Sorrow's Crown

by Tom Piccirilli

  "Don't."

  "From now on I won't."

  I moved to sit beside her and Katie sneaked in close—she knew how to read me and how to make it better. I'd catch her staring at the side of my face and realize she'd set aside her own worries to concentrate on mine. I slipped my hand onto her belly, which made her sigh, both of us falling into a weird pattern of being preoccupied with something so natural yet terrifying as this. I hoped she'd understand that no matter what happened we'd get through it all. I hoped I could believe it myself.

  "Teddy Harnes may have faked his own demise," Anna said.

  "Yes, but why?"

  "It's something to consider. And you're quite right, Jonathan, I apologize for seeming narrow-minded when it was you who was personally involved with the situation this morning. That was foolish and thoughtless of me. It's correct to keep our possibilities open. Crummler may indeed have been provoked."

  "Into defending himself, maybe." I shook my head. "I'm not sure how you can be provoked into shearing somebody's nose and lips off."

  Anna's eyes filled with a great distance. A shaft of late afternoon sunlight cut down from the one shade less window, wreathing my grandmother in rose. "A psychiatric facility like Panecraft will be pure torture for him. . . ." She hesitated in following up, blowing out a thin stream of air that made Anubis' eyelids twitch, and stopping just short of saying, He'll go mad.

  The bloody blade of the shovel came up toward my face again, with him whimpering about battling himself, perhaps not feeling any differently than I did now, yanked in too many directions at once. He wouldn't make it. Something lurked down inside him—he's no different from any of us—and whether it was a weeping boy locked in silence or a burgeoning call to lash out, Crummler wouldn't be able to handle being taken from Felicity Grave and the dead that gave his life meaning.

  "I tend to agree," I said.

  "Jonathan, are you holding anything back?"

  I answered more easily than I would have thought. "I think I saw another side of him."

  "Which side is that?" Katie asked.

  "A part of him that might be sane."

  Anna steepled her fingers and brought them to her chin as though she were trying to figure out which part of me might still be sane. "You know as well as I do, dear, that his sanity is not actually in question. Crummler is mentally handicapped."

  "Mentally-challenged is the PC term nowadays. And I'm not sure what he is anymore, except that I saw someone else lurking beneath his usual self."

  Anna worried her lips and sipped her tea. The chemistry had shifted between us with the introduction of Katie, as it had once before with Michelle. "Theodore Harnes married a friend of mine."

  "Who?"

  "One of my bridesmaids, Diane Cruthers. They met while I was on my honeymoon, had something of a whirlwind storybook romance, and eloped only days later. Of course, since he did not come from old wealth, this was before he'd amassed his fortune, Theodore Harnes proved to cut something of a deliberate, but shy, figure."

  What had it meant when she'd frozen like that before just hearing his name? "So, you've met him."

  "No more than three or four times." Her voice both gained and lost an edge, as though she did and didn't want to talk about any of this. My stomach started to knot. She cleared her throat and fell silent for a moment, and I knew she was editing her story for either my benefit, or her own. Whatever she was hiding would undoubtedly be ugly. "A year or so younger than us, actually, he was hardly more than a boy himself. I only saw Diane once again, very briefly. She was expecting their first child."

  I scanned the photos on the wall, the large black-and-white of Anna's wedding; my grandfather standing there looking frightened in a bow tie before the rampant forest of his eye-brows completely consumed his forehead; a row of men and women in their wedding party, everyone grinning good-naturedly. I wondered who was Diane Cruthers. The ladies seemed so much alike in the somewhat worn-out, dark pictures, with a sort of glaze to them all. Youth and expectancy, eagerness perhaps. Which of these women would Harnes sweep away to Europe? Maybe he was only a foolish young man with feverish dreams at the time ... or maybe a monster in the making.

  Only rarely did my grandmother allow some prejudice to bubble up and break the surface where it could be viewed by someone who might notice. She gathered Katie's cup and the uneaten cookies back onto the platter and put it across her knees, and worked her wheelchair around and rolled toward the kitchen.

  "Where is she now?" I asked.

  Anna smiled blandly, one of her few acts of false bravado, and consequently a poor one. "She committed suicide shortly thereafter."

  Katie paled and said, "Good God." She shifted against me, folding herself closer under my arm.

  There had to be more. I hadn't really heard it in my grandmother's voice or seen it in the virtually wrinkle-free angles of her face, but the truth had been there, a tiny thing searching for a place to hide.

  Anna had been jealous of Diane Cruthers for winning the love of an intriguing man named Theodore Harnes.

  FIVE

  Katie still lived at the Orchard Inn, a kind of boarding house run by the Leones. She'd found no reason to move, and I didn't blame her. The place was much bigger than my apartment in the city, and cheaper than just about anything else she might find in the Grove. It had a certain charm, with a trellis beyond the window, and doilies, floral chintz curtains, and rosewood everywhere you looked. She'd taken down the crucifixes and some of the statues of saints the Leones had left around, and politely kept them all in one corner. I'd sometimes glance over and feel the weight of a thousand years of Catholic canon upon me.

  When we got back to her apartment we spent a long time in bed whispering and caressing before we finally made love. Need grew steadily. We worked with the slow madness of everything we'd been feeling lately, the fuel of frustration and passion, and wondering how it would all play out. My flight reservation back to the city had been made for this morning. I had weeks' worth of backorders to fulfill and auction lots to scout.

  "Boy," she said as we drifted back against the pillows. I brushed the hair from her face, drawing my fingers in and out of her dimples. "Somebody had his Wheaties."

  Wind howled like baying hounds and rattled the windows, the roof lurching and groaning. The night split open and that freaky hail started pecking at the glass again. Even the weather seemed out of sorts, working to get back on track. Katie shivered, clambered to her dresser, drew on a thick flannel nightgown that had either been out of style for six decades or had just come back in, and climbed back into bed where we huddled beneath the comforter.

  She said, "You're looking at Jesus again."

  "He's looking at me."

  "You want to brood. I can tell. Hey, I know, we'll put on Mozart's 'Requiem,' is it too late for that? What time is it?" She leaned over and checked the clock on the night stand. Beyond her silhouette, the trellis bowed into view, hail driving a little harder now like some kid outside throwing pebbles to get our attention. "We don't want to wake anyone with funeral dirges, somebody might get upset. Why are you still feeling guilty, Jon?"

  "Not guilty exactly, just pondering," I said.

  "Your choices were limited."

  "Yes, they were."

  "When in doubt, wallop first."

  "Wallop?"

  "I kind of like wallop. Better than whatever you did to that loudmouth horsey-faced guy in the restaurant."

  "Well, yeah."

  "You going to join Oscar's gym?"

  "I think I'll take a pass."

  She was trying to be serious, but it wouldn't work with that nightgown on. When she turned too quickly the flannel would snap against my knees. I feared burns. She smoothed herself out in front of me and said, "When in doubt, wallop first. A motto to live by, especially when forced with that kind of a situation."

  "Which I hope never to find myself in again."

  "I think all the major parties involved feel that same way."
r />   "Especially Teddy. If only he'd walloped first." Even in shadow, her beauty carried through, the set of her lips so clear, and her voice giving her so much substance here in the night. "You don't really think it's him, do you?"

  "I'm not sure. What was done to his face bothers me. Why would a millionaire's son hide? And if it's not him, then who is it?"

  "It's not your problem, and you really don't need to make it your problem."

  "I already did that when I didn't listen to whatever Crummler would have told me."

  "Maybe he wouldn't have said anything. Maybe there was nothing to say." She took my face in her hands and I took hers in mine, and we looked like some couple in a Fellini film where they talk into each other's noses. "Is it possible we can put this on the back burner for tonight?"

  "We'll take it completely off the stove."

  "The things you do for me."

  "Damn straight," I said. I hoped she didn't mean that we should talk about the flower shop/bookstore idea all over again.

  She didn't.

  Dawn broke unevenly. A lot of red light, but it was cold again. I wished I had some flannel pajamas. Jesus was still looking at me. I lay staring at the ceiling for about two hours, until Katie lifted her head from my chest and put it back and then pulled it away. Large drops of sweat suddenly rose and began to drip down her ashen forehead.

  She whimpered, "Oh hell."

  I held on for a second, not wanting to be parted just then. I started to sweat, too. She knew more about this from being a woman, and more still from having been in medical school before deciding she'd rather open a shop and let me steal tulips. Her color drained further, as if somebody with a huge eraser was working down her face inch by inch. I'd been assured this was completely natural, but I still didn't know what to do most of the time, sitting around helplessly while she suffered.

  Katie scampered from the bed and nearly didn't make it to the bathroom in time. Her words had a muted echo. "Oh, yuck." I stepped beside her in time to see her legs fall out from under her as she retched and slid against the freezing tile floor. I wrapped her into my arms until she finished.

  "It's okay," she said, trying to smile. "Don't look like that. This is normal, really. I don't know why they call it morning sickness, a woman feels ill almost all the time the first three months." I carried her back to the bed and wet her face, breasts, and belly down with a cool wash cloth. At a couple of points she giggled and the hard knot of guilt and stress in my skull loosened a bit.

  "You're going to stick around now, aren't you?" she said. "You'll skip going back to the city?"

  "I have some things to clear up, but I'll be back in two or three days."

  Her jade eyes filled with an irritated charge, and the silence hit like a physical force. She wanted to know why I'd leave Manhattan to return to Felicity Grove in order to get involved with murder, but hesitated when it came to finding housing and happiness with a woman I loved and a child on the way.

  That silence followed us while we showered and dressed and got ready for her to drive me to the airport. I was famished, but didn't want to mention food in case she still felt a bit queasy. Her cheeks had the rich pink gleam of stoked anger, even as we made our way down the staircase and past the Leones' living room, where the luscious aroma of breakfast wafted throughout the house. My stomach made one huge gurgling noise that startled me as much as if I'd sat on a cat.

  Mr. Leone waved to us as we walked out. "You're not staying for breakfast? Come in, come in here, what, are you pazzo making me go in there and eat all that by myself? Hey, did that schifo crazy caretaker ever find you?"

  I stopped short in the doorway and Katie plowed into my back. She let out a loud whuff.

  I said, "What?"

  They kept their television turned mostly to the Italian cable stations. You could hear Cella Luna playing at late hours, all kinds of weird Italian soap operas where the main characters shrieked and wept and tried to bite each others' ears, then threw themselves down on altars at church. Bowling trophies and photos of stern-faced men and women lined the rosewood shelves. The religious icons weren't kept in a corner down here, but spread out on every horizontal surface you could see, with the walls covered by some truly beautiful paintings of scenes from the bible, giving the room a vaguely funeral-home feel to it.

  "He came here a couple nights ago looking for you. I told him you two went to that restaurant, what is it called, Frank's Bistro? How can you eat at a place called Frank's Bistro I have no idea. I went once, tried their frutti di mare and it tasted like they boxed and mailed the fish over from Genoa, fourth class, on a slow boat, took maybe two months to get here. Tell me you didn't have that, please, couldn't be anything worse. Hey, I already told you, come in here, want some pasta fagioli? Just made it yesterday. It's good even for breakfast, hot or cold. Jonny, tell this girl she's got to eat. She's too skinny and looks pale to me all the time." His wife shouted something in Italian from the kitchen, and his eyes got very wide. He said, "You forget the basil and she goes for the cleaver, scusi," and wandered off.

  "Crummler was looking for me," I whispered.

  "Call Lowell."

  "Anna was right. He needed my help."

  "Listen to me. It still doesn't have to be your problem. Call Lowell, notify the police. If Crummler really needed help he would have told the sheriff."

  "Maybe he couldn't for some reason."

  We were still stuck in the doorway, the screen open with leaves swirling in a circular drift around our feet. A white Mercedes limousine idled at the curb, with a shine so thick you could have thrown buckets of gravel on the hood and never dented the coat of wax. Both front doors opened, and two men climbed out and stood rigid, waiting and staring.

  "Now what?" Katie asked.

  "I think I can guess."

  An Asian woman stepped up the walk and took a long bead on me. Her straight, shining black hair fell longer than any I'd ever seen before, down beyond her waist in a perfect crest. The rising wind hadn't dislodged a strand. She wore only a tightly fitted, sleeveless red dress, and I saw the slight rise of goose bumps on the back of her arms as she approached.

  "Mr. Harnes would like to speak with you." I expected an Asian sing-song cadence but there was only an Ivy League thickness of voice and manner. She added with a note of demand and finality. "Now, please."

  Katie kept the quiet fume going and said, "Go do what you have to do."

  "I'll be back in a few minutes."

  Except for the curiously dead gaze of the woman, she was the most exotic lady who'd ever stepped foot into Felicity Grove, and looked like she could teach a man the secret sensual pleasures of the Orient even if he were on the rack. If she had been one of the kids in Thailand forced into sweatshop factory work at the age of six, then somehow it had paid off for her.

  "That won't be necessary. Please allow us to drive you to the airport."

  Katie asked her, "You want to tell me how you happen to know where he's going?"

  "Please." There was no query or room for discussion in the woman's tone. She simply stared, her lips not notched so much as a millimeter toward a smile or frown. Her face seemed fabricated from cloth or plastic, smoother than flesh should be. I didn't spot a single line in her skin, not around her eyes, not at the edges of her mouth, not even between her eyebrows where we all get a furrow.

  To know I was leaving they had to know my schedule. I tried to placate my paranoia by accepting the possibility that Harnes had simply made a few inquiries about me in the past twenty-four hours after all the news broadcasts. A man of his wealth and position wouldn't find it too difficult to garner information. It made more sense than the idea that he'd been hovering over me—or perhaps Crummler—for weeks.

  "What's your name?"

  "Jocelyn."

  "I'll be with you in a moment," I said, and turned my back to her. I didn't like being accosted, checked up on, and followed right to the door of my girl's place. Jocelyn hardly made a sound walking down
the walk to the Mercedes limousine again, but Katie watched her leave.

  "Call Lowell," she said. "Whatever is happening, you're going to need his help. I'll call him now."

  "No, it's all right."

  "You have to do everything alone, in your own way, don't you?"

  "It'll be fine."

  "You're going to get hurt." She stood quickly on her toes, threw a kiss at my lips that sort of missed, spun back inside and shut the door.

  The driver was hardly more than spectral: a thin, ashen-faced man in a bad-fitting black suit who smelled like he'd gotten into Oscar Kinion's bathroom and used up the rest of his cologne.

  Another guy with a white crew cut stood half out of the passenger seat, as if ready to come in and get me if I hadn't been persuaded to follow the woman. The etched lines of his face bent around his mouth like a poorly folded map—his sneer had been affixed to him for decades. He looked a very healthy, fit, and forceful sixty. His upper lip dipped at an improper angle, almost like a harelip. Once he'd been punched in the mouth so hard that he'd bitten out a large piece of his lip, and the sew-up job had mauled him further. The lower half of his front teeth showed through, yellow and dry. He said, "Stop looking at me."

  The woman opened the rear door of the limo, and I got my first glimpse of Theodore Harnes.

  Nondescript was the best description I could come up with. Nothing about him stuck with me, no simile or metaphor came to mind. I sat beside him with my body slightly twisted in case he wanted to shake hands. He stared straight ahead. Jocelyn got in beside me, pressing me over until I sat in the middle between her and Harnes. If this was a Chandler, Block, Williams or Vachss novel I'd have been "scrunched between the heaving shoulders of two guys named Vincenzo and Popgun Rolly." The woman felt like smoke beside me, a presence but not a pressure. Harnes, though we didn't touch, was the opposite. A live pressure but no sense of a living presence.

  I was starting to think that getting into the car was a bad idea.