Seeing Crows

by Matthew Miles

  “I know,” he said, and I thought he choked back a sob. “My sister told me Charlie was having problems after the abortion, especially with her boyfriend.”

  “She said he was abusive,” I offered. “That’s the only other thing I can think of. He followed her here? He saw her out there, hanging out with me? He took her back out there? Why didn’t he come after me?”

  “The police are looking for him now,” Dr. Phillips said. “Person of interest.”

  Nice term, I thought.

  *10*

  “They should just let us all go home,” Marianne said, distraught.

  “We can’t. Jones is a suspect,” Winewright snapped.

  I was convinced he was jealous that I had had some kind of early morning escapade with Charlie, one detail at least that was confirmed by police in a sea of rumors circulating the camp.

  Dalia scowled at him. “We’re all suspects,” she hissed at him. “Anybody here could have done it. That’s why nobody’s allowed to leave.”

  We sat around a campfire down by the edge of the lake, crouched on the ground and hugging our own legs, looking alternatively at each other and off into space. No one knew really what to say. The professors had a counselor brought in, who was speaking to the students up at the main lodge now, and eventually we would have to go up too.

  But no head shrink makes the sight of a mangled human go away.

  “What kind of sick fucker?” I asked. “Would kill something that beautiful?”

  “She might have done it herself,” Dalia reminded us.

  “I could have cheered her up,” Winewright said.

  “Shut up, asshole,” Marianne said in disgust.

  “Well, obviously, Jones couldn’t do it,” he sneered.

  “You should really shut up, Winewright,” Dalia snapped.

  “Why, you going to jump off of a waterfall too?” he asked her derisively.

  “What are you saying?” she asked, her mouth curling in anger.

  “Seems it’s what bitches obsessed with Jones do,” he said, lashing out at her.

  “Then maybe you’ll be next,” Dalia snarled.

  “Let’s go up to the main lodge,” Marianne said, squirming uncomfortably. “We have to meet with the counselor soon.”

  “I’ll put the fire out,” I muttered, “and meet you up there.”

  Everyone climbed to their feet, and trudged off toward the camp, leaving me blessedly alone.

  *11*

  I left the counseling session not feeling much better. It was late in the evening by now and it was hours since I had found Charlie’s mangled body sprawled across the rocks near the waterfall. It consumed all of my thoughts, and the whole camp’s, for that matter, throughout the uncomfortable heat of the day. I was drained. I slipped out the door as soon as the group session ended. We were invited to stay for personal sessions, or to come back the next day, but I had no interest.

  I heard Dalia say my name but I acted like I didn’t hear and shot straight down the steps and onto the dark lawn. I didn’t want any more company; I just wanted to be alone and to rest. I made it back to my cabin without interruption, but saw a light on inside when I got there.

  Lester was there, laying on his back on top of the blankets, wearing headphones, an iPod sitting on his chest. He was rocking his head and drumming the sides of his thighs. I could hear some industrial metal or something blasting behind it. He pulled his headphones off as I flopped down on my bed.

  “Yo, is that some shit that happened today or what?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I groaned. “Where the hell have you been, man?” I asked. “Didn’t you have to go to that counseling or whatever?”

  “Ha,” he snorted. “I was up at the one with the kids. This is way more fucked up than I could have imagined, so I showed up with a small digital and was filming the group counseling with the students. All discreet, though. They’re probably all minors and shit, so I could get in trouble or something, I’m sure. Man, they’re all freaking weirded out and going nuts about this thing. I was going to stick around and shoot your meeting too, but that counselor lady thought I was sticking around because I needed a private session or something, so I ducked out.”

  “Damn,” I said, not really in the mood for dealing with a roommate, or an asshole. “Nothing like secretly recording other people’s pain.”

  “Shit,” he laughed, pulling his headphones back on. “There shouldn’t be any expectation of privacy left in the world at this point, so what the hell.”

  There certainly wasn’t any privacy for me, I thought, as Lester returned to his incessant drumming. In a day I had gone from virtual obscurity to nowhere to hide, nowhere to go to be alone, no way to escape the police spotlight. There were no grays left in the world, it seemed - only extremes. At least that’s all that registers in our minds anymore.

  *12*

  After an hour or so of Lester drumming his thighs along to the shitty music blasting out of his headphones, I found myself unable to sleep, despite my exhaustion. I was still lying on top of my blankets, fully dressed, so I just stood up all of a sudden when I couldn’t take it anymore, slid into my sandals and walked out the door. His eyes were closed and I don’t know if he even noticed me leave. It seemed obvious he wasn’t so conscious of others, unless, perhaps, he was behind a video camera.

  I strolled down to the lake and across the beach, dropping myself onto one of the logs circling the fire pit. An orange bed of coals still glowed, probably from earlier, when Winewright, Marianne, Dalia and I had sat here and argued with each other for little reason. I was supposed to have put the fire out. Some fires just keep burning. The counseling session had actually helped us stop bickering at each other, and I was much more relaxed now, especially after leaving Lester’s incessant drumming behind.

  I stared into the seething molten wood of the coals and breathed a deep sigh of relief. It was the only sound I heard for moments before I became aware of splashing out in the lake. I looked up and could now make out, with the partial moonlight, someone swimming toward the shore. It was kind of freaky. I looked all around me and noticed, for the first time, some clothes littered about ten feet away between the fire pit and the lake. It was a tiny pair of jeans and a little T-shirt. A figure came strolling up out of the lake and toward me, a small-framed girl in a swimsuit, reaching up to pull her long wet hair back. I watched her walk toward me, not sure if she knew I was waiting by the dwindling fire, consumed as she was with her hair.

  She stooped and picked up her shirt, standing back up and pulling it over head, and then bent down and grabbed her jeans. It was only then she noticed me sitting there.

  “Hello,” she said, timidly, holding her jeans in front of her like a shield.

  I couldn’t tell who it was at all, so I assumed it was one of the students, maybe one I hadn’t met or something.

  “It’s Tilly,” she said. “I’m in your group.”

  The tiny redhead. She must have noticed that I was staring blankly at her. She wasn’t recognizable, with her hair soaking wet, in only the dim light of a dwindling fire and distant stars.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “I didn’t realize that was you.”

  “Probably because of the partial nudity,” she demurred, only half smiling, the other half trying to hide herself in some discomfort.

  “It does create a different impression,” I acknowledged. “What are you doing down here so late?”

  “Oh, you know, looking for machete-wielding children,” she joked.

  I liked her humor. My mood was still heavy, though, so I wasn’t much for laughter.

  “How about you?” she asked? “Can’t sleep?”

  “Tough day,” I said dryly.

  “It’s a lot of work being accused of murder,” she conceded.

  More dry humor. I smirked this time, but mostly just let out a deep sigh.

  “Do you think people can do bad things even if they don’t realize it?” I asked.

  “What do you m
ean?” she asked, looking at me sideways like I was the Son of Sam.

  “I mean, we might think we’re doing good things,” I tried to explain. “But maybe there’s some negative cause and effect that we aren’t aware of, and bad things happen because of it.”

  “Sounds like good old guilt,” she suggested.

  “I’m feeling plenty of that,” I admitted.

  “Are you talking about today?” she asked, sitting on the log across from me. “Like you think it’s your fault?”

  “It’s a little hard to shake the feeling.”

  “You know, I kind of understand,” she said, a crack in her voice betraying her sincerity, the dry humor evaporating. “My sister died the same way. It brings back a lot of painful memories.”

  “The same way?” I asked, imagining her sister mutilated on the rocks.

  “She killed herself.”

  I was a little surprised by the frankness, but also Tilly’s assumption that Charlie had committed suicide.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, unable to think of anything that expressed any stronger emotion.

  “She was seventeen,” Tilly explained. “I was fourteen then. For love. She killed herself for love.”

  “That must have been tough,” I suggested.

  “It’s strange because now I’m older than she was, but it’s like she’s still always older and smarter and more grown-up than me in my mind, so I still feel like her little sister, like I haven’t learned some terrible secret she knew.”

  “Maybe you’ve already figured out something that she never knew,” I suggested, feeling like a big brother. “Maybe you’re smarter and more grown-up than her already. She was a kid that didn’t know how to feel, how to understand her emotions. She never made it past being a young child. You’ve grown up, you survived all of that.”

  “But I’ve never known feelings like that,” she said. “Feelings that could kill a person.”

  “Love doesn’t kill,” I explained. “That’s something much different than love.”

  “Did you love Charlie?” she asked.

  “I didn’t know her,” I said. “Maybe I could have.”

  “Have you ever felt love like that?” she asked. “I want to know. I’m writing a story about love. But I don’t know what love is. My sister killed herself over love,” she repeated. “How can she have killed herself over love and I don’t even know what it feels like?”

  “Love just finds you when you’re ready,” I told her. “You kind of have to let it just happen.”

  “That’s just one of those things people say,” she answered. “Some people still end up alone.”

  “Just be yourself,” I told her. “You will get your chances, make mistakes, learn from your experiences and get it right some day. That’s just the way it works.”

  It was easier advice to give than believe, from a man who felt like he hadn’t any human contact in two years, except to bump into strangers on crowded streets without even bothering to excuse himself. And any opportunities to break free of that seemed cursed to end in tragedies.

  Not tragedy. Tragedies.

  Like I actually did cause bad things to happen.

  A dark silhouette suddenly emerged from the darkness of the trailhead.

  “Well, look who’s decided to join us,” Dalia chided, walking into the ring of logs and slumped down on the ground next to me. She wrapped an arm around my leg and kissed my knee. She nestled a big bottle of wine in her lap, a cheap jug of Carlo Rossi.

  “Tilly and I were enjoying the quiet, fresh air of the lake,” she told me. “I decided to get her drunk and have retrieved this large bottle of wine for said purpose.”

  “How very responsible of you,” I said.

  “Listen,” Dalia explained. “I ran into her after our counseling thing and she was upset. She lost her sister before. We’ve been down here talking for a while. A little wine will put us to bed.”

  “Please,” Tilly chimed in.

  I couldn’t argue with that and took the Dixie cup of red wine that Dalia offered me.

  “What a fucked up way to start writing camp,” I said, tossing back the whole Dixie cup.

  Dalia poured me more as I scraped up some twigs and small branches and put them on the fire, re-kindling the flame. It crackled with new life as worked on the bottle of wine.

  “So, are you writing something now?” I asked Tilly, trying to get the topic back to something I was actually hired to counsel for.

  “Don’t tell him, he won’t publish your story anyway,” Dalia said.

  “Maybe hers is good,” I shot back.

  “Ha,” Dalia said laughing.

  “I’m writing a romance,” Tilly said.

  “Like white knights, heaving breasts and panting heroines?” I asked sarcastically.

  “No,” she assured me, annoyed. “I’m trying to write about love that moves people to do things they didn’t think they were capable of.”

  “Hooray to that,” Dalia said, lighting a joint and passing it to Tilly.

  “What kind of stuff do you write?” Tilly asked Dalia, taking a hit off the dope.

  World’s best counselor.

  “I’m interested in the moment where mundane life transcends into something mystical,” she said, turning serious. “Where dull, gray lives burst into fireballs of magnificence.” She laughed at that, toking the joint as Tilly handed it back to her.

  “How very ambitious of you,” I said, finishing another Dixie cup of wine and accepting the joint from Dalia.

  Dalia leaned over to pour me another. I slid off of the log onto the ground next to her, my coordination diminishing with the wine, tension evaporating into the humidity. Dalia giggled as she spilled some onto my hand, slurping it up with her mouth and eyeing me with a mischievous promise.

  “So what do you like to write about?” she asked me, looking down up from my hand, smiling.

  “I’m trying to nail the moment normal, good people do bad things, the finite line that exists between good intentions and bad and what propels someone to cross it. Kind of like what you just said, but when the mundane instead transforms into something intense, and often ugly.”

  “Yeah, except that would be the opposite of what I just said,” Dalia laughed.

  We all giggled and just kind of fell silent after that, each lost in our own stories. Dalia leaned against me, her head on my shoulder, her left arm dangling over my leg, a loose embrace that soothed me after the terror I had been through that day. I contented myself to drift off into a dreamy comfort, my worries vanishing for a moment, at least.

  “Come down here, Jones,” Dalia said, pulling me into her arms, an invitation too tempting to ignore. Her affection comforted me, the guileless way she revealed her attraction to me. So I surrendered to it, and as she curled against me and the summer heat intensified, I could only pray this didn’t somehow lead to her demise.

  Tilly was still with us, herself seemingly ready to succumb to the comfort of the ground and sleep.

  I prayed that was the case as my face lay scant inches from Dalia’s, our noses brushing, her glazed and twinkling eyes staring into mine, her mouth falling the slightest bit open.

  But by then we all already heard footsteps - heavy, fast footsteps, thumping down one of the trails toward the lakeside clearing.

  Fight or flight kicked in, all three of us shooting glances at each other. Our individual fears amplified as our eyes met, panicking us all at once, all of a sudden. And just like that, we all scattered in different directions, toward the shadows ringing the wooded edges of the beach.

  After all, Charlie was killed that morning.

  “Who’s down here?” I heard Dr. Phillips say, shining a flashlight around as he emerged from the trees.

  I huddled alone in the dark, holding my breath, willing everyone all of my heart, and brainpower, to stay put and quiet. We had gotten Tilly, a minor, drunk and high; we could get in serious trouble for that, especially with all of the police scrutiny already
on me.

  No one responded to him, and I thanked God, even as I cursed Dr. Phillips as he stood there for what seemed forever. I was certain I had been about to screw Dalia, as soon as Tilly had passed out. About to finally get laid. So I cursed Phillips, and my twisted luck, clearly the centerpiece of a relentless, cruel, cosmic joke.

  *13*

  I woke up, my heading pounding and my mind groggy, as the sun crawled over me, confused to find my face in the sand, my mouth gritty with its fine particles. Dalia was nestled against me; sweat from the morning heat was already collecting into a slick sheet on our skin. Memories of hiding on the edge of the beach crept into my consciousness, how we had ducked along the tree line, in the shadows, crouched there while Dr. Phillips shone his light around the beach. Dalia and I eventually found each other and waited for Phillips to leave. We lay there so long we fell asleep.

  Not that it had taken long, with the wine and the pot, and everything we’d been through that day.

  I separated myself from Dalia, waking her some and rolled to a sitting position. I hoped nobody had seen us, either last night or even sleeping here this morning. I looked for Tilly, who had fled a different direction when we all scattered. I was afraid Molly would report that Tilly had never returned last night, and this would come back on me and Dalia – getting her drunk and high. I could lose my job. I scanned the sand around us and walked toward the fire pit, expecting to see her nestled up somewhere, but I didn’t. I did, however, see her clothing – jeans scattered to our left, shirt several feet from it. I frowned. Images of Tilly stumbling, wasted, only partially clothed, back to her cabin filled me with unease. I turned in circles, expanding my search further down the beach and eventually out over the water, where I saw something white floating.

  “Dalia, get up,” I ordered, kicking her roughly with my foot.

  “What?” she groaned, rolling over, holding her head?

  “Come on, get up!” I snapped.

  Dalia rose quickly to her feet, brushing sand off of her arms and chest.

  “Look,” I said, pointing.