A Murder of Crows

This is a story about murder… a murder of crows that is. More specifically, the gathering of crows that I see every day on my walk home from the bookshop where I work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yesterday there were twelve, today there are eighteen.

I am a writer you see. Well, as much as a fourteen-year-old could consider themselves a writer. Crime, sci-fi, adventure, even the occasional, commercially popular romance, though I have no experience in any of them… especially the latter. I scribble down my observations in my little black Moleskin notebook, the one that fits ever so conveniently in my cargo pant pocket. A fashion choice my older sister, Savannah, would highly disapprove of… had she been around recently to notice. But she hasn’t been, so I remain the weird and unfashionable little sister.

As it would turn out, besides my lack of fashion sense, I also have a slight case of OCD. The kind where a doctor had to prescribe medication, not the exaggeratory kind when people say they have a messy desk or mismatched socks. It was a fun little tidbit my parents discovered when I was about four years old. I would refuse to go to sleep until I counted every star in the sky… you could imagine how difficult that made bedtime.

That’s probably why no one believed my daily ramblings of the murder of crows that continuously waited, perched along the telephone wire alongside Route 12, near where the creek meets the State Park, increasing in numbers, and dare I say it, fervent demeanor each and every day. “Oh Madison,” they would say, “writing another one of your little stories again?” I wrote this in my notebook as well… especially the backhanded remark about them being little.

Days tended to be hot in Sedona, Arizona. A dry heat. The kind where you knew you should be sweating, but the lack of humidity in the air wouldn’t allow it. That’s one of the reasons why my parents decided to move here about seven years ago, right before I turned seven myself. They didn’t like the cold, wet, dreary nature of Seattle. There was another reason why parents needed to move… Seattle held too many bad memories.

My sister wasn’t a fan of the change of scenery. At the time of the move she was fourteen, just starting high school, destined to be prom queen or an Instagram influencer or whatever those types of girls wished to be. I am not one of them, so I couldn’t tell you. There’s something else you should know. Savannah and I had a brother between us, Austin. He died at the age of two, a few months after I was born. I think my sister secretly blames herself for the ‘incident’. And from the stories I’ve heard, she has every reason to feel that way. Not that I hold it against her, she was only a kid herself when it happened.

The story goes, she was supposed to be watching Austin in the bathtub while my mom changed me, and my dad was at work. But the doorbell rang. It was a friend of hers from school, wanting to talk about Ezra who apparently had a huge crush on her. She had left for what was only a few minutes, ran back to the bathroom and he was floating in the bathtub.

Savannah never really got over that, no one did. Things change significantly for everyone in the family after the ‘incident’. Savannah grew distant, always partying, skipping school, meeting up with random guys and getting into all around trouble. I guess she figured she couldn’t feel any worse about herself. Or maybe she just wanted to feel something besides grief.

My parents were sad, devastated, but they tried not place blame on Savannah, or themselves really, and instead focused all their efforts on me. Making sure I was the perfect child. And that’s what I had to be. I made straight A’s, I played the clarinet, I was on the swim team. Anything they could do to give me the perfect life that their son missed out on and that their other daughter wanted no part of.

Back in the present, days passed and Savannah still hadn’t checked in. This wasn’t a total shock. She’d always go a few days without calling, months without coming by, especially if there was a new guy in her life. But this time felt different. She hadn’t called “Daddy” to ask him for money and she hadn’t updated her Instagram in over two weeks. She may not speak to us on a daily or even weekly basis, but her 8k followers was a different story. This is when I started to worry. Maybe she was making her own money? Was she making money from endorsements? Was she being a cliché and working as some podunk diner? …Was she happy?

I told my parents my concerns about Savannah, but they just shrugged me off. “She will come home when she’s ready, you know your sister,” they’d say. And they were right about that. I did know my sister, and this was not like her. I sent her multiple texts, I even called her. I was desperate. But they went unanswered.

The next Tuesday on my way home from the bookshop, there were twenty crows lurking on the telephone pole, with another eight circling the air. Suspicious. Maybe something died out there? The investigator in me wanted to see what these birds were circling, watching ever so closely. But the fear in me wanted to keep walking. But I could hear Savannah’s voice in my head, “Don’t be such a baby all the time. You want to write, you need to experience the world and you can’t do that if you’re scared.” So, I decided to be as brave as my sister said I should be.

I clutched my pepper spray that was attached in my keychain, ready to use it If necessary. I counted my steps from the road, just in case I needed to know how many it took to get back if it got too dark. One, two, three… I got up to sixteen before I hit the creek. The crows above me cawed as I got closer, circling me now. There was something up ahead... there with ten more crows on the ground picking at something. I held on even more tightly to my pepper spray. “Be brave Madison,” I heard Savannah’s voice in my head again. As I crept closer I saw what it was that birds were picking at… it was a person.

“Shoo! Get out of here!” I screamed as I ran towards the person lying on the ground, frantically waving my arms to scare away the birds. Jumping across the small creek to get to where the person laid. The birds weren’t very scared and instead, feverishly flapped their wings around me. But I didn’t care, someone was in trouble and I had to help them.

“Are you okay?” I asked breathlessly. But as I got closer I realized it wasn’t a person. It was a body. A dead one at that.

I guess a part of me knew this was a possibility, when I came out here. And an even bigger part of me, down in the depths of my soul, knew what was going to happen when I turned the body over on its back.

I turned it over and gasped. I couldn’t catch my breath. And when I did no words would come out. I backed away trying to scream, trying to do anything, I tripped over some rocks and fell backwards into the creek. But I couldn’t look anywhere else but what laid in front of me. “Be brave Madison,” Savannah’s voice said. And I finally screamed.

Savannah’s body had been at the creek for eleven days. At least that’s what the police I had told my parents days later. She wasn’t killed there. No, she had been murdered somewhere else and dumped there, in hopes the wildlife would clean up the mess for the killer. It had started to. The killer was some guy she had been seeing. Apparently, he had been beating her because she was getting too popular on social media, making too much money, afraid she was going to leave him. When she finally tried to defend herself, he accidentally killed her. “It was an accident,” he had told the investigators in tears, “it was just an accident.”

I guess in the end, it wasn’t a murder of crows, but a wake of vultures, which is depressingly fitting.

I didn’t write once during that month after the investigation. Not once. How could I? I couldn’t even sleep. I counted the stars instead. But after a lot of grieving, and even more therapy, I went back to the bookstore.

On the way to the store, I walked past the place where I found Savannah’s body. There were no longer any ravens on the telephone pole, but there was a fox slinking around the tall grass that hid the creek. The fox was Savannah’s ‘spirit animal’ and that sparked my imagination once again. Instinctively, I reached into my pocket to pull out my black notebook. But it wasn’t there. Then it hit me. I had lost it. I lost it the day I found Savannah’s body. It must have fallen out when I fell.

I had to get it. This wasn’t a question. That notebook held everything, it held all my memories, my dreams, my fears. The fox ran into the brush and I knew that was sign to go in after it. I counted my steps. One, two, three… all the way up to sixteen. I replayed the scene in my head and went to where I fell. I dug through the wet grass and found my notebook. It was wet, pretty much destroyed, but I hugged it tightly anyway.

As I turned around to head back, I saw the fox dash into a small patch of mismatched grass, as it wanted to show me something that was hiding in there. ‘Be brave, Madison’, but this time, it was my voice. I walked toward the spot as the fox darted away. As I lifted the patches of earth, I saw something familiar, Savannah’s purse, it was her favorite Chanel bag my grandmother got for her birthday. I guess these small-town cops had better things to do than search the area. Maybe since it was such a cut and dry case: Another pretty girl who lost her way.

Apparently, that murderer boyfriend of hers wasn’t very smart either. Her wallet, ID and car keys were gone. But what Savannah loved about this purse were the secret pockets. It’s where she would store her weed, condoms and cigarettes. I opened the zipper, hoping to find some evidence that Savannah was happy, at least for a moment.

Inside, I found a pictured folded in fourths. It was crumbled, but there was no mistaking what it was. It was a family picture of the five of us. My parents, Savannah, Austin and I, probably the only one we had. On the back, there was a note, it said.

“If there is anyone who will discover this, it’s you Madison. If something should happen to me, know that I was brave. Don’t be sad. Now, go write the next best-seller. -Savannah.”

Below that, there was a code “AUSTIN02!!”.

I slung the purse over my shoulder and thought about the code my walk back to the bookshop. But then it hit me. It was a password. But to what? And how would it help me? Facebook? An email? A bank account! I pulled out my phone and pulled up the family bank where my parents opened accounts for when we turned thirteen. Three email combinations later and… b ingo.

Inside the bank account was twenty thousand dollars.