Sorrow's crown

THREE

Lowell Tully arrived first, with the wig-wag lights on but no siren, so that a strange red sheen from the cherry top spun against my legs and the array of whitewashed angels behind me. He stared at the scene for a minute, squinting as his hair tousled into his eyes, taking in every detail before silently returning to his car.

He made a few murmured calls on his police radio, the wind snapping at his brown deputy's shirt across his broad, muscular back. Crummler had fallen into a deep but fitful sleep not far from the corpse, his arms wrapped around his knees as though he couldn't quite fit into the fetal position. His fingers scratched at the dirt on occasion, like a dog chasing rabbits in his dreams. Anubis gazed about serenely, seated on a grave, comforted by the fact that he hadn't done anything this time. I was sweaty from chasing birds away from the dead kid.

Lowell handled the situation-macabre as it was-the way he handled everything: with the relaxed, easy assurance of a man with four percent body fat and a working knowledge of the body's nerve clusters and major arteries. He still had a football hero's swagger, back from when he'd fractured his pelvis in our last homecoming game. He went to one knee beside the corpse, carefully inspecting the faceless kid without touching him.

He stood and put his fists on his hips, and I decided if there was anything in this world that could rattle him I didn't want to know what it was.

"How are you holding up?" he asked.

"Oh," I said. "Fine."

Lowell took firm hold of my shoulder with one of his massive hands and led me a few yards off. Crummler, Anubis, and I had already done a proper job of fouling the crime scene, and he tried to save whatever investigative integrity remained. There wasn't much. We looked down at the sleeping man-child coated in dried blood, whose fingers kept flashing out.

"Did you touch him?" he asked.

"Only when I hit him."

"Did you handle the shovel?"

"No."

"Or the body?"

"No."

"Are you certain?"

"Hell, yes," I said. "You think I'd forget?"

"Just answer my questions directly and stow the remarks for the time being, all right? Can you work with that?”

“Yes."

"What did you see here?"

I told him, and I made sure I was precise. He listened without a word, without even movement. I was going to repeat myself, and once again felt the odd sense that my fate, and even my love, had become entwined with Crummler's life. "Despite the facts on hand, do you really think he could have done this?"

Lowell had never hesitated on anything in his life, and didn't hesitate now. "He's no different from any of us. Why else would you have knocked him down?"

"I was taken aback."

"You were scared shitless."

"That's what took me aback."

He nodded. "I can see as it might. Tell me everything that happened. Go through it again."

I told him once more, beginning with last night, and the ice-rimed wraith from out of the darkness who had leaped into the restaurant. I expected him to smile when I got to the part of Crummler dancing with the children, but instead he only sucked air through his teeth in a low, unpleasant whistle.

Events had forced a new reality on us. What I'd hoped would paint the caretaker as harmless only led to uglier thoughts: what if he'd snapped last night in a dining room full of children?

"What did you do after you hit him?"

"Called you."

"From where?"

"Duke Edelman's gas station."

Lowell looked over his shoulder at the graveyard path that led up to the road heading back into town. "That's how far? A mile? You left him there like that the whole time?"

It sounded extremely stupid when he put it like that-leaving a murder suspect passed out beside the mangled victim, along with my dog. "He was crying, and fell asleep by the time I got back. I didn't exactly have much choice in the matter. What did you expect, for me to carry him over my shoulder or drop him hog-tied to a tree?"

"You still running them six-minute miles, Johnny? You might consider carrying a cell phone, what with all the shit you get into. You should've borrowed one of Duke's trucks to come back."

"It's less than a mile, and by the time I pulled Duke out from under one of his junkers and found the keys and answered questions I could've run back here anyway. I figured we'd get a lot of unwanted attention soon enough. A cell phone, huh?"

Three more police cars pulled up, followed by Keaton Wallace, the Medical Examiner, in his coroner's wagon. A dull morning for everyone, and the News van crews would be coming soon. Sheriff Broghin sauntered down the hill trying desperately to keep his stomach from getting too far out in front of him, the gun belt riding way too low. He hadn't been able to resist using the siren, and now Crummler slowly roused himself from the mud.

For a moment, Zebediah Crummler looked like any man I'd ever known awakening from a two-night drunk, opening his eyes wide to whatever hell had driven him to it. I could see Lowell there after his fiance left him at the altar on the eve of his twenty-first birthday. I saw myself when my parents died in their car and Anna remained comatose with her legs crushed; I watched my father on the couch at dawn in his dirty T-shirt back before AA saved what few years he had left. The pain seeped into the air, and it seemed familiar to me. Then the light of coherence faded, and Crummler grinned happily, shuddering and snapping, on fire again, unaware or not caring about the reek of blood on him. He sat up and shouted, "Jon!"

Broghin had a few ways to play it, and once more he surprised me with his gentleness. He reached down and took Crummler by the hand, led him up to the sheriff's car, and gingerly put handcuffs on the caretaker's wrists and eased the yawning man into the back seat.

At some point Lowell glided away from me and conferred with Keaton Wallace and the other deputies as they bagged bits and pieces. I didn't want to look too closely. Anubis remembered the police photographers and appeared ready to engage in lively discourse with them. I pulled him down beside me and we sat beneath the knotty limbs of a stunted white oak. It took a while but eventually Anubis murmured and rolled over, and I watched the slow and steady rise and fall of his chest.

A half hour later, Broghin returned and stepped next to me without a word. We were going to do this gradually. His enormous gut hung over his belt: he had a belly you just wanted to grab with both hands and shake vigorously, then sit back for a few minutes and watch the fun. I wondered if he would question me about Oscar, here over the body of a dead, faceless boy. The sheriff, like most men with high blood pressure who refused medication, couldn't control the flow of his frustration, and would let it out regardless of time or place. His jealousy had to have been prodding him savagely.

"You know him?" he asked.

"The kid on the ground? I don't think so."

"You do or you don't?"

Besides being lactose intolerant I had a touch of high blood pressure, too. "How can I be certain? He has no face. Who is he?"

"You sure you don't know him?"

"What the hell does that mean?"

Broghin was nearly as good at looking suspicious as Anubis. It took me another few seconds before realizing that he actually considered me a suspect. "Oh, well now," I said. "That's wonderful."

"Just answer me, damn it," he hissed, and the slight nub of veins at the edges of his temples suddenly bloated into writhing black centipedes. Anubis caught the ugly inflection and instantly rolled to his feet, giving Broghin his best flat, dead gaze, mouth open a little and showing the barest sheen of fangs. "Goddamn, but I do despise that dog. I never hated a man as much as I do that dog. Now answer me."

"I did answer you. I don't know if I know him, he's got no face."

We both glanced up at the sheriff's car and watched Crummler doing some kind of funky Rockette number in the back seat, his heels tapping out against the window. He saw us and started waving ecstatically even while cuffed. One of the other deputies walked over, trying to pacify him.

"You can't believe he did this," I said.

Broghin's lips skewed into a sorrowful smile that still had a lot of self-righteousness to it. "Jonny Kendrick, I've never heard you sound so unsure of anything in all the years you've been climbing on my back."

"Yeah, well … what did he say to you last night when you took him back here?" I asked. "Did he tell you anything?"

"I swear, it nearly sounds like you're questioning me. Yes, I think I hear that in your voice a bit, just a little bit, I do."

Broghin and I could go through the battle of the wills some other time. I wished Anna were here now; she liked it when he pulled out the podunk, and could work him into telling her anything, one way or another.

"You saw all that blood on him, you don't get that covered just hitting a guy with a shovel."

"Somebody took their time with him. The kid wasn't only hit, you saw that."

"Yes, I did, but even so."

He stood smoothing the few hairs on his head as if the wind might have messed them. It hadn't. "Crummler must have held the boy. Cradled him, maybe. During … or after."

"Why beat the kid to death, mutilate him, and then hold him in your lap?"

"You want to ask him? Look over there, he's still spouting. I think he's up to the part where the giant alien insects in black robes are robbing Egyptian tombs. You'll like that one, it's one of my favorites."

He grabbed at his hair again and made a show of hiking his belt up, but a moment later everything sagged back in the same place. "Did you hear anything?"

"Arguing? Sounds of struggle?"

“No."

"You're always at the center of the storm, aren't you, Jonny Kendrick?" That sounded fairly poetic for him, and I could tell he was proud of himself for coming up with it-I didn't argue the point that there was actually calm at the eye of the storm. His mouth curled and twisted. "Did Crummler say anything when you found him?"

"No, he only repeated what he said last night. That he'd been in battle with himself."

"His conscience bothering him? Maybe he's been planning this."

''That's ridiculous."

"Don't go getting involved any more than you already are. Tell your grandmother the same."

I already had. I knew that no matter what happened from here on out, I'd always get back to past misfortunes that followed, and how deeply immersed I became in new troubles because of those in the past.

"What did he tell you last night?" I asked, but Broghin was already stomping off.

They tossed Crummler's shack, wrapped the shovel in plastic and tagged it. Lowell drifted back about an hour later, when the reporters started bustling over, looking to interview me. They kept to a tight but distant ring since Anubis occasionally stalked forward and they were forced to draw back. A couple shouted and asked if the dog had ripped anybody else's throat out. Lowell ordered the other deputies to back them off.

"What about the grave he was lying on?" I asked. "Any connection there?"

"The fella died over a hundred years ago, so I tend to doubt it. Cletus Johnstone, died of tuberculosis in the winter of eighteen seventy-three. His headstone says he fought bravely at Gettysburg. Killed his own cousin, Thomas Johnstone, in the name of God, country, and freedom of these beloved United States. Survived by his loving wife, Annabelle, and twin teenage daughters, Rachel and Ruth."

"Christ, they managed to fit all that?" I knew Lowell would check the name out further. "Who is the kid?"

"Found a wallet in Crummler's shack. It belongs to Teddy Harnes."

"Teddy? Does that make him the son of Theodore Harnes?"

"I'm guessing so. If it's him at all, and not just a lost wallet."

Theodore Harnes was the richest man in six counties, and though he'd spent most of the last decade out of the country, he still had more news and gossip floating around him than anyone else in a couple hundred-mile radius. The facts though, as I recalled them, included paternity suits and rape charges leveled against him that he'd either been innocent of, or had paid his way out of, and didn't cost him any lasting trouble.

Rumors were another matter. They said he'd used a hammer to murder a turncoat company partner. They said that in the past thirty years he'd helped more people in this part of the state than any of our senators of governors. They said he owed factories overseas where children were sold into sweatshop work. His assembly plants drove all the smaller competition out of business. They said he bought rat poison by the vat and fed it to the Indonesian kids who tried to run. He was a philanthropist who donated millions to hospitals, shelters, museums and libraries. People protested against his factories constantly, and others reviled the protesters. I could only remember having seen a few photos of him in the paper and thought him a highly unassuming man. If those rumors were true, I wondered what being the son of such a man might be like.

I said, "If Teddy wanted to fake his own death for some reason, perhaps to get away from his father, this might just be the way to do it."

"Yes," Lowell said.

"What are you going to do with Crummler?"

"You already know. Bring him to the jail. He'll stay there for a day or two and then we'll need a psychiatric evaluation."

Broghin got into his car and threw it into drive, languorously easing up the cemetery path. Crummler kept waving out the back window to me, his hands in cuffs. His gaze, in even those last few seconds, floated with chunks of madness, innocence, lucidity and rage.

Tomorrow he'd be in Panecraft.