Sorrow's crown

SIX

For the next two days I sat in the store fulfilling orders I'd received from the Internet. More and more of my business was actually done through the mail and over the Internet, now that I'd hooked up with several online bookseller databases. I'd list most rarities and first editions, and within a couple of weeks I'd generate orders and I'd send the books off. It was much easier to reach collectors who knew what they were after and were willing to pay, rather than relying on the chance that someone would come in off the street who was probably only interested in finding a cheap paperback copy of a recent bestseller. I had three locked glass cases filled with books over a century old, and it felt nearly that long since anyone had browsed and asked me to unlock the cabinets.

My assistant Debi Kiko Mashima finally realized that the way to fame and success was not to work in a Greenwich Village bookstore, but to quit NYU and marry one of the leading software writers on the face of the earth. His name was Bobby Li and he liked to rollerblade and always wore hockey jerseys. They'd met at a computer expo at the Jacob Javits Center. Despite the fact that he, too, was of Japanese descent, he'd lived in the San Francisco area all his life and now owned a large portion of it. He was Debi's age, twenty-one, and worth roughly half a billion dollars. They'd had five dates before he proposed and she accepted. I did not consider her leaving my employ to be a great betrayal.

If I moved the store to Felicity Grove and went in partners with the flower shop, I could still make a living, but I'd have to get a door with bells on it that chimed or jangled or rang or tinkled whenever anybody came in. Maybe I just had a low distraction threshold, but the idea of having a clanging noise interrupt my thoughts and work every few minutes didn't appeal to me. A door opening and somebody entering made more than enough clamor to alert you to the presence of a potential customer. And every once in a while somebody came in hoping to sell me a few rain-soaked paperbacks they'd nabbed out of the trash.

Or so I thought, until I turned in my seat and saw a guy standing there only two feet away, staring intently at me.

He'd entered without a sound.

No way to judge how tall he might be, crimped as he was, low to the ground like an animal tensed and coiled. He wore remnants of a dark three-piece suit, ripped and patched with different pieces of fabric, a frayed black overcoat hanging open so that he looked like an Old West gunslinger waiting to draw. He had the hard, confident, but wary edge the street imbued those whose brains hadn't been turned to tapioca by drugs, self-pity, sexual abuse, or the unending loneliness of the outcast. His eyes had a black, shrewd, and discerning energy to them, but I might have just been mistaking malicious aptitude. He had a poorly trimmed beard, thick in spots and showing cuts in other places, as if he'd used a pair of broken scissors to slice off hanks.

He took his time sizing me up, shifting now until he stood in front of the counter, glancing down at my fists filled with invoices and mailing labels.

Despite his silent entrance, I should have noticed the reek. The stink of rotting fruit and vegetables followed him in. His torn, gaping pockets were stuffed with lettuce leaves and a few bruised apples and old legumes. I smelled no alcohol. He looked fifty, but might have been a decade younger or older. A sharp look of feral intelligence lit his face, and I thought he must be one of the rare breed who had chosen the street instead of the street choosing them. He could have been a cop taken down low.

"You're Kendrick," he said.

"Yes."

A bell over the door might not be such a bad thing after all, I thought. One that jangled and rang up such a storm that nobody who looked like they wanted to yank a Colt strapped to his thigh could walk in while I worried about how distracting bells over the door would be.

Even if I'd wanted to wallop first and ask questions later, he stood just out of arm's reach. Keeping a fair distance, yet staying close enough so that if I had a weapon handy he could whirl over the counter and leap into my chest before I could do anything about it.

"I'm Nicodemus Crummler," he said. "Nick. I know you're my brother Zeb's friend. I need your help."

"Who's Maggie?" I asked.

His eyes lost their protective black shale aspect, the dead sheen lifting for a second. That seemed to be about as close to a flinch as he was capable of after living so long in the refuse. He chose to ignore the question for the moment.

I'd rolled with it pretty well myself, I thought, but he'd still shocked the hell out of me. I'd known Zebediah Crummler most of my life and always believed that in his childish mind and burning-wire mania resided truths not even the rumor mill of a small town could ever chum free. But a brother? He'd been in orphanages, hospitals, and foster homes before coming to rest in Felicity Grove, that much was common knowledge.

Now that I looked harder I could make out similar physical characteristics: the same wiry hair, facial muscles spread wide as if battling tics forever, an equal amount of intensity there, although Nick bit his down hard.

"How did you hear about him being in trouble?" I asked.

"You make the news, you and your grandmother, and now him, too. The son of Theodore Harnes murdered, that's what they're saying. Did you think they'd only hear about it in Buffalo?" That wasn't what I'd meant at all, and of course he knew it. "Oh, because I don't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, you think I can't buy and read a paper? I can only wrap my feet in them?"

I cleared about twenty pounds of books from the chair beside me, but he didn't sit. The idea that he might have once been a cop hit again, the way he stood with such a sense of authority. He reminded me of Lowell. There was no anger behind his words, everything fell out with a perfectly composed and even tone, as if whatever might have been heated had cooled before he said it.

"He never mentioned a brother," I told him. "I thought he was an orphan, a ward of the state."

"He was. You're talking about when we were six and seven years old. A brother who's a year younger doesn't count as family in the eyes of the law. We were separated. That's what they did back then. Still do, I think. Besides, he's special, they call it. They couldn't wait to get him into the system." He leaned back against the cabinets of rare books and my heart hitched a little to the left, imagining him with shards of glass raining on him, my stock destroyed. He had a dancer's spryness though, and the fragile doors didn't even rattle in their frame. I couldn't quite picture him jitterbugging with children. "It's not hard to track somebody, not as hard as they make you think it is, anyway. I've kept in touch with him, best as I could, best for him."

"Why haven't you ever shown up before?"

"I do, but that's between me and him. Not you, and not the rest of that place. He's better off with the dead, and a whole lot safer. At least he was until now."

We stared at each other for a minute. I thought of the guy I'd sissy-slapped in the restaurant, and the way he'd wanted to shoot Crummler. I could imagine him raising his fist and shouting in delight the next day after reading the paper, vindicated for his beliefs that the "psycho son of a bitch" had proven to be a killer.

"Did he ever say anything about Teddy Harnes?”

“No."

"He said he'd been in battle with himself. Does that mean anything to you?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. How do you know that name?" he asked, again without any inflection in his voice, so that it hardly sounded like a question at all. "Maggie."

I focused on his hands. Although small, they were thickly veined, and appeared powerful, like Lowell's. For some reason I didn't like thinking of Lowell and this man together, but couldn't help myself. "He mentioned her."

He nodded, resettling himself against the glass cabinets, and again not even making a whisper of noise. "She was our aunt, a wonderful woman. Wanted to adopt us after our parents were killed, but she died not too long after. He talks about that?"

"No, the sheriff offered to take him home and your brother answered, ‘Not to Maggie's.'

"Not there? He didn't want to go to Maggie's?" He squinted, pondering it, and looked like Lowell.

"Were you ever a cop?"

The black shale broke off again, his eyes filling with real humor. "Me?" He smiled, showing off a few spaces between amazingly white teeth. "Are you insane?"

"Was he abused?"

“No.”

"Are you certain?"

"Yes. Don't ask me again if I'm sure or certain about something, I wouldn't say it if I weren't."

"All right. Were you abused?"

"No. I understand why you're asking, but you can quit this track. It was the happiest we've ever been in our lives."

I wondered what Aunt Maggie had done to them.

Nick Crummler said, "That town scares me. I need your help. We've got to get him out of Panecraft."

"I'm going back tomorrow. You're welcome to come with me, sleep on my couch tonight if you like."

"Thanks for the offer, but I'll pass. You'll see me around, though."

Of that I was certain, as he eased back toward me and shook my hand. He appeared to be a man who could take all the city had to offer, so I wondered what in the hell there could be about Felicity Grove that could scare him.

"How do you know about Panecraft?" I asked.

"How else?" His voice, like the stench, wafted off him even as he slid out the door. "I've been in there."

Teddy brought them in. Hundreds of people showed for his funeral, their whispers crowding us like a constant brush of the breeze, though I didn't hear a single person crying. They milled and wore their best suits and dresses, everyone overly-aware of the newscasters beaming around us.

Another rainy day, but the drizzle had petered to a fine mist an hour ago, so that Felicity Grave appeared well watered, as if by a troupe of loving gardeners. Katie must have been extremely busy the past couple days if even a small percentage of the flowers on view had been purchased at the shop.

My grandmother hated the cemetery. I saw the soft flesh beneath her ears bunch because she kept her teeth clenched. She obviously hadn't been sleeping well, and I didn't know whether she'd come out with whatever was on her mind about Harnes or if I should prod her the way she usually did me. We were both good at it, and both susceptible.

She wore a black kerchief which accentuated her silver hair. Because she was in a wheelchair the crowd parted to allow us nearly to the front of the casket. When we got close enough she reached up and tightened her hand on my wrist, not willing to get so near that Harnes might see her. We could also talk more easily at a little distance, backed away by ourselves off to one side.

I stood over her with a closed umbrella in my fist, just in case it started raining again. Anna had a healthy pink in her cheeks, and she made me point out the area where I'd tripped over Teddy's body. I heard a mild huff from her when she realized it would be extremely difficult for me to wheel her to the spot. Small running threads of water streamed down the hill, forking against gnarled, erupted roots.

"Ironic," Anna said. "That he should be put to rest here, of all places, where he met such an appalling end.”

“And that his grave is the most sloppily dug."

"Yes, they have two men here, with another overseeing, and still it hardly compares to a plot worked on by Crummler, who has a real sense of accomplishment, and a respect for the dead."

Teddy was apparently being buried beside his mother. The grave angled down from an embankment about twenty yards from where I'd found his body. Her headstone read Marie Harnes, but the name didn't mean much to me. After Nick Crummler had left my store I'd gone over to the main branch of the New York Library and spent a few hours checking through the reels of microfiche for whatever I could find on Theodore Harnes and his family.

Outside of business articles and brief accounts of mergers and other financial ventures, there were only vague reports of mistresses and sexual lawsuits handled out of court. He must have paid plenty of hush money to put down the gossip so competently. Most sources were unconfirmed, identities never revealed. Marie Harnes, his wife following Diane Cruthers, died giving birth to Theodore Jr. The date made Teddy twenty-one, a little older than I'd originally suspected. Theodore Harnes had married and divorced twice more in quick succession, and there had been hardly any information on either woman. His fifth wife, whom he'd divorced years ago, had been notably in and out of drug and alcohol rehab centers all over Europe. It didn't seem like Harnes was a man who knew how to please women much.

He stood staring straight ahead, at an angle from the casket, without a glimmer of expression. He might as well have been watching a sunset in the Bahamas, or an ant farm, or kids in Nicaragua making shoes for fifty cents a day. Some people might think he was in shock, paralyzed with heartache, as though he might crack at any moment and fling himself down into the grave, tearing at the mud and howling. The most human response I saw was when he blinked.

"You are right, Jonathan," Anna said. "He has changed radically."

"What's different?"

"He once exhibited a powerful presence. The kind of man who commanded a fundamental admiration. He exuded a natural ease and charm in his youth. Now, he hardly moves at all. I'd suspect tranquilizers."

"Or tranquillity."

"No, a man like him never finds peace."

"I know. He acted the same way a few days ago, but was in full control of his faculties from what I could tell."

The newscasters were on the move, getting better coverage than at a raging fire. They were being particularly brazen, even for Action Team Channel 3, sidling up behind the priest and getting a view of the tombstone, panning around at the throng, tight close-up of the father. The thought that Harnes was a mannequin posed in a window struck home again.

"Anna, I've only seen him once or twice in the paper . . ."

"Yes, he relishes his privacy, to the extreme. Curious, then, that such a recluse would allow a personal tragedy as this made into an exhibition."

"Maybe he doesn't really consider it to be very tragic."

She folded her hands in her lap and slowly rubbed her knuckles, which either meant she had a touch of arthritis acting up in the rain or all those hard-boiled novels were really getting to her and she wanted to jab someone in the jaw.

She wet her lips. There are times when you want to say something like, Impossible, no father would ever kill his own child, no friend would betray a friend, and the words die in your throat because you know the bitter truth. She would never take another step again and my parents were dead because of a friend.

My grandmother merely said, "Dreadful."

The priest grew annoyed with all the camera equipment and started motioning for them to be set aside, or at least backed out of his face. He waited another moment before beginning the final service. His voice didn't carry far into the wind. Harnes' lack of emotion bothered him as well, giving him no one to comfort. He murmured in Harnes' ear and gripped his arm in a gesture of sympathy. Leafless branches bowed in the breeze. Harnes didn't move or reply.

"His utter indifference is almost a cruelty to those around him," Anna said. "What kind of effect might that have had on a child?"

"I was thinking the same thing when he picked me up in his limo," I said. "I'm getting a hint as to why five wives left him, taking the hard route." I wondered where Diane Cruthers had been buried. "You told me Diane Cruthers was pregnant. Did she have the child before she committed suicide?"

"No."

Jesus, I thought. "Harnes has had several lawsuits brought against him, sexual harassment, palimony. Do you think that we. . ."

"That we might find Teddy's bastard siblings in this assemblage?"

It bothered the hell out of me when she finished all my sentences. "It'll be a good chance to find out something about him. What did you learn from Wallace?"

She didn't bother to ask how I'd known she'd spoken to Keaton Wallace. He stood a dozen yards away, fiddling with his dentures the way he usually did. Even from here I could see the spotting of burst blood vessels in his nose, his drinking almost as bad as my father's had been. They'd both gotten on the wagon together, though Wallace continued to leap off.

"Virtually nothing. The wounds are consistent with being attacked with a shovel. Teddy was indeed killed by blunt trauma to the head, the cleaving of his visage induced either as he died or just post mortem."

"Do you think Wallace might have missed something?”

“No."

"If he released the body to Harnes, then Wallace is satisfied the corpse is Teddy. He must've matched the fingerprints to Teddy's passport."

"My thoughts exactly, but passports can be faked. Wallace may have been deceived."

"Or bribed."

"No, I don't believe that."

We were silent for a moment, each of us lost in thought, disturbed by the fact that the killer had taken the time to eradicate his victim's face. It didn't sit well.

I looked over at Wallace again: in his mid-fifties, the barbershop quartet haircut and bristly mustache made him look like a man reaching backward to the day of Teddy Roosevelt. He grinned too widely because his dentures didn't fit well, and his generally jolly nature could make you forget that he'd once had a mean streak that landed his ex-wife in the emergency room a few times. I liked him a lot, and as a kid I especially liked him when he was drunk.

I wondered where he stood on the road of his life, and if he was proud of what he'd accomplished or if he felt like a failure, still full of hate, the anger hiding within him the way it had hidden inside my father. He and my Dad hadn't been especially close friends, but they had been devoted drinking buddies, and gotten into brawls that landed them in Broghin's jail more than once. The broken blood vessels lining his face depicted all the regrets and remorse of his life; and a lot of the fun, too, I supposed.

Could he have made a mistake? Could a faked passport have gotten by him? He rubbed at his mustache, smoothing it as he licked his lips. He might still go to the occasional AA meeting, but he was so far off the wagon at the moment I could tell he was already starting to get thirsty. Could Teddy, trying to escape his father, have paid off Wallace into faking the autopsy? And if so, who was the dead man I now watched being buried?

"We may just be dealing with a jealous psychopath who hated Teddy so much he cut the kid's face off for no real reason," I said.

"Doubtful."

Lowell moved off to one side, wearing a black suit and sunglasses, weaving among the crowd.

"Deputy Tully also suspects something is amiss," Anna said. "He's studying the crowd."

"He knows the killer might be here."

"As does anyone who has ever seen a television police drama or read a mystery novel."

"Yes, but only a real genius would do it covertly," I said, putting on my sunglasses.

Finally we heard a heartfelt wail, and a girl at the front slowly drew nearer to the casket. She sobbed loudly and was comforted by a young man who looked on the verge of tears himself. Okay, I thought, now I have something to do. Harnes didn't even turn to look at her. Jocelyn didn't either, or the chauffeur. I didn't see Sparky and wondered what else he might have to do that was more important than attending the funeral for the son of his employer.

"A girlfriend?" Anna asked.

"Or his sister."

"Did you hear any of the names of his personnel?"

"More like an entourage. Just the Asian woman. Her name is Jocelyn. The others never addressed each other, and the lipless guy didn't take the bait."

"This Jocelyn looks quite"-she searched for the right word-"formidable." There were a lot of other adjectives I'd use in describing her, but formidable worked just fine for the moment. "Regardless of the men in his company, I believe she might actually be Theodore Harnes' bodyguard."

I wondered how many copies of Emerson's MayDay I'd have to sell in order to have enough cash to pay a body like hers to guard a body like mine. "She could certainly wallop me."

"Oh, dear."

I knew a lot of the people and when we caught each others' eye I understood that we all shared the same thought: why are you here? Harnes hadn't even been in the country for most of the last decade, so what kind of hold did he have on the town? Vinny Matalo and John Trusnick and Pete Wilkes, Jessica Sperling, Daphne Kupfer, some other friends I hadn't seen in months, neighbors, all of us here for whatever reason, to pay our respects to a dead kid and a wealthy man whom nobody even really knew.

"Not like Daphne Kupfer is a business associate of Harnes, being a waitress in Pembleton's Diner, and how would she know Teddy?"

I watched the girl crying. It was the only noise heard outside of the priest who mumbled through his service.

I waited a while longer before I finally asked, "Do you think Harnes killed Diane Cruthers?"

Anna remained silent. Her lips parted, but she soon closed her mouth again and cleared her throat. She looked beyond Harnes into their shared history, and I knew it hadn't only been bad, it had been awful. It took a few seconds but she eventually shook the question off.

She didn’t want to deal with the dead past, and said, “The truth of Teddy’s murder lies with Crummler.”

“Yes.”

I had to go to Panecraft.

Pembleton’s diner had been downtown on the corner of Broome and Maiden since nineteen-twenty-eight and looked every minute of it. Arthur Pembleton himself had stepped in front of a southbound freight a couple months following Black Monday, but none of the successive proprietors had ever decided to change the name, including the current owner, Harvey McCoy. Pe,bleton might not have had any luck businesswise, but he sported a properly high-class name, and lending it to a diner must’ve been thought to raise the general level of class in the place.

A few coats of paint would have gone a lot further to that end, I thought, and might have made a dent in the seventy years’ worth of grime clinging to the walls. Maybe not. I’d been in worse-looking places in Manhattan, but none that served meals as bad as Pembleton’s. No one liked to eat here, and the regulars appeared to have mutated two levels further down the food chain, but the next nearest diner was several miles uptown and the lunch crowd hated to travel.

If anybody ever went into the direct competition with Harvey McCoy they’d make a fortune. I thought about a flowershop-bookstore-diner and wondered if we could get the Leones to come and cook for us, with Katie putting fresh flowers out in the booths and me going table to table selling first editions of A. E. Houseman, Francois Mauriac, Thomas Wolfe, and books on longhorn sheep.

Already the fumes in this place were starting to get to me. The hostess seated me with nod of her head and slapped a menu down in front of my face so hard that it bounced off the table and hit the floor. I reached down and had a perfect view of Daphne's legs as she shouldered the kitchen door open and stepped out carrying two plates of what might be passing for scrambled eggs. I didn't know what the purple stuff was, and I would make it my mission in life never to know.

Daphne Kupfer had never stopped being twenty-one. She'd held thirty at bay with skin-tight clothing and a physique she worked hard to keep with at least four nights a week spent in the gym. Those angles and stone-hard contours of her body stuck out whenever she moved in the slightest; just turning her head or shifting her stance brought curves and veins up from all over. She still had a little girl space between her two front teeth and wore dangling earrings of unicorns leaping through hoops that jingled like wind chimes.

Twice while Katie and I were in line at the movies we'd run into her and her dates. She went in for the boyish types who weren't so much boyish as they were boys. I thought that if anybody I'd seen at the funeral might have actually known Teddy, it would be Daphne.

She swung by my table carrying a pot of coffee, and though she caught my eye she drifted away quickly, unsure of how to react. My skills at covert operations needed to be improved upon. I'd left my sunglasses at home.

I beat the lunch rush by a half hour and the place was nearly empty. She spotted me again as I sat staring in her direction and a ripple of tension moved through her face. I smiled and turned up the wattage of my natural charm. She ducked her head and hurried back into the kitchen. I tried hard to recover from the blow to my ego.

It took a few minutes before she came back out. She didn't have any choice but to eventually come over. "Jonny, hi.”

“Hi, Daphne."

She didn't need a pen and a pad to take my order, and just kept smiling widely as annoyance continued to slip in and out of her eyes. The muscles in her sleek neck bunched. In a fair fight she'd probably kill me. "What can I get you?"

I glanced down at the menu. It all looked about the same so I just pointed toward the middle, hoping she wouldn't bring me the purple stuff. Her smile down-shifted into a grin and she sort of bopped her head to the side so that her hair did a wheeling twist in the air. It was a gesture that might have been cute when she was fifteen. She nabbed the menu from my hand. "Coming right up."

When she returned I was thankful to see nothing purple on the plate. There was also nothing edible. "Can I talk to you for a minute, Daphne?"

She tilted her head again and her hair swept back in the other direction. "Can't, Jonny, the boss might see me."

"You've been working here for twelve years, Daphne. You think Harvey is going to fire you anytime soon?"

"I don't like the way you said that," she told me, and two thin bands of red spread in straight lines across her cheeks.

"I'm sorry."

"What do you want?"

"To talk about Teddy Harms."

"Teddy?" She drew her chin back and frowned.

"Yes."

"I didn't even know him."

"Why were you at his funeral then?"

Now the real heat came up, and I heard something crack in her, maybe her knees as she grew rigid. Even the unicorns looked pissed off. "And what the hell business is it of yours?"

"Listen, I…"

"Why, do you think I killed him?"

"No, of course not."

"I'm a suspect? Funny, I don't remember you ever wearing a badge, Jonny. Exactly when was it again that you became a cop?"

I was beginning to have serious concerns about my abilities to glean useful information by merely smiling. So far, I'd done nothing but rile her into throwing up a defensive wall. Her hair wagged back to the other side again. Time for a new tack. "You didn't know Teddy?"

"I just said that. I never met him."

"But Theodore Harnes?"

"None of your business." Her arms crossed and appeared strong enough to break two-by-fours. "You like to think you're smooth, don't you?"

"Uhmm, no, actually."

"Slipping back into town, nosing around until you find something ugly you can yank out and hold up for all the cameras and newspapers, right? That's your action? Funny thing is, didn't you ever think that some people might think you're a suspect? The way you're always in trouble? Watch where you point that finger, Jonny, because there are plenty of folks around who are pointing one right back at you."

The lunch crowd began to pile up, doorway filling, the hostess seating more customers and bouncing more menus. I'd lose Daphne in another minute.

"The young woman at the funeral who was crying. Do you know her?"

"Her name is Alice Conway, lives out on High Ridge. Her father was a competitor of Harnes' in some local merchandising business, I don't know what. Her old man got driven out pretty quick, lost everything. Her parents are dead. Now leave me alone, and when you see her, give the little bitch my regards."

She caught herself at the last moment and realized she'd said more than she'd cared to say, but really didn't care that much. A nasty smile nicked the edge of her mouth as she stared at me.

I thought I'd better turn off the goddamn charm, and I got the hell out of there.

High Ridge seemed draped against the foothills overlooking the country, falling back one level upon the next farther and higher into the hillside: huge homes sparsely dappled the entire area, some huddled together and others keeping their distance like squatting, cagey brutes.

The houses all appeared to be at least a century old, and I saw several Historical Society preservation plaques inlaid along the sides of boulders. Wrought-iron signs standing beside stone lions kept proclaiming which great people had done what great things in bygone eras. A statue of a revolutionary war hero stood on an empty bluff looking lonely and very confused. I knew just how he felt.

I still didn't have a car in Felicity Grove, and all three of Duke Edelman's station trucks were up on skids, so I kept borrowing Anna's van. The hand controls were as familiar to me as using foot pedals, almost more so considering I drove her van more than I drove a standard. I hadn't owned a car in the six years since I'd moved to Manhattan. I had a CD of Pachelbel's "Canon and Other Baroque Favorites" playing, and the winsome classical music didn't match the approaching vista as I made a sharp turn onto a private road.

Alice Conway's house brooded behind a thick line of oak and hickory, dark except for one foreboding yellow light that shone gloomily through the shadows of abundant trees. The driveway had chipped and rutted in several spots, and last autumn's rotted leaves lay strewn against the porch. Rain gutters on the east side of the house had torn loose and hung askew, bouncing against the split wooden shingles in the breeze.

I stepped up the porch and the stairs wobbled and creaked under me. I waited for a black cat to leap at my face or an unkindness of ravens to burst from the attic window. A '68 Mustang that looked like it had scraped every highway divider from here to the Holland Tunnel sat at an angle facing the house. Behind it, nearly kissing the bumper, was a GTO that somebody had spent a couple hundred hours restoring to mint condition.

I rang the doorbell and then knocked loudly. It seemed like the kind of house where people might quite often say, "I didn't hear a thing." I waited a minute and repeated the process. And then again. No cats crept along the porch rafters.

The young lady who'd wailed at the funeral finally answered the door. Only one side of her face was visible as she peered through the crack at me. We both looked at each other for a little while. Slowly she opened the door wider, exposing more of her face. She was eighteen or nineteen, with large, pink lips made for pouting that nearly drew complete attention from the deep brown circles under her eyes. A rowdy group of curls hung into the corners of her mouth. Her nerves were clearly shot, and when she said "Yes?" her voice squeaked curiously, hauling the word out and snapping it in half.

I saw the outline of a man next to her behind the door and I dipped forward to get a better look. She jerked back and the young man who'd been comforting her during Teddy Harnes' service came into view. She said "Yes?" again and kept it to one syllable this time, the curls edging in and out of her mouth. We watched one another some more, and I understood that the depth of her sorrow was real and I suddenly felt very sorry for her.

"My name is Jonathan Kendrick, Alice. I was hoping I could talk to you for a few minutes."

Her eyes grew wider and I got to see just how bloodshot and raw-looking they were from all the hours of crying. She gasped and pointed at my nose and said, "It's you!"

"Me?"

"The one on television. You're the man who found Teddy."

''Yes, I did."

She appeared to be lost for a moment, and glanced indecisively from side to side. The kid hiding in there with her muttered something in a harsh tone. She shut the door in my face with a heavy blast of air. I heard more quiet but urgent talking as they argued. The door popped open again and she told me, "Please, come inside."

I felt certain the guy would be out of sight but near enough to eavesdrop on everything Alice and I might say. I was wrong. He stood in the foyer with his features tautly drawn like a bow pulled too tightly. He had the grimace of a man holding back a well-stoked rage just waiting for an excuse to set it loose.

Alice Conway introduced him. "This is my friend, Brian Frost."

"Hello," I said.

We shook hands and he glared at me and tried to crush my knuckles. He kept scowling, and I could almost hear his brain cackling and shrieking "Die, die, die!" I had no idea why, or whether it was focused at me or if he hated the world at large. He had hair so yellow and short that it looked like a huge lemon peel sitting on top of his head. He wore a black sleeveless T-shirt and had the excessive musculature of a serious steroid user. He didn't work his shoulders or stomach enough though, so he also suffered from a somewhat swollen appearance. The enormity of his biceps forced him to sway when he walked.

Alice led us into a spacious and barren living room that had deep grooves in the carpet where a lot of furniture had once rested for many years. Brian leaned against an achingly bare wall where you could see the outlines of paintings that had recently been taken down.

"Did he … did he try to … say anything?" she asked.

"No, I'm sorry, he was gone by then."

"Oh, my God."

She wanted to cry more but didn't have anything left to give. I could tell by the way her shoulders shrugged inward and hands drooped to her sides that she must have felt as if a fist were barreling into the center of her chest. I've felt that way a few times myself.

"How did you know Teddy?" I asked.

"I was his girlfriend."

Teddy's presence, unlike his father's, seemed to be solidifying. He grew around me, a ghost taking on a more substantial form with each person I met who knew him. Here was someone who sobbed and trembled at his loss, those beautiful lips had touched his. It felt as if Teddy stood at my shoulder, urging me on.

I took a deep breath. I couldn't shake my odd doubts that he might still be alive; that Wallace may have been mistaken, duped, or influenced.

The boy's face-why had they taken his face?

"Do you know of anyone who might have had a reason to hurt Teddy?"

"No!" she said. "There was no one."

"Are you sure?"

"Teddy didn't even know that many people. He was… shy. Reserved. For most of his life he traveled around the world with his father. He never had a stable home life, and there were a fleet of stepmothers. Spending so many years in the Orient and South America, without being able to speak much of the languages, he learned to live comfortably with his own company. They really didn't settle back into New York until two summers ago.”

“Did he like it here after being gone for so long?”

“We didn't really go out much at all, and when we did it was up to the mountains or to the preserves. Or bookstores. He loved to read, and read everything he could get his hands on. He returned all the books for credit or else just gave them away. With his money he could have bought anything he liked, but he didn't believe in materialism. A few weeks ago he started getting involved in volunteer work, some community service. He was interested in nature, and started to take up painting. He loved Chinese brushwork. He learned a lot about being … spiritual, I guess you would call it, in China, by watching the monks and the people at their shrines.”

“He was religious then?”

“He loved Eastern culture. He cared about aesthetics."

Brian Frost snorted loudly.

"You disagree?" I asked him.

He said nothing, but his face tightened even more until I thought his chin and forehead would meet.

I turned back to Alice. "What did he think of his father?”

“He loved his father, of course. Very much.”

“Did Teddy ever mention Crummler?"

Alice hesitated and grimaced at Frost, who continued to smolder in silence. "Yes, he liked the man," she admitted. Her voice continued to strain and splinter, wavering from a whisper to a whimper. "Teddy thought Crummler was blessed, in a way. Crummler had the proper sense of respect for the dead, and made the cemetery into a beautiful place of worship, the way they do in the East. Teddy's mother is buried in Felicity Grave, and he said that Crummler not only understood the beauty of the land, but the reverence for the departed."

Respect for the dead. Anna had said the same thing.

"That's all such shit," Brian Frost hissed. They were the first words I'd actually heard him speak, and about what I expected. "That Crummler guy is a bum. Just a crazy bum who tried to rob Teddy."

"Do you have a photo of him?" I asked Alice.

Frost tipped himself off the wall and took a step toward me. "You don't have to show or tell this guy anything."

"It's okay, Brian," she said and quickly reached behind her to a breakfront where some knickknacks and pictures still rested.

"He isn't a cop, you don't have to let him stand here and question you." Frost started flexing. Actually, I was surprised he'd managed to contain himself this long. "You sound like the police, but you aren't, are you?"

“No."

"You sound like that deputy. Tully. We had to talk to him, but we don't have to listen to your questions."

I figured Lowell would have beaten me here, and knew that after having been questioned already Alice would be a lot more reticent with me. "It's just that I never got a chance to meet Teddy," I said.

"So, why the hell do you care?"

Alice touched him softly on the back and handed me a framed photograph. "This was taken last summer."

Frost looked like a nice kid when the lines of his face weren't folded into a blazing hatred, trying to use psychic powers to make people shrivel up. He hadn't indulged in steroids then and was almost skinny. No wonder he was so angry. A side-effect of overindulgence in steroids can lead to aggressive, combative behavior, what they used to call "roid rage" back when I was in high school. We had some players on the football team who would smuggle the stuff in. They'd also get the chills and have a hell of a time getting even minor bleeding to stop if they happened to get cut during a game.

In the photo Alice appeared extremely happy, with a bright smile that reached her eyes and ignited her whole being with exuberance.

Teddy Harnes stood between them.

Unlike his father, Teddy appeared to have a glowing personality to him, leaning into the camera as if wanting to launch himself forward, one arm around Alice and the other around Brian's shoulders, pulling his friends to him. He had black hair with large looping curls that spilled down his collar and hooked against his forehead. I had no way of telling if this was the kid I'd found dead on the ground, but I kept staring, hoping that something would trigger.

"Do you know his father well?"

"Why would you ask that?" Frost said. He flexed a little more, his pectorals heaving. "Now why would you want to know something like that?"

"I'm just trying to find out what might have happened.”

“He's dead and they arrested the killer who did it, and I hope they fry his ass even if he is a retard."

"Look, I think-"

"That's enough," Brian Frost told me. He was the kind of guy who raged up to the point when he was about to cut loose, then grew calm. All the fury left his face and I knew our sociable, amicable time had about run out. "You can leave now, you son of a bitch."

He put his hand on my chest and shoved me backward, then did it again as I backtracked step by step down the hall. I stumbled and Alice's eyes grew wide with terror.

"Don't push me, kid."

"Screw off, creep."

Frost got ready to prod me once more but I dodged out of reach and opened the door. I couldn't see any point in arguing, fighting, or bothering them further. When I got out onto the porch, Frost lunged and elbowed me in the kidney, slamming the door and locking it.

I floundered down the steps and landed on my ass, then sat with the wind blowing and piling leaves against my back. I looked up at the highest dark window far above. I saw nothing, but could imagine a hand slowly releasing a lace curtain, and a ghostly figure quickly easing away.

I couldn't shake the stupid feeling. I wondered if Teddy Harnes was alive and hiding somewhere in the bowels of the black house or someplace else, and if so, what he was running from, and who was buried in his grave.