The Face on the Wall(2)

“Of course, you don’t have anything like Annie’s artistic talent. She gets that straight from her great-grandmother. Oh, Homer, you should have seen my grandmother’s cakes. Five layers high with confectionary swans and castles and three-masted ships, all in spun sugar. She was amazing.”

Homer gave one more glance across the field as he turned the key in the ignition. “You know, that’s a hell of a big house.”

“Well, she’s just going to live in the new wing. She’s already rented the old part to a family named Gast. Nice people, she says, with a couple of little kids.”

“Well, good, maybe the rent will pay her taxes.”

As they drove away Mary caught a last glimpse of the bright new boards heaped on the ground beside Annie’s house, until they were hidden by the trees around the conservation field. Then she saw only the tractor that was turning under the remaining stalks of corn, and a couple of crows flapping low over the ground, looking for morsels turned up by the plow.





Chapter 2



There were three ravens sat in a tree,

Down adown, hey down, hey down….

Old English song




There were crows too around another house, twelve miles away, in the village of Southtown. Months had gone by. It was March, not November, a warm melting day with puddles in the ruts of the driveway.

When Pearl’s brother got out of his car and moved toward her front porch, four or five of the crows were settling in the trees, harshly cawing, as though they had flown up all at once and were just coming back down. There was no other sound but a faraway cheeping like squeaking wheels, the chatter of birds on the rusty towers of Fred Small’s sand-and-gravel company, over there to the south, beyond the farthest reach of Pearl’s land. The birds were stopping to rest on their way north, fluttering from the gravel-sorting hoppers to the crushers and back, taking possession of the abandoned quarry.

When Joe entered the house he sensed at once that something was wrong. There was a shivering in his skin, the vibration of a noise still battering the walls. With his heart in his mouth he raced up the stairs and threw open the bedroom door upon a scene of carnage.

They were both bleeding. Small held his left arm high over his head, doctoring himself with a scarf, tugging at one end with his teeth. There was no way of doctoring Pearl. She lay folded up on the floor, face down in her own blood.

Joe fell to his knees beside her, and put his hand in the bushy tangle of her yellow hair. “Pearl,” he said, “oh, Pearl.” Then he rolled her head to one side and cried out, because there was nothing left of her face but a bloody hole.

Springing to his feet, he threw himself at Small. But Pearl’s husband had finished knotting the scarf around his arm. His right hand held a revolver. Joe recognized it as the little Ruger he had bought for Pearl from a good-natured goon in an East Boston bar. He stopped short and backed up, his throat bursting with sobs.

“I thought you’d turn up,” whispered Small. “It was your idea, right? Give her a gun, she’ll kill me while I’m asleep? That’s what women do, you’re asleep in bed, they blow you away. Well, you should have done your own dirty work.” Small’s eyes were large and shiny, gleaming with miniature reflections of the bright panes of the window. “Because she made a mess of it. She stood beside the bed sniveling and crying, so I woke up, and then she couldn’t handle the fucking firearm, and she shot wild. So I grabbed it and defended myself. What else could I do? And guess what?” Small’s expression changed. He grinned and brandished the firearm. “She signed that piece of paper. Did you know that? She signed it.”

“She didn’t. She couldn’t have. You’re lying.”

Frederick Small’s wild whispering stopped. On the highway a truck went by, then another. Small lowered his wounded arm and steadied the gun. A spasm jerked in his face, and he fired.

The crash sent the crows up again from the trees, flapping their dark wings and frantically cawing.



The one of them said to his mate,

“Where shall we our breakfast take?

With a down, deny, derry, derry down, down.





Chapter 3



Once more the fisherman rowed out into the sea. Leaning over the side of his boat, he cried, “Oh, my Lord Fish! I am sorry, but my wife wants a palace.”

At once the fish rose from the water and said, “Go home, my friend. She has her palace.”



The new house was finished, and it was perfect, because Annie had designed it all by herself. For months she had worked on plans and elevations. It had been a year since she had made a single drawing for a new picture book, but that could wait. Jack and the Beanstalk had made her a lot of money, and the royalties from The Owl and the Pussy-cat were still pouring in. The new addition to her house had been expensive, but Annie was still a wealthy woman. Wisely, she had consulted her old boyfriend Burgess, that swashbuckling freelance investment broker who knew all there was to know about the stock market. She had followed his advice, and now she was set for life.