Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (18 page)

“You have to go,” she told herself then. “You have to.”

A few minutes later she went into the living room and looked at the DVD. The readout said 8:05 P.M.

By the time she had the Jeep out of the garage, the first few lines of an old Moby Grape song were playing on a continuous loop through her mind.
Eight oh-five . . . I guess you're leaving soon. I can't go on without you, it's useless to try.
She was able to drown the lyrics out finally only by grabbing a CD from the four she kept in the console, shoving it into the player, and turning the volume up loud. She wanted only sound, no words, no memories or associations, just noise she could feel on her skin and in her teeth, noise to drum all thoughts from her brain, so all the way to the elementary school she swam through the punishing current of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's
Beethoven's Last Night
—swam, she told herself, like an old, barren salmon struggling upstream to die.

T
HE parking lot at the elementary school was jammed full, and the only parking space Charlotte could find was out along the highway. She parked with the Jeep's right wheels inches from a drainage ditch. She could see hundreds of cars and trucks but not a single person in sight.

She climbed out of the Jeep and closed the door softly and stood there on the gravel shoulder. There on the highway, she was enveloped in darkness. The sky was black, no moon and no stars visible. The air was cool but clean-smelling, with just a hint of wood smoke from somebody's chimney. The nearest light was forty yards away, across the schoolyard at the corner of the parking lot, a sodium-vapor light mounted at the top of a thirty-foot pole.

Nobody even knows you're here,
she told herself. It would have been a more comforting thought had she believed the anonymity could last.

Then she heard the singing. The words were indistinguishable, little more than a muddy drone of voices, but a wavering melody made its way to her through the darkness, broken bits of which she thought she could identify as John Denver's “Sunshine.” She thought it a strange choice to be singing in darkness for a surly little boy whose favorite place had been the darkened woods.
But maybe it's his mother's favorite song,
she thought.
Or his father's. They probably don't have much money for music. Or maybe it's not even that song at all.

She thought the night felt more like October than April. A crisp night of gathering excitement. Football season. Homecoming. The high-voltage drama of adolescence.

But no, this night was an ending, not a beginning. Charlotte wondered if any candlelight vigils anywhere had ever ended with happiness. Were missing children ever returned safely to their families? Did all those songs and prayers ever pierce the heart of heaven?

Now that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she was able to pick out a couple of dim stars. Then she saw that they did not twinkle, they hung like tiny sequins on black velvet. Satellites, probably, she told herself. Tin cans beaming signals. Tonight's episode of some stupid reality show. The four-hundredth rerun of
Blazing Saddles
.

She stood there on the side of the road and searched from one corner of the sky to the next. Then suddenly she remembered her dream the night before the search in the woods, the shadow man who had approached her, and suddenly she was afraid standing there alone. Across the road were a few houses separated by wide, vacant yards, and behind the houses, a row of trees leading toward a ridge. She shivered with the thought of somebody rushing toward her out of that darkness. She reached into the pocket of her stadium jacket and closed her hand around the key chain and crossed quickly toward the school building and the light behind it.

The elementary school sat at the bottom of a gentle slope, and behind, on a low plateau, were two football fields. The nearest, maybe fifty yards behind the building, was the high school team's practice field. Then came a sharp rise of twenty or so feet, and on another plateau of sculpted land were the game field and the high school. Sodium-vapor lights at the rear of the elementary building made all this visible to Charlotte, though the two football fields themselves were unlit but for the watery, flickering glows of several hundred candles in the center of the nearest field. It seemed to her that the entire town must have been gathered there, everybody from all the little trailer court hamlets, the isolated farmers and their families, the entire scattered school district. She had not known there were so many people in the entire county.

Her stomach lurched with every step. By the time she reached the rear of the crowd she was shivering uncontrollably, despite the heavy jacket she wore and the gray wool scarf wrapped twice around her neck. She kept both hands in her pockets, came to within two feet of the nearest people, and would have paused there, hung back, invisible at the rear, except that a man turned at her approach and smiled. He greeted Charlotte with a nod and took a step to the side. “Come on through here,” he told her. “You won't see nothing but people's heads from back here.”

She wanted to tell him that that was all she wanted to see. But he kept smiling and waiting, so she continued forward, moved into the space he'd made for her. Immediately others turned to look at her, and they, too, moved aside. She continued to inch her way forward, though she could not help wondering, uncomfortably, why all of those strangers continued to make room for her to advance. At first she thought it an act of simple rural courtesy, but halfway through the crowd she became aware of people leaning close to one another, whispering, edging away to let her pass. She understood then that these strangers who had never laid eyes on her all recognized her immediately because she was not one of them. She did not dress like them or look like them, and she could only be the woman who lived in the house not a hundred yards from where the boy had disappeared. She could only be the woman who had told the sheriff about Dylan Hayes. She could only be that painter lady from the city, that outsider in their midst.

The blood was pounding so explosively in Charlotte's head that despite the continued singing of hundreds of voices, the music did not register to her as anything but a loud drone. Then it was as if her ears suddenly became unstopped and she heard the words, “When evening falls so hard, I will comfort you. I'll take your part . . .”

She came to a stop then and stared straight ahead into the broad back of a tall man, and she let the music come to her and tried to breathe more easily and allow her heart to calm. Soon her field of vision began to expand as if the tunnel she had been in was fading away, and she saw that she was well inside the crowd now, only ten feet or so from the front. Nearly every person but her was holding a paper cup with a little candle flickering inside. Some of them, men and women both, also held a can or bottle of beer, a soda can, or a cup of convenience store coffee in their free hand. Some of them whispered to one another. A few had set the paper cup and candle between their feet. A teenage boy and girl not far away were kissing.

The woman standing next to Charlotte was a small, round woman wearing a denim jacket over a gray hoodie. She turned to Charlotte and said, “There's candles up front.”

“Thank you,” Charlotte said. “But I'm okay.”

“Eldon,” the woman said to the man in front of her, and jabbed him on the shoulder so that he turned to look. “Move aside and let this lady through.”

“Really, I'm fine, thank you,” Charlotte said, but the woman took her by the arm and pulled her forward, all but thrust her through the opening Eldon had made, at which point the person in front of Eldon moved aside as well, and the next person and the next, and Charlotte, smiling awkwardly, felt she had no choice but to be pulled forward by this tide of courtesy, no choice but to be drawn into the open circle at the heart of the crowd.

The open space was perhaps twenty feet wide. At its center, on the ground at the base of a bamboo patio torch, was a mound of flowers, pictures, letters, and cards all stacked around a large corkboard that leaned against the bamboo torch. Two people stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind this display. The woman, Charlotte knew, could only be Jesse's mother, a thin thirty-something woman, pretty but looking so worn, so exhausted by grief. She stood huddled into herself and stared at the ground near the mound of flowers. The fire from the torch threw flickers of light across her face.

The man beside Livvie Rankin was one Charlotte recognized as a man she had seen on a few occasions while driving through town. Each time she saw him, he had been standing on the sidewalk, apparently locked in earnest conversation with somebody else, their conversation so earnest, on his part at least, that it always appeared to be on the verge of an argument. Each time Charlotte had driven past this scene, she had felt compelled to glance back once or twice to reassure herself that the men were not fighting.

So you're Denny Rankin,
she thought. He wasn't much taller than his wife, maybe five-nine to her five-seven, but he held himself as stiff as a sword and stared hard past the flame, his gaze going into the darkness just above the top of the crowd, the bill of his ball cap pulled low, his arms crossed tightly across his chest. What held Charlotte's attention was the turn of his mouth, the full lips in a tight, one-sided, very critical smile.
That's Jesse's mouth,
she thought.

Then a hand touched Charlotte's shoulder. She jerked away at the touch and turned quickly.

“Hey, it's only me,” Mike Verner said. He had to lean close so as not to shout above the singing. “Sorry if I surprised you.”

Beside him stood a petite, smiling woman with a pretty, slightly freckled face. She leaned past her husband to reach for Charlotte's hand. “I'm Claudia,” she said.

Charlotte thought the woman's hand felt rough and dry, but it was also warm, and in an instant her other hand also closed around Charlotte's. “It's so nice to meet you finally,” Claudia said. She stood no taller than five feet two and had a delicate kind of beauty, a pale Irish complexion and shining auburn hair.

Charlotte leaned close to her and said, “Your husband is a big, fat liar.”

“Oh yes, he certainly is. What did he lie about this time?”

“He said that you're fat and ugly.”

“Well, I could stand to lose a few pounds.”

“Where? You don't have an ounce of fat on you.”

“Actually, I was referring to this hundred and ninety pounds standing here beside me.”

Mike grinned as if the women's sudden alliance against him was a personal victory. “I'm glad we found you,” he said. “So many people showed up, they had to move this thing off the front yard. I hope half this many people show up when I disappear.”

Claudia shushed him, flashed her green eyes at him. He drew an imaginary zipper across his lips.

To Claudia, Charlotte said, “I wish I had brought some flowers or something.”

“Some people are throwing a dollar or two in that little cardboard box. To help Livvie out.”

“I didn't even think to bring my purse.”

Claudia looked up at her husband. He reached for his wallet, then held it open in front of Charlotte. “An interest-free loan,” he said. “But no free toasters.”

Charlotte told him, “You're an inveterate liar but a very nice man.” She thumbed through the inch-thick wad of bills, then extracted a twenty. “You mind?”

“Well, I kinda had that one earmarked for a lap dance at the Sugar Shack.”

Claudia gave his hand a little slap. “He ever sets foot in the Sugar Shack, he won't have need for money or anything else, and he knows it.”

“I'll pay you back tomorrow,” Charlotte said, then immediately stepped into the open space and crossed toward the torch, six stiff steps over beaten-down grass. Her intention was to drop the twenty into the shoebox, which was already half-filled with other bills, handwritten notes, and what, as she drew closer, looked to be a St. Christopher medal. Charlotte's knees threatened to buckle as she drew closer to the display, but she managed to close the distance finally and to let the bill flutter out of her hand. She could smell the burning oil in the torch and could hear the singing going on all around her, “How Great Thou Art” now, the lyrics mingling also with the scent of cigarette smoke, the chilled scent of the air, all of it wrapped together in a softly buffeting wave that took Charlotte's breath away and made her feel simultaneously tiny and too conspicuous.

She became aware of standing motionless too long and told herself to move. She lifted her gaze out of the cardboard box, looked at the mound of flowers surrounding it, mostly wildflower bouquets from the nearest Walmart, but also some florist shop roses, bunches of tulips and lilies, gladioli and sprigs of yellow forsythia, hand-printed and colored sheets of paper and cards, everything banked against a corkboard that leaned against the bamboo stake.