Sorrow's Crown Page 11

  "See here, now, if you're attempting to discredit. . ."

  "I'm not finished." I didn't know what the hell I was talking about but it sounded plausible enough. Lowell had told me to fake it, so if we were sending protocol to hell on the bullet train, I might as well be the engineer and ride that sucker all the way down the line. "I'm personal friends with Dr. Asa Hutchings of Channel Three News, and he's been considering a four-part series on the history of Panecraft Hospital and its current standing. There are quite a number of questions surrounding procedure at this facility."

  "This is simply outrageous."

  "Will you let me see Crummler?"

  I thought of Lisa Hobbes in here, being asked questions about her miscarriages and her desperate want for a child. They'd go round and round about when and how her husband's affair had been discovered, and exactly what had brought up the rage that carried her to murder her friend and dump the body on my grandmother's lawn. I also wondered how she'd fared in the clean chair beneath these boiling white lights, and what she'd felt when faced with this kind of over-whelming arrogance, finding her name at the top of the list of the first page of every clipboard in the place.

  Dr. Brennan Brent kept staring at me and sweating. He champed the pipe a few more times and finally assented. "All right."

  ~ * ~

  I followed him back into the normally lit world, down the hall to the elevators. We passed a huge room where someone had just finished reading bad poetry aloud and others were commenting on how powerful the imagery of smashed frogs had been. Beautiful murals of cliffs and cloudscapes covered the walls, designed to take the patients' focus off the bars on the windows. I was surprised to see so many young people seated in a semi-circle among other, older, more harried and plagued faces.

  Brent said, "Volunteers working with our non-violent patients. Mostly church-affiliated, though sometimes we get high school students or college freshman hoping to earn credit before formally applying to the psychology department."

  We went up to what I suspected were non-restricted areas B and C of Sector Seven. It was also the twelfth floor. Two more guards met us there, and I was frisked again. We were led down a series of corridors to a cell that looked like little more than the drunk tank in the jail where I'd visited my dad. There was a small plastic window and a slot in the door. I didn't know what I expected, but I didn't expect such overbearing silence. The lights were tapered so that one corner proved to be a bit darker than the rest of the room. I didn't see Crummler anywhere. A guard unlocked the door and ushered us in.

  Brent gave a cheerful greeting that sounded excessively loud as it rang around the cell. "Good evening, Zebediah, you have a visitor!" He started to chortle but gulped it down at the last second. "Zebediah? Would you like to see your visitor? Are you awake? Did you enjoy your dinner?"

  A thick brown blanket rustled on the bed and a figure slowly began to unfurl like an animal awakening from its lair.

  The blanket slid back to reveal, inch-by-inch, the pale shape of a baby's face, eyes wide with confusion and tears. Two streams dripped down the cherubic cheeks to land on the quivering bottom lip, hanging there before dropping off. A tiny gurgle escaped, and another, and another, until they became sounds that were almost words, but I didn't know what those words might be. The blanket clung like a robe as he got to his feet and took a few halting steps forward.

  They'd shorn him.

  "Oh, good Christ," I whispered. I swallowed repeatedly but my mouth had gone desert dry.

  Crummler shuffled almost into my arms but didn't seem to recognize me. The happiness and the fire, his ecstatic energy and fervor, all of it gone, and nothing remained but unbridled terror.

  His, and now mine.

  I spun on Brent and could feel every muscle locking up one by one, even my elbows popping as I began to shake. "What have you done to him?"

  The guard moved in as well, one hand resting on a billy club and the other on something I'm sure I didn't want to get sprayed with in the face. Brent's self-assurance grew here, surrounded by his men. "Do not take that tone with me, sir. Shaving is a requirement of this facility. He proved to be quite wild when placed in confinement and physical restraints originally proved to be necessary. Remember, he is charged with murder."

  "You keep leaving out the important part," I said. "Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, Doctor. A court, Brent, and this facility isn't one."

  Crummler kept staggering forward, sobbing and muttering harshly now, and rested his face against my chest.

  I'd have given anything in the world at that instant to have been Lowell Tully. Lowell would have known what to do, how to play this round, how to lash out or bide his time waiting, and he wouldn't have tipped his hand. I took the blanket and wrapped it around Crummler's shoulders like a shawl and walked him back to the bed. A barred window showed rain pulsing against the glass.

  I said, "I want to talk with him alone."

  Brent saw the value in not pushing this scene for more than it was worth. He champed his pipe once more and followed the guard out of the cell. The lock latched with an unbelievably loud clack that sounded like a bear trap snapping shut.

  I checked Crummler thoroughly for bruises and welts, under the arms and on his thighs and lower back where someone might think they could get away with pounding him. In a little while he stopped weeping and just sat there staring out the window. All I found was a slight discoloration on the point of his chin, where I'd punched him.

  A slab of ice collapsed within me as I looked at the man child, his mouth open and stunned face so much like a toddler's.

  "I've seen your brother," I told him.

  Crummler's voice flattened and hardened, and became serious and full of understanding. It scared the hell out of me. "Nick? You've seen my brother Nick?"

  "Yes."

  "He shouldn't be in town. Tell him to stay away. If they catch him they'll put him in here. They'll put him back in here."

  "He'll stay away," I said. "It's all right. We're both going to help you."

  "I am cold."

  "I'll tell them to give you more blankets."

  "They won't listen. They don't listen. They never listen to anyone, and never have, and never will. I don't want more blankets, I want to go home. I want to go home, Jon."

  "Crummler ..."

  "Please, Jon, make them let me out." Tears welled in his eyes again and I felt a furious animal scratching inside my chest trying to scrabble its way out.

  "I'm going to try. Tell me what happened that day in the cemetery."

  "I like it there, Jon. I want to go back to the cemetery.”

  “You will, I promise. Crummler, tell me what happened. Do you remember that day?"

  "An errant night fallen before the dragon."

  "How did you get covered in blood?"

  "He was coughing."

  "Teddy?" I asked. "Do you mean Teddy was coughing up blood?"

  "The knight."

  "Teddy was coughing?"

  "The dragon kissed and bit him to death."

  "The dragon coughed? How did you get covered in blood? Did you hold him? Did you cradle him?"

  "He was coughing."

  Part of me wanted to shake him into answering me, and the rest of me realized that if I hadn't been so quick on the draw in the first place all of this might have been avoided. "Did you know Teddy Harnes? Was it him? Had you met him before?" He continued to look out the window and tsked with a groan, as if hoping the rain and wind wouldn't mess the cemetery much in his absence. I thought he might recognize a headstone more easily than a living person. "He was visiting his mother, Marie Harnes. You take care of her grave."

  "I take care of all the graves. I do a good job. I want to go back to the cemetery, Jon, please."

  I could feel what span of attention he'd had to give quickly dwindling away, so I started throwing everything at him, hoping something would connect and make an impact. "Was another man there? A big man named Frost? A girl? Do
you know Alice Conway? She says she was Teddy's girlfriend."

  "He kept coughing."

  "Who killed him?"

  "The dragon's bite."

  I sighed and sat back on the bed and saw motion outside the cell door. They'd be coming in to tell me that my time was up any second now. "Tell me about Maggie."

  "Maggie?" Crummler said. He snapped up straight as if I'd passed a torch over his back. "Aunt Maggie?"

  "Yes. What happened there?"

  "Oh no. No, oh no."

  "Tell me, Crummler, I need to know."

  "I was. . . ." The muscles of his face tugged in every direction at once and his eyes filled with the fragments of his lifetime. His breathing sped and faltered. A mass of emotions slithered and scaled. Twin veins in his forehead bulged in a V pattern. I'd never seen his ears before: they were large and almost pointed. They turned crimson until I thought they might bleed. The corners of his mouth lifted and drooped as if fishhooks tugged repeatedly at his lips. He sat frozen, trapped by his own dead smile. "I was happy there. I was so happy there!"

  Crummler bent forward and dropped to his knees, and crawled into a ball in the corner of the room sobbing wildly.

  ~ * ~

  I knocked on the door and no one came. I knocked again, and played another scene in my mind, imagining them outside planning their strategy and filling out forms and giving me a new identity, never letting me go. I saw myself bald and in rags, ancient and mad, clambering in the shiny white rooms and subsisting on spiders and flies. I pounded harder. They could do what they want, claim I never arrived, drive the van into a lake.

  In a near-panic, I hammered some more and the door opened slowly. Brent whirled past and a guard stepped into view.

  It was Sparky.

  "You," I said. "You did this to him."

  "You know what the beauty of this moment is?" Sparky asked. He smiled, and the etched lines around his mouth and eyes continued to bend and twist—his upper lip dipped toward me at that strange and ugly angle. "Seeing that look on your face. Christ, I wish I had my camera. Hey, I'm just doing my job, now ain't that right, Doc?"

  "Please, Mr. Shanks," Dr. Brennan Brent said.

  I thought about that for a minute, how the head of the hospital would call a guard "mister." Shanks. The name fit.

  With an intense clarity I realized Theodore Harnes had bought them both, and that Panecraft was his to use as he needed. But was it to torture Crummler or to kill him and hide the truth of what happened that day in Felicity Grave?

  "Hey, Doc, call me Freddy. Everybody does, except this asshole here, he likes to call me Sparky. Doc, you got a Polaroid around here anyplace? Look at his nostrils, I think they're quivering like a bunny's."

  "So," I said. "Harnes has the hospital in his pocket."

  "Sure," Shanks told me, more gleeful than anybody over the age of five ought to be. "He put three wings on this place. Mr. Theodore Harnes is a gen-you-ine philanthropist." He stopped and tried to appear thoughtful. "You know how much money this institution earns for this town? This county? How many employment opportunities that comes out to be? Nurses, doctors, pharmacists, custodians, security officers?"

  "Patients," I said.

  He smiled with that ripped mouth and said, "Oh yeah, lots of patients. Well hell, wouldn't be a hospital without them.”

  “No, I suppose not."

  I kept looking back and forth from him to Brent, thinking about how much time there was before something awful happened to Crummler. Shanks let a little of the ferocity ease though, jabbing like his namesake.

  We drew a bead on each other and he said, "Hey, asshole, I told you once already, quit staring at me."

  "With pleasure. Where do you keep the violently insane?"

  Brent knew his place and kept silent. He'd been given his tasks and orders over the last few days. Maybe debts had been owed, and were now being paid. I didn't even guess at how many of them had been collected over the years. Who else had Harms hidden away here? Pregnant girls, irritating partners, mistresses, his ex-wives ... Teddy?

  "The fifth floor, actually," Shanks said. "Always been partial to it myself. They got this water therapy tub down there, a big basin with one of them massagers, you know?" He put his hands on his lower back and stretched. His spine popped like pulling up a bath mat. "I get twinges on occasion, ain't young anymore." His white crew cut and corrupt persona didn't make me think of him as old and infirmed. "Me and this little nurse I know, we sometimes get together and we get to washing each other's backs and such. Better than a hot tub, I'm telling you. Next door, there's this cell, rubber all over, you get my drift?"

  "Tell me later," I said.

  "Anyway, it's the fifth. Why'd you ask that?"

  I could picture him cutting off somebody's face, starting at the upper lip and carving outward from there, peeling back flesh as he unwound a boy's good looks. "I just wanted to make sure I knew where to visit when they lock you up in here." I turned and we stared at each other, and I thought about how much more of his lip I could ruin with my fists when the proper time came. "See you at the party tonight, Sparky? Or are you working late?"

  ~ * ~

  Rain spattered down as heavily as syrup, smearing angry shadows across the streets. Despite a relatively cold night, lightning still occasionally speared the riled, cresting sky.

  The bloated moon, fiery and flickering, bobbed in the clouds like a luminous buoy set adrift in the rolling ocean.

  I expected an even more abundant security force at the Harnes estate than there'd been at Panecraft, but only two life-size stone lions rising to roar in the wind greeted me as I drove down the private road. The imposing electric gate had been left open just wide enough for the van to squeak through, as if daring me to enter. The name HARNES arced above, each letter an intricate piece of ironwork art. I continued on the road for a couple hundred yards more, the moon sliding down the wet trees and appearing in the sheen of windows haphazardly glinting through the woods. Backlit by lightning, the mansion loomed: four floors, perhaps thirty or thirty-five rooms, and yet hardly any lights on at all.

  Oscar's truck sat parked out front in the impressive brick drive, along with several luxury vehicles, limousines, and Sheriff Broghin's police car. I noticed Alice Conway's mauled '68 Mustang directly across from a new Ferrari with so much wax on it that the rain beaded into thick pools gliding like mercury over the hood.

  Quite a dinner party.

  Dormers and colonnades filled the roof like a dark playground where glaring gargoyles could cavort and hide. The streaming panes of glass gawked like hundreds of bleary eyes gauging my approach.

  I pressed the doorbell and the first several notes of Bach's "Air on the G String" played distantly within. There was no overhang at the front door. I waited and continued to get rained on. The six Burmese servants didn't scurry to let me in. I pressed the doorbell again and another classical piece seemed to play; it sounded like Mendelssohn. I'd never heard of a doorbell that switched tunes, but if such a thing existed I thought Theodore Harnes would be the man to have it. Then again, I was completely soaked, my ears were filling with water, and everything was beginning to sound like rain and my own breathing.

  I tried the door, opened it, and walked inside.

  Jocelyn stood directly in front of me.

  She took a station at the foot of a magnificent staircase that wound to a landing filled with a line of sculptures. The statues receded into the murkiness like escaped convicts making a break. A chandelier burned dimly overhead, and most of the light seemed to drop down onto her like columns pitching forward. Her incredibly long, straight, shining hair continued to fall in a perfect crest. The dead gaze also hadn't altered.

  Wearing a tight black dress and with her intensely black hair framing her pale face, she appeared cut from the fabric of darkness. She said nothing as I dripped on the marble floor. I realized immediately that she was actually a Ninja warrior, and in half a second my chest would be stuck with nineteen throwing sta
rs that had earlier been dipped in poison.

  "Your invitation?" she asked.

  "Surely lost in the mail," I said. "Wouldn't Mr. Harnes have invited the man who captured his son's killer? Or should I consider the ride to the airport to be thanks enough?"

  "You have extremely poor manners, Mr. Kendrick."

  I simply nodded. "Not always, but tonight that happens to be the case. I apologize."

  "Leave."

  “No.”

  "I can have you arrested."

  "Just try to interrupt Broghin during the main course. He'd arrest you for bothering him."

  She remained completely expressionless, showing no anger, no warmth, no clemency. I speculated again about what kind of childhood she might have had. Had Harnes bought her for table scraps from her starving family? I wondered where she fit into this game, and whether she was another of Harnes' lovers or just a captive like all the kids in Thailand and Nicaragua working themselves to death for him.

  She took a step toward me and I could feel the welling of her presence, as though a crowd of people moved with her. I was amazed by the sudden shift in atmosphere and waited for her to take another step, but she didn't.

  We stared at each other for a while longer and thunder growled as the wind tore at the door behind me. Finally Jocelyn took another step, and whatever ghosts had flocked around us receded into the gloom of the foyer. I reached and found some switches on the wall and hit them. The chandelier blazed. She lifted her chin as if to give me a clearer view of her face, displaying those exotic features and mysterious chemistry that comprised her being.

  "I'd like to see my grandmother."

  "Mr. Hames and his invited quests are currently enjoying their dinner, and you shall not disturb them." A Chinese empress couldn't have said anything that sounded more detached and indifferent, yet abiding no opposition. "However, they will be taking drinks in the library shortly, and I shall announce you then."

  "Thank you."

  We stared at each other some more. The discord running between us grew even heavier. In a romantic comedy we would be adversaries who would now begin slapping each other and then break down into frantic groping; the camera would cut to the two of us entwined in bed with the covers drawn up to our armpits, fondling happily, and the audience would get a laugh. I did not foresee such a scene occurring for us anytime in the near future. Though nothing registered in her face, I thought I noticed a slight uncertainty in her eyes, as if she did not know what I was, or what to do, or which can of spray to use on me.