sat very still, forehead wrinkled, eyes in a partial squint. Finally she said, “I could answer with more certainty about last week, or even last month. But yesterday . . .”

“Because of the migraine?”

“It just wipes things out. Most of the day is just a thick, black fog.”

“I had a friend in high school, his mother used to get them. He said she'd lock herself in the bedroom with all the blinds drawn tight. The whole family had to whisper and tiptoe around until she came out of it.”

“A sound, a touch, a single ray of light. Any movement whatsoever. It's like an explosion inside the head. It's excruciating.”

“Do you get them frequently?”

“This was the first one in close to a year.”

“What time did it hit you yesterday? First thing?”

“I think I remember . . . starting to work. Getting ready, I mean.”

“Painting?” He knew that much about her, what everybody knew. Even before she had moved into the farmhouse last July, the news had spread, not only throughout Belinda, the small town just three miles west of the farmhouse, but all the way to Carlisle, the county seat approximately fifteen miles distant. A rich lady from New York City, not much over forty probably, not at all hard on the eyes. She had purchased the house and two acres with its garage and garden shed. Old Bert Simmons, now living with his middle son in Kansas City, had leased the barn and fields and all the rest of the three hundred acres to Mike Verner, owner of the neighboring farm.

It had been Mike who, at the Fourth of July Volunteer Firemen's Picnic in Belinda's oak grove, had announced the newest citizen's arrival to Gatesman. “I suggest you buy yourself a treadmill,” Verner had said. “Maybe get some hair plugs while you're at it.”

“Who says I'm on the market?” Gatesman answered.

Verner, who had run interference for Gatesman during Belinda's three-year hold on the conference championship in the early eighties, jabbed him in the ribs and said, “You will be.”

Less than a week later, Gatesman's secretary had shown up at their office in the Carlisle courthouse with an old copy of
New York Art Scene
. Tina, a former cheerleader for Belinda's conference rival, now a mother of five and as round as a pom-pom, tossed the magazine onto Gatesman's desk, the magazine folded open to a full-page photo of Charlotte Dunleavy. “She was married when that was taken,” Tina informed him, “but she's a free agent now. From the looks of those legs, I'd say you've got about twenty minutes to stake your claim.”

Gatesman had intended to answer with the same thing he said to her at least twice a week: How about you quit interfering in my personal life and pretend to get some work done for a change? Instead he found himself made mute by the photograph.

Tina said, “You know what you look like right now? You look like one of those hundred-and-fifty-pound linebackers trying to climb up outta the dirt after you knocked him for a loop.”

“She's a good-looking woman,” he had finally said. But it was more than that. It was that inexpressible something. That out-of-nowhere, for-no-reason-whatsoever fierce tug of longing. That indefinable hunger he had not felt since tenth grade, when the new girl, Patrice Moore, had walked into his homeroom. After Patrice's and little Chelsea's deaths, he had never expected to feel that need again, never wanted to. Then Tina showed him a photo in a magazine. And he resented the way it made him feel. He wanted nothing to do with such a feeling.

“So don't you think you oughta pay the lady a visit?” Tina had asked. “Welcome her to town and all that?”

He told her, “I don't get paid to be the welcome wagon.”

Over the next nine months, the matchmaking attempts subsided to a halfhearted remark or two now and then—much less frequent than the number of times he remembered that photograph and the feeling it engendered. Such thoughts always came unbidden. But he had no desire to entertain a fantasy that, if indulged, could only end in grief, so whenever the airbrushed image of Charlotte Dunleavy came to mind, he immediately pushed it away by remembering that wonderful, aching fullness of Chelsea asleep on his chest, her tiny hands against the sides of his neck, or of Patrice curled against him, one leg thrown over his.

But now the woman who had been only a photograph, unreal and untouchable, sat across from him at a small pine table in a farmhouse kitchen. She suffered from migraines and had lovely, wounded hands. He could see in her eyes that her divorce or some other injury had left its mark on her too. She sat with her bare feet crossed at the ankle and tucked underneath the chair. Her chestnut hair was slightly mussed and looked as if she had not brushed it yet that day. She looked smaller and less perfect than the woman in the photograph, but unfortunately for him, Gatesman had become a man who was most touched by imperfection, most moved by the bruises and scars life left behind.

He said, “So you remember getting ready to start painting. And what time of day would this have been?”

“Well,” she said, “by habit I'm an early riser. So it all depends on when I wake up. If it's still dark outside, I might run the vacuum for a while. The noise helps me to . . . I don't know how to explain it.”

“To push everything else away,” he said, “so that you can do what you have to do.”

“Exactly,” she said. “It helps me get my head empty, I guess. Get myself ready to paint.”

The sheriff sipped his coffee. Then he said, “I fish.”

She smiled and nodded but offered no other response.

“So you remember doing that yesterday morning?” he asked. “Vacuuming?”

“I do, yes. Then, when it started getting light out, I went into the study . . .” She nodded over her left shoulder toward a set of closed French doors. “It's the dining room, actually. Used to be. But it has the best light.”

“I drove by last summer and saw the Hagan brothers doing some remodeling. They put in a punch-out and installed a bay window?”

“Not so much a bay window as a window bay. My light catcher.”

“You mind if I have a look?”

“You'll have to open the curtains,” she said. “I'll wait here.”

The room was long and narrow, adjacent to the foyer but with the former access door walled off now. He felt for a light switch on the wall, found it, and turned on the recessed lighting. The hardwood floor was bare, as were the white walls. An eight-foot-long folding table stood against the right-hand wall. On it were jars containing brushes and water, tubes of paint, several photographs of people in Amish garb, a page torn from a magazine showing a customized Harley with extended forks, plus an assortment of painter's knives, sponges, a couple of magnifying glasses, and other tools. In the western corner stood an easel covered with a sheet. In the nearest corner, a Windsor chair and footstool, both covered in an oatmeal-colored fabric, and, beside them, atop a small bookcase holding several oversize books, a Bose CD player, and a CD holder.

He crossed to the punch-out, found the drawstring, and opened the curtains. The bay window was composed almost entirely of glass, a wide, tall center panel, and two narrower side panels. With the curtains open, the room was filled with morning light. He could see all of her front yard outside the window, plus that part of the cornfield and woods that bordered on Metcalf Road, the two-lane macadam in front of the house.

He said, “Would you mind if I take a peek at what you're working on?”

He waited a few moments, heard her slide out of her chair. Then she was at the threshold. She stood off to the side, one hand raised against the sunlight. “I haven't gotten very far with it,” she said.

“If you'd rather I didn't . . .”

“It's all right,” she said. “There's just not much to see.”

He lifted the sheet away very carefully, took a few steps back, and considered the painting. Most of the scene was only sketched in, but the background of sky and the corner of a white Amish house were already roughed in. In the yard was a little girl in full Amish dress, the bonnet and blouse and long skirt, and she was pushing an old-fashioned rotary mower with its cylinder of whirring blades. She was just a tiny thing and had to bend forward as if walking into a heavy wind, putting all her weight against the mower. Her little brother stood a few steps behind her, whipping a sassafras stick through the air. In the foreground, coming down the highway in front of the yard, was an Amish buggy. A boy barely old enough to grow whiskers was at the reins, a young girl beside him, a toddler in her lap. Coming from the opposite direction, in the lower right foreground, was a grizzled old biker, scruffy-bearded and all leathered-up, astride his gleaming chopper. The Amish boy with the sassafras stick stood goggle-eyed in fascination of the biker, his free hand rising in a friendly wave, and the toddler was leaning out of his mother's lap so as to get a better look at the chromed-up roaring Harley. The painting wasn't even half-finished yet, but in the lines, Gatesman could see the fullness of a finished work, could see the colors and brushstrokes, could see one world greeting another in passing, the young couple bound to their time and place, the children spellbound, the grinning old biker with a continent of freedom between his sunburned hands.