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 difficult 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."
"What's different?"
"He once exhibited a powerful presence. The kind of man who commanded a fundamental admiration. He exuded a natural ease and charm in his youth. Now, he hardly moves at all. I'd suspect tranquilizers."
"Or tranquillity."
"No, a man like him never finds peace."
"I know. He acted the same way a few days ago, but was in full control of his faculties from what I could tell."
The newscasters were on the move, getting better coverage than at a raging fire. They were being particularly brazen, even for Action Team Channel 3, sidling up behind the priest and getting a view of the tombstone, panning around at the throng, tight close-up of the father. The thought that Harnes was a mannequin posed in a window struck home again.
"Anna, I've only seen him once or twice in the paper . . ."
"Yes, he relishes his privacy, to the extreme. Curious, then, that such a recluse would allow a personal tragedy as this made into an exhibition."
"Maybe he doesn't really consider it to be very tragic."
She folded her hands in her lap and slowly rubbed her knuckles, which either meant she had a touch of arthritis acting up in the rain or all those hard-boiled novels were really getting to her and she wanted to jab someone in the jaw.
She wet her lips. There are times when you want to say something like, Impossible, no father would ever kill his own child, no friend would betray a friend, and the words die in your throat because you know the bitter truth. She would never take another step again and my parents were dead because of a friend.
My grandmother merely said, "Dreadful."
The priest grew annoyed with all the camera equipment and started motioning for them to be set aside, or at least backed out of his face. He waited another moment before beginning the final service. His voice didn't carry far into the wind. Harnes' lack of emotion bothered him as well, giving him no one to comfort. He murmured in Harnes' ear and gripped his arm in a gesture of sympathy. Leafless branches bowed in the breeze. Harnes didn't move or reply.
"His utter indifference is almost a cruelty to those around him," Anna said. "What kind of effect might that have had on a child?"
"I was thinking the same thing when he picked me up in his limo," I said. "I'm getting a hint as to why five wives left him, taking the hard route." I wondered where Diane Cruthers had been buried. "You told me Diane Cruthers was pregnant. Did she have the child before she committed suicide?"