Tom Piccirilli - Sorrow's crown

The chauffeur said, "What the hell was that noise?”

“Me," I told him. "Come knocking. Cops will be here soon. Hold on."

"What are they headed here for? Nothing they can do. He won't hurt your grandma. He hates her, but he won't hurt her. That's what he likes."

"Why aren't you in a hospital?"

He went into a coughing fit and spasms coiled him in his seat. I heard something break away deep inside his chest. "No medical."

In the hard-boiled novels Anna read, the protagonist would have a host of choices to make: he might throw himself through the front window; roll on the floor in perfect tune with the room, some psychic sense aiming his gun for him; or he might climb and enter through a skylight left carelessly open, and then swing down into a plush room where a blond had moments earlier finished showering and stood naked with a thin smile at his entrance; or he might just grab the dying chauffeur and hurl him through the window and follow with a roar in the acrid air.

I tried the door, opened it, and walked inside.

In the library, my tape recorder lay on the table, turned off, the cassette beside it.

Anna sat with Theodore Harnes by the window where they'd spent the night talking during the party. Jocelyn stood beside them, looking at me, waiting expectantly. I couldn't tell what kind of charge was already in the room, but we all knew a conclusion of some sort was at hand.

My grandmother appeared extremely tired and weak. Her cheeks were ashen and she rubbed her wrists together to heat her hands. A full glass of wine rested beside the tape recorder, and I realized she'd never be able to look at that chateau the same way again, much less drink it after hearing of Harnes' exploits in poisoning women.

I would have to lead the dragon from its lair.

There wasn't much light in the library, and gloom enwrapped us all. Jocelyn's incredibly long, intensely black hair seemed to draw her further into darkness, like a suitor wanting to dance. A phone rang distantly, and I realized it had been ringing for some time. That would be Brent calling to report the escape from Panecraft. It was a nearly plaintive sound in the dim recesses of the house, the night soaking inside.

Jocelyn said, "Leave."

"Boy, you have got to be kidding."

I walked past her and moved to Anna, who reached for my hand. Jesus, her fingers were freezing. Had she sipped any of the wine? A nervous gurgle boiled in my throat, but she grinned and softly said, "My, I hadn't realized how the time had galloped away, dear." She glanced at Harnes and tipped her head as if to thank him for such a lovely day. "Well, Theodore, we really must be going now. I have so much to do at home. The place is an absolute shambles ."

"What with all the dusting," I said. "And cleaning out the rain gutters."

The nondescript persona of Theodore Harnes slid against me once more, a pressure without a living force wallowing within his body's residence. I thought if I looked closely enough I could spot the seams where they'd stuffed him full of sawdust and cotton.

He said, "I'm afraid I cannot allow that just yet."

Anna's hand didn't warm quickly enough in mine. We both released long sighs. I tried to get into Harnes' thoughts for a minute but still nothing clarified. He was a man who enjoyed a standoff and needed an audience. He used people at his whim, and when finished he either murdered or imprisoned them. His methods took months or years to play out. He delighted in watching the plight of his prey.

Anna said, "Theodore, you are a stately sophisticate, a brilliant industrialist, and a terrifyingly refined psychopath.”

“Yes," he responded.

Jocelyn inched forward and so did I. Although she stood completely stationary, her lithe form still seemed to be floating around me, on the air and threading through my hands. In another minute we were going to be into it and somehow, without her ever having done anything remotely threatening, she had become one of the very few people I'd met who actually frightened me.

My grandmother, smiling now, allowed the beginning of that cackle to escape her once more. She let out fifty years of anger, scorn, contempt, and heartache for her lost bridesmaid and also herself, and she never raised her voice. Her chilled hand slid on top of his, and the iciness startled him. She patted him with a disdain that actually brushed Harnes back in his chair.

She said, "For Diane, and Crummler, and all your other victims, but more so for myself, I will do everything in my power to see that you not only pay for your heinous crimes, but that you suffer for them, and suffer dreadfully."

I sighed even louder. Anna shouldn't be threatening a wealthy, psychotic killer during our attempted getaway.

Jocelyn glided forward and I moved to meet her.

Nick Crummler stepped into the room.

I whispered, "Oh shit."

He appeared to have spent the last several days in the woods, perhaps around the Hames estate, or hiding in the back fields of the hospital, or somewhere in the cemetery where he could seek occasional shelter inside his brother's shack.

"Hello," he said.

Harnes stood and approached him. "Hello, Nicodemus.”

“No need to get up on my account."

"You shouldn't have returned."

"You shouldn't have gone after my brother."

"He murdered my son."

"No, he didn't."

Nick had proven to be the wild card, somehow a part of all that had transpired, and yet not really of it. He remained too far outside the rest of us. He'd saved my life but I didn't know what that might mean anymore. Jocelyn drifted back into a darkened comer of the room. I quickly checked around. There wasn't much to grab, not even a bottle of wine, a letter opener, nothing.

"What are you doing here, Nick?" Anna asked.

My grandmother had been right: sometimes all you had to do was ask. I suddenly realized with an awful clarity that no one, so far, whom I'd spoken with since Teddy's murder, had actually lied to me.

"I had an affair with his wife, Marie, a long time ago," Nick said, reaching into his pocket and retrieving a hardened piece of cheese. He swallowed it in one bite and proceeded to look so relaxed and untroubled in Harnes' home that I was beginning to feel extremely uneasy.

"And you, I presume," Anna said. "Are Teddy's biological father?"

He grimaced and shook his head. "Hell, no. Vasectomy when I was twelve. There are places that still do that to orphans." He went through his pockets, found the stub of a cigarette, and stuck it in his mouth. "I used to work for him. I was his chauffeur once upon a time, back when I wasn't much more than a kid." When he couldn't find any matches he dropped the butt back in his coat. “By the way, you need a new driver. The one outside is dead."

Jocelyn descended through the ink trails of the room and reappeared like a dark angel landing. I spun toward her and we met face-to-face, as if about to kiss. She pressed a silver .32 she'd probably bought from Oscar Kinion hard above my heart as I looked deeply at the dragon that Crummler had seen murdering a boy in his cemetery.

"You'd do anything to protect him, wouldn't you?" I asked. "But you don't have his light touch or his patience. He enjoys the slow drag and you like the quick finish. That's why you had Shanks kill Brian Frost. What are you after?"

"You ordered Freddy to do such a thing?" Harnes asked.

"Yes," she answered.

Nobody seemed too concerned about the gun jammed into my chest except me.

Harms' brows drew together in a scowl of disappointment. "That is not my way."

No, he had his own methods. Theodore Harnes enjoyed a standoff, the panic and passion and dismay of others he could leech to fill his own vacant shell, but she clearly hated all of us; everybody.

"Have we not dealt with these pretentious American fools long enough?" Jocelyn asked. Something displaced beneath her face, like the slow but irrevocable movement of a leviathan thrashing from the depths toward the surface. "A moronic, arrogant brute daring to demand money for a weak, simpleminded girl? Attempting to disrupt our lives with lawyers and reporters? And you abide their impudent threats instead of putting a stop to such insolence?"