Still Life with Crows

by Preston; Child

  She jerked and moaned, as if the announcement was a physical blow.

  “He was killed in the cave,” Pendergast went on quietly. “It was unavoidable. He didn’t understand. He attacked us. There were a number of casualties. It was a matter of self-defense.”

  The woman was now rocking and moaning, repeating over and over again, “Murderers, murderers.” But the accusatory tone seemed almost to drain from her voice: all that remained was sorrow.

  Corrie stared at Pendergast, struggling to understand. “Herson? ”

  Pendergast turned to her. “You gave me the crucial hint yourself. How Miss Kraus, when she was young, was known for her, ah, free ways. She became pregnant, of course. Normally she would have been sent away to have the baby.” He turned back to Winifred Kraus, speaking very gently. “But your father didn’t send you away, did he? He had a different way of dealing with the problem. With theshame. ”

  Tears now welled out of the old woman’s eyes and she bowed her head. There was a long silence. And in that silence Sheriff Hazen exhaled loudly, as the realization hit him.

  Corrie looked over at him. The sheriff’s head was swathed in bandages, which were soaked red around his missing ear. His eyes were blackened, his cheeks bruised and puffy. “Oh, my God,” he murmured.

  “Yes,” Pendergast said, glancing at Hazen. “The father, with his fanatical, hypocritical piety, locked her and her sin away in the cave.”

  He turned back to Winifred. “You had the baby in the cave. After a time, you were let out to rejoin the world. But not your baby. He, the sinful issue, had to remain in the cave. And that’s where you were forced to raise him.”

  He stopped briefly. Winifred remained silent.

  “And yet, after a time, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea, did it? Completely sheltered from the wicked world like that. In a way, it was a mother’s dream come true.” Pendergast’s voice was calm, soothing. “You would always have your little boy with you. As long as he was in the cave, he could never leave you. Never would he leave home or fall into the ways of the world; never would he leave you for another woman; never would he abandon you—as your mother once abandoned you. You were doing it toprotect him from the opprobrium of the world, weren’t you? He would always need you, depend on you, love you. He would be yours . . . forever.”

  The tears were now flowing freely down the old lady’s cheeks. Her head was swaying sadly.

  Hazen’s eyes were open, staring at Winifred Kraus. “How could you—?”

  But Pendergast continued in the same soothing tone of voice. “May I ask what his name was, Miss Kraus?”

  “Job,” she murmured.

  “A biblical name. Of course. And an appropriate one, as it turned out. There, in the cave, you raised him. He grew to be a big man, a strong man, enormously strong, because the only way to move about in his world was by climbing. Job never had a chance to play with children his own age. He never went to school. He barely learned how to talk. In fact, he never evenmet another human being for the first fifty-one years of his life except for you. No doubt he was a boy with above-average intelligence and strong creative impulses, but he grew up virtually unsocialized as a human being. You visited him from time to time, when it was safe. You read to him. But not enough for him to learn more than rudimentary speech. And yet, in some respects, he was a quick boy. A desperately creative boy. Look what he was able to learn by himself—lighting a fire, making clever things with his hands, tying knots, creating whole worlds out of little things he found in the cave around him.

  “Perhaps at some point you realized you were doing wrong by keeping him in the cave—away from sunlight, civilization, human contact, social interaction—but by then, of course, it would have seemed too late.”

  The old lady remained bowed, weeping silently.

  Hazen exhaled again: a long, pent-up breath. “But he got out,” he said hoarsely. “The son of a bitch got out. And that’s when the murders began.”

  “Exactly,” said Pendergast. “Sheila Swegg, digging at the Mounds, uncovered the ancient Indian entrance to the cave. The back door. Which also happened to be used by the Ghost Warriors when they ambushed the Forty-Fives. It had been blocked off from the inside, when the warriors went back into the cave and committed ritual suicide after the attack. But Swegg, digging in the Mounds, found it. To her sorrow.

  “It must have been a monumental shock for Job when Swegg wandered into his cave. He had never met another human being besides his mother. He had no idea they evenexisted. He killed her, in fear, no doubt unintentionally. And then he found the freshly cut opening Swegg had made. And for the first time, he climbed out into a vast and wondrous new world. What a moment that must have been! Because you never told him about the world above, did you, Miss Kraus?”

  She slowly shook her head.

  “So Job emerged from the cave. It would have been night. He looked up and saw the stars for the first time. He looked around and saw the dark trees along the creek; heard the wind moving through the endless fields of corn; smelled the thick humid air of the Kansas summer. How different from the enclosing darkness in which he had spent half a century! And then perhaps, far away, across the dark fields, he saw the lights of Medicine Creek itself. In that moment, Miss Kraus, you lost all control of him. Just as happens to every mother. But in your case, Jobwas over fifty years old. He had grown into a powerful—and transcendentally warped—human being. And the genie could not be put back in the bottle. Job had to come out, again and again, and explore this new world.” Pendergast’s voice trailed off into the chill darkness.

  A small sob escaped from the old lady. The room fell silent. Outside, the wind was slowly dying. A distant rumble of thunder sounded, like an afterthought. Finally, she spoke: “When the first lady was killed, I had no idea it was my Job. But then . . . Then hetold me. He was so excited, so happy. Hetold me about the world he’d found—as if he didn’t know I already knew of it. Oh, Mr. Pendergast, he didn’t mean to kill anyone, he really didn’t. He was just trying to play. I tried to explain to him, but he just didn’tunderstand —” She choked on a sob.

  Pendergast waited a moment and then continued. “As he grew, you didn’t need to visit him as often. You brought him his food and supplies in bulk once or twice a week, I imagine, which would explain where he got the butter and sugar. By that time he was almost self-sufficient. The cave system was his home. He had taught himself a great deal over the years, skills that he needed to survive in the cave. But where he was most damaged was in the area of human morals. He didn’t know right from wrong.”

  “I tried, oh, how Itried to explain those things to him!” Winifred Kraus burst out, rocking back and forth.

  “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 s
trict 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.

  She turned the bills over thoughtfully in her hands. Pendergast had stayed in town the last week, working with Hazen and the state police to wrap up the evidentiary phase of the case. He had called to say he was leaving tomorrow, early, and said he wanted to say goodbye before he left—and collect his cell phone. That was what he really wanted, she knew, the cell phone.

  He’d already been by the hospital several times to see her. He had been very solicitous and kind; and yet, somehow, she’d hoped for more. She shook her head. What did she expect—that he’d take her with him, make her his permanent assistant? Ridiculous. Besides, he seemed increasingly eager to leave, citing some pressing matter waiting for him back in New York. He’d taken several calls on his cell phone from a man named Wren, but then he’d always left the room and she’d never caught what was said. Anyway, it didn’t really matter. He was going away, and in two more weeks high school would begin again. Senior year, her last in Medicine Creek. One last year of hell.

  At least there wouldn’t be any more trouble from Sheriff Hazen. Funny, he’d saved her life and now he seemed to have taken some kind of almost paternal interest in her. She had to admit he had been pretty cool when she’d visited him that day she left the hospital. He’d even apologized—not in so many words, of course, but still it just about floored her. She had thanked him for saving her life. He’d shed a few tears at that, said he hadn’t done nearly enough, that he’d done nothing. The poor man. He was still really broken up about Tad.

  She looked down at the money. Tomorrow, on her way out, she’d tell Pendergast what she planned to do with it.

  The idea had formed slowly, over those days she’d spent in the hospital. In a way, she was surprised she hadn’t thought of it before. She had two weeks before school, she had money, and she was free: the sheriff had dropped all charges. Nothing was keeping her here: she had no friends to speak of, no job, and if she stuck around, her mother would wheedle the money out of her sooner or later.

  Not that she had any illusions, not even when the idea first came to her. She knew that when she found him he’d probably turn out to be one of those guys who couldn’t seem to get it together: a loser. After all, he’d married her mother and then split, leaving both of them in the lurch. He’d never paid child support, never visited, never written—at least, that she could be sure of. He wouldn’t exactly be a Fred MacMurray.

  It didn’t matter. He was her father. In her gut, this seemed like the right thing to do. And now she had the money and the time to do it.

  It wouldn’t be hard to find him. Her mother’s en
dless complaints had the unintentional side effect of keeping her informed of his progress. After bouncing around the Midwest he had settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he worked doing brake jobs for Pep Boys. How many Jesse Swansons could there be in Allentown? She could drive there in a couple of days. The money Pendergast had paid her would cover gas, tolls, motels, with a nice cushion in the very likely event that some unexpected car repairs came up.

  Even if he turned out to be a loser, her memories of him were good memories. He wasn’t a jerk, at least. When he was there he’d been a good father, taking her out to the movies and miniature golf, always laughing, always having fun. What did it mean, anyway, to be a loser? The kids at school thought she was a loser, too. Hehad loved her, she felt sure . . . even if he did leave her alone with a horrible drunken witch.

  Don’t get your hopes up, Corrie,she reminded herself.

  She folded the bills, stuffed them into her pants pocket. From beneath her bed she pulled out her plastic suitcase, plopped it on the bed, opened it up, and began throwing clothes in. She’d leave first thing in the morning, before her mother woke up, say goodbye to Pendergast, and be on her way.

  The suitcase was soon packed. Corrie shoved it back under her bed, lay down, and in an instant was asleep.

  She awoke in the stillness of night. All was dark. She sat up, looking around groggily. Something had awakened her. It couldn’t be her mother, she was working the night shift at the club, and—

  From directly outside her window came a gurgle, a chattering noise, a soft thump. Instantly, the grogginess went away, replaced by terror.

  And then there was a splutter and a hiss, and a patter of drops began falling lightly against the side of the trailer.

  She glanced at the clock: 2A.M. She sank back on the bed, almost laughing out loud with relief. This time, it reallywas Mr. Dade’s sprinkler system.