Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (4 page)

He turned to the threshold to speak, but Charlotte was no longer there, so he looked at the painting a few moments longer, then carefully replaced the sheet, drew the curtains closed, and returned to the kitchen, where he found her seated at the table again.

He pulled the French doors closed and stood with his back to them. “It's amazing,” he said.

“The Hagan brothers do good work.”

“You know what I'm talking about,” he said.

She smiled. “Thank you.”

He returned to the table but did not sit. He picked up his coffee mug but only held it. “Did you actually see a scene like that? Or is it from your imagination?”

“I almost saw it. I drove past the house where the little girl was mowing and her little brother was whipping a stick through the air. Then later, closer to town, I passed the buggy. Later that night I was sitting on the porch swing, just thinking about how I might paint the scene, when a lone biker came roaring past the house. And all of a sudden the pieces just fit together perfectly for me.”

“Amazing,” he said again. “My wife was very creative. Music, poetry, everything. The whole process has always been a mystery to me.”

Charlotte said, “Cindy at the post office told me about your family. I'm very, very sorry.”

He gazed out the window. Two small, black shadows sat side by side on a tree's highest branch. Then one of them shot up and out of the bare branches, became a pair of black wings. The other crow soon followed.

He said, “I like how the trees look this time of year, don't you? Just before the leaf buds burst open. You can always tell then that spring is here because the treetops all look red.”

“You sound a little bit like an artist yourself.”

“Not me,” he said. “I'm about as imaginative as a stone.” Before she could reply, he said, “Listen, I just need a little more information. I'm sorry. You probably want to get in there and get to work.”

“Not this morning,” she said. “My head's not where it needs to be.”

He nodded. “So, anyway. Do you recall seeing anybody else around in the last day or so? Anybody who doesn't come around normally? A strange vehicle? Anything like that?”

She thought for a few moments. “The mailman usually comes by around noon every day. But what you're asking is . . . somebody unfamiliar. So, no. Nobody.”

“Do you know what Jesse's father looks like? Denny Rankin?”

“As far as I know, I've never seen him. Nor the boy's mother, for that matter.”

“Denny's maybe five-nine, fairly thin. Wiry, I guess you'd call it. He's got black hair like Jesse's, but he keeps it cut short most times. You didn't happen to see him out in the woods, or in the field, or just walking by, or anything like that?”

“I saw a man and a boy out at the pond late last summer. They were on the far side, fishing. That might have been them?”

“Probably not. Denny's more of the jittery type, not good for fishing. Anyway, I meant like yesterday or today. You didn't see him around here then?”

“No. Not a soul.”

“How about Dylan Hayes?” he asked. “Have you seen him around?”

“The boy who works for Mike Verner?”

Gatesman smiled, said nothing, and waited. Having already spoken to Verner, he knew where Dylan Hayes had been yesterday, knew that Dylan and Charlotte Dunleavy were acquainted.

Perhaps ten seconds later, she said, “You know what? I think I did see him.”

She thought for a moment, then told him, “I think he was out there on the tractor for a while yesterday. Most of the afternoon, in fact.”

The sheriff nodded. “That's what Mike said too. Said the boy put in three hours spreading lime.”

“That sounds about right.”

“And as far as you know, he was out in the field that whole time? On the tractor, I mean?”

She became aware then of a subtle anxiety building inside her, a vague heaviness in her chest. Coming out of a migraine episode had always seemed to her similar to coming out of a period of intense fever marked by intermittent flashes of pain. She had no desire to dig around inside those dark hours for moments of lucidity, pieces to the sheriff 's puzzle. In New York, during the settlement period with the lawyers, when the migraines were at their worst, she had talked about migraines with a female pharmacist, a mother of two who equated her own migraines with childbirth. “All I remember about being in labor was how unpleasant it was and how it seemed like it was never going to end. I have no desire to watch a video of it. You do it, you get through it, you forget it and get on with the good things again.”

Charlotte wanted this conversation with the sheriff to be over. She did not dislike him; in fact, he seemed an easy man to like. She liked that he resembled James Dickey, that he seemed trustworthy and sincere. Still, she wanted him to leave. Every breath made her chest ache.

“I think he got off the tractor once and went into the woods,” she said.

“And when would that have been?”

“I was inside at the kitchen window, I think. Washing a few dishes. Teacup . . . spoon . . . the saucer I had my muffin on that morning.”

“So it was still morning?”

“No . . . later. Early or midafternoon, I think.”

“So you were up and around by then? It wasn't the kind of migraine that kept you in bed all day?”

She sat there thinking, trying to see into the darkness. “I'm sorry, it's . . .”

“Take your time.”

“What happens is . . . during a migraine and afterward, everything gets broken up and splintered. Time does, I mean. I have these little splinters of memory, but for all I know, they could be days, even weeks old. There's no . . . continuity? I'm sorry, I'm probably making no sense at all.”

“Of course you are,” he said. “And I apologize for putting you through this now. If it weren't for the little boy . . .”

“No, of course,” she said. “I want to help.” She turned her gaze out the window then, appeared to be staring at the pond more than a hundred yards away. Then her eyes closed, and she sat very still. Half a minute later she opened them.

“I was upstairs,” she said. “In the spare bedroom on the eastern side of the house. The room was nicely dim, so the sun must have been at least overhead if not farther along. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to look out the window.”

“But you did?”

“I had been sleeping, I think. It's the darkest room in the house in the afternoon. And the rumbling of the tractor intruded, I guess, and woke me. I went to the window and peeked out. Dylan was out there on the tractor. The lime was spraying out in an arc behind that machine he pulled . . .”

“The spreader.”

She nodded. “And the way it looked in the sun . . . that lime flying out. It was like white fire.” She looked up at the sheriff and smiled. “I remember thinking it all looked like a dragon walking backward and spraying fire over the field. It was beautiful.”

“You're right on the money about the time,” he said. “Dylan was in school until noon. By the time he got the tractor out and over here, it would have been nearly one. It was maybe a quarter to four when he got the tractor back to Mike's. So you're doing fine here, Charlotte. Is that okay, if I call you Charlotte?”

“Of course,” she said.

He was having trouble keeping his eyes off her face or even her hands. Her mouth was lovely and soft, and her eyes, when they looked at him, seemed to be asking for help of some kind, asking for kindness. The fingers of her right hand rubbed lightly over the nails of her left hand, and he caught himself wondering how it would feel to enclose those hands in his.

He realized that he was still holding the coffee mug, so he set it atop the table and took a half step toward her but turned his body so that he was looking straight out the window. He focused his gaze on the wide space between the barn to the right and, much nearer, the garden shed to the left. Her property ended just thirty yards or so beyond the clotheslines, and there the L-shaped cornfield continued all the way over to Mike Verner's soybeans, not even sprouts yet, just an expanse of flat brown soil soaking up the sunlight.

Gatesman said, “And you think Dylan got off the tractor once and went into the woods?”

Several moments passed before she answered. “Yes,” she said, remembering. “He was driving right alongside the woods then. Then he stopped . . . he got off . . . and he went into the woods.”

“How did . . .” Gatesman searched for the right words. “Did he jump off the tractor and go running into the woods like maybe he'd seen something surprising? Or did he just go strolling in? Or what?”

“He just climbed down and . . . jogged, I think. It was sort of a jog.”

“How long would you guess he was in there?”

She continued to stare at the pond. A clump of cattails along the shore. A flash of red. “Red-winged blackbird,” she said aloud.

Gatesman said, “Excuse me?”

“No, nothing, I was . . .” She looked down at the notepad, tapped her finger against the edge. She said, “Forty minutes or so?”

“Really? He was in the woods that long?”

“You said ‘guess.' And that's my guess.”

“And you're basing that on . . . ?”

“Just how it feels now when I think back on it. It feels like a half hour or so before I heard the tractor start up again.”

“So he shut the tractor off before he went into the woods?”

“I . . . guess he must have, if I remember hearing it start up again.”

“And you were at the window all this time?”

“I was back on the bed.”

“When you heard it start up again, did you happen to look at a clock or anything like that?”

“No. I was just lying there on the bed, had my eyes closed, everything was very quiet. And then that growl again.”

Twenty seconds passed. “Well, I guess that's all, then,” he said. “I'm sorry I took up so much of your time.”

She looked up at him. “I haven't been of any help at all, have I?”

Her eyes . . . He knew how dangerous it was to look at them. Doe eyes, he thought. A soft, dark brown. There seemed to be a plaintiveness in those eyes, but he wondered if he was misreading them, misinterpreting because of the weakness in his chest. He said, “You did just fine. I'll go have a talk with Dylan, see what he has to say for himself, and we'll take it from there.”

“I can't imagine that Dylan would have done anything to hurt the boy.”

“I'm sure he didn't. Still . . . it's my job to cover all the bases.”

“Of course,” she said.

The sheriff stretched out his hand to her. “I'm glad to finally meet you. I've heard a lot about you.”

“I bet you have.”

“Nothing like that,” he said. “The painter lady from New York City, that kind of thing.”

“Your eyes get narrow when you lie,” she told him.

He grinned and self-consciously withdrew his hand. “It's just people talking, is all. Trying to figure out why a woman like you would want to live all alone in the middle of nowhere.”

“Cindy at the post office said she heard I was in the witness protection program.”

“The one I like is that you're hiding from the Russian mafia. What for, nobody knows.”

“Running from a bad marriage is more like it.”

“Yes, well, I guess that's too common a thing to get anybody's interest up.”

“I guess so.”

He offered another smile. She thought this one appeared even shier than the others. She asked, “So what are your thoughts on where Jesse is? You think he's still, you know . . . out there in the woods?”

“His mother went all through there yesterday afternoon, about five, five-thirty, she said. I'm surprised you didn't hear her calling out to him.”

“You know,” said Charlotte, “I thought it was just a dream I had. I heard crows and . . . a woman's voice . . . sort of all mixed together. But it was raining by then, wasn't it? I seem to remember the rain.”

“It rained hard for a while in the late afternoon. Then we got a break until close to midnight. I went through the woods myself, after Livvie called me.”

“There was no sign of him?” she asked.

“It was already dark by the time I went through. Dark and wet. My flashlight didn't do a lot of good.”

“What about old wells of some kind?”

“I called Old Man Simmons out in Kansas about that. He says no. There was a gas well once, but it got capped with concrete long ago. Wouldn't have been big enough to fall into anyway.”

Charlotte said, “Poor child. I hope he's not still out there.”

“My gut tells me he's not.”

“Is your gut usually right?”

He shrugged. “All we know for sure is that he didn't go to school yesterday, wasn't home when his mother got back in the afternoon, and he still hasn't come home. The shotgun and an old coat he likes to wear are missing too. We're still trying to track down his father, who's been known to show up unannounced from time to time. My guess is the two of them are off somewhere together.”

“And what if they're not?”

“In that case I suspect the boy will show up on his own as soon as he gets hungry enough. Meantime, I'm just trying to cover all the bases.”

Charlotte let a few moments pass. “I'll pray you find him soon.”

“Me too,” he said.

He stood there smiling as if he wanted to say something more but couldn't remember what it was. Then he reached inside his jacket, pulled out some business cards, peeled one off, and put the rest away again. Then he dug into three other pockets before coming up with a pen.