Sorrow's crown

EIGHT

Katie turned to the door as the bells jangled, smiled at me, and said into the phone, "Carl, you're not listening, you hate to listen. Do not send me irises. No, I am not imploring, I am simply telling you. Stop buying irises. You always get stuck with inventory and then try to unload your rotting overstock on me. Yes, Carl, always."

She swung back and forth behind the counter, checking through papers, opening drawers, and began packing together a bouquet. She had a fluidity of motion that I could watch for hours, a combination of ballet, aerobics, and erotic dancing.

Her eyes, as usual, flashed with unrestrained feeling, showing everything that was going on inside her, perfectly expressive and easy to read. She smiled again and my chest loosened; brick by brick the rest of life fell away, and I got a little heady again with my love for her. She scratched the tip of her nose and cocked her ear away from the phone because Carl the jughead was fouling her orders again and whining loudly about it. I heard his high-pitched pleas and yammering from across the room. She needed to connect with another supplier but hadn't managed to find a competent one yet. I never realized gardening could lead to such a cutthroat industry.

Katie's dimples came and went as she worried her lips for a moment. "I send the check when I receive the orders. That's how it works in this world, Carl. Goodbye." She hung up with a slam. "Jerk."

"Carl has not exactly established himself as reliable," I said.

"As a matter of fact, Carl has established himself as a grade-A moron, is what he's done."

I sat and pulled her onto my lap and kissed her for a long time. I stroked and smoothed the line between her brows, caressing her face, and gently touched the length of her soft, cool neck. As I pressed my lips on her throat she sighed. She grinned her crooked grin at me and my breath hitched in the same way it had when I'd first seen her, and every time since.

"I missed you, too," she said. "Been a long day?"

"You could say that."

"Want to tell me about it?"

I shrugged and shifted her farther back into my arms. "I got yelled at by a lot of people."

"Well, if that's all they did . . . for you that's not too bad, actually."

"I think I have to agree."

I checked the refrigeration unit to my left and saw through the glass doors that most of her stock had been emptied in the past couple of days. Except for the irises. "How've things been here?"

"About what you'd expect with a funeral that size. And hey, did Anubis eat my spider plant?"

"Only a little bit."

Lots of people walked by the shop. A few hovered in front by the door talking excitedly, either because of all the media coverage in town lately or because the purple stuff had escaped Pembleton's and was currently rampaging down Main Street.

"I had a raid on white roses and lilies," Katie said. "They didn't even want wreathes. Folks trying to outdo each other with larger and more elaborate arrangements, hoping to impress Theodore Harnes."

"Or just each other."

"Strange what people take pride in."

"City image, maybe," I said, thinking about the neighbors I knew at the funeral, without understanding why they were there. "Nobody wants the reporters to think we don't throw nice funerals for all the murdered kids who get their faces sliced off."

I shouldn't have said it, and especially not with such an offhand tone. Katie paled, her jade eyes appearing even more intense and luminescent as she lost her color.

"I'm sorry, it was wrong of me to joke that way."

"No, it's not that, Jonathan, I'm only sorry you were the one who had to find him."

"Me too."

She looked at me for a minute as if she didn't want to tell me something. I waited. I wouldn't push it. She grew more rigid on my lap. "He didn't order anything, you know. Harnes. All those flowers at the funeral and that wealthy man didn't have anything to do with it. I thought it was odd, but maybe not. Since Carl screwed up my orders so badly this week I called around to most of the other shops in the county, working out exchanges. Harnes didn't order anything from them, either." She tried to give me the grin again but couldn't quite pull it off. "Is that a clue? Did I just give you a clue?"

It made sense if Teddy wasn't really dead. Why would Harnes waste his efforts on whoever had taken Teddy's place? But that would mean he and his son were in it together, spoiling my idea that maybe Teddy had planned his own death to escape his father. Harnes had the news teams there; he'd opened the ceremony up to a public that knew nothing about him. He'd gone through all the appropriate motions, even if he found himself incapable of properly playing the bereaved father. Or was it possible that Harnes so loved his son that his grief had fashioned him into the colorless man I'd met?

Katie stared at me, and I saw the fear nudging everything else aside. "Let Lowell and the department handle it. As much as you dislike Broghin, he is the sheriff, and I can't believe he'd ever allow Crummler to come to any harm if Crummler is innocent."

"And if he's not?"

"If he's not then it isn't your fault." She kissed me lightly; it was the kind of peck you give a crying kid when you want him to shut up and go watch cartoons. "If you keep getting yourself involved where you shouldn't be it's going to cost you a lot one of these days."

A veiled threat of an ultimatum might be lurking in that statement, but I chose to let it pass. I looked over at the other room, thinking of workmen putting in bookcases, a neon sign in the window, and wire spin racks that squeaked and never rotated correctly. I could just see the Leones serving pasta faglioli to anyone who came in.

"Listen, Katie, I …"

"I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about you. You're going to get hurt, and I don't ever want to see that again." She'd actually stitched me up only a few days after we'd first met, using her background as a med student one last time before she'd fully left it behind to take over the shop. "Sometimes you just need to let it go."

"Crummler needs all the help he can get right now.”

“And have you found anything to help him?"

"No," I admitted. "Not yet."

"So what happens next?"

"I didn't listen to him when I should have. Now I'm going to try to make him tell me whatever it was he needed to say.”

“You're going to visit him in the hospital?"

"Yes."

"What if he says that he murdered Teddy?"

"Then I want to know why."

She traced the lines of my face for a while, and I did the same to her, stroking her hair. So many huge decisions loomed nearby, and it seemed like I was the only one who felt any pressure from them, a coward at heart. I let my fingers continue to glide across her throat in the playful way we sometimes did when not thinking of so much that might come between us. I ran my palm lightly over her belly and could almost sense our child growing there, heading toward the world.

"He came back in," she said.

"Who?"

“That football player who still hates you, Arnie."

"Devington," I said. "He came here again?"

"Yeah."

I thought of him unchanging through the years, emotionally and mentally stagnant while his body grew to fat, balding prematurely, his knees probably not in the best of shape, so that they sounded full of sand when he got up in the morning. Perfecting his pettiness. "What did he say?"

"Nothing. He just watched me."

"Watched you?"

"Stared a little while he wandered around the store. Don't get upset. It was nothing, really. I sort of feel a little sorry for him. He seems like he's trying to find something he already knows is gone, but can't help checking for it anyway."

"Okay," I said.

Watched her.

I spent a half hour downtown shopping until I found what I needed, then called Lowell.

"What's that noise?" he asked.

"A Suburban with a bad transmission in the left lane."

"So you finally bought a cell phone. Keep a set of fresh batteries on you. I've got a feeling you're going to be on that thing a lot."

"It's a rechargeable."

"You buy two. Keep one always charged so when the other starts going you just switch them."

"Oh."

"Give me the number."

I gave it to him. I also gave him the doubts that had been stacking up like firewood in my mind. "Listen, this might sound stupid-"

"Hell, when you admit it yourself, I know it's going to be bad."

"-but are you sure it was Teddy?"

He sighed heavily and there was a long pause that kept lengthening until I thought he might have gotten into his car and was about to drive up behind me. "You're dogging my steps, Jonny Kendrick."

I couldn't argue, and waited until he decided whether he'd threaten me, give me a lecture, or let it roll. We'd played it every way in the past. The cell phone had clear sound, and I could hear his slow, regular breathing while he ran it through his mind and wondered if I'd trip him up on this. He'd stand for a lot, but never that.

I thought I might have stepped over the line this time, as the silence thickened, but eventually Lowell said, "Cause of death, about what you'd expect. Multiple blunt trauma to the head. We matched fingerprints from the victim to Teddy's passport."

"Dental records?"

"No dental records on Theodore Harnes, Jr. that we could find. They spent most of their time in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Netherlands. The kid didn't put in a single grade in our school system. Harnes had private tutors, he's a certified tutor himself, and taught Teddy at home when they were in the country, which wasn't often over the past twenty years. Teddy was born in Roggeveldberge, Cape Province, South Africa. He'd never been in jail or the service, never been printed outside of his passport."

"You matched him to latent prints found in the house? In Teddy's room?"

"Hey, 'latent prints,' you been reading Ed McBain novels again, Jonny? You even know what 'latent' means? The mansion has six maids from Burma who can't speak English and have nothing to do all morning and night except cook, scrub, dust, vacuum, and do little things like pluck hairs out of brushes. Entire place gleamed like a sheet of ice, and smelled of four daily coats of furniture polish. They're teenage girls, and not one of them can so much as raise her chin high enough to look a person in the eye. More than likely, they're also Harnes' personal harem and he uses them to keep business associates happy."

"Jesus."

"Harnes probably bought them from their starving families for twenty bucks total. The man makes his fortune off slave labor." Lowell's tone didn't waver. "Not everybody is lucky enough to grow up in Felicity Grove."

It sounded like sarcasm, but he meant it sincerely.

"Okay," I said.

"Teddy wasn't murdered in his bedroom, there was no legal impetus to perform a full forensic investigation there once we established his identity. Sheriff Broghin was satisfied with the passport match. Why wouldn't he be?"

"And you?" I asked.

"I got Harnes' permission to inspect Teddy's room, but there were no grounds to bring in the lab boys and start dusting and pulling hair samples. I searched around, but didn't find much. Kid lived like monk in a cloister. Just a few books and some clothes. No posters, videos, or CDs. No love letters from Alice Conway, none of the usual stuff you'd expect from your average twenty-year-old."

''Art supplies?"

"No, though Alice and Harnes both mentioned that Teddy enjoyed painting. He didn't have any brushes or easels in his room or anywhere else I looked in the house."

"What about his driver's license?"

"Didn't have one."

"A kid rich enough to own a fleet of Lamborghinis, and he couldn't even drive? So Alice Conway wasn't exaggerating about him being a recluse."

"He sure didn't go to any father-son picnics."

I knew my time was running out; I could tell I'd just about reached my limit with Lowell, and was surprised he'd allowed me as much leeway as he had. He would be about this close to hanging up on me, anyway, so I went for broke. "Teddy could have faked his passport if he needed to get away from his father badly enough."

Lowell had considered it, of course, and any other angle I could possibly come up with. "Badly enough to kill somebody and cut the guy's face off? No, it doesn't play out. Not like he just found a hitchhiker and laid him to waste. He would've needed the accomplice in order to use his prints on the passport."

"But-"

"Like most people, you think it's easy to get a solid print. You have no idea how easily they smudge and smear, and how difficult they are to get off an unwilling party, or a corpse. Like some talcum powder and scotch tape are all you need." A passing eighteen-wheeler drowned him out for a couple of seconds. ". . . assume he did want to get out from under the old man. If even half the rumors about Harnes are true, you know you're dealing with someone capable of cracking your head open or poisoning you in your sleep. He's not on any corporate boards, he runs his shop the old-fashioned way. Alone, and in complete control. If I had a millionaire father like that, a man who makes most of his money from slave labor around the world, and my father was pissed at me about something, I'd probably run-"

"No, you wouldn't, but Teddy might."

"-but nobody would do it by leaving a faceless corpse in the cemetery. If he had the money and resources to fake a passport, he's got the brains to go for the long haul. A fire, a car explosion, a rock-slide, those are more effective ways to erase yourself, if you wanted to play dead. Why leave room for questions and doubt afterwards? No, it doesn't play out. Teddy Harnes is dead."

How did any of it fall back to Crummler? What had he seen the night before the murder that brought him miles out of town in the middle of a freeze searching for me? What had scared him that much?

"Can you get me in to see Crummler?"

He thought about that for a while too, turning it over. He was right, I should've bought an extra battery. "Beats the hell out of me. I'm not sure I can. Why?"

"I don't know. But if I'd talked to him before I'd started pounding him, maybe we'd have some answers and understand what happened."

"Understanding isn't a word I'd associate with Crummler. Talking, either, really. Prattling is more like it. He babbled and jabbered gibberish non-stop before we transferred him. Gave the guy in the cell next to him the crawling heebie jeebies, this drunk British silverware rep from Briscane County we nabbed on the turnpike doing triple digits. You should have heard Crummler carrying on about ten thousand leagues of evil swamps in dark orders of ocher nights, fighting the dwindling obsidian empires. Dragons and knights kissing and fighting."

"I have heard him. I like listening to it. He mixes in fragments of the truth, sometimes. Bits and pieces."

"Maybe. Sometimes. But can you tell the differences?”

“On occasion something sings out."

"If that's singing, it must be a Wagnerian opera. Along the lines of 'Twilight of the Gods.'”

It impressed me that he knew Wagner, and I could hear a soft, angry rattle in his throat because he knew I was impressed. Listening to that rattle coming from him made my scalp prickle. It became startlingly clear to me that one of these days Lowell would probably beat the shit out of me over something like this.

"Do you think he did it?" I asked.

"I'm not convinced he didn't," Lowell said. "You're not either. Either way, something else is going on. Crummler may have had cause, but that will never come out."

The guilt had been hanging on my back since I'd first raised my hand to Crummler. I had to make a choice.

There are times when the hedging is over and you must make a decision despite confusion. You've seen blood and sharpness coming up at your face, and you react without thought, and the rest follows the way it must, with the shadows already cast.

If I'd handled it differently, if I hadn't struck first but in-stead danced with Crummler for a little while, calming and reassuring him, I might know who was dead and who had committed murder. My fear had forced my hand.

I had to put my faith back in him. I couldn't effectively work to free him if I didn't wholeheartedly believe he was innocent.

"Crummler didn't do it," I said.

"You just keep telling yourself that, Jonny Kendrick."

And that was it; there wasn't a sound on the other end but I could hear Lowell shut down completely and pull away. He hadn't gone this far out for no reason. He knew how it looked to the outside eye, and how it would play out in front of a judge and jury. Crummler would be buried in court, incapable of even giving his own testimony. Nick Crummler had been right, the system just couldn't wait to get a hold of a man like his brother.

"By the way," Lowell said. "We got a complaint on you.”

“On me? From who?"

"Alice Conway."

I guessed that Brian Frost put her up to it, and wondered what that meant.

I pulled up in front of Devington's house.

Watched her.

"Yeah, well, you're about to get another one."

Some folks, when they retire, take up a perch in their front windows and wait with the stony patience of the Sphinx for something to happen. Mrs. Devington was such a person, set like a guardian over a king's crypt, with only her diligent, scornful face visible through the parted velour drapes. She spotted me and her eyes filled with expectation and excitement. She drew back and her bottom lip began to quiver.

She was already freaking me out, this lady.

The drapes folded shut and she ran through the house shouting for Arnie. I waited on the front lawn and glanced around at the overgrown bushes and untrimmed trees, the dilapidated garage that looked like it would fall over any second. A rusted tool shed with a corrugated metal door appeared eager to slice a finger off anyone stupid enough to try to get inside. There were a lot of shingles scattered across the grass, and a sizable amount of mold and ivy crept up the brick and crumbling gingerbread trim.

Last I'd heard, Arnie had gotten married and relocated to the Midwest for a couple of years, then returned after a bad divorce and moved back into his parents' house just before his father died. The old man had apparently taken with him whatever love for the place there'd ever been. Arnie's disdain for his home was evident. Perhaps its poor condition proved a testament to his laziness, or merely confirmed his self-disdain.

Mrs. Devington burst from the door in such a flurry of motion that I nearly dove for cover.

Arnie came charging out on her heels and pleaded with her for a minute, trying to get a hold of a skirt the way a five-year-old would. He'd gone even further to fat than I'd thought, with male pattern baldness leaving him with only a horseshoe of fluff that he let grow too long so he could feel something dangling down the back of his neck. "Ma, go on inside, I'll handle this. C'mon, go on back inside."

Rounding in at about two-eighty, I thought Arnie's mother could thrash me and Arnie both without breaking a sweat. If she were a thin woman, one might've noticed the rabbit teeth first, but with so much ballast to her and a nose like a dollop of wet clay, she was more like an enraged wild boar. I wished Oscar Kinion were here with one of his high caliber rifles.

"You!" she shrieked, pointing at me. "You always been trouble from the first, now get off our land!"

She said "land" like we were out on the Ponderosa and I was trying to rustle a hundred head of cattle, instead of standing on a quarter-acre of crabgrass covered with wind-blown trash and uncleared brush.

"Sure," I said. "Right after your son and I discuss the finer points of civil conduct."

"What's that? What'd you say?" She made a face I don't think I've ever seen on a human being before, and doubted I'd ever see again. A few beads of cold sweat rolled down my back. "You, always thinking you're so superior to everyone else."

Arnie kept trying to get a grip on the situation, alternately scowling at me and working hard to calm his mother. He put his hands on her broad shoulders and tried to shove her back up on the porch. She wobbled a bit, and the meat under her beefy arms swung back and forth. Eventually she decided to just stand and glare, and my old football teammate Arnie Devington stomped on over.

Devington's younger sister, Kristin, pushed through the screen door and pressed past their mother. I'd dated her a couple of times in high school, and had even taken her to her junior prom. Margaret Gallagher, Katie's aunt who'd owned the flower shop before her, had let me go a few bucks on the corsage and boutonniere.

Though Kristin and I had never really connected I'd always enjoyed her company. There was something about her I found solemn and intriguing, even after that final game when her whole clan had come after me like crazy hill folk. She'd badmouthed me a little for a couple of years but eventually let it drop. I knew she did it more out of some loyalty to her family than any real deep-seated hostility on her part.

She watched us both closely now and I could see the way she worried her bottom lip. She worked the makeup counter at McGreary's discount store and used an attractive vermilion on her mouth. She'd missed out on nearly all her mother's physical characteristics, but I could see some of the same fleshiness in her face, the softening of her chin. On her it almost looked good, though, the gentle humanity rising in her eyes as she watched me and Arnie on the lawn, each of us harboring resentments that went back to a decade-old football game, knowing something was about to end completely and something else might get kick-started back into motion. She'd root for him, I thought, but I had no real trouble with it.

He said, "Get the hell off my property, you shit heel."

"I accept your offer of the olive branch."

"The hell you talking about, you bastard?"

"Arnie," I said. "You can growl and glower at me all you like, I really don't mind. But if you bother my girl again we will no longer be able to remain amicable."

My peripheral vision filled with the wide shadow of his mother stalking closer again.

"Ain't you done enough?" Arnie asked.

"Enough? Good Christ. I dropped a pass, I didn't back over your legs with a cement mixer!"

"You might as well have. I could have been with the Dolphins."

"Arnie, scouts from Miami don't come to iceberg towns like ours without a reason, and even Lowell wasn't good enough. It was just a rumor. You've been stewing in your juices for ten years over nothing."

"I could've been with the Dolphins."

"You couldn't have been water boy for the Dolphins, Arnie. You were a scrub, we all know it. I wasn't much better, but it's time to-"

Not like I didn't know it was coming. You call an unstable, hypersensitive, borderline psychopathic wretch a "scrub" when his days are built into a shrine for his glory years-which consisted of three seasons spent mostly on the bench and a couple of flounders and fumbles in the mud-and you can pretty much count on him lunging.

His footwork was about the same. He came at me with his shoulders low, throwing a bad block, looking for a tackle by keeping his eyes on my face instead of my hips. I wondered if he'd raise his fist, knee me, or do anything you might do in a real fight, but he wasn't interested in punching me out anymore. In his head he wanted to knock the ball out of my hand, recover it, run it down to score in the last ten seconds, invite the scout from Miami home for some of his mother's beef stew, talk about the color of the car he wanted, five-speed, fuel-injected, cherry red.

I set myself, wondering if he really thought he'd find salvation in knocking me down in the dirt and crabgrass of his yard. For a second I felt a great sympathy for him, watching his lumbering charge, his mother's eyes wide with anticipation and pride, hoping he'd find himself again over something as small as dropping me on my ass, letting all the venom pour out of him in some cathartic moment when he might finally jump-start his thoroughly wasted life.

Then I thought, fuck that.

We hit the way we had in a hundred practices on the high school field, grunting shoulder-to-shoulder. He'd gone to pot but he had a lot more weight behind him, and the ground was still wet and slippery in spots. He slammed into me like a charging … sea lion, maybe … and his forearms came together hard on my collarbone. It hurt and a red blaze filled my head as we clung together and grappled. I drove hard into his barrel-chest, digging my feet in and working him back one step at a time.

A sharp stab of pain pierced my back and a loud crack like snapping bone twisted me around. I wondered if the old lady had actually stabbed or shot me. I turned and saw Kristin holding half a broom handle, the other splintered piece lying at my feet. She screamed, "Leave my brother alone!”

“Kristin…"

There was a lot more in her face than anger and worry. She spoke under her breath out the side of her mouth. "Sorry, Jonny, she was gonna bash you with a wrench."

"Oh," I said. "Okay, thanks."

"You should go now."

"Your brother hasn't quite seen the error of his ways.”

“Have you seen yours?"

Arnie lumbered to his feet, set himself and started to grunt and growl. His hands were bleeding and tiny shards of brown glass stuck to his palms. The yard was in worse shape than I'd thought, a couple years' worth of broken beer bottles scattered in with the rest of the refuse.

I told him, "If you ever cared this much when we were in high school and didn't always quit after half-time, Arnie, we would've won more games too."

It drove him berserk and he howled in rage, lunging for me again as if the quarterback had just shouted "Hike!" He kept his head too low, the way he'd always done, so that he couldn't properly judge speed and position. He caught me low but not low enough to actually shove me back, and his ham-hock fists worked ineffectually against my thighs as he tried to find my kidneys. Mrs. Devington shrieked some more, urging him on. This was not exactly the t`ete-`a-t`ete I was hoping for.

I rolled out from between his meaty arms and wove aside a few paces. "Don't look at the ground, Arnie, I'm up here. You always used to do that, go for a guy's knees, that's why they could always dodge you."

He worked his lips as if he wanted to chew them off and spit them out at me. His cheeks inflated and deflated like a blowfish until he managed to yell, "You screwed me!"

"I did not screw you."

"You did!" his mother chimed in.

"I dropped the ball. In one game. Ten years ago. You people need a serious reality check, you're both a couple of quarts low."

Kristin groaned loudly and rolled her eyes at me. I shrugged.

Arnie was catching his breath, and starting to feel good again, his mouth working into a pretty ugly parody of a smile. "I should've taken care of you a long time ago."

"How many articles did you ever clip out of the Gazette's sports section, Arnie, huh? How many times were you singled out for ever winning a game? For Christ's sake, get over it. Have you really been like this for ten years? Or did you need me to be the scapegoat again when your marriage fell through?"

"You son of a bitch! I'll kill you!"

He swung wildly and caught me on the temple. The red haze returned and I flopped over onto my knees and scrambled. His laughter could hardly fit through that weird smile of his now, coming up hollow and like a gurgle. He sprang, grabbed the back of my head and hauled me to my feet. He pulled his arm back and drove a fist into my stomach twice in quick succession, and I yelped and nearly vomited. He tried it again and I seized two handfuls of his sweatshirt, yanking him around and around, then let him go. Arnie slipped in the mud but tried to stay on his feet, did a couple of fairly graceful spins before he fell on his face. Mrs. Devington held a wrench and Kristin wrestled with her shouting, "No, Ma, no!"

No matter what our respective intentions had been, we were all beginning to border the farcical. Arnie took a crawling lunge at me and I put my palm down on his bald head and held him at bay.

I said, "Couple of things here, Arnie. First, I shouldn't have made that crack about your wife, that was low. I'm sorry." It brought up another snarling cough. "Next, get over that damn game and get on with your life." He'd bitten the inside of his cheek and blood dappled his lips. "Last, and listen good, this is the important part, you can forget the rest but not this… if you have any intention of bothering my girl again, don't do it. You hear me? Don't do it."

He said nothing, as his mother continued to screech. Kristin looked at me as if she knew this wasn't over, and might never be.

I had the same feeling, got in the van, and went to buy more batteries.

The old photo albums had a primitive type of plastic covering the pages, now yellowed and split in places. They made a distinctive crackling snap when you touched them, like freshly cut pine popping in the fireplace. Anna sat with two of the albums on her lap and another few piled atop the precarious tower of hard-boiled Gold Medal paperbacks on the coffee table. I tried to keep things in perspective and not let my usual anal nature take too firm a hold of me, but it wasn't easy. My stomach clenched at the thought of those rare novels from the 'forties and'fifties being crushed beneath the weight of Christmas and birthday pictures from those same decades.

Semi-conscious and lying flat on the floor, Anubis caught the scent of blood and nervous sweat and reared to his feet in one sinuous wheeling motion. He opened his mouth, mumbled like the priest at Teddy's service, and stalked closer to me. He sniffed my bruised knuckles and stared into my face impassively, but somehow managed to convey the impression that he was rolling his eyes.

"You've been walloped," my grandmother said.

"Repeatedly.”

“That much is apparent. Was it the Asian woman? Jocelyn?”

“I wouldn't be looking so dejected if it had been."

She nodded with enthusiasm. "I suspect that's true. I also fear you wouldn't be quite so jaunty afterwards. Let me get an ice pack. Sit down on the couch, darling, you've got quite a lump." She rolled into the kitchen and made up an ice pack. Again I failed to control myself and wound up shifting items all over the coffee table, moving the albums aside.

My cell phone rang and both Anubis and I jumped. It was the guy who'd sold the phone to me, checking to see if it worked to satisfaction. I told him yes even though I thought the shrill, twittering ring was as bad as jangling bells over the door of a flower shop-bookstore.

Anna returned and gently set the ice pack against my temple. She took the phone out of my hand and fiddled with it, flipping open the receiver and pressing buttons that made pretty green lights blink. She appeared agitated and so did Anubis, who continued to mutter. I got a pad and pen out of the drawer and gave her the number. We both realized that the world had suddenly gotten a little smaller.

"A cell phone. This reminds me of when you were eight and cried unabashedly for weeks on end because of your insistence on walkie-talkies."

"I never did get them."

"You did, but we refused to address you as Agent X-49, and you proved to be far too petulant to speak with afterwards." She handed the phone back to me and rubbed her hands together as though touching it had made them cold. "Who did this to you? Tell me what happened."

I told her about Devington haunting Katie, and my seeing Kristin again, and the amount of animosity and displaced malice that could still rage inside even the mothers of failed football heroes.

"And was this fight analogous to your letting off a little steam?" Anna asked.

"No, it was analogous to me punching an asshole in the head."

"And being punched."

"Yeah, well, that too."

She left for a minute and returned with cotton balls and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. "You might consider taking up stamp collecting as a more beneficial way to pass the time."

"It's something to think about."

My grandmother swabbed my bruises and made a huffy noise in her throat exactly like the irritated grumble that everybody else had been giving me lately, including the dog. Two of the photo albums remained in her lap and after she finished cleaning me up, she rested her forearms over them, staring out the one window with the shade up. The ice pack felt good against the rising knot on my head. Anubis kept looking at me with anticipation, like he was expecting a detailed catalogue of the afternoon. I told him to go lie down a couple of times, but he sat stolid and sedate, waiting for something to happen. I sort of felt the same way, and knew that Anna did, too.

"It is your assertion that Keaton Wallace was duped with a false passport into incorrectly identifying the corpse as Teddy Harnes?" she said.

"I'm not certain. Lowell sure doesn't think so."

I couldn't get over what I'd seen in the cemetery. The boy's face-why had they taken his face?

"But you considered the possibility that Teddy might be hiding in the Conway house on High Ridge?" she asked.

"If he is then Alice Conway is brokenhearted about whoever was buried in his stead. Her grief was real."

"As was Daphne Kupfer's anger? Or do you feel it was resentment? Jealousy, perhaps?"

"I don't know."

"Possibly Daphne planned to woo young Teddy, and her plans were derailed by his relationship with Alice?"

"Makes sense. From what I've seen she mostly woos young men, and none of them are as well off financially as Teddy … was… would have been … might have been."

"Has Nicodemus Crummler made contact with you yet?"

That took me back a step. "Made contact with me? Anna, you make it sound like we're in a James Bond flick."

"Be that as it may, have you seen him since your arrival back in Felicity Grove?"

"No." I had the feeling he was sitting back waiting until some major play was at hand. I looked down at the albums and said, "Show me Diane Cruthers. I want to see her."

Anna reacted instantly, like she'd been waiting all night for me to ask that. She knew where to look and turned to it without having any trouble locating it among the array of snapping pages and hundreds of photographs. Years crackled and swept by. I spotted my grandfather in his pre-sagebrush eyebrow period. Other smiling faces spun past, along with children, weekends at the lake, houses, pets, windswept hair, lots of dimpled knees.

She stopped abruptly and her index finger tapped out a tattoo on the plastic. "There is Diane."

The two large black-and-white photos on the page had that extra-sharp contrast and crispness that the old-time cameras gave-that wonderful light, shadow and shine effect that made everyone look so damn good, straight out of film noir.

Diane Cruthers, for all time, remained on this page a statuesque woman with shiny luscious lips that formed a knowing, honest smile. In the first shot she had her palm up to the camera as if to wave it off, her head slightly turned like she was about to burst into laughter. She wore her hair in a nearly full-blown bouffant. Beside her stood my grandmother. Anna had on a plaited flower dress, with her teenage gawkiness on the cusp of shifting into womanly grace. I noticed a slight roll of her shoulders, as though she hunkered before a more weighty personality. Her smile was nothing more than her teeth clicking together. Her face was partially obscured by Diane's arching hair as they both sort of dipped their chins in opposite directions.

In the second photo Anna had begun to lurch to one side, leaving the scene without realizing another photo was being shot, the smile softening and becoming much more natural. Her eyes focused as she spotted someone across the room, her attention directed away from the photographer. Even at the age of eighteen she'd hated to pose. Diane Cruthers looked more solemn in this one, the smile less structured. She and Anna both had long sleek legs, and kept their hem lines lifted an extra few inches as the post-war years edged into the hipster abandon of the 'fifties.

"Do you have any photos of Harnes?"

"No."

"He's not in any of these?"

"No."

"Are you telling me the truth, Anna?"

If I'd smacked her I couldn't have gotten a more hostile reaction from her. My grandmother's chin snapped up as if a gunshot had gone off. The air filled with such an atmosphere of disappointment that I suddenly felt more afraid than when Mrs. Devington had come after me with a wrench.

Anna said, "I've never lied to you. Never. Nor would I begin in this instance. You ought to be ashamed for asking.”

“I am. I'm sorry."

The cell phone rang and both Anubis and I jumped again. I knew I'd never get used to the damn thing.

I answered and Lowell kept it brief. He said, "Go see Crummler tomorrow. In the evening, after most of the staff have already left for the day. We're sending protocol to hell on the bullet train so just fake it when you have to." He didn't say "if" I had to. "Try to get something useful out of him."

I hung up and told Anna, "I'm going to visit Crummler tomorrow.”

“Good, Jonathan. He needs to understand that he hasn't been forgotten inside that awful place. Discover whatever you can from him, and I shall attempt to do the same directly at the source.”

“The source? What source?" She drew an envelope from her pocket and handed it to me.

"What is it?”

“An invitation. I've been invited to Theodore Harms' home for dinner tomorrow night.”

“Dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Is this a dinner for the two of you or a party?”

“A small gathering, I believe.”

“I don't suppose one arrived for me?”

“No.”

“You're allowed a guest?”

“Yes. Oscar will be accompanying me."

I sat back, sighed, and snapped the envelope against my knee. "You're trying to shut me out on this one. Why?" She cocked her head, but I had my answer already. "You're trying to protect me from him, aren't you? For a guy with his resources, capable of making people disappear, I don't see why he'd get so sloppy in murdering his own son." She seemed a little too pleased that I couldn't be in attendance, so I grasped at straws. "Maybe my invitation went to Katie's.”

“No, I'm afraid it didn't. I took the liberty of phoning her earlier, and she mentioned that nothing had come in the mail for you there.”

“Oh. Well, then."

Guess I'd just have to crash the party.