Tom Piccirilli - Sorrow's crown

Panecraft had its own history, entwined with the secrets and sorrows of those towns surrounding it. Back in the early 'seventies, the mental hospital had housed eleven thousand patients, such a high volume due to the returned vets and end of the hippie movement, when the serious dealers got into the game and brought a trembling house of cards down even faster, leaving runaways without a Haight-Ashbury to head for anymore. Now there were fewer than two thousand faces up there behind the leveled rows of cube windows rimed with ice.

On certain nights, you could head down the back roads surrounding Panecraft and watch how the twining shadows of the complex cut into the skyline and carved down alongside the moon. High school kids performed primitive ceremonies of passage, knocking down barbed-wire fences in pick-up trucks. My ex-wife Michelle and I had made love back there a few times, right before I started noticing hickeys on her throat that I hadn't given her. Echoes rang from the highway, and she liked the noise of the big trucks and the biker packs that roamed up and down the county line in the darkness.

A soft sound faded in, rustling like the hail on the restaurant windows, and after a few moments I heard it again, and once more, much sharper, and knew it as my name. "Jonathan."

I looked at my grandmother, who stared at me with a combination of amusement, deep interest, and general dismay. After we'd returned from Karen Bolan's funeral several weeks ago, one of the papers had dubbed Anna "a lady of silver rarity," and I couldn't quite get the phrase out of my head. I also wasn't completely sure what it meant. Sort of blatant, but accurate enough at the moment, I supposed: her full and lustrous silver hair framed her heart-shaped face, the restaurant's lavish candles reflecting off her knife and fork, light catching in the armrests of her wheelchair. "Yes, Anna?"

"Is there anything wrong?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"Are you sure, dear?"

"Yes."

She smiled one of those resplendent smiles that told me I was doing something wrong and would really hate myself when I found out what. I checked around and spotted sauce everywhere. "Then perhaps you'd like to take your tie out of your lasagna, darling, before you spoil your meal."

Katie giggled and so did Anna's date for the evening, Oscar Kinion, who had the awful habit of slumping against my arm and reaching around in a semi-familial embrace during our appetizers. My father used to do the same thing at ball games when I was nine, and I recalled the warmth it afforded me at the time. Now all I got was a lengthy perusal of Oscar's eyes and a serious whiff of his after shave, a pungent odor that drained my sinuses and smelled like eau de boiled cabbage. The eyes I didn't mind. They sat attentively in his thin, meager face: bright, deeply brown, almost weepy with acute sentiment, and full of seven decades of stolid integrity. When he told me he had four kids, I could see a lot of love for his children in the watery mahogany-colored eyes, and he beamed and came close to tittering whenever he mentioned his grandchildren.

He owned a popular hunting goods store in Felicity Grove, had a well-trimmed goatee, no hair, and a jagged scar under his ear where one of his sons had snagged him with an eagle's claw fishing hook thirty years ago. I got the feeling he'd been trying to impress me when he mentioned he'd been one of the first U.S. soldiers to enter Auschwitz when the allies had liberated the camp. He told a good story, and I enjoyed the fact that he cared enough about Anna that, even at his age, he proved willing to make an effort at impressing her grandson.

The restaurant was about eight miles outside of the Grove, up some rugged, hilly roads that grew treacherous on a fierce night like this. Oscar's treat. The place had a lit fireplace and peering animal heads, with stuffed birds and fish on the wall-compliments of the ammo and rods bought at Kinion's Hunting amp; Tackle Supplies. It's amazing what watching dead animals scrutinizing you while you ate them could do to your appetite. I had to go for the pasta.

Staring beyond a family of harried, shrill parents and children smothered in ketchup, I could just make out the silhouette of Panecraft on the far ridge as it rose insolently into the glow of the half moon.

Anna turned and looked out the window as well, and I could see how the contemplation snapped so easily in place for her. She refolded the cloth napkin across her lap, making the corners tight and impeccable the way they'd originally been, sipping her wine and settling comfortably into the chair when she realized what was on my mind. My grandmother always remained a mere breath away from discerning all my thoughts, and she must have been passing the aptitude along because Katie was getting pretty good at it, too.

Dimples flashing and giving me only about a thousand watts of her jade gaze, front teeth fit snugly over her bottom lip because she knew it drove me crazy, Katie clearly wanted to talk about the store again. She dipped her own napkin in ice water and found a couple more sauce spatters on my cuff, tsking me while Oscar told Anna, "See the one on the end there, with the chip in his tusk? Kinda looks like he's still pissed off about being dead? A wild boar I caught up in the deep woods off the eastern summit about eight, nine years ago, took him with a Remington 760 pump action in a 30.06 caliber. It's a deer rifle. The first round made him sneeze."

Panecraft had other uses. Not long ago, pregnant teenage girls were sometimes stowed there until after the babies were born and bundled off to adoption agencies. Wealthy men whose spouses troubled them too much over business ventures or children could always pay to have their wives locked away for a year or two, and found to be unfit for alimony or motherhood. More recently, the hospital had taken its turn as a hospice for clergymen dying of AIDS, cloistered on the top floors, hoping to avoid whispers and scandal.

They couldn't. No one could.

Lisa Hobbes, a woman I'd known since grade school when we first learned to finger-paint together, with a baby doll face and a voice like Tinkerbell's, and who'd suffered through four miscarriages I knew of, each loss another presumed failure, now sat in a cell awaiting trial. They had locked her in Panecraft for mental evaluation, and two state psychiatrists had found her competent to stand trial for the murder of Karen Bolan. They would say that Lisa had been of sound mind when she'd placed the barrel of a .22 into Karen's ear and pulled the trigger-carefully cleaning the interior of her El Dorado afterwards, but still not fastidiously enough-all because her husband and her pregnant best friend had been having an affair. But the blood hadn't been spilled for love or sexual jealousy, or any of the many spiteful, bitter reasons everyone else might list. I could remember the timbre of her tiny voice perfectly when she'd said, "But the baby, he needed to have a baby, and I couldn't give him one."

Katie found more sauce on my sleeve. "How does somebody get lasagna on his elbows?"

"You're asking me?" I said. "I thought I was doing pretty good."

"Fork to mouth, you bring the fork up to your mouth. It's fairly simple." She pursed her lips and cocked her head, surveying the damage. "Though for you the end result has somehow become a Jackson Pollock painting."

"Be kind to me, I'm dining-challenged. A bag of chips and a football game are about as high-class as I usually get."

"And aren't I sweet to have never brought that up myself?"

Oscar flung his arm around my shoulder again and pointed out the chipped tusk to me. We had separate conversations going. I turned away from Katie for a minute, and when I glanced back I experienced the same new sense of amazement I always felt seeing her.