Sorrow's Crown (14 page)

"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.

Panecraft
continued to rise into the darkening sky, silhouetted in the lustrous moon as black and silver clouds roiled onwards. Not even five o'clock yet and already the day had drifted into a deepening night with the approach of another storm.

Looking up at the hospital, it didn't take a great leap of imagination to believe every rumor about this place was true, and that even greater secrets prowled within that had never even been whispered about.

Yesterday Lowell had made calls. To whom I didn't know, and had no clue how effectual they might actually be. The institute had a black-and-white striped semaphore arm at the front gate checkpoint. When I told the guard my name he made a big show of flipping page after page of lists on his Lucite clipboard and not finding me anywhere. He said, "Wait right here. Turn off the engine," and picked up a red phone in his little booth. He muttered unhappily for a while before finally palming a button that opened the gate.

He dismissed me without a word or gesture, pulled out a men's magazine called
Gozangas
and turned back to the centerfold he'd been staring at before I'd disturbed him. I drove through thinking of every low-budget horror movie I'd ever seen where madmen in asylums leaped onto the hoods of visiting cars and giggled maniacally, their insane faces splashed against the windshield.

I found the parking lot and got out. There were a great many people walking the grounds, some accompanied by nurses or guards, others alone or with visiting friends and family. Regardless of the dusk, several patients still read beneath trees, and a couple of guys threw a football. At the main doors there was another checkpoint where two guards looked over my identification. I was frisked and told to turn out my pockets; they nabbed my cell phone and went through more pages on other clipboards.