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  Sorrow's crown

  ( A Felicity Grove mystery - 2 )

  Tom Piccirilli

  Tom Piccirilli

  Sorrow's Crown

  "That sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things."

  -Tennyson, Locksley Hall

  ONE

  Panecraft had its own history, entwined with the secrets and sorrows of those towns surrounding it. Back in the early 'seventies, the mental hospital had housed eleven thousand patients, such a high volume due to the returned vets and end of the hippie movement, when the serious dealers got into the game and brought a trembling house of cards down even faster, leaving runaways without a Haight-Ashbury to head for anymore. Now there were fewer than two thousand faces up there behind the leveled rows of cube windows rimed with ice.

  On certain nights, you could head down the back roads surrounding Panecraft and watch how the twining shadows of the complex cut into the skyline and carved down alongside the moon. High school kids performed primitive ceremonies of passage, knocking down barbed-wire fences in pick-up trucks. My ex-wife Michelle and I had made love back there a few times, right before I started noticing hickeys on her throat that I hadn't given her. Echoes rang from the highway, and she liked the noise of the big trucks and the biker packs that roamed up and down the county line in the darkness.

  A soft sound faded in, rustling like the hail on the restaurant windows, and after a few moments I heard it again, and once more, much sharper, and knew it as my name. "Jonathan."

  I looked at my grandmother, who stared at me with a combination of amusement, deep interest, and general dismay. After we'd returned from Karen Bolan's funeral several weeks ago, one of the papers had dubbed Anna "a lady of silver rarity," and I couldn't quite get the phrase out of my head. I also wasn't completely sure what it meant. Sort of blatant, but accurate enough at the moment, I supposed: her full and lustrous silver hair framed her heart-shaped face, the restaurant's lavish candles reflecting off her knife and fork, light catching in the armrests of her wheelchair. "Yes, Anna?"

  "Is there anything wrong?" she asked.

  "No," I said.

  "Are you sure, dear?"

  "Yes."

  She smiled one of those resplendent smiles that told me I was doing something wrong and would really hate myself when I found out what. I checked around and spotted sauce everywhere. "Then perhaps you'd like to take your tie out of your lasagna, darling, before you spoil your meal."

  Katie giggled and so did Anna's date for the evening, Oscar Kinion, who had the awful habit of slumping against my arm and reaching around in a semi-familial embrace during our appetizers. My father used to do the same thing at ball games when I was nine, and I recalled the warmth it afforded me at the time. Now all I got was a lengthy perusal of Oscar's eyes and a serious whiff of his after shave, a pungent odor that drained my sinuses and smelled like eau de boiled cabbage. The eyes I didn't mind. They sat attentively in his thin, meager face: bright, deeply brown, almost weepy with acute sentiment, and full of seven decades of stolid integrity. When he told me he had four kids, I could see a lot of love for his children in the watery mahogany-colored eyes, and he beamed and came close to tittering whenever he mentioned his grandchildren.

  He owned a popular hunting goods store in Felicity Grove, had a well-trimmed goatee, no hair, and a jagged scar under his ear where one of his sons had snagged him with an eagle's claw fishing hook thirty years ago. I got the feeling he'd been trying to impress me when he mentioned he'd been one of the first U.S. soldiers to enter Auschwitz when the allies had liberated the camp. He told a good story, and I enjoyed the fact that he cared enough about Anna that, even at his age, he proved willing to make an effort at impressing her grandson.

  The restaurant was about eight miles outside of the Grove, up some rugged, hilly roads that grew treacherous on a fierce night like this. Oscar's treat. The place had a lit fireplace and peering animal heads, with stuffed birds and fish on the wall-compliments of the ammo and rods bought at Kinion's Hunting amp; Tackle Supplies. It's amazing what watching dead animals scrutinizing you while you ate them could do to your appetite. I had to go for the pasta.

  Staring beyond a family of harried, shrill parents and children smothered in ketchup, I could just make out the silhouette of Panecraft on the far ridge as it rose insolently into the glow of the half moon.

  Anna turned and looked out the window as well, and I could see how the contemplation snapped so easily in place for her. She refolded the cloth napkin across her lap, making the corners tight and impeccable the way they'd originally been, sipping her wine and settling comfortably into the chair when she realized what was on my mind. My grandmother always remained a mere breath away from discerning all my thoughts, and she must have been passing the aptitude along because Katie was getting pretty good at it, too.

  Dimples flashing and giving me only about a thousand watts of her jade gaze, front teeth fit snugly over her bottom lip because she knew it drove me crazy, Katie clearly wanted to talk about the store again. She dipped her own napkin in ice water and found a couple more sauce spatters on my cuff, tsking me while Oscar told Anna, "See the one on the end there, with the chip in his tusk? Kinda looks like he's still pissed off about being dead? A wild boar I caught up in the deep woods off the eastern summit about eight, nine years ago, took him with a Remington 760 pump action in a 30.06 caliber. It's a deer rifle. The first round made him sneeze."

  Panecraft had other uses. Not long ago, pregnant teenage girls were sometimes stowed there until after the babies were born and bundled off to adoption agencies. Wealthy men whose spouses troubled them too much over business ventures or children could always pay to have their wives locked away for a year or two, and found to be unfit for alimony or motherhood. More recently, the hospital had taken its turn as a hospice for clergymen dying of AIDS, cloistered on the top floors, hoping to avoid whispers and scandal.

  They couldn't. No one could.

  Lisa Hobbes, a woman I'd known since grade school when we first learned to finger-paint together, with a baby doll face and a voice like Tinkerbell's, and who'd suffered through four miscarriages I knew of, each loss another presumed failure, now sat in a cell awaiting trial. They had locked her in Panecraft for mental evaluation, and two state psychiatrists had found her competent to stand trial for the murder of Karen Bolan. They would say that Lisa had been of sound mind when she'd placed the barrel of a .22 into Karen's ear and pulled the trigger-carefully cleaning the interior of her El Dorado afterwards, but still not fastidiously enough-all because her husband and her pregnant best friend had been having an affair. But the blood hadn't been spilled for love or sexual jealousy, or any of the many spiteful, bitter reasons everyone else might list. I could remember the timbre of her tiny voice perfectly when she'd said, "But the baby, he needed to have a baby, and I couldn't give him one."

  Katie found more sauce on my sleeve. "How does somebody get lasagna on his elbows?"

  "You're asking me?" I said. "I thought I was doing pretty good."

  "Fork to mouth, you bring the fork up to your mouth. It's fairly simple." She pursed her lips and cocked her head, surveying the damage. "Though for you the end result has somehow become a Jackson Pollock painting."

  "Be kind to me, I'm dining-challenged. A bag of chips and a football game are about as high-class as I usually get."

  "And aren't I sweet to have never brought that up myself?"

  Oscar flung his arm around my shoulder again and pointed out the chipped tusk to me. We had separate conversations going. I turned away from Katie for a minute, and when I glanced back I experienced the same new sense of amazement I always felt seeing her.

  We'd been dating for two months, and you
'd have thought the twinge of excitement I got from noticing the curls of her hair lying across her forehead, dimples angling at the edges of her smiling mouth, nearly invisible blond down under her ears waving slightly with my breath on her face, would have faded a fraction by now, but it hadn't in the least. More than once she'd had to snap her fingers under my nose to drag me out of reverie. You would think I'd get used to her beauty from moment to moment, while we made love in her small bed or when I watched the side of her face in the glow of coming attractions at the movies, but the draw never lessened. She stared at the ketchup-covered kids without seeming to notice just how stressed and besieged their parents were. She remained a romantic constantly frustrated by my grip on reality, however tenuous it might be at times.

  "So?" she said, as sweetly as she could, yet failing to keep the hints of anxiety and anger out of her voice. "You were supposed to give it some thought. You told me we'd discuss it over dinner. This is dinner."

  "Or a Pollock retrospective."

  "Well, in either case, we should talk."

  "You're right."

  I attempted picturing it again. The refrigerators humming all day long, filled with tulips, roses, and daffodils, the bell over the door jangling every two minutes. First editions of Wilkie Collins, James Agee, H. P. Lovecraft, and Sartre toppled against paperback originals of David Goodis and Sheldon Lord, everything piled in the corner while plant-growth mix got kicked into the carpeting. Novels smelling like manure.

  "A combination flower shop-bookstore?" I said.

  She gave this slight sigh of exasperation that ended with a low, sensual growl deep in the back of her throat. I tried to get her to do it as often as possible. "Did I say that?" she asked. "Give me some credit, Jon."

  "I do."

  "I said there's plenty of empty space at the fringe of the shop, facing Fairlawn. We could set the bookstore up there; it would have its own entrance, plenty of room, and the businesses would be exclusive. Have the two stores side by side. The rent is cheap. There's lots of pedestrian traffic downtown. It would be adorable."

  The cuteness of her suggestion scared me. My store in Manhattan, full of scarce and uncommon books-a great many mysteries since Anna had cultivated my love for the field while nurturing her own tastes-could be considered a number of things: quaint, impressive, atmospheric, well-furnished, all of that, but never adorable. Katie failed to grasp the concept that while there might be room for a bookstore amidst the flora, shelf space was only the minimum of the room I needed. Most of my back stock remained in a storage area twice as large as my store itself. She'd been in Felicity Grove for three months, since her late aunt had bequeathed her the flower shop, and she hadn't quite come to the realization that nobody read much in this town.

  Of course, the entire conversation simply provided a front for talking about deeper issues. We were both frustrated that we didn't spend enough time together, but I hadn't worked my ass off to build a reputation as a book dealer and antiquarian in a city rapidly being overtaken by superchains only to toss it all and return to a place I'd spent years getting away from.

  "What do you think, Anna?" Katie asked.

  "It's an appealing notion," my grandmother said. "And certainly there's an inherent charm. Felicity Grove could certainly use an antiquarian bookstore." Despite being in a wheelchair, she always managed to walk the balance beam between intent and interest. She never came down on some of Katie's more impractical business ideas, but never let me be a pure realist, either. "However, you must be cautious about entering into a business partnership like this, Katie."

  "Of course," Katie said stiffly.

  "Look, last week I sold a copy of Emerson's MayDay, Ticknor and Fields, eighteen sixty-seven, in a clamshell box, signed by Emerson, for twenty-four hundred dollars. You think I'm going to get that from anybody in the Grove? I'll have to start buying books on longhorn sheep and large-mouth bass."

  Oscar nodded. "Those field books would do well for you, Johnny. I know, I sell racks of them, too. Back stock at least a couple dozen copies of The Whitetail Deer Guide: A Practical Guide to Hunting America's Number One Big-game Animal. I sell a couple of them a week, and don't mind the competition if you start pushing them, too."

  "I appreciate that."

  "Jonathan, dear," Anna said. "Your superiority complex is showing."

  "That's just sauce."

  The jade gaze had more heat in it now, Katie's eyebrows arching a little so that her forehead showed a lovely crease of irritation, none of this really about the store at all. "You can continue expanding your mail order business. That's where you make most of your sales, anyway."

  "I'd have to spend nearly as much time in the city buying and trading stock, Katie."

  Oscar nearly body-checked me out of my seat this time. He might've been seventy, but he had the kind of muscle that was hard-earned and would never disappear or turn to fat. He got me into a friendly headlock. "You can always come in with me if you like, Johnny. I keep my eye out for men like you who show real initiative."

  Now he was starting to get a tad pushy with his need to impress. He glanced at the animal heads like he wished they'd come back to life again and attack the women so he could sprint into action and kill them with his butter knife. I tried to imagine the quail or moose running rampant and endangering lives, but couldn't quite make it.

  "Well, it was just a thought," Katie said.

  Oscar whispered something in my ear that I didn't hear because Katie was on the verge of either letting it go for tonight or possibly crying. Anna noticed and poured more wine, making small talk. Katie didn't have any. She hadn't had a drop of any kind of liquor for two weeks; she'd started eating more vegetables and staying away from smokers. Shafts of moonlight washed against her back, slender shoulders covered with freckles shrugging as if to loosen her neck and dump some of the stress. The shadow of Panecraft fell across my hand as I reached for her wrist. We interlaced fingers. She grinned and let it go for the evening. "I've got the tulips you wanted."

  "Thanks, I know how difficult they are to get this time of year."

  "Difficult, but not impossible. Not if you try hard enough."

  Maybe that was a dig, maybe not. We kissed, and the cool softness of her lips played against mine, her breath in my mouth like ten thousand spoken and unspoken words. Shifting toward each other, we kissed again, more passionately, and it hurt for me not to throw down a credit card and grab our coats and rush back to her place to hold her tightly beneath her aunt's thick blankets.

  We heard him at the same time.

  Staring into each other's eyes, she frowned, puzzled: a sudden odd, distant humming and gasping stalked nearer, the sound of splashing outside coming closer and closer like a child leaping loudly into every puddle. We knew the noise.

  Katie said, "Surely not this far from town."

  Clearing her throat, Anna told me, "Jon, I think you should . . ."

  "Oh boy," I said.

  The door burst open in a flurry of black motion, wind and hail rushing inside with icy streamers twirling.

  "I am Crummler! I am here!"

  Impossible. He almost never left his shack at the cemetery, and when he did he went no farther than Main Street. To get this far he would've had to walk for hours-who would ever give him a ride? Always in action, even now with the ice crystals so heavy in his wiry beard and hair that his face appeared frozen in place, Crummler erupted into the room with a ballerina's bounce. His coat trailed behind him like a black and ghostly shroud trying to catch up. He smelled of the cemetery, which was only slightly better than Oscar's after shave. His customary mania at once seemed lessened and heightened, internalized so that he twitched even more wildly than usual, blinking in the bright lights, shivering in the freeze.

  Bus boys went running. The maitre d' threw menus on the floor, and a young waitress grabbed a fire extinguisher, ready to douse the edgy stranger if she needed to-which I thought was extremely level-headed of her.

  "Crummler
," Katie told him. "You're freezing. Come sit by the fire."

  He jitterbugged and snapped his fingers, following her dolefully. He trembled as much from the night as from his own fiery, burning nerve-endings. "I have been in battle with forces," he moaned. "I have been in battle."

  He still wore the same pair of work boots I'd bought him a couple months back. Odd to realize that he'd been there when I'd first met Katie in the flower shop, like the living embodiment of the excitement I felt for her, his eyes blazing with love and madness. He glared at the wild boar's head on the wall, then down at our table and especially at my plate, and I got the unsettling feeling that he was thinking the same things I was.

  "I am here, Jon!"

  "Want some lasagna?" I asked.

  Katie said, "He probably eats neater than you."

  "Well, his elbows are clean, anyway."

  Melting rime rolled off his neck, and despite the shuddering he actually did manage to eat more neatly than I had, carefully cutting up the pasta and forking it into his mouth with a trained and cautious maneuvering. I could tell a hundred hours of harsh training had probably gone into that conduct, someone at the orphanage forcing him to repeat the action until he got it down perfectly.

  "Armadas roared across the roiling waves," Crummler continued. "Met at the shore by the infernal war devices of ancient beasts, pyres burning in the antediluvian skies."

  Anna loved listening to his impressive vocabulary that only filtered out when he told tales of ocher nights and ancient empires of other galaxies. It seemed that about a fifth of the patrons in the place recognized him and tried their best not to be bothered. The rest gaped, whispered in a near panic, or hid their faces behind the centerpieces.

  I heard the manager in the alcove hissing loudly into the phone. "Don't give me that jurisdiction crap, he's your loony, you come get him out of here. Yeah, we've heard about this gravekeeper you got. What, if he's three feet over the county line you're going to let him ruin my business?" I could just imagine Sheriff Broghin lumbering to his feet, the gun belt angled into his belly rolls and leaving ugly welts.