The Painted Drum Read Online Free Page B

open, that the state police become involved.
     
    A dragnet of shotgun-armed volunteers and local police fan through the woods. Parked on this road, an officer with a vague memory of a car theft in Concord runs a check on Davan Eyke’s red car as it flashes past. Eyke is on his way up to Krahe’s, where Kendra, less boldly attired than usual and biting black paint from her nails, waits to counsel him. Apparently, they go for a walk in the woods, leaving the car in the driveway in view of Krahe’s studio. They return and then, against Krahe’s express, explicit, uncompromising, direct orders, Kendra does exactly as she pleases. The human heart is every bit as tangled as our road. She gets into the car with Eyke.
    On the computer check, the car turns up hot, stolen, and as it speeds back down from Krahe’s an hour later, the police officer puts on his siren and spins out, giving chase. There ensues a dangerous game of tag. On our narrow roads filled with hairpin turns, sudden drops, and abrupt hills, speed is a harrowing prospect. Davan Eyke tears down the highway, past his family church and the week’s wishful-thinking motto, God Cares, hangs a sharp left on Jackson Road, and jumps the car onto a narrow gravel path mainly used for walking horses. He winds up and down the hill like a slingshot, meets the wider road, then joins it and continues toward Windsor, over the world’s longest covered bridge, into Vermont where, at the first stoplight, he screeches between two cars in a sudden left-hand turn against the red. Leaving town, he pops an old man walking the road—John Jewett Tatro—high into the air. The car has vanished before Tatro rolls to the bottom of the embankment. Tatro lies there, dying among the packed brown leaves, the snow crust, the first tough shoots of trillium. No doubt, the ravens are curious. On blacktop now, Davan’s car is clocked at over a hundred miles per hour. There isn’t much the police can do but radio ahead and follow as fast as they dare.
    Another left, and it seems Davan is intent on fleeing back toward Claremont on the New Hampshire side. The police car slows as Eyke swings around a curve on two side wheels and makes for the bridge that crosses over the wide, calm Connecticut that serves as our boundary. The afternoon air is on the verge of freezing, the mud’s a slick gloss. According to the sign that blurs in Davan’s eyes, the bridge is liable to ice up before the pavement. It has. The car hits transparent black ice at perhaps 120 miles per hour and soars straight over the low guardrail. A woman in the oncoming lane says the red car travels at such a velocity it seems to gain purchase in the air and hang above the river. She also swears that she sees, before the car flies over, the white flower of a face pressing toward the back window. No one sees a thing after that, although there is a sort of witness near the scene. An early fisherman pulling his boat onto shore below the bridge is suddenly aware of a great shadow behind him, as though a cloud or bird has fallen out of the sky and touched his back lightly with its wing.
     
    Within minutes of the radio call, all of the pickups and cars on our road gather their passengers and firearms and sweep away from the dog posse to the scene of greater drama at the bridge. Although the wreckage isn’t found for days, and requires four wet-suited divers to locate and gather, the police make a visit to Krahe’s on the strength of the woman witness’s story. Fearing that Kendra has gone over the bridge as well, they take me along to question my friend.
    I wait on the edge of the field for Krahe, my hand on the stump of an old pine’s first limb. From deep in the brush, I hear the ravens, the grating haw , haw , of their announcement, and it occurs to me that he might just show up with Kendra. But he doesn’t, only shambles toward me at my call. As I walk toward Kurt, I feel for the first time in our mutual life that I am invested with a