Still Life With Crows

“There are some things that cannot be explained, Miss Kraus,” Pendergast said. “They must be observed. They must belived. ”

The storm shook and rattled the house.

“How did his back become deformed?” Pendergast finally asked. “Was it just his cave existence? Or did he have a bad fall as a child, perhaps? Broken bones that healed badly?”

Winifred Kraus swallowed, recovered. “He fell when he was ten. I thought he would die. I wanted to get him to a doctor, but . . .”

Hazen suddenly spoke, his voice harsh with disgust, anger, disbelief, pain. “But why the scenes in the cornfields? What was that all about?”

Winifred only shook her head wonderingly. “I don’t know.”

Pendergast spoke again. “We may never know what was in his mind when he fashioned those tableaux. It was a form of self-expression, a strange and perhaps unfathomable notion of creative play. You saw the scratched wall-etchings in the cave; the arrangements of sticks and string, bones and crystals. This was why he never fit the pattern of a serial killer. Because hewasn’t a serial killer. He had no concept of killing. He was completely amoral, the purest sociopath imaginable.”

The old lady, her head bowed, said nothing. Corrie felt sorry for her. She remembered the stories she had heard of how strict the woman’s father was; how he used to beat her for the merest infraction of his byzantine and self- contradictory rules; how the girl had been locked in the top floor of her house for days on end, crying. They were old stories, and people always ended them with a wondering shake of the head and the comment, “And yet she’s such anice old lady. Maybe it never really happened that way.”

Pendergast was still pacing the room, looking from time to time at Winifred Kraus. “The few examples we have of children raised in this way—the Wolf Child of Aveyron, for example, or the case of Jane D., locked in a basement for the first fourteen years of her life by her schizophrenic mother—show that massive and irreversible neurological and psychological damage takes place, simply by being deprived of the normal process of socialization and language development. With Job it was taken one step further: he was deprived of theworld itself. ”

Winifred abruptly put her face in her hands and rocked. “Oh, my poor little boy,” she cried. “My poor little Jobie . . .”

The room fell silent except for Winifred’s murmuring, over and over again: “My poor little boy, my little Jobie.”

Corrie heard a siren sound in the distance. And then, through the broken front windows, the lights of a fire truck striped their way across the walls and floor. There was a squealing of brakes as an ambulance and a squad car pulled up alongside. Then came the slamming of vehicle doors, heavy footsteps on the porch. The door opened and a burly fireman walked in.

“You folks all right here?” he asked in a hearty voice. “We finally got the roads cleared, and—” He fell silent as he saw Hazen covered with blood, the weeping old woman handcuffed to the chair, the others in shell-shocked stupor.

“No,” said Pendergast, speaking quietly. “No, we are not all right.”

Epilogue

 

The setting sun lay over Medicine Creek, Kansas, like a benediction. The storm had broken the heat wave; the sky was fresh, with the faintest hint of autumn in the air. The cornfields that had survived the storm had been cut, and the town felt freed of its claustrophobic burden. Migrating crows by the hundreds were passing over town, landing in the fields, gleaning the last kernels from among the stubble. On the edge of town, the spire of the Lutheran church rose, a slender arrow of white against the backdrop of green and blue. Its doors were thrown wide and the sound of evening vespers drifted out.

Not far away, Corrie lay on her rumpled bed, trying to finishBeyond the Ice Limit. It was peaceful in the double-wide trailer, and her windows were open, letting in a pleasant flow of air. Puffy cumulus clouds passed overhead, dragging their shadows across the shaved fields. She turned a page, then another. From the direction of the church came the sound of an organ playing the opening notes of “Beautiful Savior,” followed by the faint sound of singing, Klick Rasmussen’s warble, as usual, trumping all.

As Corrie listened, a faint smile came to her lips. This would be the first service by that young new minister, Pastor Tredwell, whom the town was so proud of already. Her smile widened as she recalled the story, as it had been described to her when she was still in the hospital: how Smit Ludwig, shoeless, bruised, and battered, had come shambling out of the corn—where he had lain, unconscious and concussed, for almost two days—and right into the church where his own memorial service was being held. Ludwig’s daughter, who had flown in for the service, had fainted. But nobody had been more surprised than Pastor Wilbur himself, who stopped dead in the midst of reciting Swinburne and collapsed in an apoplectic fit, certain he was seeing a ghost. Now Wilbur was convalescing somewhere far away and Ludwig was healing up nicely, typing from his hospital bed the first chapters of a book about his encounter with the Medicine Creek murderer, who had taken nothing but his shoes and left him for dead in the corn.

She set her novel aside and lay on her back, staring out the window, watching the clouds go by. The town was doing its best to return to normal. The football tryouts were beginning and school would be starting in two weeks. There was a rumor that KSU had decided to site the experimental field somewhere in Iowa, but that was no loss. Good riddance, in fact: Pendergast seemed to feel Dale Estrem and the Farmer’s Co-op had a point about the perils of genetic modification. Anyway, people could hardly care less, now that the town was alive with National Park people, cave experts, a team ofNational Geographic photographers, and hard-core groups of spelunkers, all of whom were anxious to get a glimpse of what was being called the greatest cave system to be discovered in America since Carlsbad Caverns. It seemed the town was standing at the edge of a new dawn that would bring wealth, or at least prosperity, to all. Time would tell.

Corrie sighed. None of it would make the slightest difference to her. One more year and then, for better or worse, Medicine Creek would become ancient history for her.

She lay in bed, thinking, while the sun set and night fell. Then she got up and went to her bureau. She slid open the drawer, felt along the bottom, and carefully peeled off the bills. One thousand five hundred dollars. Her mother still hadn’t found the money, and after what had happened she’d stopped harping about it. She had even been nice to Corrie for the first day after she’d come back from the hospital. But Corrie knew that would not last long. Her mother was now back at work and Corrie had little doubt she’d return with her purse rattling with its usual quota of vodka minis. Give it a day or two and she’d bring up the money and everything would start all over again.