Sorrow's Crown

by Tom Piccirilli

  Theodore Harnes, who had married one of my grandmother's bridesmaids, said, "I want to thank you.”

  “You do?"

  "Yes."

  "For what?"

  "Catching the man who murdered my son."

  An autopsy report wouldn't be completed for at least another day. The kid's teeth had been broken and scattered and it would take a while for him to be identified by his dental records or whatever other means they had. I wondered why, under these circumstances, a father wouldn't reach out with both hands for even the slightest hope that his child wasn't dead.

  "It might not be your son. There's no real evidence yet that...”

  In a tranquil, toneless voice, he said, "He did not come home."

  “But there's a chance that ..."

  "My son always came home."

  I could see he was a man who brooked no opposition of any kind, not even by natural events. All things had to follow in the same course, at his insistence. What he expected must come to pass. His demands would be unrealistic and unobtainable. Only death proved to be an acceptable excuse for Teddy. What would having this man for a father do to a boy? To what lengths would someone forced to live in that shadow go to get away?

  "I don't think Crummler did it," I said.

  He showed no bewilderment, as if prepared for my response. "A raving lunatic covered in blood holding the murder weapon? He is guilty."

  "Crummler wouldn't hurt anyone."

  He ignored my comment and said, "I've heard of your past, helpful interests in certain investigations. The kidnapped Degrasse child. The sheriff's recent troubles. You found the murderer of your parents. You and your grandmother, I believe. You are a formidable pair. She sounds like a most intriguing woman."

  "Oh cripes."

  So, he would take the tack that he didn't know Anna, or perhaps he'd forgotten her, or only remembered her in a haze from before he had such power to wield.

  "Why was Teddy at the cemetery?" I asked.

  Jocelyn gazed at me, the driver glared into the rearview mirror, and the other guy kept his grin up, as if nobody ever asked Harnes a question, or maybe nobody ever mentioned Teddy.

  "His mother is buried there," Harnes said.

  "Was he visiting her grave?"

  "I believe so."

  "Tell me about him."

  "Why?"

  "Why not? Who were his friends?"

  "You should have murdered that madman," Harnes told me, and a static charge built around him. I thought if I reached out and touched him, sparks would skitter off my fingernails. He gave me a sidelong glance, showing nothing. "Believe me, Mr. Kendrick, it would have been worth your while, if you had killed him."

  He said it the way anyone else would talk about turning in their recycled cans for cash. I stared at the side of his face, trying to get a bead on him, but he moved in and out of focus from second to second.

  "Is there anyone I can talk to?"

  "Talk? About my son?" Barnes snapped back into himself, so unassuming that he seemed to fade in and out of existence. "No, there is no one with whom you can talk."

  The guy in the front seat turned to grin at me some more with that scarred mouth. He had the air of a man who knew a secret and wanted everyone else to know that he knew it. Whatever he wanted to tell me, he'd eventually get around to it. I smiled pleasantly at him, showing off my nice upper lip. I wasn't getting anywhere with Harnes anyway. "What's your name, Sparky?"

  He opened his mouth slowly and I saw that part of his tongue was missing as well, leaving it slightly forked. He said, "It sure as hell ain't Sparky," just as we pulled up to the airport. Jocelyn got out and I followed.

  Harnes said nothing, and didn't even glance toward us. Jocelyn slipped back into the Mercedes, slammed the door, and they left me there.

  I realized that Harnes hadn't given me a lift in his nice limousine to thank me for finding his son's killer, not at all. He hadn't even seen me, really. He'd been looking right through me and staring at Anna.

  ~ * ~

  I called my grandmother from the airport but got my own voice on her answering machine. I said, "If Harnes comes around call Lowell immediately." Then I called Lowell and told him that I thought Theodore Harnes was going to be great misfortune in one form or another.

  He laughed and said, "You giving me a bulletin, Jonny? Guy's got kids in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nicaragua, all the places you can't even point to on a map—"

  "I think I could get Nicaragua."

  "—they do nothing but work on the line making shoes for sixteen hours a day that are sold on Rodeo Drive for six hundred bucks a pair. He has a house full of Burmese servants who probably get paid off in table scraps and half the minimum wage. He makes the old men in the sawmills and out on the road camps thank their stars they've at least got shooters and beer to slump into in their dirty trailers at night. Thanks for the advice, I can't express in words how much I appreciate it. Why don't you go shelve some more books out there in the big bad city, Jonny Kendrick? What's that noise, you dropping change into a pay phone? What, you didn't get your cell phone yet?"

  SIX

  For the next two days I sat in the store fulfilling orders I'd received from the Internet. More and more of my business was actually done through the mail and over the Internet, now that I'd hooked up with several online bookseller databases. I'd list most rarities and first editions, and within a couple of weeks I'd generate orders and I'd send the books off. It was much easier to reach collectors who knew what they were after and were willing to pay, rather than relying on the chance that someone would come in off the street who was probably only interested in finding a cheap paperback copy of a recent bestseller. I had three locked glass cases filled with books over a century old, and it felt nearly that long since anyone had browsed and asked me to unlock the cabinets.

  My assistant Debi Kiko Mashima finally realized that the way to fame and success was not to work in a Greenwich Village bookstore, but to quit NYU and marry one of the leading software writers on the face of the earth. His name was Bobby Li and he liked to rollerblade and always wore hockey jerseys. They'd met at a computer expo at the Jacob Javits Center. Despite the fact that he, too, was of Japanese descent, he'd lived in the San Francisco area all his life and now owned a large portion of it. He was Debi's age, twenty-one, and worth roughly half a billion dollars. They'd had five dates before he proposed and she accepted. I did not consider her leaving my employ to be a great betrayal.

  If I moved the store to Felicity Grove and went in partners with the flower shop, I could still make a living, but I'd have to get a door with bells on it that chimed or jangled or rang or tinkled whenever anybody came in. Maybe I just had a low distraction threshold, but the idea of having a clanging noise interrupt my thoughts and work every few minutes didn't appeal to me. A door opening and somebody entering made more than enough clamor to alert you to the presence of a potential customer. And every once in a while somebody came in hoping to sell me a few rain-soaked paperbacks they'd nabbed out of the trash.

  Or so I thought, until I turned in my seat and saw a guy standing there only two feet away, staring intently at me.

  He'd entered without a sound.

  No way to judge how tall he might be, crimped as he was, low to the ground like an animal tensed and coiled. He wore remnants of a dark three-piece suit, ripped and patched with different pieces of fabric, a frayed black overcoat hanging open so that he looked like an Old West gunslinger waiting to draw. He had the hard, confident, but wary edge the street imbued those whose brains hadn't been turned to tapioca by drugs, self-pity, sexual abuse, or the unending loneliness of the outcast. His eyes had a black, shrewd, and discerning energy to them, but I might have just been mistaking malicious aptitude. He had a poorly trimmed beard, thick in spots and showing cuts in other places, as if he'd used a pair of broken scissors to slice off hanks.

  He took his time sizing me up, shifting now until he stood in front of the counter, glancing
down at my fists filled with invoices and mailing labels.

  Despite his silent entrance, I should have noticed the reek. The stink of rotting fruit and vegetables followed him in. His torn, gaping pockets were stuffed with lettuce leaves and a few bruised apples and old legumes. I smelled no alcohol. He looked fifty, but might have been a decade younger or older. A sharp look of feral intelligence lit his face, and I thought he must be one of the rare breed who had chosen the street instead of the street choosing them. He could have been a cop taken down low.

  "You're Kendrick," he said.

  "Yes."

  A bell over the door might not be such a bad thing after all, I thought. One that jangled and rang up such a storm that nobody who looked like they wanted to yank a Colt strapped to his thigh could walk in while I worried about how distracting bells over the door would be.

  Even if I'd wanted to wallop first and ask questions later, he stood just out of arm's reach. Keeping a fair distance, yet staying close enough so that if I had a weapon handy he could whirl over the counter and leap into my chest before I could do anything about it.

  "I'm Nicodemus Crummler," he said. "Nick. I know you're my brother Zeb's friend. I need your help."

  "Who's Maggie?" I asked.

  His eyes lost their protective black shale aspect, the dead sheen lifting for a second. That seemed to be about as close to a flinch as he was capable of after living so long in the refuse. He chose to ignore the question for the moment.

  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, ‘Not 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 difficu
lt 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."