Read Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) for Free Online

promise not to disturb anything.”
    â€œThere’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.

5

    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