"You don't need to know much besides that," Broghin said.
"Is that so?"
"It is."
"You always this damn sociable?"
I walked off. Alice Conway looked even more lost and scared as the night went on. She obviously wanted to talk to Harnes and continued to float around him, wafting in and out among the other guests, but she didn't want to impede on his conversation with Anna. I could only guess at what he'd make her wear if she ever made him dissatisfied. Every time Daphne spun by Alice sparks passed between them. I wondered if they had both been Harnes' lover at one time or another, and if Daphne had been completely ousted by Alice, intentionally or not, or if they'd both only been after Teddy. For some ugly reason, I also wondered if their mothers had been his lovers as well, and if, in fact, Alice and Daphne were actually his daughters.
People brushed shoulders with mine and continued talking without skipping a beat. Pompadours had sneaked back into style, and several white-haired gentlemen wore their hair up high and thick with sculpting mousse like Baptist televangelists. Conversations circulated around me, discussions ranging from stocks and politics to the latest sitcoms and sports statistics. The strata of the county could be noticed as clearly as striations in an emptied quarry. Nobody mentioned Teddy.
Time ran at a new pace as I waited for Shanks to join the party. Over an hour passed and I still felt wet from the rain. I circled back and Oscar and Broghin were talking guns and duck hunting and had reached that point of being drunk when the world is a happy place and you love absolutely everybody in it. Before long they would settle into a friendship of sorts, maybe even before they passed out, but they needed to do so if they both intended to remain close to Anna. She could deal with the male rivalry, but not with petulance.
My grandmother finally caught my eye.
Years dropped to the floor around us like dead leaves, or bodies. I couldn't read anything in her features, and that frightened me. It seemed as if our lives unfurled for an instant until we were both the same age, eighteen or so, neither of us more secure or smarter than the other. I saw her in the photo again, side by side with Diane Cruthers. Harnes had drawn her back into the dead past. When Anna spoke to him did she see a murderer, or a man she might have loved? Or a fate she had barely avoided? I tried to read her eyes but something kept shifting there.
Jocelyn appeared at my side and I backed out of the room with her gaze sutured to me. With Alice here I had a chance to check out the house in High Ridge, and see if Teddy actually was alive and hidden or snared inside, the way Crummler had become trapped in the heart of Panecraft. I backed out another step and Harnes turned now as well, and we made a pact of sorts. Again came the live pressure but no sense of a living presence, less intimidating than Oscar's aftershave. Harnes quickly snapped back into himself this time, no longer unassuming and fading out of existence. He grew more substantial as the seconds flew by. Shanks would have called him, and seeing me must have proven to Harnes that I wouldn't be letting go of this. A part of me reeled thinking that perhaps Anna had actually had an affair with him-and more than that, so much more than that, the idea that I might be his grandson. I looked into his eyes and took my time to dig deep, hunting through whatever it was he wanted to show me, and I saw that down in there, with all the rest of his coiled malice, rested the dormant, but still deadly, dragon.
~ * ~
A dark and thrashing animal, the night continued to squirm with wind and rain. I sat in the van praying that Anna knew what she was doing, and that I had at least a little more time to get Crummler out of Panecraft. I still had the vague sense that somehow I was too slow and standing outside the rest of the world, watching everyone else cruising along. I needed to pick up my pace.
I drove down the slick private road and reached for the cell phone. I should have called Lowell after I left the hospital, but I'd been too worried. I hoped Brent could keep Shanks in line for a few more days. Crummler would fail his psychological examination, and instead of going to jail he would be kept in Panecraft for the rest of his life, along with Christ only knew how many others Theodore Harnes had left locked up to rot.
I coasted past the stone lions, out from beneath Harnes' arcing name twisted in metal, and Nick Crummler disengaged from the convulsing shadows. He stepped out into the open and walked toward the van. I stopped and he got in.
Even seated he kept himself crimped, low and tensed. Streams of water slithered across his face and ran down his badly trimmed beard, pooling in the seams of his black overcoat. He was soaked, but somehow didn't appear to actually be wet, as if only a moment of blotting with a handkerchief would have dried him completely. Someone so used to being out in the elements had a thousand ways of countering cold and rain, most importantly by ignoring them.
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
The wary edge in his shrewd, discerning eyes lifted a little. "Rummaging through their garbage, of course, what else? Figured there might be lots of good food going to waste. I was right."
It was only partly a joke. The odor of fresh shellfish and dill sauce flowed off him, and I could tell that Harnes had served crab meat quiche for appetizers. Nick Crummler's gaping pockets were stuffed with crumbling bits of hors d'oeuvres. I would have offered to take him out to dinner if I wasn't so sure he'd turn me down.
"How do you know Harnes?" I asked.
"I don't," he said. "Let's go."
We got moving again. The van handled well in the mud; all the sports cars were going to have trouble making it back to the highway later tonight. Nick rolled the window down just enough to let a nasty wind whistle come tearing across the front seat. It didn't bother him. Apparently nothing did. I kept seeing Zebediah Crummler come bursting into the restaurant covered in ice, capable of walking miles with the burning wire inside keeping him heated. What made such men? I'd stood in the rain for two minutes ringing the doorbell, complaining the whole time.
"You were in Panecraft."
"Yes."
"Tell me about it."
"No."
"I saw your brother."
"I know, I was watching you."
"You got past the gate?"
He huffed, the whistle underscoring his words as we swung up the looping back roads. "You forget that kids like to go tearing up the fields and the thickets behind the hospital? A lot of the fencing has been cut through or torn down, they go there to rip up the grounds with their trucks and get drunk and get laid. Bet you been back that way with a girlfriend or two yourself in your day. I didn't get too close, they've got three-man random patrols, but I saw you leaving. Is he making it?"
"So far."
"They won't bother him for a while, not until after they get him off the murder charge by considering him incompetent. A mental deficient. They won't touch him for a few months. Maybe longer. Then it will get bad." Nothing changed in his voice, but I heard his neck and shoulders crackle as he tightened. "Eventually Shanks will probably kill him. There's a lot of empty acreage on that property. A lot of bodies buried on it, too, I'd bet. Who the hell would ever care? Potter's Field isn't the only resting place for the destitute and schizophrenic."
"Has Harnes always paid off Shanks?"
"Sure, Shanks has been there at least twenty years." The keening kept up with him, musical strains rising and falling, cold rushing my face and the rain starting to seep and run down the inside of the window. "Theodore Harnes has got a lot of enemies, or thinks he does anyway. A lot of wives and bitter girlfriends, right? I'd think there are accountants who caused him some trouble along the way, too. A few pissed-off bastard sons. Some business partners? It makes sense. It isn't hard for lawyers to get a drinker committed for ten days. Or get somebody hooked up with cocaine. Or oversex them with prostitutes and paddles, living the good life for a while, then pull the whole magic rug out from under them. How about one of his wives or mistresses with post-partum depression. Once they go in for the ten days, they're in for good."