The Dead Past (13 page)

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."

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 agitation 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?"