“I wouldn't be looking so dejected if it had been."
She nodded with enthusiasm. "I suspect that's true. I also fear you wouldn't be quite so jaunty afterwards. Let me get an ice pack. Sit down on the couch, darling, you've got quite a lump." She rolled into the kitchen and made up an ice pack. Again I failed to control myself and wound up shifting items all over the coffee table, moving the albums aside.
My cell phone rang and both Anubis and I jumped. It was the guy who'd sold the phone to me, checking to see if it worked to satisfaction. I told him yes even though I thought the shrill, twittering ring was as bad as jangling bells over the door of a flower shop-bookstore.
Anna returned and gently set the ice pack against my temple. She took the phone out of my hand and fiddled with it, flipping open the receiver and pressing buttons that made pretty green lights blink. She appeared agitated and so did Anubis, who continued to mutter. I got a pad and pen out of the drawer and gave her the number. We both realized that the world had suddenly gotten a little smaller.
"A cell phone. This reminds me of when you were eight and cried unabashedly for weeks on end because of your insistence on walkie-talkies."
"I never did get them."
"You did, but we refused to address you as Agent X-49, and you proved to be far too petulant to speak with afterwards." She handed the phone back to me and rubbed her hands together as though touching it had made them cold. "Who did this to you? Tell me what happened."
I told her about Devington haunting Katie, and my seeing Kristin again, and the amount of animosity and displaced malice that could still rage inside even the mothers of failed football heroes.
"And was this fight analogous to your letting off a little steam?" Anna asked.
"No, it was analogous to me punching an asshole in the head."
"And being punched."
"Yeah, well, that too."
She left for a minute and returned with cotton balls and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. "You might consider taking up stamp collecting as a more beneficial way to pass the time."
"It's something to think about."
My grandmother swabbed my bruises and made a huffy noise in her throat exactly like the irritated grumble that everybody else had been giving me lately, including the dog. Two of the photo albums remained in her lap and after she finished cleaning me up, she rested her forearms over them, staring out the one window with the shade up. The ice pack felt good against the rising knot on my head. Anubis kept looking at me with anticipation, like he was expecting a detailed catalogue of the afternoon. I told him to go lie down a couple of times, but he sat stolid and sedate, waiting for something to happen. I sort of felt the same way, and knew that Anna did, too.
"It is your assertion that Keaton Wallace was duped with a false passport into incorrectly identifying the corpse as Teddy Harnes?" she said.
"I'm not certain. Lowell sure doesn't think so."
I couldn't get over what I'd seen in the cemetery. The boy's face-why had they taken his face?
"But you considered the possibility that Teddy might be hiding in the Conway house on High Ridge?" she asked.
"If he is then Alice Conway is brokenhearted about whoever was buried in his stead. Her grief was real."
"As was Daphne Kupfer's anger? Or do you feel it was resentment? Jealousy, perhaps?"
"I don't know."
"Possibly Daphne planned to woo young Teddy, and her plans were derailed by his relationship with Alice?"
"Makes sense. From what I've seen she mostly woos young men, and none of them are as well off financially as Teddy … was… would have been … might have been."
"Has Nicodemus Crummler made contact with you yet?"
That took me back a step. "Made contact with me? Anna, you make it sound like we're in a James Bond flick."
"Be that as it may, have you seen him since your arrival back in Felicity Grove?"
"No." I had the feeling he was sitting back waiting until some major play was at hand. I looked down at the albums and said, "Show me Diane Cruthers. I want to see her."
Anna reacted instantly, like she'd been waiting all night for me to ask that. She knew where to look and turned to it without having any trouble locating it among the array of snapping pages and hundreds of photographs. Years crackled and swept by. I spotted my grandfather in his pre-sagebrush eyebrow period. Other smiling faces spun past, along with children, weekends at the lake, houses, pets, windswept hair, lots of dimpled knees.
She stopped abruptly and her index finger tapped out a tattoo on the plastic. "There is Diane."
The two large black-and-white photos on the page had that extra-sharp contrast and crispness that the old-time cameras gave-that wonderful light, shadow and shine effect that made everyone look so damn good, straight out of film noir.
Diane Cruthers, for all time, remained on this page a statuesque woman with shiny luscious lips that formed a knowing, honest smile. In the first shot she had her palm up to the camera as if to wave it off, her head slightly turned like she was about to burst into laughter. She wore her hair in a nearly full-blown bouffant. Beside her stood my grandmother. Anna had on a plaited flower dress, with her teenage gawkiness on the cusp of shifting into womanly grace. I noticed a slight roll of her shoulders, as though she hunkered before a more weighty personality. Her smile was nothing more than her teeth clicking together. Her face was partially obscured by Diane's arching hair as they both sort of dipped their chins in opposite directions.
In the second photo Anna had begun to lurch to one side, leaving the scene without realizing another photo was being shot, the smile softening and becoming much more natural. Her eyes focused as she spotted someone across the room, her attention directed away from the photographer. Even at the age of eighteen she'd hated to pose. Diane Cruthers looked more solemn in this one, the smile less structured. She and Anna both had long sleek legs, and kept their hem lines lifted an extra few inches as the post-war years edged into the hipster abandon of the 'fifties.
"Do you have any photos of Harnes?"
"No."
"He's not in any of these?"
"No."
"Are you telling me the truth, Anna?"
If I'd smacked her I couldn't have gotten a more hostile reaction from her. My grandmother's chin snapped up as if a gunshot had gone off. The air filled with such an atmosphere of disappointment that I suddenly felt more afraid than when Mrs. Devington had come after me with a wrench.
Anna said, "I've never lied to you. Never. Nor would I begin in this instance. You ought to be ashamed for asking.”
“I am. I'm sorry."
The cell phone rang and both Anubis and I jumped again. I knew I'd never get used to the damn thing.
I answered and Lowell kept it brief. He said, "Go see Crummler tomorrow. In the evening, after most of the staff have already left for the day. We're sending protocol to hell on the bullet train so just fake it when you have to." He didn't say "if" I had to. "Try to get something useful out of him."
I hung up and told Anna, "I'm going to visit Crummler tomorrow.”
“Good, Jonathan. He needs to understand that he hasn't been forgotten inside that awful place. Discover whatever you can from him, and I shall attempt to do the same directly at the source.”
“The source? What source?" She drew an envelope from her pocket and handed it to me.
"What is it?”
“An invitation. I've been invited to Theodore Harms' home for dinner tomorrow night.”
“Dinner?”
“Yes.”
“Is this a dinner for the two of you or a party?”
“A small gathering, I believe.”
“I don't suppose one arrived for me?”
“No.”
“You're allowed a guest?”
“Yes. Oscar will be accompanying me."
I sat back, sighed, and snapped the envelope against my knee. "You're trying to shut me out on this one. Why?" She cocked her head, but I had my answer already. "You're trying to protect me from him, aren't you? For a guy with his resources, capable of making people disappear, I don't see why he'd get so sloppy in murdering his own son." She seemed a little too pleased that I couldn't be in attendance, so I grasped at straws. "Maybe my invitation went to Katie's.”