Sorrow's crown

TEN

Despite the historical fireplace, dark pine paneling, a huge finely detailed wooden globe of the ancient world, and marble chess pieces set upon a mahogany table-board, the library held all the appeal of a diorama. It lacked any real ambiance, and came off more like a setting in a wax museum.

The room spread out large as a ballroom, and guests milled as though ready for the countdown to New Year's. Built in shelving ran sixteen-feet high, with two rolling ladders on either side of the library. Instead of rare originals, most of the books were cheap facsimiles, faux-leather-bound sets of the Masterpieces of Literature, World's One Hundred Greatest Novels, encyclopedias, and a ton of outdated law books, as well as several duplicate series of novels and journals. Haines simply wanted to fill the shelves, and didn't care with what.

Chatter enveloped the room. No one seemed puzzled or surprised as to why they'd been invited here in a time of supposed grief. There was a lot of laughter. Nobody took any notice of me. Jocelyn drew attention, chins snapping up around the room. People turned and watched as she glided past. The smarm factor rose a thousand percent as wealthy single men swarmed and surrounded her. They didn't seem to mind each other. I hoped she might smile, out of courtesy, as she was offered lit cigarettes and snifters of cognac, but the band of grinning attendants couldn't garner so much as a grimace from her.

I walked among them listening to the small talk, gossip and tattling. Anna spoke with Harnes off in the farthest corner where nobody bothered them. Clearly they were in deep discussion and had been for some time, perhaps the entire evening. Harnes wore an artificial smile, his hands out in front of him hanging emptily in a gesture of unconcern. They had the ease of old friends, or very good new friends, which perhaps they were. My stomach tied into timber-hitch knots.

Sheriff Broghin glared and glowered at Oscar Kinion among a group of laughing land barons from the southern edge of the county. Oscar appeared to be enjoying the fact that he upset Broghin so much, and sat drinking and smirking a little. Still, he kept checking over his shoulder at Anna, and I could tell he was growing more and more disconcerted. Alice Conway stood alone near the globe, forlorn and on the verge of tears, also watching the corner where Harnes and my grandmother kept talking. I wondered where Brian Frost could be. Harnes hadn't made the mistake of inviting Lowell here tonight.

Others told bad jokes and discussed economics and got drunk and ate desert, and I couldn't see any way to get anything from anyone.

A woman wearing a little French maid outfit wandered among the guests serving drinks. Talk about a thankless job; she wore a bustiere and her hair up in a French twist, the little skirt and apron giving an extra-fine inch here and there. She wasn't from Burma. When she got a bit closer I saw it was Daphne Kupfer, her lips set so tightly they were colorless.

"Hi, Daphne," I said.

"Jonny," she said, and her eyes narrowed into two short angry wedges. I'd never seen anybody do it quite that way before, her entire face thinning and becoming redefined by the squint. "What are you doing here?"

"Just dropped by."

"You're not on the guest list."

"How long have you worked for Theodore Harnes?”

“Every once in a while to make some extra money." She tried to answer naturally enough but the words caught on barbs. Harnes made her wear the maid outfit in order to use her as thoroughly and openly as he could, complete with the frilly little headpiece. A punishment of some kind? For talking to me? For causing some kind of stir when he'd passed her over for the embraces of Alice Conway?

Daphne shifted nervously, hoping to recess her cleavage. "What the hell are you after?" she asked, backing away and drifting off. "Whatever it is you're just going to get yourself in trouble."

"I'm sorry," I said softly, and I was.

I could smell Oscar's aftershave from here.

Broghin and Oscar were both drunk and slurring and miffed, but appeared to have reached a deadlock. Broghin could only stick to his juvenile jealousy, and Oscar could do nothing about it but take exception and note a resentful man's grudge. "You've got no call to take that tone with me, Sheriff."

"I'll take whatever tone I want."

"Not with me you won't. I've had enough of your hateful manner."

"You have, eh?"

"You heard me, I think. You have something to say, then let's get out with it."

"I've got nothing to say."

"Hell, that much I already picked up."

"Is that a fact now?"

"It is."

Broghin mopped his brow with a wadded dirty napkin, the high-priced smooth liquor bringing out two large round red circles on his flushed cheeks. He kept blinking and looked wobbly on his feet, not nearly as angry as I was used to seeing him. He started teetering just enough to get his belly moving, picking up momentum. His heartache was evident, and I knew it wasn't all because of Anna and Oscar. It had cost him something to lock Crummler away, the joyous man he'd danced with.

"She's a fine woman," the sheriff said.

"I know it."

"And a good friend of mine."

"So she's told me, though I hardly know why."

Oscar kept glancing around at the walls as though expecting wild animals heads to suddenly appear instead of all these books. He blinked a lot too, and although he didn't teeter, he had a tremble working through his legs, as if an awful chill had grabbed hold of him and he couldn't get free.

"You don't need to know much besides that," Broghin said.

"Is that so?"

"It is."

"You always this damn sociable?"

I walked off. Alice Conway looked even more lost and scared as the night went on. She obviously wanted to talk to Harnes and continued to float around him, wafting in and out among the other guests, but she didn't want to impede on his conversation with Anna. I could only guess at what he'd make her wear if she ever made him dissatisfied. Every time Daphne spun by Alice sparks passed between them. I wondered if they had both been Harnes' lover at one time or another, and if Daphne had been completely ousted by Alice, intentionally or not, or if they'd both only been after Teddy. For some ugly reason, I also wondered if their mothers had been his lovers as well, and if, in fact, Alice and Daphne were actually his daughters.

People brushed shoulders with mine and continued talking without skipping a beat. Pompadours had sneaked back into style, and several white-haired gentlemen wore their hair up high and thick with sculpting mousse like Baptist televangelists. Conversations circulated around me, discussions ranging from stocks and politics to the latest sitcoms and sports statistics. The strata of the county could be noticed as clearly as striations in an emptied quarry. Nobody mentioned Teddy.

Time ran at a new pace as I waited for Shanks to join the party. Over an hour passed and I still felt wet from the rain. I circled back and Oscar and Broghin were talking guns and duck hunting and had reached that point of being drunk when the world is a happy place and you love absolutely everybody in it. Before long they would settle into a friendship of sorts, maybe even before they passed out, but they needed to do so if they both intended to remain close to Anna. She could deal with the male rivalry, but not with petulance.

My grandmother finally caught my eye.

Years dropped to the floor around us like dead leaves, or bodies. I couldn't read anything in her features, and that frightened me. It seemed as if our lives unfurled for an instant until we were both the same age, eighteen or so, neither of us more secure or smarter than the other. I saw her in the photo again, side by side with Diane Cruthers. Harnes had drawn her back into the dead past. When Anna spoke to him did she see a murderer, or a man she might have loved? Or a fate she had barely avoided? I tried to read her eyes but something kept shifting there.

Jocelyn appeared at my side and I backed out of the room with her gaze sutured to me. With Alice here I had a chance to check out the house in High Ridge, and see if Teddy actually was alive and hidden or snared inside, the way Crummler had become trapped in the heart of Panecraft. I backed out another step and Harnes turned now as well, and we made a pact of sorts. Again came the live pressure but no sense of a living presence, less intimidating than Oscar's aftershave. Harnes quickly snapped back into himself this time, no longer unassuming and fading out of existence. He grew more substantial as the seconds flew by. Shanks would have called him, and seeing me must have proven to Harnes that I wouldn't be letting go of this. A part of me reeled thinking that perhaps Anna had actually had an affair with him-and more than that, so much more than that, the idea that I might be his grandson. I looked into his eyes and took my time to dig deep, hunting through whatever it was he wanted to show me, and I saw that down in there, with all the rest of his coiled malice, rested the dormant, but still deadly, dragon.

~ * ~

A dark and thrashing animal, the night continued to squirm with wind and rain. I sat in the van praying that Anna knew what she was doing, and that I had at least a little more time to get Crummler out of Panecraft. I still had the vague sense that somehow I was too slow and standing outside the rest of the world, watching everyone else cruising along. I needed to pick up my pace.

I drove down the slick private road and reached for the cell phone. I should have called Lowell after I left the hospital, but I'd been too worried. I hoped Brent could keep Shanks in line for a few more days. Crummler would fail his psychological examination, and instead of going to jail he would be kept in Panecraft for the rest of his life, along with Christ only knew how many others Theodore Harnes had left locked up to rot.

I coasted past the stone lions, out from beneath Harnes' arcing name twisted in metal, and Nick Crummler disengaged from the convulsing shadows. He stepped out into the open and walked toward the van. I stopped and he got in.

Even seated he kept himself crimped, low and tensed. Streams of water slithered across his face and ran down his badly trimmed beard, pooling in the seams of his black overcoat. He was soaked, but somehow didn't appear to actually be wet, as if only a moment of blotting with a handkerchief would have dried him completely. Someone so used to being out in the elements had a thousand ways of countering cold and rain, most importantly by ignoring them.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

The wary edge in his shrewd, discerning eyes lifted a little. "Rummaging through their garbage, of course, what else? Figured there might be lots of good food going to waste. I was right."

It was only partly a joke. The odor of fresh shellfish and dill sauce flowed off him, and I could tell that Harnes had served crab meat quiche for appetizers. Nick Crummler's gaping pockets were stuffed with crumbling bits of hors d'oeuvres. I would have offered to take him out to dinner if I wasn't so sure he'd turn me down.

"How do you know Harnes?" I asked.

"I don't," he said. "Let's go."

We got moving again. The van handled well in the mud; all the sports cars were going to have trouble making it back to the highway later tonight. Nick rolled the window down just enough to let a nasty wind whistle come tearing across the front seat. It didn't bother him. Apparently nothing did. I kept seeing Zebediah Crummler come bursting into the restaurant covered in ice, capable of walking miles with the burning wire inside keeping him heated. What made such men? I'd stood in the rain for two minutes ringing the doorbell, complaining the whole time.

"You were in Panecraft."

"Yes."

"Tell me about it."

"No."

"I saw your brother."

"I know, I was watching you."

"You got past the gate?"

He huffed, the whistle underscoring his words as we swung up the looping back roads. "You forget that kids like to go tearing up the fields and the thickets behind the hospital? A lot of the fencing has been cut through or torn down, they go there to rip up the grounds with their trucks and get drunk and get laid. Bet you been back that way with a girlfriend or two yourself in your day. I didn't get too close, they've got three-man random patrols, but I saw you leaving. Is he making it?"

"So far."

"They won't bother him for a while, not until after they get him off the murder charge by considering him incompetent. A mental deficient. They won't touch him for a few months. Maybe longer. Then it will get bad." Nothing changed in his voice, but I heard his neck and shoulders crackle as he tightened. "Eventually Shanks will probably kill him. There's a lot of empty acreage on that property. A lot of bodies buried on it, too, I'd bet. Who the hell would ever care? Potter's Field isn't the only resting place for the destitute and schizophrenic."

"Has Harnes always paid off Shanks?"

"Sure, Shanks has been there at least twenty years." The keening kept up with him, musical strains rising and falling, cold rushing my face and the rain starting to seep and run down the inside of the window. "Theodore Harnes has got a lot of enemies, or thinks he does anyway. A lot of wives and bitter girlfriends, right? I'd think there are accountants who caused him some trouble along the way, too. A few pissed-off bastard sons. Some business partners? It makes sense. It isn't hard for lawyers to get a drinker committed for ten days. Or get somebody hooked up with cocaine. Or oversex them with prostitutes and paddles, living the good life for a while, then pull the whole magic rug out from under them. How about one of his wives or mistresses with post-partum depression. Once they go in for the ten days, they're in for good."

"Jesus Christ."

"A nice set-up if you want to vanish somebody."

Lowell had said the same thing. "Why were you in?" He simply shrugged.

"Shut that damn window, Nick. How did you get out?"

"I wasn't crazy, just had a period when I drank too much and didn't handle it well. Made me talk to myself. But I wasn't on Harnes' shit list, or anybody else's for that matter. Not really. So they couldn't keep me in for long."

"But you dealt with Shanks."

"Oh, yes," Nick Crummler said, and the honed blade of indignation slid into his tone. "I dealt with him."

The foothills of High Ridge came into view, rising levels falling back farther and higher into the mountainside. Only when I passed the statue of the lonely revolutionary war hero did I realize I'd been on auto-pilot and heading toward Alice Conway's home the whole time.

Nick reached for the CD player, checked Pachelbel's "Canon and Other Baroque Favorites," and gave a satisfied grunt. "Good taste in music. You really know how to use those hand controls well."

"It didn't take long."

"Yeah," he said. "You can get used to almost anything."

Alice Conway's brooding house showed through behind the thick line of oak and hickory, that same single foreboding yellow light shining in the darkness. The chipped and rutted driveway tossed gravel up against the grille. Caught in the heaving wind, those rotting leaves spun wildly against the porch. The rain gutters on the east side of the house had torn loose completely and lay on the lawn along with piles of crumbled wooden shingles.

"Why are we here?" he asked.

"I think Teddy Harnes might still be alive and hiding inside."

"I never did buy that cutting the face off thing. There has to be a reason for it." He changed tracks on the CD until he came to Vivaldi's "Concerto in C major: Minuet.”“Harnes is out of his mind, so it makes sense his kid might be, too. Okay, so you think the ME is in on it, too?"

"No, but he may have been duped, and the sheriff didn't ask many questions."

"No reason why he should, when you think about it. So who's the corpse then?"

"I have no idea. A friend he double-crossed. Somebody helping him out until things fell through."

"Doesn't sound like you really believe it."

“I don't."

"Well, you know how to play the string out anyway. Why here? This his girlfriend's house?"

"Yes."

We stepped up on the porch; the stairs creaked loudly beneath me but remained silent under Nick Crummler. I thought I saw a blur of activity in the living room, like someone dropping back out of sight. Nick kept so low beside me that when I turned it took me a moment to spot him, hunkered below my shoulder. His coat snapped in the wind and he seemed at complete ease, as if nothing ever fell outside the reach of his own experiences.

I put my hand out to knock on the door, and he grabbed my wrist and held me in a rigid, impressive grip. Everybody was doing that to me lately and everybody was a hell of a lot stronger than me, too.

I said, "What?"

"You didn't hear that?"

"No, I didn't hear-"

"Shhh."

"What?"

"Shhhh."

It took a few seconds to focus past the rain pummeling the porch roof and the rustling of overgrown brush pressing hard against the railings. I stepped closer to the front door and heard a soft but anguished groaning. I thought of Alice Conway's look of desperation as she attempted to talk to Harries tonight, and could clearly see her being forced to choose sides: Teddy hiding in the house, arguing with her, Frost fighting and beating him, and Alice going to Harnes to tell him that his son had escaped his influence and was still alive.

"I'll go around back," Nick said, reminding me how much like a cop he sometimes acted. I nodded at nothing-he'd already slipped away into the storm. I waited a minute but the groaning became louder, more intense, until I was sure Frost was killing Teddy this very moment. I tried the door and found it locked, but the wood of the jamb was so rotted that all I had to do was lean heavily on the knob and the door popped open. Splinters shot against my legs.

I stepped into the foyer and the harsh sharp stink of blood smacked me in the face like it had been hurled from a bucket. I moved toward the living room. Moonlight sporadically cut through the windows and sliced the house apart into the great black-and-white slats. Dark clouds frothed and the front rooms filled with silhouettes, curling black shapes, and gray murkiness.

Brian Frost lay in the center of the floor, tied to an overturned chair. Frost's face had been pulped, his teeth broken, and his nose so shattered that it leaned too far to the left and the right at the same time. Blood hung from his eyes and ears. He tried blinking at me but couldn't quite do it. It looked like I'd interrupted somebody from doing the same thing to Frost as had been done to the guy in the cemetery, except this time there'd been no shovel handy. I kneeled beside him and rested a hand on his chest as he gurgled his pain. Despite it all his breathing remained slow and regular.

I faded backward to the wall, listening for Nick and whoever had done this. A creak from a kitchen floorboard caused my ears to prick up. I sniffed, but didn't smell the hors d'ouevres. It wasn't Nick. I hadn't heard a door or window open, so he might still be outside.

Another footstep. The house was cold and damp and the rafters groaned and the house shifted mightily with parts of the roof tapping and ringing like a kettle drum. I didn't know what kind of play to make. Frost probably wasn't in any real danger from dying of his wounds, but I didn't want to leave the kid lying in a ring of his own drying blood like that.

I progressed through the living room. From what I remembered there was hardly any furniture to worry about tripping over. Moonlight kept throwing my vision off, one moment lighting the room and ruining my night-sight, the next casting the place back into total blackness. Another footstep, somewhere behind me. I thought I'd take a lesson from Nick and hunker down, holding my breath, hoping not to misstep on a bad spot on the floor and give away my position. It worried me that he didn't care about the creaking; it meant that I didn't worry him.

He was moving around from the kitchen to the dining room, maybe trying for the foyer or heading for the back door. Could he see Nick waiting for him back there? Would he circle right into me? Bottled, he'd have to either head upstairs or make a launch for the front door. Was it Teddy Harnes? Or somebody looking for Teddy? And might Teddy still be in the house?

My cell phone rang.

Behind me, Freddy Shanks, my old pal Sparky, said, "Now that was goddamn stupid."

I agreed with him as the phone tweeted again and I spun, and a blackjack with one edge of its leather covering showing glinting metal beneath from so much continuous wear struck me low on the back of the skull, his exposed tooth shining with that ragged lip raised in a blissful snarl, his laughter loud in my head stuffed alongside the sudden black agony and knowledge that I deserved this for being so goddamn stupid.