Page 102 of A River of Crows

Jay had started writing Caroline letters again when his trial began. Letters begging her for a chance to talk. Letters asking why she sat on the State’s side. Because no matter what he’d done to her, she had to know he’d never purposely hurt Ridge. A letter for almost every day of the trial. She had a letter for him too, but she was saving it for today, for after the verdict. Walt would deliver it to his cell. She scribbled it on her yellow legal pad while waiting for the jury.

Jay,

A crow never forgets, and neither do I.

Caroline

The judge entered the courtroom, then the jury a few minutes later. Jay stood. Caroline noted how the jurors looked past him or down at their laps. That was a good sign.

“We, the jury, find the defendant, Jay Greggory Hadfield, guilty of murder in the second degree.”

Jay’s knees buckled, Anna cried out, and the bang of the gavel echoed throughout the courtroom. Anna’s father had to drag her out. Jay’s eyes filled with tears as the bailiff secured his cuffs. The idiot public defender put a hand on Jay’s back, shaking his head as if the jury somehow got it all wrong.

Caroline looked up in silent prayer. Guilty, guilty, guilty. It was over. She was free of him. Free of him forever. Now her life, the life that Jay Hadfield had hijacked, could begin again.

“I swear, she sounds happy about all this, Vince. It’s sick.”

“What did you expect? That she’d be angry that her plan, that your plan together, worked out?”

Libby pulled a mug out of the cupboard. “Well, not angry, but I just expected this would be difficult. Instead, she’s relishing in his fall.”

“And you aren’t?”

Libby slammed the cupboard. “Of course not. I mean, I hate what he’s done, obviously.”

“If he’s done it.” Vince crossed his arms. “Ridge is holding his story.”

Libby swallowed but seemed to have a permanent lump in her throat these days. If Jay hadn’t been abusive, then her best friend had used her.

“Hopefully, now that the trial is over, Caroline will put her children before her own bloodlust,” Vince said.

“Yeah.” Libby bit her lip. The trial was over. That meant they didn’t have much time left with Ridge. “I’m going to miss him so much.”

“Me too,” Vince said. “He’s a good boy. And so smart. Let’s set something up for college for him.”

“We can’t very well do that for him and not do the same for Sloan.”

“Okay.” Vince took his glasses off. “Let’s do the same for Sloan.”

Despite her husband’s generosity, Libby still felt a hollow feeling in her chest. College was important, but a stable home life more so. Maybe Caroline just needed time. With the trial behind her, she could focus on Sloan, focus on finding them a place in Ithaca. Still, Libby couldn’t shake the feeling that none of this had ever been about Sloan and Ridge.

Now that Jay was sentenced, Caroline knew she should make some phone calls about apartments and jobs in Ithaca. She doubted she would get hired at the Cornell Lab with only a bachelor’s degree, but she could work on her master's and get a job teaching high school science or something.

She just wasn’t in the mood to make phone calls today. She was in the mood to go to the creek. There was nothing about Mallowater she would miss when she left, except for the crows. Sure, there were roosts in New York, even bigger ones than this, but they were city roosts. The birds gathered near courthouses, prisons, or traffic lights. In some towns, they made such noise and left such a mess that mayors tried to get rid of them—air cannons, silver mylar balloons, lasers, plastic owls. Caroline guessed most people only liked their own noise and their own mess. Not that crows were treated much better here. She remembered Jay telling her last year that a hunting magazine had encouraged its readers to take up crow shooting to cure cabin fever. Caroline wondered now just where he’d seen that magazine. Probably at Anna’s house. Anna Hadfield seemed like the type to have an extra freezer in the garage stuffed with a dismembered deer. To think Jay lived a life with each of them was mystifying.

Once she arrived at Crow’s Nest Creek, Caroline made her way to a tree that held a large nest. The last time she’d been here, she’d seen four speckled blue eggs but couldn’t get close to them with the mama crow around. Caroline understood that, understood the fierce instinctual need to protect your offspring. That’s why she’d done all this for Sloan and Ridge.

The cry of the baby crows filled the air before Caroline got close. She climbed a nearby tree to get the best view of the large bowl-shaped nest. Two crows, likely a mother and father, were feeding their nestlings. One noticed Caroline but didn’t seem bothered. They know my face, she realized. They remember me.

Caroline watched the parents feed their babies what looked like chunks of roadkill. She understood that the red gape of young birds was a stimulus that turned on the feeding behavior of adult birds. So much so that the chicks became anonymous mouths to feed. When she was in college, a scientist had swapped chicks from different broods, and the adult crows didn’t seem to care, if they even noticed. They would later recognize their own fledglings by voice, but apparently not their nestlings. When there were screaming red mouths open, you fed them, whether they were your chicks or not.

The instinct wasn’t so different for human females, really. That’s how Caroline knew Libby would help her once she heard Sloan and Ridge were in danger. No, they were not Libby’s flesh and blood, but when children were screaming, you did what you could to soothe them. It was innate.

Eventually, the feeding ceased, and the baby crows grew silent. The smaller adult, likely the mother, stayed in the nest, but the other flew away. Probably to forage for more food. These sleeping baby birds would be hungry and screaming again within twenty minutes. Papa crow didn’t have time to go to another nest; that was certain.

Crows could do two things at the same time. Their two-sided vocal organ made them able to sing two songs at once. They could sleep with one eye open, keeping half their brain active to detect approaching predators. But they didn’t build two nests with two mates. Not even the cleverest of crows were that duplicitous.

Caroline realized she had to let it go. Jay had been caught and caged. She had to think about herself now . . . and the kids. They would get out of this town, out of this trap, while Anna and her children would remain chained, too weak to fly free.

---