"I have returned!" Crummier yelled.
"From where?" I asked.
"Know you not, Jon?" he said, peering at me.
"I know not."
"Then I shall tell you."
"Oh lord," Katie whispered in my ear.
"I have been in battle," Crummier went on, his voice hushed. "With forces."
"I see."
"Jeez, what forces?" Katie asked.
"Know you not?"
"I know not," she said.
"This could get repetitious," I said.
"They fear me for I am Crummler! These forces of an ancient and dark domain." His eyebrows danced like horny caterpillars. "Who reign in far off dimensions where obsidian towers rise through the ochre night and desert winds blow the sand of ages across the ruins of a thousand lost civilizations and the world . . ."
I cut him off. "Do you want a ride back to the cemetery, Crummler? I'm heading that way."
"The cemetery?" Katie murmured out the side of her mouth.
"I would like for you to give me a ride back to the cemetery, Jon. My feet hurt. I have a hole in my shoe and the snow makes my toes cold."
"Okay," I nodded. "You know Anna's van right over there. The door on the passenger side is open. Wait for me and I'll be out in a minute."
He told me okay and went off much more calmly than he'd come in, glad that he had someone who'd listen to him. As if just now realizing she had her arms around me, Katie glanced down from my neck, let go and stepped away.
"In case you didn't catch it," I said, "that was Crummler."
"I caught it, and he's going to catch a swift kick if he ever comes in here like that again. You mind telling me if I have that to look forward to every afternoon?"
There was a dropped hint in that statement that said she was planning on remaining in Felicity Grove indefinitely.
"I take it you've never seen him before."
"No, wouldn't I remember? I must've missed him because he's been in that dark domain for so long."
I chuckled and she did too, letting out a lot of nervous laughter, and then we stood facing each other for a few seconds before Crummler began beeping the van horn. "It was nice meeting you," I told her.
"I'm sorry we didn't have tulips. But I promise I'll track down those orders for you. Why don't you come back in a couple of days and see if they're here?"
Yeah, why not?
~ * ~
I drove Crummler to a shoe store and bought him a pair of work boots before I took him back to the cemetery. Someone without much wit had dubbed the place Felicity Grave, and to the town's shame, the name stuck. I listened to Crummler's excited prattling the way an adult is forced to listen to a child's jabbering about cartoons or comic books or squirrels chasing nuts in the back yard. Every once in a while I let out an "ooh" and an "ah." He rallied back and forth with himself, shifting gears between highly detailed stories of knights and demon dragons to what he had for breakfast—franks and beans—to a ghost that walked the edge of the graveyard and scared him by flinging willow branches at his shack, to how warm his feet were, to an assortment of other weird mental meanderings.
I liked Crummler because he kept the cemetery more well-kept than a gardener keeps his azaleas. It was not hyperbole to say that his job was his life; Zebediah Crummler had been a ward of the state for decades, and his lost existence before he came to Felicity Grove was nothing but the confines of orphanages, foster homes, and mental hospitals around New York State. Like a snapping electrical line, his manic persona needed grounding, and being caretaker of the graveyard gave his life meaning. You could hear the excitement in his voice when he talked of visitors who'd commented on the landscaping, the pure joy of being indispensable. Crummler meant something to himself as much as he did to the town, and I didn't think I could say that about more than a handful of other people I knew.
He got out of the van and walked with me to the graves of my parents. He said, "Say hello to your folks for me, Jon." I promised him I would and watched him race across the snowdrifts back to his home.
I kneeled in the snow, touching the tombstones out of some sense of respect. Sometimes I thought Crummler must actually clean each grave separately, a feather duster in one hand and a polishing rag in the other. The trees were trimmed, evergreens pruned, the leaves always raked so that the cemetery looked more like a park than a place for the dead. The snow and ice added new sculptures to this museum, and I wasn't sure whether I should be embarrassed by the pleasure I felt in simply spending a little time here.
The frozen earth crackled and rustled beneath my feet as I walked back to the van. Crummler waved from his shack near the surrounding stone wall, fenced-in by spiked gates like those at Dracula's castle. It only added to the eccentricity of the place, as though we should all know that graveyards are only a kind of playground where you ate franks and beans and ran into ghosts with willow swatches. Crummler kept waving and waving, both arms in the air as if he was guiding planes to safe landings. He laughed and called out more of his Crummler talk, frantic and hysterical and filled with meanings I would never understand.
I hoped.
FOUR
It began snowing again as I drove back to Anna's. The wind rose to beat and twine the wafting flakes into spiraling sheets around the van. An odd mood descended, partly darkened by recalling murder yet buoyed by meeting Katie, and this time I got to do it without the foam cakes.
I got out of the van feeling like one of those skaters in a glass globe, the world shaken up stuck behind transparent walls. Stasis, for the moment, but something would give soon. The spot where Richie Harraday had died on the lawn had already been covered with fresh snow. I clopped slush off my shoes, and walked into the foyer. Anubis snapped forward growling until he recognized me, then settled back on his haunches at Anna's side, mildly perturbed. My grandmother put Agatha Christie's final novel, Sleeping Murder, on her reading stand and grimaced sadly at me.
"Uh-oh," I said.
Her lips were thin, like my father's had been, and smoothed out thinner still. "You were right, Jonathan. It doesn't pay to be too pushy with our local constabulary."
"And just what does that mean?"
"I may have already committed the first faux pas of this case."
I couldn't stand it when she called our—experiences or whatever the hell they were—cases. They weren't cases. A case was what you put suits in, or books. It was twenty-four beers packed into cardboard. It's what lawyers take to make money, and what prosecutors fail at too often. But for those exceptions, I didn't want to think that cases have anything to do with me.
"What happened, Anna?"
"I held off from immediately phoning the morgue. Instead, I spent the afternoon reading until a few minutes ago when I called Wallace and inquired into what progress had been made in determining Harraday's death."
"And?"
"And although I'm certain Wallace doesn't have any reservations with sharing his findings, I believe he's under direct orders from the sheriff not to confer with me about this case."
"It's not a case. Did he offer any information?"
"No," she sighed, rubbing her hands together. The sunlight behind her snapped brilliantly against the snow and caught in her silver hair. "But he did tell me that Broghin is at this moment on his way here to talk to you."
"To me?" That one tagged me hard. "Why?"
"I'm not certain, but Wallace claims that Broghin is in, quote, a sour enough mood to piss lemonade, unquote."
"Oh, that's just terrific." I had a feeling I was going to be heading to jail again soon.
"He has a flair for capturing the spirit of the sheriff, our Keaton Wallace does. I believe we may have to continue mending a few pickets on those neighborly fences."
"But what did I do?"
No point in asking; there didn't have to be a particular reason behind Broghin pissing lemonade or wanting to heave me off a bridge. I'd known him my whole life, but the first time we ran into each other in a
collision-course was a week after my parents died in a car accident out at the Turnpike, on their way to visit me during my senior year at New York University. Anna had gone along; on the day I nearly cracked Broghin's skull, she was still in a coma, her spine having been crushed in the wreck.
I was as alone in my life at that moment as I can imagine myself ever being.
Broghin didn't take kindly to my pestering him during his investigation of the accident, and took even less kindly to my hurling his desk chair at him when he wrote the crash off as Dad's fault, claiming the autopsy had found enough liquor in my father's stomach that it was a miracle he ever backed out of the driveway. They said he'd fallen off the wagon after seven years of Alcoholics Anonymous; once a drunk, always a drunk.
When I was released from jail three months later Anna had come out of her coma. Maybe we both felt a little like we were being reborn together, with the rest of our family gone, and the two of us now orphaned.
She told the police about my father being forced off the road by a black sedan, and how, after a burning swirl of tearing metal the car went into a ravine, and through a haze of agony she'd seen a man climbing down the rocks. At first she thought he'd come to help, and tried with her remaining strength to attract his attention, to no avail. Thrown from the back seat and pinned beneath the overturned car, she couldn't move or even whisper—that's what had saved her life. Seconds before passing out, the truth clarified as she watched the man carefully take my mother's jaw in his hands and snap her neck. My father survived long enough for his killer to pour half a bottle of scotch down his throat.
Broghin listened to Anna's statement and reopened his single sheet file. Whatever evidence there might have been was three months old. In my cell, I'd fumed and mulled the facts over; afterwards, you could say I wasn't the most stable person in the world as I went to hunt for reasons. I threatened to separate Wallace's gluteus from his maximus if he didn't exhume my father's body and make a toxicology report out on the amount of alcohol in his bloodstream, there hadn't been enough time for any alcohol to get into my father's system. He should have done it the first time, but Wallace is an alcoholic too and probably enjoyed believing that no one ever reformed. Perhaps I was crazy, but I cared as much about getting an apology as I did catching my parents' murderer.
Anubis barked when a police cruiser pulled up outside.
Sheriff Franklin Broghin opened the car door and shifted his considerable bulk to get out of the seat, wrestling with his gun belt. He would come up to my chin if he could ever stand close enough to do it—his eighty-pound belly forced him back a good two or three feet. He could never get nose to nose with anybody, never look anyone square in the eye.
"Let me handle this, Jonathan."
"This has somehow already gone beyond our handling. It started off that way."
She nearly grinned. "I think so, too. I wonder why that is?"
Broghin didn't even glance at the murder site as he trundled up the path. My heart started hammering and my breath hitched; whenever I saw him I could only think of the three months my father had been in the grave and shamed. Anubis looked on and perked and snarled.
"I'm not ready for this today," I said.
"Don't let your temper get away with you, dear. Let's listen to what the man has to say."
"I'll listen so long as he doesn't yell in my face and poke me in the chest." Broghin had a nasty habit of poking people in their chests. He was doing it to me, screaming about how my father was a lousy bum, when I flung his desk chair at his head.
I met him at the door, sticking my chest out like a pubescent girl, waiting for him to jab me with his frankfurter fingers. Instead of having a smirk already curling his lips, he actually gave me a friendly smile and reached out to shake my hand.
"Hello, Johnny, nice to see you're back for a little visit. It's been a while since the last time. You should come on home more often."
"Ah," I wanly replied, "okay." I stepped out of his path as he took off his coat and approached my grandmother. Anubis stood without a sound and glared. The dog was always one word away from killing someone.
"Keep that damn animal away from me, Anna. You know he's just waiting for the right moment to tear my yahoos off."
Yahoos? I decided my grandmother never had an affair with Broghin. Forgetting all the other jerkwater town close-mindedness he'd exemplified over the years, it simply wasn't acceptable that Anna would go to bed with a man who actually used such a word as yahoos to describe any part of his anatomy.
She pulled Anubis aside while Broghin leaned down and hugged her, cautiously working his way around the coffee table to the couch, careful of his yahoos. He didn't sit down so much as he quit fighting gravity and let himself topple backwards to the cushions. The couch slid a few inches and thumped the wall, shaking the picture frames.
Anna turned her chair and smiled at me as if to say, Now what? I smiled stupidly back at her. She asked, "Franklin, may I offer you a cup of tea or coffee? We have a good deal of food left over from brunch. I can fix you a plate."
"No," the sheriff said. "Thanks anyway. I was just paying a call to see how you were, after last night.”
“You needn't have worried. I'm fine."
"Yeah, I knew you would be." He nodded in my direction. "But I'm still glad Johnny's here with you. You're on your own too much of the time as it is, and you really shouldn't be alone after something like this, Anna. I feel a lot better knowing there's somebody else with you for at least a few days."
It was obvious she didn't want to hear him talk about being watched over and taken care of, which only served to remind her of her own fears; the night had already faded before the fervor of her curiosity. "Have you made any progress in the case?"
"Not a whole hell of a lot, Anna, to be truthful," he said. Broghin had a deep, melodic and pillowy voice when he wasn't shouting, along the lines of Bing Crosby. "Harraday was a creep from a whole family of creeps and I guess it just caught up with him is all."
"Caught up with him?"
"Yup."
Anna waited for him to explain himself. When he didn't she commented, "I fail to catch your meaning.”
“What meaning?"
"Your meaning."
"My meaning? What I mean?" The pulse in Broghin's neck ticked rapidly and the snow left a sheen of droplets on his face. "Well, it's the same old story. You've got a kid who's a bum and is always going to be a bum. He gets into trouble as a teenager and works his way into the fringes of serious crime. He steals a couple cars when he's bored, snatches a few purses, burgles houses every now and again, and eventually makes a few enemies. He was probably moving up to committing heavy-time felonies when he came across an even worse badass who double-crossed him. A drug deal gone wrong is my guess."
I said, "Lowell told me that Margaret's home was Harraday's first burglary."
"First one we caught him at, Johnny. That doesn't mean it was his only one." He pointed his index finger at me and cocked his thumb, shooting me with a silly grin like an oversized uncle playing games with his favorite nephew. It knotted my stomach to see him act this way. I almost would've preferred the red-faced maniac who'd cuffed me and escorted me to jail.
Jesus, I thought, Broghin's nervous about something, too. What the hell is going on?
Anna asked, "What was the cause of Richie Harraday's death, Franklin?"
"I'd rather not say."
"Why is that?"
"I'd rather not say why not."
"Why not?" she asked.
"Why I don't want to tell you? Because I don't want to, Anna."
"Yes, but why is that?" she insisted. It cracked me up how she worked him.
"Why? Because we're so early into this investigation—Christ, it's barely been twelve hours—and I don't want to start taking potshots in the dark. We need more to go on." He held his hand up as if to ward her off. "When we have some leads I'll let you know exactly what's happening, but for now let me handle it."
"Bu
t surely telling me the cause of death is not taking a potshot in the dark if Wallace has already finished his medical examination."
"No, it's not," Broghin consented, "but this is a homicide and we don't want to run around bouncing into walls. Besides, they're only preliminary results."
It was a pleasure to see my grandmother hitting her stride, as tenacious as the Rottweiler. She wasn't going to let go of this one until she got the answers. I even felt a bit sorry for Broghin because, for whatever reason, he was trying so hard to be a nice guy.
"I can appreciate your feelings, my friend, but with deepest sincerity I can promise you that I will not—"
"You won't anything," he told her, "because you're going to stay at home and read your books and cook for your grandson and not get in my hair this time, Anna."
I did not point out that he only had nine or ten hairs on his head.
"I have no intention of interfering with any police matters."
"No, not you," he said.
"Not us," I said.
Anna checked her Christie collection and found further resolve. She wheeled closer. "But you cannot argue that I do have a certain amount of personal involvement, and I am naturally curious to know as much as possible about the events that have transpired on my property. I believe it is my right to know."
Broghin groaned. "I—"
"Or is it that you find me incapable of accepting the truth because of some notion that I am merely an elderly woman who should be watching soap operas and knitting baby booties?"
The Dead Past Page 3