Four Crows

by Lily White

  Turning to him with equally tired green eyes, I gave him a thin smile. I hadn’t seen our place in so long, I wondered if it would hold the same magical appeal it always had when I was a small girl growing up.

  My eyes scanned the distance outside the windshield of our beat up red truck, and I could barely see the roof of the old barn and dilapidated house over the tall grass of the overgrown field.

  “I missed it,” I finally breathed out, lying to keep the old man happy. “I’m sure once we clean up, it’ll feel like home again.”

  Although it’d only been a few years since I’d seen the place, it was a long two years. It was the time during which I became an adult, legally, at least. And it was the time I finally grasped onto the understanding of the life fate had decided I would live.

  In many ways it wasn’t a bad life. I had three men who loved me and looked after me, even if two of those men had grown distant over the last few years. Anything material I wanted in the world was at my fingertips. Never denied, I could talk my father into buying just about anything. But money wouldn’t buy my freedom. Money couldn’t buy friends, or love, or even a different life.

  The tire of the truck dipped in a pothole on the dirt road, viscous mud splashing up onto the side of the truck from one of the large divots that speckled the land. Behind us drove another truck that towed machinery my father couldn’t be without. And behind that was a ratty old camper - a fifty square foot aluminum nightmare that was my home away from home.

  The shocks on the truck were all but gone, the land rocking us to and fro like two babies in the cradle of a solitary life. Daddy didn’t talk much on the long drives across country, but his silence was better than the way my brothers would prattle on if I rode with one of them. I only accepted the passenger seat in one of their vehicles if I was sick of the thoughts that invaded those long empty periods of silence that came with riding with my father.

  The bark of a phlegmy cough caught my attention, my head spinning left to see the bloody spittle that covered my father’s palm. Clenching his hand quickly, he lowered his arm to wipe the evidence of a burgeoning disease along the side of dirty jeans.

  “Don’t think I didn’t see that.”

  Despite the sheltered and guarded life the old man had forced on me, he was all I had, and I loved him. “You need to get that looked at, Daddy. What’ll happen to me if you’re not here, huh? You think Finn or Brody are going to look after me? They’ll sell me off just as fast -”

  “Don’t you be talking about that, Magpie. Not one damn word. And don’t ever accuse my sons of not looking after you, neither.”

  Side-eyeing me, the old man’s shoulders rattled with another cough, this one small enough that he was better able to hide it.

  His coughing fits were like earthquakes, small pre-shocks that rumbled in his lungs until the pressure became too much. Everything inside him rattled then and the filth trapped in his lungs came up. He’d suffer the small aftershocks for at least a half a day later.

  As far as I was concerned, it was getting time the stubborn man see someone about it.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I’m still the parent around here, whether you think you’re a grown up or not.”

  Rolling my eyes, I turned to catch my reflection in the side window. The moon had settled low on the horizon and it was that mysterious space between night and the first light of day. It was my favorite time because it was an in between space where anything could happen.

  A round face framed by wild black hair stared back at me. Green eyes the color of a forest at dawn were slanted at the corners, just enough to give me an exotic look, but not enough for me to pass as foreign. Daddy always said I got my eyes from my Native American momma, but I wouldn’t know. The woman lost her life while bringing me into the world.

  Every time I was told the story of where I came from, the tale became more magical and surreal. Born inside an old, deserted church, Daddy swore the angels and God himself were looking down at me, blessing me with beauty and sweetness when I took my first breath. Unsure whether that was true, I swore they must have left immediately after. No child worth the love of angels was raised in a family of Crows.

  My full mouth was drawn into a thin line as I stared into eyes that seemed vacant. Where had the little girl gone that was happiest in the rare moments she had alone with her father? Why did she have to grow up and want more?

  It took years for me to realize that life wasn’t made up of toys, pretty dresses, and friends for one night only. Once the understanding hit me, though, I’d never been able to escape the longing for something beyond what I’d been given.

  Leaning my head against the cool glass, I recalled the first time I truly understood what my family was doing. Not too old, perhaps eleven or twelve, I listened to the screaming that echoed out from behind the loud, raucous music they always played when company was over. The pleas from that woman’s mouth never stopped haunting me from that night forward.

  Please stop…

  No!…

  I have a family…

  The words never stop repeating in my head, becoming an endless loop of sorrow and pain, of torment and new beginnings.

  Daddy stopped letting me bring friends home after Old Man Maxwell died when I was nine, and I never understood why. Not until that night at least, the night a stranger’s frightened screams painted a clear picture of the life my family was living.

  Red rain. God, I’d been so stupid to believe anything so unnatural could exist.

  “The field has really filled out since we burned it last.” My father’s hand touched my arm, dragging my attention back to the present. “Ain’t that the way it works, little one? I’m telling you, Mother Nature sure knows what she’s doing. Ashes to ashes and all that. Destruction by fire feeds the new life that grows.”

  A chill slithered along my spine, the buried knowledge of what lay in that field and now fed the grass that reached for the sky. A small plot of earth that sat to the left of the barn, a place where the rubies would shimmer beneath the bright sunlight. Those gemstones were always lost to the dirt my brothers tossed over them, before the gasoline they poured caught flame and the field became a raging fire, contained by trenches, that burned all the rubies away.

  The night after I discovered the horrifying truth to the parties my family threw, I’d sat on my father’s lap and asked him if we were all destined for the gates of Hell.

  Laughing so deep, I thought he’d dump me from his lap, his arms held me tight when he explained, “it’s the nature of life, Maggie Pie. Kill or be killed. Us against them. A man’s gotta have the ability to feed his family, and those women bring in good money.”

  He’d squeezed my shoulder when I flashed him a grim expression. ”Now don’t you worry, little one. The sins of the father don’t lie on the shoulders of his daughter. It’s the sons that bear that weight.”

  Scooting me off his lap, he gently nudged me along. “Go play with your dolls, Maggie. You let Daddy worry about the things that are too scary for you to know about.”

  It was as if that conversation had torn the veil off their sinister deeds, as if it had freed the three men to openly play, because the baby had finally learned the truth. Nothing was the same after that conversation, and I quickly learned to stay silent.

  On the nights they brought those women home, I’d gather my things and disappear into the fields of whatever place we were staying. Always far away from any city, always out where the stars were my friends, we only stayed in one place for a few months at a time.

  We moved around so often I didn’t know what it meant to have a permanent and stable home.

  After the parties, the women would be gone by the time I returned in the morning. If they’d been smart, they were packed up and shipped out to wherever Daddy sold them. If they weren’t, well, they became the sustenance for the fields that would eventually be burned to ash. Finn never did run that chipper during the day again, and I didn’t miss the shine of rubies
across the grass.

  His voice a mellow hum across the surface of my thoughts, my dad broke through the storm of memory. “Don’t you worry, Maggie Pie. We’ve got enough money to last us a while. We won’t have to move out again for at least another year or so.”

  I hated the constant moving. He knew it. But his words were always the same, nothing more than a bunch of sounds with no true promise or meaning.

  In a few months, their skin would itch for another party, and we’d be back on the road again.

  “It’s been fourteen years, Elliot. At some point, you have to let all of that go.”

  The fear in my mother’s voice didn’t shake the need inside me to discover the truth of my wife and son’s disappearance. It didn’t settle the constant crush of anger and rage, the deep-seated sorrow that broke through the stillness of the night to stab my heart and tear my soul to pieces.

  In the beginning, she’d played along. She’d listened to me cry through the cold, lonely nights when I swore that the heavens above had abandoned me. But as my mother’s acceptance of their loss grew stronger from year to year – as well as her need for me to move on - my thoughts of revenge became more pronounced until it became my obsession.

  My hand gripped the phone so tight, the blood rushed from the wrinkles in my callused skin.

  “I’m not forgetting about them, Mom. I’m not just rolling over on this and accepting it. Something happened to Katelyn and Michael and I’m not letting it go until the bastards that took them pay for it.”

  “Let the cops handle the matter, Son -”

  “The cops have done nothing but store the case file away and mark it as unsolved! I’ve tracked more potential suspects than they ever cared to find.”

  From the second I returned home from my last tour, I’d devoted every waking moment to finding my wife and child. The horrors of war, the slaughter of angry and proud men, it was nothing compared to the agony of not knowing. I was a specialist in the Marine Corps and had been on assignment at the time my family disappeared. It took the military a month to finally get the message to me because, to my country, the assignment had been more important than the soldier. Perhaps if they had told me sooner - if I’d returned home sooner - I could have saved my wife and child.

  “You need to calm down, Elliot. Your anger won’t bring them home. All it’ll do is tear you up inside until you’re as lost as them.”

  I was already lost, but I didn’t pass that thought on to my mom. She was worried enough as it was.

  “Listen, mom. I’m going to let you go. It’s late and -”

  “Get some sleep, Elliot. Take your pills and get some rest.”

  I never took the damn pills, but she didn’t need to know it.

  “Love you, mom.”

  My thumb hit the button to end the call, my hand clenching the phone so tight, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was crushed to dust in my hold.

  Before I even knew what I was doing, the phone crashed against the opposite wall, the glow of blue light beaming from where it lay atop a layer of dust that gathered in the corners.

  Those poor phones. The salesman at the cellular store thought I was just some unfortunate klutz, his smile far too bright every time he saw my shadow darken the large glass doors. How many phones had I gone through this year already? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t really care either. All that mattered was hunting down the bastards that took my wife and son.

  I should have been home protecting them, but instead I was somewhere in a foreign country fighting a battle that meant little to me besides the piss poor amount of money it sent home to my family. I’d left home to take care of them, and all my absence had done was leave them alone and exposed to the homegrown monsters that plagued this country.

  Aggravated thoughts constantly spinning, my brain wouldn’t stop asking the same questions over and over again.

  What had Katelyn been thinking? She was always so careful. She knew that predators lurked in the shadows, ready and waiting for someone as beautiful as her to come along.

  But damn if that woman didn’t have a soft heart. It must have been some stupid stray that distracted her, some lost soul struggling to make it through the world that she took the time to help. That was the only thing I could believe would have left her open and vulnerable, the only thing that would have distracted her enough that she and Michael could be stolen.

  Pulling a smoke from the crushed pack that sat on a pile of papers, I slipped the butt between my lips and fired up the zippo. The first tug was always like coming home to something familiar. Blowing it out, I watched the cherry transition from red to grey, the ash gathering at the tip like what remained of my life after my family had vanished.

  While overseas, I swore I’d quit the nasty habit as soon as I was home and safe. With nothing but an empty house to return to, I saw no reason for quitting a habit that would put me in an early grave.

  Drawing a deep drag of death into my lungs, I blew the smoke out to dance above my head, my eyes staring at the handwritten notes of the journals I’d been keeping for years. At first, every time I came across a new possibility, a new clue, I took it to the police, hoping like hell they’d follow it up and locate the two people who meant the world to me.

  They may as well have taken my hope, stomped it beneath their state issued shoes, and spit on it for good measure.

  For the first three years, they played along with my visits.

  Yes, Mr. McLoughlin, we’ll look into it.

  Yes, sir, we can definitely check it out.

  Thank you, sir, for your service to this country.

  All bullshit. All lies. The slack jaws never bothered to look into even one of the leads I came across. After the third year, all I got from them was their pitiful stares and the barely spoken whispers that I needed a shrink.

  I gave up going to the cops when those whispers started, and for the eleven years that followed, I investigated the leads on my own.

  Nothing concrete had turned up in the years I’d been pouring over document after document about the people who lived in my rural town. As far as I could decipher, most of the people in the area were good folk, their noses clean of illegal activities.

  However, one family always stuck out to me. A foursome of oddballs, three men and a girl. The Crows owned an old farm on the outskirts of town. They operated a landscaping company that mainly performed large lot clearing, storm cleanup and tree removal.

  On its own, I wouldn’t have considered their lifestyle strange, but the family had a pattern of taking off for a few years at a time - normally after a string of crimes occurred within the county surrounding the small town.

  It took me too long to make the discovery, and it was just another mistake that buried my family deeper in the crevice of their mysterious fate.

  By the time I was discharged from the military and returned home, the Crows had been long gone. It took another few years for them to return and draw my attention.

  They were a strange lot, three grown men - one much older than the others - and a young girl that I discovered later was near the same age as my son. Asking around, I learned that the foursome were comprised of a father, two sons and a daughter that had been a surprise child for her aging parents. The mother didn’t survive the birth of the girl according to what little information I could obtain on them through townsfolk.

  The Crows - as they were called by the town - lived off their land mostly, rarely coming into town to purchase tools, sparse food, clothing and other odds and ends. Packages were often delivered to the mail center on the main boulevard of the town, and once a week when they were staying on their property, the eldest Crow, Jonah, would drive in to fetch the packages. Every so often, he’d bring one of his sons along to assist, but rarely the young girl.

  After several years of watching the family’s patterns - as much as I could without drawing attention to myself - I became concerned when a woman went missing twenty miles outside of the county at a strip mall in ano
ther rural city. Two days later, the Crow family packed up and was heading out.

  It was by coincidence only that I’d seen them leave, but news of the woman’s disappearance was playing on the truck radio at the same time I saw them hauling out. Perhaps God himself finally found it within his heart to lead me in the right direction.

  From what I’d learned about Katelyn’s disappearance, she’d been frequenting the park on a daily basis with Michael, each time staying for a few hours and leaving just before sundown. I couldn’t find anybody who’d witnessed her at the park on the day she was taken, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been there.

  Sitting exhausted over the notebooks I kept, my eyes endlessly searched the words written over the pages, as if by reading them enough, some concrete answer would appear.

  “Damn it, Katelyn,” I quietly hissed, “what were you doing that day?”

  Finding the bottle of whiskey I’d been nursing all night, I brought the rim to my lips, and settled into my chair to pour over the notes. It was a task I did every damn night, a task I’d never stop doing until the day I found my wife and son.

  I’ve always loved animals. All creatures, big and small, it doesn’t matter. There are certain ones that frighten me more than I care to admit, but despite my fear, I still respect the lives of those creatures.

  However, that respect wasn’t enough to prevent me from cowering in a corner when faced by one of those dreadful pests, the eight legged variety in particular.

  “It’s just a spider, Maggie. It’s not going to reach out and get you. Just smash it.”

  Shaking my head, I fixed my eyes on the eight legged threat. “Please, just get it outside.” Pleading with my father, tears welled in my eyes.

  There was too much death in my life already. I had to wonder if I could call myself a good person if I, at least, stopped some of it.

  Even if it was just a spider.

  My father shook his head in disbelief before running a frustrated hand through his hair. “I’ll never get you, Maggie. You’ve seen stuff a hell of lot worse than a spider getting squished. What is it with you and these animals?”