Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (26 page)

Then a soft thud, a single distant knock on wood. He stood motionless. It had come from deep in the darkness, at least forty yards away. The barn. He walked briskly now, ducking under the clotheslines, long strides landing only on the balls of his feet. He kept replaying the thud in his head, homing in on it by instinct alone. It hadn't come from inside the barn, it had not been muted enough for that. Nor from the front or it would have been clearer. He made his way quickly to the rear of the barn, could hear the sibilance of his own footsteps but doubted that anyone else could. And when he saw a slender spear of yellow light dart past the lower corner of the barn, he froze for a moment, stood where he was, held his breath, and listened. The light had hit the yard like a splash, then had leapt back behind the barn.

Now he moved close to the wall, crept to the corner, and peeked around it.

Under the overhang that opened off the empty stalls, opened onto the weedy pasture enclosed by a fence, a man stood facing the barn. He moved his flashlight beam up and down along the wall beneath the overhang. The light was weak, probably a Dollar Store model, nothing like Gatesman's own twelve-inch Vortex, 10-watt halogen bulb, 220 lumens. Bright enough to sear a man's eyeballs if necessary, sturdy enough to knock him unconscious. But none of that would happen tonight, because Gatesman had seen the man's face, saw it briefly illuminated by the weak yellow light.

“Hold it right there, Denny,” Gatesman said.

Denny Rankin spun toward him, the light moving with him but barely strong enough to travel the five yards to where the sheriff stood. Now Gatesman turned on his own torch, threw the entire area and fifty yards beyond into white light.

“You trying to fucking blind me?” Rankin said, a hand raised to his face now.

Gatesman aimed the light at the hard-packed ground as he approached. “What do you think you're doing here?” he asked.

“Looking for the way in. What are you doing here?”

Gatesman came to within six inches of him, a tactical move made to emphasize the difference in their sizes. Rankin stood maybe five-nine in his heavy boots, still three inches shorter than the sheriff and at least eighty pounds lighter, a man all sinew and bone, gristle and spit. Gatesman said, “Lucky for you, you didn't find it yet. You're flirting with a trespassing charge.”

“There's not a single sign around here and you know it.”

“That doesn't give you the right to go creeping around on private property. So I'm going to ask you again, Denny. What are you doing here?”

Rankin blew a breath between his teeth. “You and I both know she had something to do with my boy being gone.”

“There is absolutely no evidence of that.”

“Fuck evidence. I know what I know.”

“And what do you know?”

“I just know, is all.”

“Then you don't know diddly.”

“I know that those woods are right over there, and she's right down there in that house. And I know my boy. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts he's been in this barn plenty of times. Maybe she caught him in here once, got pissed off, and whacked him with something. You ever think of that?”

“I've been through this barn already. Inside and outside. Mike Verner's got some hay stored in there; otherwise the place is empty.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe I'm the one needs to do the looking this time.”

“I'm gonna tell you what you need to do, Denny. I understand that you're angry and frustrated. You
know
that I know how you feel. Losing a child is a hell of a thing. But I can also smell your breath, and I doubt very much you want to take a Breathalyzer tonight, do you?”

“You see me driving something? I fucking
walked
here.”

“You're trespassing, you're drunk, and you're causing a disturbance at three in the morning. You want to go find out how the magistrate feels about that? After what you did to the Hayes boy?”

Rankin stared up at him. “You got any witnesses to that?”

“Dylan's going to turn up sooner or later, don't you worry. In the meantime, you give me the slightest reason to haul you in, it's a sure bet I'm gonna do it.”

Every line and angle in Rankin's face was hard. “You need to go over this place again.”

“Don't you tell me what I need to do.”

Rankin stared at him a few moments longer. Then he turned away, a sudden pivot that made the sheriff tighten his grip on the flashlight. “You need to open your fucking eyes,” Rankin said as he strode away, long, hot strides carrying him out into the pasture, shoulders hunched forward, weak light swinging back and forth over the weeds.

Gatesman thought about calling out to him, warning him to stay away from this place, but in the end, all he did was to throw the wide beam of his flashlight at Rankin's back to spear him in a shaft of white as he marched toward the trees.

Back at the house, Gatesman knocked on the front door. “It's me, Charlotte,” he called. “Can you open up for a minute?”

He heard her feet padding down the stairs, heard the dead bolt snap open. Then she was standing there behind the screen with only the upstairs hallway light illuminating the foyer. The heat that had risen to his face during his encounter with Rankin suddenly cooled at the sight of her, or rather turned into a different kind of warmth, soothing and healing. She was wearing a long robe, blue flannel with primroses, and her feet were bare. Her eyes were frightened and she looked small, and her scent came to him through the screen door: a clean, soapy smell, a hint of strawberries.

He smiled. “Not a thing out here,” he told her. “Not a sign, not a sound. Nothing.”

She said, “I heard somebody rattling the doorknob. And I heard footsteps on the back porch. And just now I thought I heard voices.”

“Well,” he said, “let's just think about this a minute. 'Cause I'm not saying you didn't hear what you say you heard. But a raccoon can turn a doorknob, did you know that?”

“Are you serious?” she said.

“Plus . . . if somebody was trying to break in, would he
rattle
the doorknob? Or would he try to be quiet about it?”

“What about the footsteps?” she said. “Those weren't made by a raccoon. And what about the voices? Do the raccoons around here know how to
talk
?”

She was holding the neck of her robe closed with one hand, held her left arm across her belly. More than anything, he wanted to pull open the screen door, step close, and wrap his arms around her. What he didn't know was whether he wanted to do it for her sake or his own. The light from upstairs was soft and warm, and it illuminated the stairway behind her. He would carry her up those stairs like a child. He would feel her warmth and softness as she held herself against him.

He told her, “I'm not saying you're wrong, Charlotte. All I'm saying is, sounds are amplified in the night. Everything is. Even the way we feel about stuff. You'd think the darkness would have a dampening effect, wouldn't you? But instead it makes things bigger.”

After a moment or two, she smiled. “I'm sorry I brought you out here in the middle of the night.”

“You call me anytime. That's why I gave you that number.”

“You want some coffee? I can make you a cup.”

To him it seemed a long time before his answer came, before he could decide which answer to make. “You go on back to sleep. That's where I'm headed too. You might leave the porch lights on if you feel like it, though. That oughta keep the coons away. And what about that sodium-vapor light out at the barn? That still work?”

“It does, but it lights the place up like a football stadium.”

“That's sorta the idea, isn't it?”

“I don't know if I'd be able to sleep in a football stadium.”

He wanted to ask her then if she had trouble sleeping too. Wanted to ask if the darkness made her feel more or less alone. Instead he told himself that she was only being polite when she brought up the coffee. He told himself,
Look at the way she's holding the top of her robe together. And she's never once reached for the screen door to open it.

Minutes later, driving home, Gatesman asked himself why he had chosen not to tell her about Denny Rankin skulking around.
Because it will only frighten her,
he answered.
It will only have her lying awake every night listening for him to come back.

Okay,
he thought.
But why couldn't you just say, “Listen . . . I think it would really be nice to hold you, Charlotte. I just want to feel what that's like again. A woman's skin beneath my hand. The way her mouth feels on mine.”

T
HE days passed. She kept no tally. Instead she watched the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, old movies from the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties, made-up stories evoking times recognizable even though they occurred before she was born. She read about crows and buzzards, read about objects—the history of the syringe (which led, not surprisingly, she thought, to the first morphine addict, the syringe inventor's wife), the morning glory vine (a beautiful killer that could kill in two ways, by slow strangulation if you were another plant, and with spectacular hallucinations if you ingested a few hundred seeds). She read about McPhee's oranges, Susan Orlean's orchids. She read Billy Collins's poetry, smiled at the thought of his gooseneck reading lamp trudging up close for a peek into the poet's grace, and then she asked herself which of her own possessions would miss her most. The teakettle? Her brushes? Her gardening hat?

She sat on the porch swing and thought about the walks she had taken last summer and fall, the narrow lanes and logging trails she had explored, the wonderful excitement of getting herself lost—a different kind of lost, a kind that leads to discovery.

She slept erratically, afraid of her dreams. She wandered from room to room through darkness and daylight, peered out this window or that. Gazed into the distance. Watched cloud shadows crawl over her yard and garden shed, the weedy pasture, the silent, hulking barn.

On a couple of occasions she went for a drive, though she did not enjoy her Jeep anymore, no longer felt the pride of possession she had originally felt. In the city she had been at the mercy of her husband or some other driver, had to wait for taxis, buses, the subway, or friends to fulfill her transportation needs. Then, for a while here in the country, each time she reached for her Jeep keys, she had received a little jolt of adrenaline, a shiver of satisfaction. But now the Jeep felt tight and cumbersome, and no matter how many times she sprayed the interior or hung a new air freshener from the rearview mirror, she could always detect a low, rumbling odor beneath the artificial scents, as dark as distant thunder on a clear, bright day.

On those drives through town she was sure she could detect a new somberness in the air. The word
pall
kept running through her mind. One spring morning she noticed lilacs and crocuses poking their white and purple punctuations up out of the earth in several yards, the delicate little blue cornflowers sprouting along the highway; but on that same day she encountered not a single smile on the people she passed, and when she drove by the schoolyard, there were three teachers keeping solemn watch over the playground; and even the children seemed somber—no running or shrieking or high swinging visible, only children sitting in huddled clusters close to their teachers.

When she spotted Mike Verner coming out of the hardware store that morning, bouncing a small bag of wood screws in his hand as he headed for his pickup truck, she pulled into the nearest parking spot, climbed out, and hurried down the street to intercept him.

“Mike!” she called just as he pulled open his door. He stepped up onto the sidewalk to meet her. Though he smiled as she approached, Charlotte thought his eyes had gone gray and tired. “How you doing, beautiful neighbor?” he said in greeting, and she wondered if the sadness she saw and heard everywhere was real, if sadness could in fact permeate an entire town, a whole county, or if possibly she carried the contagion with her.

“I was wondering about Dylan,” she said. “Have you heard anything? Any news where he might be?”

Mike held his smile in place but moved his gaze slightly so that he was looking past her, far down the gray sidewalk. Finally he looked back at her. “Not a word,” he said. “I wish we would.”

“Because I was thinking,” Charlotte told him, “that I could send him some money, maybe. I mean, I know his parents don't have a lot to spare . . .”