Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (5 page)

As he wrote on the card, he said, “This number on here is my direct line at the office. You call me if you think of anything else, anybody you might have seen hanging around, an unfamiliar vehicle, anything like that. I usually head home at six or so, so after that . . .” Now he held the card out to her, laid a fingertip beneath the fresh ink. “This is my cell phone. If you call the office after I've gone home for the day, the message will tell you to press one to talk to the officer on duty. But if you stay on the line, you'll get my voice mail, and I won't get the message till next morning. So if it's something I need to know right away, call me on my cell. I live just on the other side of Belinda, so I can easily be here in ten minutes or so.”

She sat there staring at the card. An awkwardness had come between them in the last few moments. She wanted him to leave, but only because she wanted him to stay.

He said, “If you happen to see the boy, though—even if you just think it's him—you call 9-1-1 first thing, and they'll alert the officer on duty to send out a car. Do that first. We always have a car down in this area, and I might be somewhere without any cell phone service and, well, you know. I wouldn't want any opportunities to be missed.”

She kept staring at his business card. For some reason she was finding it impossible to lift her eyes to him.

“Okay, then,” he finally said. “You have a good day now.”

She raised her head just in time to see him reach up to touch the brim of his cap. But he felt nothing there, then patted his thinning hair. He looked toward the table.

She said, “You weren't wearing a hat when you came in.”

A blush rose into his cheeks. “Left it in the car, I guess.”

He turned and walked away quickly, not looking back. She knew she should get up and walk him to the door, but she did not have the strength for it. Then suddenly he was at the threshold again, looking in at her.

“As long as I'm here,” he said, “you mind if I take a look around a bit? See if maybe he got into your shed or barn or something?”

He had startled her again, and when she heard her own voice now she thought it sounded small and tight. “That's a good idea.”

“Any of the buildings locked?”

“No. Just pull open the doors.”

He smiled. “I promise not to disturb anything.”

“There's nothing to disturb,” she said. “By the way, the barn isn't mine. Just the garage and shed.”

Again he smiled, then he turned and was gone.

She remained at the table, waiting, feeling strangely breathless. She listened but heard almost nothing of his departure. She told herself,
He's putting his shoes on now.
Then,
He's going down off the porch.

It seemed a long time before he appeared in the backyard. He must have looked in the garage, she told herself. Nothing in there but the Jeep.

Eventually, he came around the far side of the house, looked back toward the kitchen window and, smiling sheepishly, reached up to give the brim of his cap a little tug. Then he turned and crossed quickly to the garden shed. He pulled the door open and stood there, looking inside. After a minute or so, he stepped back and shut the door and headed for the barn. Along the way, he glanced down into the rusty metal barrel where Charlotte burned her trash. She inhaled a sudden scent, or imagined she did, of smoke and ash. Then the sheriff continued up the slope to the barn's wide front door. The door slid open, he stepped inside, and he disappeared into the darkness.

She remained a long time at the window, waiting for him to emerge. She was aware of a bruised feeling deep in her chest, the weight of every breath, and she hoped the feeling did not signal a return of the old fearfulness, that paralyzing anxiety that, after she had walked out on her husband, had kept her secluded in a hotel room for most of two weeks, dangling between hysteria and numbness. She thought about calling June, the therapist who had eventually brought Charlotte back to herself, got her painting again, helped her to fashion a new determination. But it was too early in the day to call June, even though she had ceased to be Charlotte's therapist and was now a trusted friend. June would be at her breakfast table now, the twin girls off to their private school, June and Elliot enjoying an unhurried hour before their workdays began. Charlotte was determined to not intrude upon that hour.

She stood by the table, felt herself sway unsteadily, held to the rounded edge. There was too much brightness coming off the window now, a glare off the notepad. She turned and pushed herself away and, with four long strides, made her way into the studio.

The curtains over the window glowed softly with the southern light, but otherwise the room was soothingly dim. She closed the door behind her and went to the chair in the corner and sat. She concentrated on regulating her breaths—slowly in, slowly out.

The sheet draped over the easel seemed to be capturing all of the filtered sunlight that entered the room. And the longer Charlotte stared at it, the more there seemed an ominous quality to the shape the sheet held, its headless triangularity, the motionless folds. It seemed to Charlotte like a kind of dead smoke, unhealthy and cold. It was at that moment that she lost all desire to finish the painting underneath the sheet, saw all of her previous work, her decades of obsession with color and light, as trivial and selfish. It was at that moment that she started to be afraid of the unfinished painting. It was at that moment, she would tell herself later, that she started to be afraid of almost everything.

G
ATESMAN wanted to keep his mind on the morning's duties, but his thoughts kept returning to Charlotte Dunleavy. Even as he stood gazing into the cobwebby emptiness of her garden shed, he was remembering his first glimpse of her. She had emerged silently from the shadows of the little foyer, and the moment her face came into the light, he had felt a kind of soft blow inside his chest, as if somebody or something had rapped its knuckles on his heart. And it was all because of her eyes and her hands. She was pretty, yes, and in a way few women in his county remained after their teens. Local women, even the beautiful ones, usually developed a veneer of hardness by the age of thirty or so, a cynicism that brittled their femininity. But Charlotte's beauty was still soft and womanly, and her eyes were the evidence of this. The eyes of someone who could still be startled, impressed, have her breath stolen by a sudden flash of beauty. And the delicacy of her hands. When the sunlight fell on them, the fine golden hairs at her wrist . . .

He pulled away from the thought. Closed the shed door and strode purposefully toward the barn. A glance into the burn barrel along the way. It was a third full of ashes, just like his own, just like everybody else's.
Keep your eyes open
, he told himself.
Focus
.

The barn door swung open easily, so well balanced that the considerable weight of the left-hand panel, eight feet wide and twelve high, felt negligible in his hand. A metal stake stopped its swing not quite parallel to the exterior wall. Not far from the stake lay a cement block, which he slid in front of the door to hold it open.

He paused on the threshold. A flutter of wings in the rafters. The warm scent of hay, a thick scent of dust and enclosure, a cavernous space. Thin shafts of light thick with dancing motes, tiny planets rising and falling in brief, unpredictable orbits.

A few farming implements hung from hooks along the front wall, probably left over from Old Bert's days. The plank floor was empty all the way back to the loft, though scarred and scored with the movements of eighty-odd years, dotted with a few splatters of pigeon droppings. Gatesman leaned down close to the floor, turned his head this way and that in search of footprints but saw none, only a few stray straws of hay here and there. He knew from previous conversations with Mike Verner that Mike sometimes had to make work for Dylan, find simple tasks, like sweeping out a barn, to keep the boy busy. Mike was known throughout the county for the tidiness of his farm, the impeccable state in which he maintained all of his equipment, a fastidiousness Mike was always quick to blame on Claudia, his wife. “She makes me wash up and brush my teeth before I'm allowed to open the refrigerator,” he liked to joke.

Gatesman brought himself back to the matter at hand. No dusty footprints crossing the floor. So much for the theory that Jesse fell down the feed shoot into the stalls, he told himself. It had happened to Gatesman when he was a boy, ten years old and playing barn basketball with a couple of friends, running around heedlessly. Straight down through the feed shoot he had dropped, whacking his head on the edge. He had lain unconscious on the mucked-up floor until awakened by his friend's mother flicking water in his face.

But not here, not Jesse. Even so, Gatesman told himself, you're here so just keep looking, don't be sloppy about it.

He crossed to the ladder and hauled himself up into the loft. Warm currents of air rose off the hay. The dust made his eyes itch. He gazed from wall to wall across the stacked rows of rectangular bales. Nearest the loft window, bales were missing from three of the rows, those bales nearest the window and easiest for Dylan to reach the last time he had tossed bales down to Mike's wagon. But there was no sign that Jesse had climbed into the loft, no sign that he had built himself a little cave of hay to keep himself warm through the night.

Anyway, you had to look, Gatesman thought. There had been the Rose boy, what, maybe ten or eleven years ago come summer? Built himself a little cubbyhole in the loft while his daddy and two brothers were stacking hay in the barn, then climbed in, dragged a bale close to seal himself inside, and fell asleep. His daddy and brothers went off to eat lunch.

“Where's Ronnie?” Mrs. Rose had asked.

The oldest boy said, “Last I seen him he was pestering me about taking him to a movie. I told him to shut up and get out of my way.”

“Why do you always have to be so mean to him?” his mother asked. “Now he's gone off somewhere to pout.”

“Let him pout,” the boy said. “At least I won't be tripping over him all afternoon.”

After lunch, the work resumed. Bales were stacked eight deep on top of the sleeping child. Impossible to believe that a boy could sleep through that, except that it had happened. They never would have found him till the next summer but for the mother's dream three days after the boy disappeared. She shook her husband, Walter, awake and told him, “He's in the hay.” Walt Rose was a serious man who knew not to doubt his wife. He left his other sons to sleep, then single-handedly tossed two hundred bales of hay down onto the barn floor. By dawn, when he pulled the last one aside, the coroner was waiting in the kitchen.

But not this time, not for Jesse. Besides, the heat in the loft was getting to Gatesman. The air was both heavy and dry, sitting like sand in Gatesman's chest. He let himself down the ladder, returned outside, swung the door shut, and latched it. The exterior air was cool in comparison and soothing to his eyes.
You never could've made it as a farmer,
he told himself. He walked along the side of the barn, following the rutted wagon path to where it ended at the gate to a fenced-in pasture.

Everywhere he went, Gatesman carried with him the tragedies of his county. He was in his sixteenth year as sheriff, and ever since Patrice's and Chelsea's deaths in the September of his third year, he seemed to retain the miseries too vividly. People got married and had babies and won lotteries and fishing tournaments and got their grinning faces in the paper, but it was the car wrecks and house fires and bar knifings that stuck with him, the suicides and beatings, the pregnant young wife who fell over dead in her yard from an aneurysm, the Amish carpenter who raped his twelve-year-old daughter. Life's happy moments, he imagined, were of a lighter nature and tended to float away from him, pretty but momentary butterflies that soon caught an updraft and sailed away. The pain of life, on the other hand, clung to him ounce by ounce, incident by incident. When his wife and daughter rolled over an embankment on that wet, foggy night, he had weighed one hundred ninety-two pounds. Since then, he had gained an average of four pounds per year. Exercise didn't help and neither did diet, mainly because he practiced neither of them. By his calculations, he could hold his job another five years, another twenty pounds of accumulated misery, then retire to a mountain cabin with a moderate pension and a fighting chance of avoiding a heart attack before AARP started sending him recruitment letters.

At the rear of the barn, the lower level opened onto a fenced-in pasture of approximately fifteen acres. Gatesman stood against the plank fence and gazed across the high weeds to the other side and to the row of trees beyond. No cows had grazed in that pasture for several years, not since the auction a year before Old Bert packed up for Kansas City. Scattered among the weeds were spindly, top-heavy umbrellas of Queen Anne's lace and yellow splashes of wild mustard. Running through these weeds was a skinny, sinuous path, still fresh enough that the weeds, heavy from last night's rain, had not sprung back up to conceal it; but the path was so arbitrary and directionless, no clear aim to its weaving, circling convolutions, that it certainly had not been cut by a boy who, coming out of the trees, bored with waiting for something to shoot at, had wandered across the corn stubble to the fence, then had slipped between the flat boards to make his way to the open entrance at the back of the barn. More like a stray dog chasing a rabbit, Gatesman surmised, because of the quick darting and zigzagging movements a terrified rabbit would make.
And that's where the dog lost him and lay down to catch his breath,
Gatesman thought,
that trampled down spot up against the fence.