The Dead Past

by Piccirilli, Tom

  "Glad you're staying for a while."

  She glanced out the window. "I can't get over this town. The entire first week I couldn't get my foot in the door without shoveling. Now, it's like spring outside." She caught herself. "Seems I'm talking about the weather anyway."

  "It's cold," I repeated.

  "Uh-huh."

  "It's because of the Canadian winds flowing off Lake Ontario. When they come on strong they play havoc with the system and turn rain into snow, and snow into blizzards. It's the Lake Effect. When there's no wind, like today, you can finally feel the sunshine, the temperature the way it should be.”

  “Thank God. I'm not used to this kind of freeze. I'm missing the beaches badly. I haven't lost much of my tan yet, though, with the sunlight reflecting off the snow.”

  “Would you like to go out to dinner tomorrow night?" I asked.

  "Sure," Katie said, smiling, jade eyes alive with sensitivity. "Just tell me one thing, Jonathan. Who are the tulips for again?"

  ~ * ~

  Usually, because of the high winds up on the slopes, flowers didn't last long in the cemetery. Petals were stripped and Crummler immediately did his duty and cleaned the remains. Once I watched a plastic bouquet get kicked from grave to grave for about half an hour, wire prongs sticking for a while before flipping end over end to the next plot, as if spirits passed sentiment along. Crummler eventually chased it down and replaced the bouquet where it had originally been intended. He knew the spot, and he cared.

  I put the tulips in front of the tombstones of my parents.

  After six years, I had not completely gotten used to the fact they were gone. I thought I had cleared up all unfinished business when I'd found their killer, but now I understood that a part of me would never be at rest. Maybe, in some fashion it's better that way.

  Phillip Dendren was my father's best friend and business partner in real estate for two decades. He'd taught me how to ride a bike and drive a car, and there were times I told him things I could never reveal or express to my Dad. He was there for me and my mother when the bottle got such a grip on my father that I could hardly recognize him anymore.

  But long after my Dad had sobered and fought back his demons, a passing interest in gambling took a tighter hold on Uncle Phil. From what I later learned, he ran up exorbitant debts and dug a well for himself too deep to climb from. He never asked to borrow money from my father, who not only would have lent it to him, but being a reformed alcoholic also would have understood the consumptive nature of addiction. Perhaps Phil was more ashamed to face my Dad than he was to kill him.

  After Anna roused from her coma and convinced Broghin to go searching three weeks late for a murderer in a gray Caddy, I began the hunt for the killer myself. The police went to work looking for a crazed driver, and coincidence gave Broghin's theory some credence: two counties to the east, in the mill town of Walkerwood, there had recently been a similar type of thrill-killing. A black truck driver had been forced off the road, robbed, and beaten to death with a flashlight. Broghin sought a connection.

  I've tried to imagine what I would have thought and felt if the police had captured Phillip Dendren instead of my confronting him that night at Jackals. I'm certain I would have found at least a passing moment of sympathy, or more appropriately, pity, but I could never forgive the pure premeditated nature of his actions. They weren't those of a man enslaved, but rather of someone who coming into his own, discovering how much he enjoyed the foulness of his own weak nature.

  Not only was Phillip Dendren my father's business partner and friend, but he was also my Dad's attorney. Six months before he ran my parents' car off the Turnpike, my father had gone to him to have his will slightly amended because I'd just turned twenty-one; perhaps that had inspired Dendren to murder.

  My father trusted him implicitly and wouldn't have bothered to read before signing; Dendren realized this and made his own additions, bestowing nearly the whole of the business to him in the event of my father's death. He was smart and slick and more imaginative than I would've given him credit for, because he made it look perfect in the paperwork, as if my Dad gave everything to Dendren so that he could watch over my mother and me. How sweet. And because Anna was in a coma and I was in jail for throwing a chair at the sheriff, Dendren had the two of us sewn up away from the action so that we couldn't question the execution of my parents' estate. By the time we were released from our respective prisons, neither cared enough to bother with the legalities. He'd wrapped the package nice and tight with a big, bright bow.

  Even now it tears the hell out of my guts when I think too hard about the ease with which my Uncle Phil had reached down and wrung my mother's neck.

  Suspicion was further thrown off him by the fact that he was very nearly the victim of a hit and run himself—by a car driven by the men he owed a cool quarter million. So that it actually appeared as if there was a psychotic driver on the loose. Gunning for anyone, and everyone.

  But Dendren made his mistakes; little things mostly, but they helped trip him up. Like lying about why he didn't visit me in jail, claiming he was busy taking care of business, and then my discovering he hadn't been seen in town for weeks and had asked another associate to wire him money in New Jersey. On a couple of occasions I noticed slight stains on his shoes and grease under his nails. A page on his desk filled with numbers and equations that made no sense. They were just nosy questions I had, little hints here and there. Nothing, in the long and short run, but it went into the recesses of my subconscious.

  After a month of staking out Walkerwood I'd stumbled onto the flashlight killer, who'd already murdered two more people; he was a deranged gas station attendant named Cuthbert who killed drivers by the quarter moon, and I'd been saved from him by Lowell's exceptional timing. In a mountain cabin retreat Cuthbert had tried to crown me and his own sister, and Lowell had been forced to shoot him dead.

  Solved, so far as the police were concerned, but the anomalies, the differences between the deaths, stuck too far out for me. I admitted my suspicions to Uncle Phil, who always listened and supported me through the whole painful ordeal. Fearing I'd learn the truth soon, he invited me over for dinner and a movie and let me crap out on the couch. In the morning, after just about my only good night of rest in the four months since the death of my parents, I got into my car and started to drive home with disconnected brake lines.

  I wound up sharing a private hospital room with Anna, six ribs cracked, a bruised Atlas vertebra, and more sprains than I could count, seeing my immobile grandmother in her casts and her agony and never complaining about what it was to now be paralyzed. Watching her, I thought about the horror following us; where the real murderer of my parents might hide a car, and wondering about other safe havens for another killer, and I remembered the abandoned garage in town on property owned by my father, now owned by Dendren. And the numbers and equations were percentages: systems to beat the odds, notes by a madman who'd been beaten by them. And thoughts turned more rapidly: casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, my father's money, the grease and rust stains on Uncle Phil's clothes, and the chance to cut my brakes.

  Still half-sedated, running a fever, I hobbled out of bed against Anna's protests as the facts came together in a hazy red rush. I left the hospital and went to the garage and discovered the caddy. I remember screaming and weeping, and I searched and finally found him at Jackals. We stared into each other's eyes until his smile melted into a greasy sneer and he realized that I knew; there was no remorse in that gaze as he pulled a .32 from an ankle holster and shot me, and my momentum and rage carried me forward onto him, and the gun went off again over my left shoulder and I beat his brains out against the bar railing.

  "Christ," I whispered.

  My attention suddenly snapped from their graves to the shack. Zebediah Crummler waved in the distance, jogging towards me. "I am here, Jon!" he called cheerfully. He stood trembling and jitterbugging on the balls of his feet, toes of his new work boots pointing. "I
keep them clean. I have not stepped in mud."

  "I wish I could say the same."

  He laughed and patted me on the back and scratched his wild beard. "Forces from the dark domain throw their evil upon our world. I must fight them for I am Crummler! And the universal battle between chaos and order is never-ending. Stars have been born and died in the same breath while ..." He kept going, bopping and weaving between frenzy and exhilaration, but I didn't listen anymore. The occasional "Uh-huhs" and "yeahs" I muttered were enough to keep him happy.

  "Your folks are nice," he said.

  "Yes, they are."

  "The ghost was here again," he said. "Chasing me with the willow switches."

  "What did you do to him?"

  Crummler slunk low where he stood, grin gone. "I ran and locked the door and read the bible." His eyes flitted, intense features contorting from his usual amiable countenance into someone who was panic-stricken. "It banged on the windows and said that it hated me."

  No matter what weird fantasies and stories he came up with, Crummler was always vibrant and filled with manic passion. Now he stood before me a scared child.

  "It wouldn't tell me, but I think it's mad because I didn't keep its grave nice."

  "You keep all the graves nice. You keep the cemetery immaculate."

  "Yes, I do," he answered. "But not the Field."

  Every town has a Potter's Field, whether they admit to it or not. Felicity Grove's was at the southern tip of the cemetery, an overgrown area straight out of a gothic novel. The twisted brushline strangled itself, branches growing together locked in battle. Even Crummler couldn't do much with the landscape, though he tried. But he didn't like to cut down trees, even those dead and diseased, and so the place was destined to decay because too many people before him had let the field become dense and rotted.

  "Show me," I said.

  He led me to the place where the vagrants, aborted, mad, and the hanged were buried nearly a century before. These were unmarked graves, identified only by a number carved into stone near the bottom.

  There were willow switches laid against the marker. "Who is buried here?"

  "Nobody," he answered.

  "There must still be records."

  "They're nobody," he said. "They are all nobody." He pointed. "Unholy ground. It's where they used to put the criminals and abandoned babies they found. Pauper's funeral. The county pays. Now they give them real gravestones on the other side of the yard."

  "What's the most recent plot here in the Field?"

  "It was a long time ago, but I remember. Ten years, maybe. Or eleven. I wasn't that good at taking care of the place back then."

  That wasn't so long ago, I thought. Even so recent as ten years ago our town was burying its lost dead here without so much as a name.

  "It's better to let them stay buried, Jon," Crummier said. "Nobodies don't like to be moved around much." He shuddered and snapped his fingers, the wire burning again. He smiled brightly. "I sure didn't."

  EIGHT

  Church bells pealed twelve, resonating sadly across the town square. Instead of being vitalized by the gorgeous afternoon, the lack of sleep was catching up with me, and I found myself sluggish and grim. My stitches were on fire. The time I'd spent with Katie had been overshadowed by memories of murder, and for the first time since my childhood, Crummler's rantings disturbed me. And I didn't know why.

  My stomach had been rumbling for a while before I noticed hunger pangs had set in. I stopped at the Maple Ridge Diner to get some lunch. The waitress came around to take my order and I let out a loud, raspy yawn. "Sorry. I don't mean to be rude."

  "That's okay, I know how you feel," she said. "Two girls are out sick and I've been here since the six AM rush. I'm ready for a siesta myself." She had a copy of today's Gazette under her arm. "In case you want to read something. Most guys do when they're eating alone." Apparently Merlin's turkey was no longer note-worthy news. The headline read: FALLEN TREE DAMAGES COUNTY CLERK'S DOGHOUSE. NO ONE HURT. "Good thing Chase was inside for the night!" says owner, Mitchell Luserke.

  I asked for a turkey on rye and tossed the paper aside. She brought the sandwich in five minutes. After eating, I felt much more awake and decided to stop in and see Lowell. I needed to tell him about the fight, which he had probably heard about already, but more importantly I wanted to know if he'd discovered anything about Broghin and the note possibly left on Richie Harraday's corpse. And I still had to find out about Tons. There was a minor car accident at the crossroads of Monroe and Stonewall Avenues, and traffic had snarled ridiculously in the vicinity: I got the feeling that people enjoyed being involved in gridlock, it was something new to do. I had enough room to back up and turn around in a gas station and circumvent the area but nobody else followed my lead. I pulled in to the police station and saw Lowell's cruiser parked out front.

  The central heating control to the building must've been stuck at full tilt. As I walked in the blast of hot air was enough to sway me in my tracks. Half a dozen deputies milled the station, guys with their sleeves rolled up and shirts unbuttoned to their navels while the two lady officers simply wore tank-tops and pony-tails. Heat must've been broken all winter. I checked the sheriff's office and saw he wasn't in.

  Lowell's door was ajar, and he sat with his feet up on his desk. He stared intently out an open window, and the set of his jaw was enough to get the hair on my nape prickling. I barely caught his eye before he swung out of the chair and said, "Let's go, Johnny."

  Sweat had already formed on my upper lip, and it was difficult to breathe with the heat so high. "Cripes yes, before we broil like steaks. Do we have a destination in mind this time? Aren't you going to mention how I look like hell?”

  “Hell's a little high on the ladder," Lowell said. "You know Freeman Hofferball got a farm out in West Stokes?"

  "Handsome fellow."

  "Had himself a prize sow called Gertie broke all kinds of local records?"

  "Beautiful pig."

  "Slaughtered Gertie and sold the pork to Fred Mudrell owns the Maple Ridge Diner?"

  "Fred's a lovely guy."

  "I went in and ordered myself a lunch special of ham, string beans and sweet potatoes—Fred's got himself a wonderful cook knows how to do the sweet potatoes just right—and the waitress brought it out to me?"

  "Cute chick."

  "And she dropped it halfway across the room and accidentally stepped on it? At the moment your face is more on par with that, I'd have to say."

  "I'm a fellow who can take a compliment," I told him. "In case you were wondering."

  "C' mon."

  In the car I asked, "You been waiting for me?"

  He ignored the question. "Who've you been tangling with?"

  "Guy with a crew cut, swimmer's body, and a bad disposition. Crazy calm eyes, the kind that can spook you. He was at Raimi's last night, drunk and needling me into a fight."

  "And you obliged him."

  "It wasn't my choice, Lowell," I said.

  "No, he just happened to pick a tussle with you out of everybody in a crowded bar."

  "I didn't go looking for it."

  "I'm sure you did your damndest to persuade him differently. It's not like you to make an asshole with a mad-on blow his goddamn lid."

  "I didn't offer him an olive branch if that's what you're after. You would have?"

  "Nope," he said.

  "Then there we are."

  We drove a similar route to the one we had the other day, meandering around the high school, the lumber yard, and the movie theater where the latest Schwarzenegger flick was playing. I didn't feel like listening to Lowell get self-righteous about my poor diplomatic relations with jackasses looking to carve me up, especially when I'd seen him break as many arms as I had. He made Schwarzenegger look like Albert Schweitzer.

  "Look," I said as we doubled back towards the power station. "It's a nice view, but I've seen it before. What'd you find out about Broghin?"

  Lowell wore his agitat
ion on his sleeve, and from the way he kept his chin down to his chest I could see he was clearly ashamed of himself for something. With the way everybody was acting lately, I'd slipped far past being spooked and entered new realms of jumpiness. The cords in his neck stood out like steel cables. He frowned and let out a stream of breath that fogged the inside of the windshield. "It was an old love letter from his wife, for Christ's sake. Reading it made me feel like a pervert going through Clarice's underwear drawer."

  "A love letter?" I repeated. Of all the possibilities I'd turned back and forth in my mind, that one came from way out in left field. "You sure?"

  "What in the hell kind of question is that? Of course, I'm sure. Darling, I can't wait to make love to you again. You make my heart sing. That kind of stuff. I can't believe I let you talk me—"

  I cut him off; his cop instincts were conflicting with his loyalties, and I proved the easiest target to foist blame on. I wasn't in the mood. "I didn't talk you into anything. You were the one who said you thought Richie's killer left a note, that something wasn't clicking on the night of the murder and the note made a connection."

  His voice went smooth and quiet. "Well, I was wrong."

  "You don't really believe that." A crust of falling snow came down on top of the cruiser as we drove under Chapel Bridge. "Did you read the whole thing?"

  "Enough of it."

  "What the hell does that mean, Lowell?"

  "It's nothing for you and me to be concerned about. I was wrong."

  "Even about Broghin being rattled?"

  He paused. He didn't like me playing devil's advocate, but the reason he'd been waiting for me today was so I could do exactly that. Where this went was more a battle of wills than a matter of facts. Would my and Anna's pushy imaginations win out over the cut-and-dried police investigation? I'd been in Felicity Grove for three days and nothing had happened so far concerning the murder—if it was a murder. Richie's body being left on my grandmother's lawn appeared more like coincidence every day, and if that were true, I could leave for Manhattan anytime. Just so long as I could be sure she was safe.