Sorrow's Crown Page 4

  "You know him?" he asked.

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

  "You do or you don't?"

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

  "You sure you don't know him?"

  "What the hell does that mean?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Yes, I did, but even so."

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

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

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

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

  "Arguing? Sounds of struggle?"

  “No."

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

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

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

  ''That's ridiculous."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Yes," Lowell said.

  "What are you going to do with Crummler?"

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

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

  Tomorrow he'd be in Panecraft.

  FOUR

  Anna could read a dozen mysteries at once and never confuse the complexities of plot lines. She appeared to be in a hard-boiled phase. In the past few weeks I'd sent her Chandler's Lady in the Lake, Lawrence Block's The Devil Knows You're Dead, Charles Williams' Go Home, Stranger, and Andrew Vachss' Strega. I'd met Block and Vachss at an autograph party in the city, and liked them personally as much as I enjoyed their work. Anna never cared if she read a signed first edition or not. She wasn't a collector as such, but I tried to get rarities when I could. Block had written, "For Anna, a true lady of mystery...." He'd seen us on the news after Richie Harraday's body had been found in her garbage can.

  I tossed the novel back on the pile and got off the couch. Katie and Anna were in the kitchen discussing herbal teas, Lamaze, marriage, and mortgage rates in the Grove. As far as conversation topics went, I was rooting for tea to come up from behind and start leading the pack. The world seemed to be sprawling away from me, but not quite violently out of control yet. I felt if I planted my feet and took a firm stance on anything in my life, the sudden shifting of what had been set in motion behind me would rise up across my shoulders and crash over my head.

  I looked out the window
at the spot on the lawn where Harraday's body had been dumped, and where Lisa Hobbes had left her best friend Karen Bolan's corpse as well, hoping to make the murders seem connected. The tougher reporters, or those less informed, occasionally knocked on the door and tried to peek into the only window with its shade not fully drawn. I left it that way on purpose: when somebody attempted to peer inside, Anubis would draw himself up, lean his front paws on the windowsill, and stick his flat, black muzzle against the glass. The reporters left in a hurry, trundling back down the ramp beside the porch stairs.

  Katie and Anna entered the living room, Katie with a huge grin that highlighted her dimples and made my heart tug to the left. Her palms angled evenly across the hand grips pushing Anna's wheelchair—it took a little getting used to, shoving the sometimes unwieldy chair across the wears in the carpet; the smaller guide tires tended to sink and slip. A silver platter of cups and cookies lay across my grandmother's lap. I wondered if we would ever be able to make the break to having liquor in the house again after my father's alcoholism.

  Mortgage rates in the Grove, I was informed, were quite reasonable, and the market appeared to be getting even better this fiscal year for homeowners.

  I waited it out. Anna would crack soon. We were into something ugly again, and while she didn't feel haunted by it, she did grow more and more enthralled, possibly even delighted. Katie also sensed the change in atmosphere as they talked—my grandmother's attention not only wavering but diverting, leading into another direction. Anna's questions and responses got slower and shorter. She started saying "That's nice, dear," a lot. Katie gave me an amused frown and I shrugged. She sat on the couch, put the television on, and ran the channels, searching for some news.

  "Such mutilation of the boy's features has meaning," my grandmother said, sipping her tea, and we were into it.

  "Means somebody probably didn't like the guy too much."

  Naturally it had significance—you cleave somebody's features off, chances are you're trying to make a pretty big point.

  "Did Lowell believe there might be any connection to the grave on which you found the body?"

  She knew I'd asked him, both of us traveling along these same paths so often we could second-guess each other's actions. The same way I knew she would go see Keaton Wallace, the ME, tomorrow morning, and ferret more information about the kid's face. "No. An old grave from the Civil War, but not belonging to any of the Harnes clan."

  At the sound of the name she stiffened slightly. That bothered me, but before I could say anything Anna continued. "There may be more to it, Jonathan."

  "Probably not. That part of the cemetery swings low down the hill into much older sections. You go from the Civil War circles to the present with the rise of the new promontories, spreading back across the fields."

  "Perhaps he stood on higher ground, the scuffle took place there, and he rolled down the hill?"

  "Maybe he was running for his life," I said. "Whatever it was, it wasn't a scuffle."

  This lady of silver rarity, her eyes hardening until she looked a little like Lowell did facing the wind—imperturbable, accustomed to talking and dealing with such matters—stared at me curiously the way my football coach used to when I was off my game. "We need to know more, dear. The wallet disturbs me. Greater suspicion is thrown on Crummler for their having retrieved the wallet in his shack, as much as for anything else."

  I thought the blood in his beard was a bit more suspicious, but only told her, "I don't know if that's true, but Crummler wouldn't have stolen the kid's money."

  "The wallet appears to be an extra and conclusive touch, without finesse, in order to implicate him."

  "Or maybe he found it, before or after he discovered the body, and was simply holding on to it."

  Anubis rose, alert to her frame of mind, and paced across the room, moving his broad head beneath her hand, where she petted him absently between his ears. "Were there any wounds on Crummler? Signs of a thrashing or abuse of any sort?"

  "No, he wasn't provoked physically, at least not in that manner. He wasn't beaten by the kid."

  In a throaty whisper filled with concern, but no real anxiety, she asked, "Do you think he sought us out last night? He said he came to see his friends."

  It couldn't be the case, but I kept wondering anyhow, thinking about the way he'd erupted from the night into the restaurant, seething and electrified. Something had driven him there. I didn't believe much in coincidence, but nothing else made any sense, either.

  He counted us to be, perhaps, his only friends, and had traveled a long way in the freeze—to find me and Anna?

  Or had he simply been trying to escape the Grove, and the ties of circumstance binding him to the cemetery, the town, and even to me and my love, had been stretched to their limit, and snapped him back to where darkness already waited?

  "How could he know where we'd be?"

  Katie caught a broadcast that showed the murder site, turned to me and said, "I know this will sound ridiculous, but I wish you'd smile more."

  "What? You mean in front of the cameras?" I thought about what kind of a day I'd had. "I think that qualifies as ridiculous."

  "You always look so angry. Half these people probably think you did it, the way you scowl."

  I did look sort of loony, just sitting there on a grave as the camera panned across the cemetery, and I tried to imagine just how many people would be smiling, waving to their mothers, primping their hair. At least she didn't mention that I had dressed sloppily. "Not exactly the best photo opportunity."

  "You know what I mean, I care what they think about you, Jon. I don't want them hounding you." She picked up the remote to change the channel but couldn't quite tear her interest from the screen. They were wringing every drop of drama from the story, getting into Harnes' sordid sexual history but not mentioning a word about Teddy's life; we watched the gorgeous newscaster smiling too much and stating that a suspect was in custody and the victim was believed to be Theodore Harnes' son. She dipped her chin to her abundant chest, over-articulated the name, "Thee-a-door Harnezz," as if she were giving you time to gasp, flinch, and wave your hands about your face before she continued.

  They went live to the scene, and Broghin, to his benefit, gave only a curt statement. He'd been right to drive Crummler away quickly, before anybody could get a shot of him dancing his Rockette steps against the back window. They cut to a close-up of Anna's house, a tight shot of Anubis' face in the window.

  "Oh boy."

  Katie's mouth smoothed into a flat, white line. "Why didn't you at least make a statement? You could have explained yourself to them. Anna, you should have handled this. Now they'll be making accusations and innuendoes, angling their reports, like the last time."

  My grandmother and I exchanged glances. We'd both spoken to the press in the past only to realize how little of our interviews had actually been used; you could never be sure if your responses and intent would come through as you meant them.

  A thin sheen of sweat dappled Katie's forehead. "They kept coming into the shop throughout the day, all these people I'd never seen before who knew we were dating, asking any kind of questions they could think to ask. Some of them reminisced, talking about your years in high school, the way you'd played football. I think most of your teammates and their wives wandered in this afternoon. I didn't think this was the type of town that took high school athletics to such an extreme, but every one of them came in alone but told the same stories."

  "Did they at least buy flowers?" I asked.

  "No, nobody. Some guy said you botched an easy play against Briscane County? And lost twenty-one to twenty-four, costing the championship. If he's not in therapy he should be. That guy seems to have some unresolved issues."

  "Yeah, that would be Arnie Devington. He's still mad. He thinks a scout for Miami University was in the stands, and he missed his shot at the pros because we lost. Did he say anything about his two fumbles in the second half?"

  "No."
>
  "That's because he hasn't thought about them since three seconds after I became his scapegoat." Arnie Devington, his mother and father, two brothers and two sisters had badgered me for months after that game, and still the old hurt and anger rose up in me, just as it did in him.

  "Was there a scout?" Katie asked.

  "Beats the hell out of me, but I seriously doubt it. If there was he would've only been interested in Lowell, anyway. Guys from Miami don't travel north if they can help it."

  My grandmother kept patting Anubis in a repetitive, rhythmic motion I could almost put music to. His tail thumped every fifth or sixth beat as Anna turned events over in her mind. Our gazes tangled, and I caught her lips working silently. I cocked my head as if to listen better, waited, and she said it aloud. "Theodore Harnes." She enunciated it with nearly as much affectation as the newscaster. "He is a most ... intriguing man."

  "Oh cripes."

  Whenever she said "intriguing" like that I remembered how much I hated her saying "intriguing" like that. I felt a sudden drop in temperature, a rise in pressure.

  Anna pursed her lips. "Truly."

  "Do you know anything about his son?"

  "No, not that I recall."

  "If he's anything like his father, from what I've heard, then Crummler might have had provocation."

  "So your assertion is that Zebediah is guilty?" She had a slicing arc of astonishment in her voice she could only afford because she hadn't seen him covered in blood. If she'd witnessed that lucidity trying to break through the haze of his burning-wire persona, she wouldn't be half so certain.

  "I'm keeping the list of our possibilities open until we learn more one way or another."

  Catching the slight edge of guilt in my tone, Katie said, "I'm glad you hit him. I'm relieved you were willing to protect yourself first. Sometimes I worry about that."