Tom Piccirilli - Sorrow's crown

"I was hoping he'd stop in again."

Her lips looked too wet, the crimp between her eyes deeper than it should be. "It was murder, wasn't it? He did kill the man."

"And saved my life," I said. I'd been able to curb my concern for all of three minutes, which I thought was still pretty damn good considering the kind of day I'd had. I feared for the baby, and wondered if she'd miscarried.

"Tell me what's wrong, Katie."

"My tires were slashed this morning."

I exhaled deeply and it felt like the last stored breath shared by Jocelyn, Harnes, and me had been squeezed out of my chest. "What?"

"Three of them anyway, and busted a headlight. Wasn't it nice that the son of a bitch didn't go for all four tires, so he could save me a few dollars? It didn't matter, though, what's the point of buying only three new ones? The car's got fifty-two thousand miles on it, so I had to go for a full set anyway. Same with the headlight, I had a new pair put in. I don't think Duke weighted the tires properly though, the right side seems off. I'm going back to have him do it again."

"I'll get them done right now," I whispered. I sounded very far away from myself.

"I know how you are when you talk like that." She came into my arms and kissed me hard, and kissed me again, more gently as the icy sweat slid down my back. "Don't do anything crazy."

"Me?" I said.

It took Duke a half hour to correctly weight the four new tires, and he muttered and grimaced because I stood there watching him work the entire time.

"You don't have nowhere else better to be?" he asked.

"Believe it or not," I said. "I do."

He finished and wanted to charge me extra and instantly saw I wasn't having any. He tried to get me to thank him for putting in so much extra time and effort, instead of owning up to the fact that he'd fouled the job the first time.

I drove out without another word and pulled up outside McGreary's discount store at about four-thirty, where I waited almost forty-five minutes before seeing Kristin Devington leave for the day. I hoped to seem careless in my approach, but the gravel crunched loudly underfoot and I sounded like a lost water buffalo moving through the parking lot. She heard me coming and wheeled and waited for me to step up.

"Hi, Jonny."

"Hi, Kristin."

"You don't plan on causing any more trouble for Arnie, do you?" she asked. "Not just for his sake, because it took my mother two days to calm down. She's got high blood pressure and diabetes. She's supposed to take a couple of different medications and watch her diet, but she only swallows some of the pills and she eats a half pound of peanut brittle almost every night."

"No," I said. "I don't want to fight with your brother anymore."

"That's good to know. What brings you here then?”

“I thought we might talk for a few minutes."

"Okay.

Neither one of us had grown so much as an inch since we were seventeen, and she reached exactly the same place on me as back then, just about my shoulders. I put my hand on her arm, thinking about the night I'd taken her to her junior prom. I remembered how lovely Kristin had looked that evening when I'd pinned the corsage on her, both of us lit by the bug light on her front porch, back when Arnie and I and the rest of the team used to wrestle in the mud of the high school fields and go drink beer in the moonlight behind the gymnasium or the bleachers.

"What's been happening at your house?" I asked.

"He's been fighting with my mother something awful the past few months. She'll put her teeth in somebody's throat to defend him most of the time, but when she's alone in the house with him it's a different story, all right. It gets ugly a couple of times a year, and Sheriff Broghin had to put handcuffs on her once just so she'd settle down in her recliner long enough to keep from killing Arnie's dog with the meat cleaver." She tipped her chin aside and I saw her mother there in her face, lurking below. "Stupid dog died anyway a couple of weeks later from eating rat poison over in the tool shed. Arnie got out his shotgun and blew up the roof a little, aiming for the weathervane."

"Did he ever hit it?"

"No, but some of the shot nailed a passing crow and brought it down into the blueberry patch. He was pretty happy with himself over that."

"I'll bet." I could see him plugging at nothing and laughing morosely, creeping around that quarter-acre of crabgrass covered with trash and shards. The mold and ivy was so thick and heavy on the gingerbread trim that he must've felt as if it covered him as well. He'd be wishing his wife was still with him, his father back from the grave. Christ, we weren't so different after all. None of us.

"Why don't you leave?" I asked.

She shrugged with the same despondency I'd seen in most of my high school crowd after they found themselves still living with their parents ten years after graduation. "Where am I going to go?"

I watched the pedestrian traffic go by, thinking that Katie might be right, the bookstore could have a fair flow of business between ten and six. The Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steele shelves would turn over quickly because of sorrowful women who had nothing better to do than scarf down peanut brittle; the Mission M.I.A. and The Executioner series would be selling well due to the NRA enthusiasts flocking over from Oscar's hunting goods store.

Kristin didn't seem to mind just standing here at the back of the parking lot with me. Her mother's features rose for a moment like a drowned woman's face bobbing to the surface. Maybe Mrs. Devington had been going for a wrench the other day, or maybe Kristin had just wanted to brain me with that broom handle.

Abruptly she said, almost too softly to be heard, "I'm sorry."

Arnie Devington wouldn't have slashed tires. That showed plenty of rage, all right, but directed toward Katie. Arnie hadn't broken into Katie's shop or mashed the orchids in the street. "Why'd you do it?"

"I don't know exactly," Kristin said. "I guess. . . I guess, maybe, because when you showed up at the house the other day, it reminded me of the prom, how handsome you looked, and the way I thought it was going to be, you know, one day. With you, or maybe with just anyone, but it never was. I ironed the corsage between two pieces of wax paper, still have it saved in the bible on my nightstand. You never asked me out again."

She was wrong, we'd had a couple more dates afterwards. Then she'd joined her family in badmouthing me in order to keep what little self-respect they had in the wake of their life-long failures. I thought she might cry, but she didn't appear to be particularly abashed.

"Sometimes," she told me. "I wish it hadn't been that stupid dog that ate the rat poison. I should've done it myself. You ever feel like that, Jonny?"

Nothing I could do would change anything. There was nothing left to be said except what I came here to say. "Please, Kristin. Don't go near her again."

The gentleness in her eyes as she'd watched her brother and I tearing it up on the lawn had fled; she had her own harbored resentments to deal with. Or those she'd failed to deal with. The orchids stepped on in the street, like a flattened corsage kept between pages in a book, might still haunt her years from now.

Kristin looked at me the same way she had the other day; as if she knew this wasn't over, and might never be.

Panecraft continued to rise into the reddening sky, silhouetted in the rotund face of the full moon breaching the sunset. Rest-less clouds curled, parted and twisted in argument, then thinned and drifted away. The air grew heavy and began to still, and the temperature dropped significantly in only a few minutes.

I drove up to the black-and-white striped semaphore arm at the front gate checkpoint, and the same guard performed another extravaganza of looking for my name on the pages of his clipboard.