Sorrow's Crown

by Tom Piccirilli

  Her eyes grew wider and I got to see just how bloodshot and raw-looking they were from all the hours of crying. She gasped and pointed at my nose and said, "It's you!"

  "Me?"

  "The one on television. You're the man who found Teddy."

  ''Yes, I did."

  She appeared to be lost for a moment, and glanced indecisively from side to side. The kid hiding in there with her muttered something in a harsh tone. She shut the door in my face with a heavy blast of air. I heard more quiet but urgent talking as they argued. The door popped open again and she told me, "Please, come inside."

  I felt certain the guy would be out of sight but near enough to eavesdrop on everything Alice and I might say. I was wrong. He stood in the foyer with his features tautly drawn like a bow pulled too tightly. He had the grimace of a man holding back a well-stoked rage just waiting for an excuse to set it loose.

  Alice Conway introduced him. "This is my friend, Brian Frost."

  "Hello," I said.

  We shook hands and he glared at me and tried to crush my knuckles. He kept scowling, and I could almost hear his brain cackling and shrieking "Die, die, die!" I had no idea why, or whether it was focused at me or if he hated the world at large. He had hair so yellow and short that it looked like a huge lemon peel sitting on top of his head. He wore a black sleeveless T-shirt and had the excessive musculature of a serious steroid user. He didn't work his shoulders or stomach enough though, so he also suffered from a somewhat swollen appearance. The enormity of his biceps forced him to sway when he walked.

  Alice led us into a spacious and barren living room that had deep grooves in the carpet where a lot of furniture had once rested for many years. Brian leaned against an achingly bare wall where you could see the outlines of paintings that had recently been taken down.

  "Did he ... did he try to ... say anything?" she asked.

  "No, I'm sorry, he was gone by then."

  "Oh, my God."

  She wanted to cry more but didn't have anything left to give. I could tell by the way her shoulders shrugged inward and hands drooped to her sides that she must have felt as if a fist were barreling into the center of her chest. I've felt that way a few times myself.

  "How did you know Teddy?" I asked.

  "I was his girlfriend."

  Teddy's presence, unlike his father's, seemed to be solidifying. He grew around me, a ghost taking on a more substantial form with each person I met who knew him. Here was someone who sobbed and trembled at his loss, those beautiful lips had touched his. It felt as if Teddy stood at my shoulder, urging me on.

  I took a deep breath. I couldn't shake my odd doubts that he might still be alive; that Wallace may have been mistaken, duped, or influenced.

  The boy's face—why had they taken his face?

  "Do you know of anyone who might have had a reason to hurt Teddy?"

  "No!" she said. "There was no one."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Teddy didn't even know that many people. He was... shy. Reserved. For most of his life he traveled around the world with his father. He never had a stable home life, and there were a fleet of stepmothers. Spending so many years in the Orient and South America, without being able to speak much of the languages, he learned to live comfortably with his own company. They really didn't settle back into New York until two summers ago.”

  “Did he like it here after being gone for so long?”

  “We didn't really go out much at all, and when we did it was up to the mountains or to the preserves. Or bookstores. He loved to read, and read everything he could get his hands on. He returned all the books for credit or else just gave them away. With his money he could have bought anything he liked, but he didn't believe in materialism. A few weeks ago he started getting involved in volunteer work, some community service. He was interested in nature, and started to take up painting. He loved Chinese brushwork. He learned a lot about being ... spiritual, I guess you would call it, in China, by watching the monks and the people at their shrines.”

  “He was religious then?”

  “He loved Eastern culture. He cared about aesthetics."

  Brian Frost snorted loudly.

  "You disagree?" I asked him.

  He said nothing, but his face tightened even more until I thought his chin and forehead would meet.

  I turned back to Alice. "What did he think of his father?”

  “He loved his father, of course. Very much.”

  “Did Teddy ever mention Crummler?"

  Alice hesitated and grimaced at Frost, who continued to smolder in silence. "Yes, he liked the man," she admitted. Her voice continued to strain and splinter, wavering from a whisper to a whimper. "Teddy thought Crummler was blessed, in a way. Crummler had the proper sense of respect for the dead, and made the cemetery into a beautiful place of worship, the way they do in the East. Teddy's mother is buried in Felicity Grave, and he said that Crummler not only understood the beauty of the land, but the reverence for the departed."

  Respect for the dead. Anna had said the same thing.

  "That's all such shit," Brian Frost hissed. They were the first words I'd actually heard him speak, and about what I expected. "That Crummler guy is a bum. Just a crazy bum who tried to rob Teddy."

  "Do you have a photo of him?" I asked Alice.

  Frost tipped himself off the wall and took a step toward me. "You don't have to show or tell this guy anything."

  "It's okay, Brian," she said and quickly reached behind her to a breakfront where some knickknacks and pictures still rested.

  "He isn't a cop, you don't have to let him stand here and question you." Frost started flexing. Actually, I was surprised he'd managed to contain himself this long. "You sound like the police, but you aren't, are you?"

  “No."

  "You sound like that deputy. Tully. We had to talk to him, but we don't have to listen to your questions."

  I figured Lowell would have beaten me here, and knew that after having been questioned already Alice would be a lot more reticent with me. "It's just that I never got a chance to meet Teddy," I said.

  "So, why the hell do you care?"

  Alice touched him softly on the back and handed me a framed photograph. "This was taken last summer."

  Frost looked like a nice kid when the lines of his face weren't folded into a blazing hatred, trying to use psychic powers to make people shrivel up. He hadn't indulged in steroids then and was almost skinny. No wonder he was so angry. A side-effect of overindulgence in steroids can lead to aggressive, combative behavior, what they used to call "roid rage" back when I was in high school. We had some players on the football team who would smuggle the stuff in. They'd also get the chills and have a hell of a time getting even minor bleeding to stop if they happened to get cut during a game.

  In the photo Alice appeared extremely happy, with a bright smile that reached her eyes and ignited her whole being with exuberance.

  Teddy Harnes stood between them.

  Unlike his father, Teddy appeared to have a glowing personality to him, leaning into the camera as if wanting to launch himself forward, one arm around Alice and the other around Brian's shoulders, pulling his friends to him. He had black hair with large looping curls that spilled down his collar and hooked against his forehead. I had no way of telling if this was the kid I'd found dead on the ground, but I kept staring, hoping that something would trigger.

  "Do you know his father well?"

  "Why would you ask that?" Frost said. He flexed a little more, his pectorals heaving. "Now why would you want to know something like that?"

  "I'm just trying to find out what might have happened.”

  “He's dead and they arrested the killer who did it, and I hope they fry his ass even if he is a retard."

  "Look, I think—"

  "That's enough," Brian Frost told me. He was the kind of guy who raged up to the point when he was about to cut loose, then grew calm. All the fury left his face and I knew our sociable, amicable
time had about run out. "You can leave now, you son of a bitch."

  He put his hand on my chest and shoved me backward, then did it again as I backtracked step by step down the hall. I stumbled and Alice's eyes grew wide with terror.

  "Don't push me, kid."

  "Screw off, creep."

  Frost got ready to prod me once more but I dodged out of reach and opened the door. I couldn't see any point in arguing, fighting, or bothering them further. When I got out onto the porch, Frost lunged and elbowed me in the kidney, slamming the door and locking it.

  I floundered down the steps and landed on my ass, then sat with the wind blowing and piling leaves against my back. I looked up at the highest dark window far above. I saw nothing, but could imagine a hand slowly releasing a lace curtain, and a ghostly figure quickly easing away.

  I couldn't shake the stupid feeling. I wondered if Teddy Harnes was alive and hiding somewhere in the bowels of the black house or someplace else, and if so, what he was running from, and who was buried in his grave.

  EIGHT

  Katie turned to the door as the bells jangled, smiled at me, and said into the phone, "Carl, you're not listening, you hate to listen. Do not send me irises. No, I am not imploring, I am simply telling you. Stop buying irises. You always get stuck with inventory and then try to unload your rotting overstock on me. Yes, Carl, always."

  She swung back and forth behind the counter, checking through papers, opening drawers, and began packing together a bouquet. She had a fluidity of motion that I could watch for hours, a combination of ballet, aerobics, and erotic dancing.

  Her eyes, as usual, flashed with unrestrained feeling, showing everything that was going on inside her, perfectly expressive and easy to read. She smiled again and my chest loosened; brick by brick the rest of life fell away, and I got a little heady again with my love for her. She scratched the tip of her nose and cocked her ear away from the phone because Carl the jughead was fouling her orders again and whining loudly about it. I heard his high-pitched pleas and yammering from across the room. She needed to connect with another supplier but hadn't managed to find a competent one yet. I never realized gardening could lead to such a cutthroat industry.

  Katie's dimples came and went as she worried her lips for a moment. "I send the check when I receive the orders. That's how it works in this world, Carl. Goodbye." She hung up with a slam. "Jerk."

  "Carl has not exactly established himself as reliable," I said.

  "As a matter of fact, Carl has established himself as a grade-A moron, is what he's done."

  I sat and pulled her onto my lap and kissed her for a long time. I stroked and smoothed the line between her brows, caressing her face, and gently touched the length of her soft, cool neck. As I pressed my lips on her throat she sighed. She grinned her crooked grin at me and my breath hitched in the same way it had when I'd first seen her, and every time since.

  "I missed you, too," she said. "Been a long day?"

  "You could say that."

  "Want to tell me about it?"

  I shrugged and shifted her farther back into my arms. "I got yelled at by a lot of people."

  "Well, if that's all they did . . . for you that's not too bad, actually."

  "I think I have to agree."

  I checked the refrigeration unit to my left and saw through the glass doors that most of her stock had been emptied in the past couple of days. Except for the irises. "How've things been here?"

  "About what you'd expect with a funeral that size. And hey, did Anubis eat my spider plant?"

  "Only a little bit."

  Lots of people walked by the shop. A few hovered in front by the door talking excitedly, either because of all the media coverage in town lately or because the purple stuff had escaped Pembleton's and was currently rampaging down Main Street.

  "I had a raid on white roses and lilies," Katie said. "They didn't even want wreathes. Folks trying to outdo each other with larger and more elaborate arrangements, hoping to impress Theodore Harnes."

  "Or just each other."

  "Strange what people take pride in."

  "City image, maybe," I said, thinking about the neighbors I knew at the funeral, without understanding why they were there. "Nobody wants the reporters to think we don't throw nice funerals for all the murdered kids who get their faces sliced off."

  I shouldn't have said it, and especially not with such an offhand tone. Katie paled, her jade eyes appearing even more intense and luminescent as she lost her color.

  "I'm sorry, it was wrong of me to joke that way."

  "No, it's not that, Jonathan, I'm only sorry you were the one who had to find him."

  "Me too."

  She looked at me for a minute as if she didn't want to tell me something. I waited. I wouldn't push it. She grew more rigid on my lap. "He didn't order anything, you know. Harnes. All those flowers at the funeral and that wealthy man didn't have anything to do with it. I thought it was odd, but maybe not. Since Carl screwed up my orders so badly this week I called around to most of the other shops in the county, working out exchanges. Harnes didn't order anything from them, either." She tried to give me the grin again but couldn't quite pull it off. "Is that a clue? Did I just give you a clue?"

  It made sense if Teddy wasn't really dead. Why would Harnes waste his efforts on whoever had taken Teddy's place? But that would mean he and his son were in it together, spoiling my idea that maybe Teddy had planned his own death to escape his father. Harnes had the news teams there; he'd opened the ceremony up to a public that knew nothing about him. He'd gone through all the appropriate motions, even if he found himself incapable of properly playing the bereaved father. Or was it possible that Harnes so loved his son that his grief had fashioned him into the colorless man I'd met?

  Katie stared at me, and I saw the fear nudging everything else aside. "Let Lowell and the department handle it. As much as you dislike Broghin, he is the sheriff, and I can't believe he'd ever allow Crummler to come to any harm if Crummler is innocent."

  "And if he's not?"

  "If he's not then it isn't your fault." She kissed me lightly; it was the kind of peck you give a crying kid when you want him to shut up and go watch cartoons. "If you keep getting yourself involved where you shouldn't be it's going to cost you a lot one of these days."

  A veiled threat of an ultimatum might be lurking in that statement, but I chose to let it pass. I looked over at the other room, thinking of workmen putting in bookcases, a neon sign in the window, and wire spin racks that squeaked and never rotated correctly. I could just see the Leones serving pasta faglioli to anyone who came in.

  "Listen, Katie, I ..."

  "I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about you. You're going to get hurt, and I don't ever want to see that again." She'd actually stitched me up only a few days after we'd first met, using her background as a med student one last time before she'd fully left it behind to take over the shop. "Sometimes you just need to let it go."

  "Crummler needs all the help he can get right now.”

  “And have you found anything to help him?"

  "No," I admitted. "Not yet."

  "So what happens next?"

  "I didn't listen to him when I should have. Now I'm going to try to make him tell me whatever it was he needed to say.”

  “You're going to visit him in the hospital?"

  "Yes."

  "What if he says that he murdered Teddy?"

  "Then I want to know why."

  She traced the lines of my face for a while, and I did the same to her, stroking her hair. So many huge decisions loomed nearby, and it seemed like I was the only one who felt any pressure from them, a coward at heart. I let my fingers continue to glide across her throat in the playful way we sometimes did when not thinking of so much that might come between us. I ran my palm lightly over her belly and could almost sense our child growing there, heading toward the world.

  "He came back in," she said.

  "Who?"

&
nbsp; “That football player who still hates you, Arnie."

  "Devington," I said. "He came here again?"

  "Yeah."

  I thought of him unchanging through the years, emotionally and mentally stagnant while his body grew to fat, balding prematurely, his knees probably not in the best of shape, so that they sounded full of sand when he got up in the morning. Perfecting his pettiness. "What did he say?"

  "Nothing. He just watched me."

  "Watched you?"

  "Stared a little while he wandered around the store. Don't get upset. It was nothing, really. I sort of feel a little sorry for him. He seems like he's trying to find something he already knows is gone, but can't help checking for it anyway."

  "Okay," I said.

  Watched her.

  ~ * ~

  I spent a half hour downtown shopping until I found what I needed, then called Lowell.

  "What's that noise?" he asked.

  "A Suburban with a bad transmission in the left lane."

  "So you finally bought a cell phone. Keep a set of fresh batteries on you. I've got a feeling you're going to be on that thing a lot."

  "It's a rechargeable."

  "You buy two. Keep one always charged so when the other starts going you just switch them."

  "Oh."

  "Give me the number."

  I gave it to him. I also gave him the doubts that had been stacking up like firewood in my mind. "Listen, this might sound stupid—"

  "Hell, when you admit it yourself, I know it's going to be bad."

  "—but are you sure it was Teddy?"

  He sighed heavily and there was a long pause that kept lengthening until I thought he might have gotten into his car and was about to drive up behind me. "You're dogging my steps, Jonny Kendrick."

  I couldn't argue, and waited until he decided whether he'd threaten me, give me a lecture, or let it roll. We'd played it every way in the past. The cell phone had clear sound, and I could hear his slow, regular breathing while he ran it through his mind and wondered if I'd trip him up on this. He'd stand for a lot, but never that.

  I thought I might have stepped over the line this time, as the silence thickened, but eventually Lowell said, "Cause of death, about what you'd expect. Multiple blunt trauma to the head. We matched fingerprints from the victim to Teddy's passport."