"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.”