Sorrow's Crown (9 page)
I'd rolled with it pretty well myself, I thought, but he'd still shocked the hell out of me. I'd known
Zebediah
Crummler
most of my life and always believed that in his childish mind and burning-wire mania resided truths not even the rumor mill of a small town could ever chum free. But a brother? He'd been in orphanages, hospitals, and foster homes before coming to rest in Felicity Grove, that much was common knowledge.
Now that I looked harder I could make out similar physical characteristics: the same wiry hair, facial muscles spread wide as if battling tics forever, an equal amount of intensity there, although Nick bit his down hard.
"How did you hear about him being in trouble?" I asked.
"You make the news, you and your grandmother, and now him, too. The son of Theodore
Harnes
murdered, that's what they're saying. Did you think they'd only hear about it in Buffalo?" That wasn't what I'd meant at all, and of course he knew it. "Oh, because I don't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, you think I can't buy and read a paper? I can only wrap my feet in them?"
I cleared about twenty pounds of books from the chair beside me, but he didn't sit. The idea that he might have once been a cop hit again, the way he stood with such a sense of authority. He reminded me of Lowell. There was no anger behind his words, everything fell out with a perfectly composed and even tone, as if whatever might have been heated had cooled before he said it.
"He never mentioned a brother," I told him. "I thought he was an orphan, a ward of the state."
"He was. You're talking about when we were six and seven years old. A brother who's a year younger doesn't count as family in the eyes of the law. We were separated. That's what they did back then. Still do, I think. Besides, he's special, they call it. They couldn't wait to get him into the system." He leaned back against the cabinets of rare books and my heart hitched a little to the left, imagining him with shards of glass raining on him, my stock destroyed. He had a dancer's spryness though, and the fragile doors didn't even rattle in their frame. I couldn't quite picture him jitterbugging with children. "It's not hard to track somebody, not as hard as they make you think it is, anyway. I've kept in touch with him, best as I could, best for him."
"Why haven't you ever shown up before?"
"I do, but that's between me and him. Not you, and not the rest of that place. He's better off with the dead, and a whole lot safer. At least he was until now."
We stared at each other for a minute. I thought of the guy I'd sissy-slapped in the restaurant, and the way he'd wanted to shoot
Crummler
. I could imagine him raising his fist and shouting in delight the next day after reading the paper, vindicated for his beliefs that the "psycho son of a bitch" had proven to be a killer.
"Did he ever say anything about Teddy
Harnes
?”
“No."
"He said he'd been in battle with himself. Does that mean anything to you?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. How do you know that name?" he asked, again without any inflection in his voice, so that it hardly sounded like a question at all. "Maggie."
I focused on his hands. Although small, they were thickly veined, and appeared powerful, like Lowell's. For some reason I didn't like thinking of Lowell and this man together, but couldn't help myself. "He mentioned her."
He nodded, resettling himself against the glass cabinets, and again not even making a whisper of noise. "She was our aunt, a wonderful woman. Wanted to adopt us after our parents were killed, but she died not too long after. He talks about that?"
"No, the sheriff offered to take him home and your brother answered, âNot to Maggie's.'
"Not there? He didn't want to go to Maggie's?" He squinted, pondering it, and looked like Lowell.
"Were you ever a cop?"
The black shale broke off again, his eyes filling with real humor. "Me?" He smiled, showing off a few spaces between amazingly white teeth. "Are you insane?"
"Was he abused?"
“No.”
"Are you certain?"
"Yes. Don't ask me again if I'm sure or certain about something, I wouldn't say it if I weren't."
"All right. Were you abused?"
"No. I understand why you're asking, but you can quit this track. It was the happiest we've ever been in our lives."
I wondered what Aunt Maggie had done to them.
Nick
Crummler
said, "That town scares me. I need your help. We've got to get him out of
Panecraft
."
"I'm going back tomorrow. You're welcome to come with me, sleep on my couch tonight if you like."
"Thanks for the offer, but I'll pass. You'll see me around, though."
Of that I was certain, as he eased back toward me and shook my hand. He appeared to be a man who could take all the city had to offer, so I wondered what in the hell there could be about Felicity Grove that could scare him.
"How do you know about
Panecraft
?" I asked.
"How else?" His voice, like the stench, wafted off him even as he slid out the door. "I've been in there."
~ * ~
Teddy brought them in. Hundreds of people showed for his funeral, their whispers crowding us like a constant brush of the breeze, though I didn't hear a single person crying. They milled and wore their best suits and dresses, everyone overly-aware of the newscasters beaming around us.
Another rainy day, but the drizzle had petered to a fine mist an hour ago, so that Felicity Grave appeared well watered, as if by a troupe of loving gardeners. Katie must have been extremely busy the past couple days if even a small percentage of the flowers on view had been purchased at the shop.
My grandmother hated the cemetery. I saw the soft flesh beneath her ears bunch because she kept her teeth clenched. She obviously hadn't been sleeping well, and I didn't know whether she'd come out with whatever was on her mind about
Harnes
or if I should prod her the way she usually did me. We were both good at it, and both susceptible.
She wore a black kerchief which accentuated her silver hair. Because she was in a wheelchair the crowd parted to allow us nearly to the front of the casket. When we got close enough she reached up and tightened her hand on my wrist, not willing to get so near that
Harnes
might see her. We could also talk more easily at a little distance, backed away by ourselves off to one side.
I stood over her with a closed umbrella in my fist, just in case it started raining again. Anna had a healthy pink in her cheeks, and she made me point out the area where I'd tripped over Teddy's body. I heard a mild huff from her when she realized it would be extremely difficult for me to wheel her to the spot. Small running threads of water streamed down the hill, forking against gnarled, erupted roots.
"Ironic," Anna said. "That he should be put to rest here, of all places, where he met such an appalling end.”
“And that his grave is the most sloppily dug."
"Yes, they have two men here, with another overseeing, and still it hardly compares to a plot worked on by
Crummler
, who has a real sense of accomplishment, and a respect for the dead."
Teddy was apparently being buried beside his mother. The grave angled down from an embankment about twenty yards from where I'd found his body. Her headstone read Marie
Harnes
, but the name didn't mean much to me. After Nick
Crummler
had left my store I'd gone over to the main branch of the New York Library and spent a few hours checking through the reels of microfiche for whatever I could find on Theodore
Harnes
and his family.
Outside of business articles and brief accounts of mergers and other financial ventures, there were only vague reports of mistresses and sexual lawsuits handled out of court. He must have paid plenty of hush money to put down the gossip so competently. Most sources were unconfirmed, identities never revealed. Marie
Harnes
, his wife following Diane
Cruthers
, died giving birth to Theodore Jr. The date made Teddy twenty-one, a little older than I'd originally suspected. Theodore
Harnes
had married and divorced twice more in quick succession, and there had been hardly any information on either woman. His fifth wife, whom he'd divorced years ago, had been notably in and out of drug and alcohol rehab centers all over Europe. It didn't seem like
Harnes
was a man who knew how to please women much.
He stood staring straight ahead, at an angle from the casket, without a glimmer of expression. He might as well have been watching a sunset in the Bahamas, or an ant farm, or kids in Nicaragua making shoes for fifty cents a day. Some people might think he was in shock, paralyzed with heartache, as though he might crack at any moment and fling himself down into the grave, tearing at the mud and howling. The most human response I saw was when he blinked.
"You are right, Jonathan," Anna said. "He has changed radically."
"What's different?"
"He once exhibited a powerful presence. The kind of man who commanded a fundamental admiration. He exuded a natural ease and charm in his youth. Now, he hardly moves at all. I'd suspect tranquilizers."
"Or
tranquillity
."
"No, a man like him never finds peace."
"I know. He acted the same way a few days ago, but was in full control of his faculties from what I could tell."
The newscasters were on the move, getting better coverage than at a raging fire. They were being particularly brazen, even for Action Team Channel 3, sidling up behind the priest and getting a view of the tombstone, panning around at the throng, tight close-up of the father. The thought that
Harnes
was a mannequin posed in a window struck home again.
"Anna, I've only seen him once or twice in the paper . . ."
"Yes, he relishes his privacy, to the extreme. Curious, then, that such a recluse would allow a personal tragedy as this made into an exhibition."
"Maybe he doesn't really consider it to be very tragic."
She folded her hands in her lap and slowly rubbed her knuckles, which either meant she had a touch of arthritis acting up in the rain or all those hard-boiled novels were really getting to her and she wanted to jab someone in the jaw.
She wet her lips. There are times when you want to say something like,
Impossible, no father would ever kill his own child, no friend would betray a friend
, and the words die in your throat because you know the bitter truth. She would never take another step again and my parents were dead because of a friend.
My grandmother merely said, "Dreadful."
The priest grew annoyed with all the camera equipment and started motioning for them to be set aside, or at least backed out of his face. He waited another moment before beginning the final service. His voice didn't carry far into the wind.
Harnes
' lack of emotion bothered him as well, giving him no one to comfort. He murmured in
Harnes
' ear and gripped his arm in a gesture of sympathy. Leafless branches bowed in the breeze.
Harnes
didn't move or reply.
"His utter indifference is almost a cruelty to those around him," Anna said. "What kind of effect might that have had on a child?"
"I was thinking the same thing when he picked me up in his limo," I said. "I'm getting a hint as to why five wives left him, taking the hard route." I wondered where Diane
Cruthers
had been buried. "You told me Diane
Cruthers
was pregnant. Did she have the child before she committed suicide?"
"No."
Jesus
, I thought. "
Harnes
has had several lawsuits brought against him, sexual harassment, palimony. Do you think that we. . ."
"That we might find Teddy's bastard siblings in this assemblage?"
It bothered the hell out of me when she finished all my sentences. "It'll be a good chance to find out something about him. What did you learn from Wallace?"
She didn't bother to ask how I'd known she'd spoken to Keaton Wallace. He stood a dozen yards away, fiddling with his dentures the way he usually did. Even from here I could see the spotting of burst blood vessels in his nose, his drinking almost as bad as my father's had been. They'd both gotten on the wagon together, though Wallace continued to leap off.
"Virtually nothing. The wounds are consistent with being attacked with a shovel. Teddy was indeed killed by blunt trauma to the head, the cleaving of his visage induced either as he died or just post mortem."
"Do you think Wallace might have missed something?”
“No."
"If he released the body to
Harnes
, then Wallace is satisfied the corpse is Teddy. He must've matched the fingerprints to Teddy's passport."
"My thoughts exactly, but passports can be faked. Wallace may have been deceived."
"Or bribed."
"No, I don't believe that."
We were silent for a moment, each of us lost in thought, disturbed by the fact that the killer had taken the time to eradicate his victim's face. It didn't sit well.
