Sorrow's Crown (2 page)

"So?" she said, as sweetly as she could, yet failing to keep the hints of anxiety and anger out of her voice. "You were supposed to give it some thought. You told me we'd discuss it over dinner. This is dinner."

"Or a Pollock retrospective."

"Well, in either case, we should talk."

"You're right."

I attempted picturing it again. The refrigerators humming all day long, filled with tulips, roses, and daffodils, the bell over the door jangling every two minutes. First editions of
Wilkie
Collins, James Agee, H. P. Lovecraft, and Sartre toppled against paperback originals of David Goodis and Sheldon Lord, everything piled in the corner while plant-growth mix got kicked into the carpeting. Novels smelling like manure.

"A combination flower shop-bookstore?" I said.

She gave this slight sigh of exasperation that ended with a low, sensual growl deep in the back of her throat. I tried to get her to do it as often as possible. "Did I say that?" she asked. "Give me some credit, Jon."

"I do."

"I said there's plenty of empty space at the fringe of the shop, facing Fairlawn. We could set the bookstore up there; it would have its own entrance, plenty of room, and the businesses would be exclusive. Have the two stores side by side. The rent is cheap. There's lots of pedestrian traffic downtown. It would be adorable."

The cuteness of her suggestion scared me. My store in Manhattan, full of scarce and uncommon books—a great many mysteries since Anna had cultivated my love for the field while nurturing her own tastes—could be considered a number of things: quaint, impressive, atmospheric, well-furnished, all of that, but never adorable. Katie failed to grasp the concept that while there might be room for a bookstore amidst the flora, shelf space was only the minimum of the room I needed. Most of my back stock remained in a storage area twice as large as my store itself. She'd been in Felicity Grove for three months, since her late aunt had bequeathed her the flower shop, and she hadn't quite come to the realization that nobody read much in this town.

Of course, the entire conversation simply provided a front for talking about deeper issues. We were both frustrated that we didn't spend enough time together, but I hadn't worked my ass off to build a reputation as a book dealer and antiquarian in a city rapidly being overtaken by
superchains
only to toss it all and return to a place I'd spent years getting away from.

"What do you think, Anna?" Katie asked.

"It's an appealing notion," my grandmother said. "And certainly there's an inherent charm. Felicity Grove could certainly use an antiquarian bookstore." Despite being in a wheelchair, she always managed to walk the balance beam between intent and interest. She never came down on some of Katie's more impractical business ideas, but never let me be a pure realist, either. "However, you must be cautious about entering into a business partnership like this, Katie."

"Of course," Katie said stiffly.

"Look, last week I sold a copy of Emerson's
MayDay
, Ticknor and Fields, eighteen sixty-seven, in a clamshell box, signed by Emerson, for twenty-four hundred dollars. You think I'm going to get that from anybody in the Grove? I'll have to start buying books on longhorn sheep and large-mouth bass."

Oscar nodded. "Those field books would do well for you, Johnny. I know, I sell racks of them, too. Back stock at least a couple dozen copies of
The Whitetail Deer Guide: A Practical Guide to Hunting America's Number One Big-game Animal
. I sell a couple of them a week, and don't mind the competition if you start pushing them, too."

"I appreciate that."

"Jonathan, dear," Anna said. "Your superiority complex is showing."

"That's just sauce."

The jade gaze had more heat in it now, Katie's eyebrows arching a little so that her forehead showed a lovely crease of irritation, none of this really about the store at all. "You can continue expanding your mail order business. That's where you make most of your sales, anyway."

"I'd have to spend nearly as much time in the city buying and trading stock, Katie."

Oscar nearly body-checked me out of my seat this time. He might've been seventy, but he had the kind of muscle that was hard-earned and would never disappear or turn to fat. He got me into a friendly headlock. "You can always come in with me if you like, Johnny. I keep my eye out for men like you who show real initiative."

Now he was starting to get a tad pushy with his need to impress. He glanced at the animal heads like he wished they'd come back to life again and attack the women so he could sprint into action and kill them with his butter knife. I tried to imagine the quail or moose running rampant and endangering lives, but couldn't quite make it.

"Well, it was just a thought," Katie said.

Oscar whispered something in my ear that I didn't hear because Katie was on the verge of either letting it go for tonight or possibly crying. Anna noticed and poured more wine, making small talk. Katie didn't have any. She hadn't had a drop of any kind of liquor for two weeks; she'd started eating more vegetables and staying away from smokers. Shafts of moonlight washed against her back, slender shoulders covered with freckles shrugging as if to loosen her neck and dump some of the stress. The shadow of
Panecraft
fell across my hand as I reached for her wrist. We interlaced fingers. She grinned and let it go for the evening. "I've got the tulips you wanted."

"Thanks, I know how difficult they are to get this time of year."

"Difficult, but not impossible. Not if you try hard enough."

Maybe that was a dig, maybe not. We kissed, and the cool softness of her lips played against mine, her breath in my mouth like ten thousand spoken and unspoken words. Shifting toward each other, we kissed again, more passionately, and it hurt for me not to throw down a credit card and grab our coats and rush back to her place to hold her tightly beneath her aunt's thick blankets.

We heard him at the same time.

Staring into each other's eyes, she frowned, puzzled: a sudden odd, distant humming and gasping stalked nearer, the sound of splashing outside coming closer and closer like a child leaping loudly into every puddle. We knew the noise.

Katie said, "Surely not this far from town."

Clearing her throat, Anna told me, "Jon, I think you should . . ."

"Oh boy," I said.

The door burst open in a flurry of black motion, wind and hail rushing inside with icy streamers twirling.

"I am
Crummler
! I am here!"

Impossible. He almost never left his shack at the cemetery, and when he did he went no farther than Main Street. To get this far he would've had to walk for hours—who would ever give him a ride? Always in action, even now with the ice crystals so heavy in his wiry beard and hair that his face appeared frozen in place,
Crummler
erupted into the room with a ballerina's bounce. His coat trailed behind him like a black and ghostly shroud trying to catch up. He smelled of the cemetery, which was only slightly better than Oscar's after shave. His customary mania at once seemed lessened and heightened, internalized so that he twitched even more wildly than usual, blinking in the bright lights, shivering in the freeze.

Bus boys went running. The maitre d' threw menus on the floor, and a young waitress grabbed a fire extinguisher, ready to douse the edgy stranger if she needed to—which I thought was extremely level-headed of her.

"
Crummler
," Katie told him. "You're freezing. Come sit by the fire."

He jitterbugged and snapped his fingers, following her dolefully. He trembled as much from the night as from his own fiery, burning nerve-endings. "I have been in battle with forces," he moaned. "I have been in battle."

He still wore the same pair of work boots I'd bought him a couple months back. Odd to realize that he'd been there when I'd first met Katie in the flower shop, like the living embodiment of the excitement I felt for her, his eyes blazing with love and madness. He glared at the wild boar's head on the wall, then down at our table and especially at my plate, and I got the unsettling feeling that he was thinking the same things I was.

"I am here, Jon!"

"Want some lasagna?" I asked.

Katie said, "He probably eats neater than you."

"Well, his elbows are clean, anyway."

Melting rime rolled off his neck, and despite the shuddering he actually did manage to eat more neatly than I had, carefully cutting up the pasta and forking it into his mouth with a trained and cautious maneuvering. I could tell a hundred hours of harsh training had probably gone into that conduct, someone at the orphanage forcing him to repeat the action until he got it down perfectly.

"Armadas roared across the roiling waves,"
Crummler
continued. "Met at the shore by the infernal war devices of ancient beasts, pyres burning in the antediluvian skies."

Anna loved listening to his impressive vocabulary that only filtered out when he told tales of ocher nights and ancient empires of other galaxies. It seemed that about a fifth of the patrons in the place recognized him and tried their best not to be bothered. The rest gaped, whispered in a near panic, or hid their faces behind the centerpieces.

I heard the manager in the alcove hissing loudly into the phone. "Don't give me that jurisdiction crap, he's your loony, you come get him out of here. Yeah, we've heard about this
gravekeeper
you got. What, if he's three feet over the county line you're going to let him ruin my business?" I could just imagine Sheriff
Broghin
lumbering to his feet, the gun belt angled into his belly rolls and leaving ugly welts.

Everything seemed to catch
Crummler's
interest, so that he spun and wheeled, wet hair whipping like shaggy fur. Brown water dripped off his soaking clothes. He broke from the table and waved to people, some of whom fondly waved back. Forever ignited,
Crummler
moved and reached. He started dancing with somebody's veal
piccata
.

"That son of a bitch has my dinner!"

I wrestled the plate away from him and put it back in front of a guy with big teeth, who sputtered and glared at the veal as if it might infect him with lunacy or rabies.

"I'll take him to his shack," I said. "I'll be back in forty-five minutes."

"Jon, be careful," Anna told me. "Something's wrong.”

“I know."

"Maybe I should go with you," Oscar offered. "He's
sorta
the overactive type, ain't he?"

"I have been in battle,"
Crummler
said. "I have been in battle ... with
myself.
"

"Come on," I told him. "I'll take you home."

His mouth fell in on itself and the reckless energy drained from his face. He shivered as though all the cold had finally caught up with him. He stood straight and idle, squinting into the distance, blind to me, his voice thickening with lucidity. "Not to Maggie's."

"Back to the cemetery," I said.

"Huh?"

"Where you take care of our families."

"Yes."

"Where you watch over my parents."

"Yes, Jon!" His eyes re-lit and held their fervor, the wire on fire once more. "They say hello, Jon. They say they love you, Anna." He reached down and embraced my grandmother, rocking gently. She brought the back of her hand to her mouth. We never got used to the way he spoke of the dead as if he'd had recent conversations with them, and I think Anna and I both hoped that, somehow, with his innocence he might actually be telling the truth.

"Thank you,
Crummler
, that is wonderful to hear," Anna said. "Thank you for telling me."

"Yes!" He shot up and hugged me, too, his hand rubbing my back in gentle and loving circles. "Thank you for the shoes. They fit well. They remain in good shape."

"I'm glad you like them," I said. "Come on, let's go get in the van, okay? We'll put the heat way up for you."

"Like them I do, though they are even more muddy. They suit me well when traveling through the swamps of ten thousand leagues of dwindled empires, fighting the dark orders of ocher nights."

When he talked of ancient obsidian towers in the far reaches of lost dimensions on the borderlands of time, he put so much into it you could almost witness his travels.
Crummler
snapped his fingers and stomped his heels in a weird but genuine fandango. I didn't know what to do except watch him. Children clapped and got off their seats and danced around with him. A few people left in a big hurry, but most just continued their dinner and conversations without furor, more kids joining in like they were at recess.

"This is why I prefer staying home with a bag of chips," I said.

"Sounds good to me right about now," Katie whispered.

The door crashed open again and
Broghin
bustled in. His perpetual scowl and flat, bloodless lips were so much a part of him that I couldn't tell anymore if he was truly incensed or if his bran wasn't quite cutting it. Even odds, I decided. The level-headed waitress lifted her extinguisher once more and kept it trained on him, for which I gave her even more credit.