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24

THE BIRD ASSASSIN

During the summer of the previous year, after Anna Lagare goes off to Texas on her Big Dog Bulldog motorcycle, Vida gives a lot of thought to whether or not she has a realistic chance to act against the powerful individuals who have conspired to shape the future of Kettleton to the ends that most lavishly enrich them. She’s reached the conclusion that the way before her is narrow and perilous, but not hopeless. She must proceed with great caution, both to protect herself and to avoid putting anyone else in jeopardy.

At the cemetery on the day José was buried, she’d overheard one mourner telling another that one of the teenagers who’d thrown those bottles of water, Morgan Slyke, lived eleven miles out of town, on Long Valley Road. A month after Anna’s revelations, Vida drives ten miles from the Kettleton city limits before beginning to check the names on mailboxes.

The Slyke family’s white clapboard house with columned porch is well maintained but of no particular style, likewise the three-bay detached garage. Encircled by white ranch fencing, the property encompasses two or three acres of meadows.

Across the road from their residence, the land is undeveloped. Grassy hills roll up to a woodland of red oaks. On still higher ground, the evergreen forest commences.

At home once more, Vida consults her maps of the hiking trails that wind through the county. She discovers that a forest-service road will bring her to the first ridgeline of pines, about a hundred yards above where the red oaks surrender dominance.

Over the next two weeks, Monday through Friday, setting out just before dawn, Vida drives her 1950 Ford F-1 pickup along that unpaved lane, stretches of hardpan alternating with gravelstone. The half-hour journey begins in darkness and proceeds through feathery shadows branching off quills of early sunlight. After parking among the trees, she crosses the ridge on foot, descends through ranks of pines, and settles in the discreet shade of the oaks.

She has an excellent view of the distant Slyke residence that stands on the far side of Long Valley Road, and she pulls it close with high-power binoculars. Gradually she establishes the family’s routine. On weekdays, at 7:15, a man of about forty leaves in a white Ford Explorer, heading toward Kettleton. Fifteen minutes later, a woman of a similar age, wearing what appear to be pale-green medical scrubs, leaves in a Honda, also bound for Kettleton.

The sixteen-year-old son, Morgan, is the only one left at the house until his parents come home from work. The kid doesn’t have a summer job but spends the days on chores such as mowing the lawn and painting the ranch fencing. The pace at which he works suggests indolence is a strata in the bedrock of his character. Most days, he puts a beach towel on the front lawn and sunbathes in nothing but a pair of bikini briefs, sometimes also toning himself with dumbbells and wrist weights. Vida pegs him as an exhibitionist.

On both Mondays, the kid seems to be occupied with in-house chores and doesn’t come out until between two and three o’clock in the afternoon. For more than an hour, Vida watches him use a .22 rifle to shoot birds in flight, mostly crows but also hawks. Little bursts of feathers spray like small, black fireworks. Wings swoon, and bodies plummet. When he is sated with killing, he scours the property for dead birds, gathering them a half dozen at a time and carrying them to the woods behind the residence, where he tosses them away among the trees, perhaps because his parents would not approve of such slaughter.

Once Vida has established the family’s routine, she parks on the shoulder of Long Valley Road, a quarter mile from the Slyke house, and waits for the father to go to work. Remaining at a distance, she follows him into Kettleton, to the county power-and-water authority, where he parks in one of the spaces reserved for employees. The sign that heads his slot bears the name R ANDALL S LYKE .

The next morning, she follows the mother to the offices of Dr. William Polk, who is one of the town’s three dentists. Mrs. Slyke’s medical scrubs suggest she’s a dental assistant or a hygienist.

Vida takes a weekend to decide how to approach the boy when he’s home alone. He’s tall, lithe, muscular, and looks more like nineteen than sixteen. If he’s an idle narcissist assailed by violent fantasies, if he kills in excess of twenty birds in a single shooting session as a means of relieving the pressure of those dark desires, he might be dangerous should she press his psycho button.

She doesn’t want to harm Morgan Slyke, but Anna Lagare’s visit has left Vida needing to know the truth, even if she can never act on it to obtain justice. If a conversation with the boy proves to be perilous, that’s all right. She has her own strengths, and her ways. Come Monday, she will give him a chance to prove he’s righteous.