The Dead Past (12 page)

"Hey, it's my job to fulfill your floral needs." She put down the clipboard and pulled the chair with my coat on it beside her own behind the counter. "Jeez, I'm sorry, I haven't even asked you to sit down yet. Come on, don't wait for me." The coffee was ready and we sat and drank, and I watched her watching me, wondering if what was going through her head was anything like what was going through mine. I seriously doubted it.

Katie brushed her hair back off her shoulder. "Now, do you want to skip the humdrum pleasantries and get down to business and explain what happened to you?" she asked, her voice an odd mixture of timidity and firmness. "Or shall we chat about the weather, Jon?"

"It's cold."

"Uh-huh."

I chuckled, but it wasn't easy to open up; though I'd felt the need to speak with her about—I don't even know what about, just…
just
—I found it difficult deciding where to begin. If I told her about the bar and the fight, she wouldn't understand the reasoning unless I went back to the four am call from Anna, and would
that
make sense unless I went further back to Jackson
Whuller's
murder five summers ago, and the
babynapper
, and Phillip
Dendren
, and the death of my parents? And maybe even that wasn't the beginning. I couldn't be sure. There were more disassembled pieces than I'd realized.

I wound up talking about my Mom and Dad, Michelle's tattoos and her leather-clad men, divorce and the bookstore and Debi and Gunter Grass, skipped to Richie
Harraday
in the trash and told it straight from there. She stopped me and asked questions to make sure she followed along; she wondered about mine and Lowell's friendship, and exactly what the beef with
Broghin
was. When I got to the part where I played freeze tag with the Dobermans, Katie sucked air and said, "I hate those dogs. There's something fundamentally insane with them."

For nearly an hour I continued, letting most of it out while she listened, engrossed, occasionally quitting her seat to take care of a stray customer or three. She was friendly and courteous and had a knack for dealing with strangers. One of the things I liked most about Katie was her generosity with laughter. She was always ready to smile.

I brought the story up to the moment of sitting with her and feeling more relaxed than I had in three days. She asked why I hadn't called the police to have them search for the guy with the crew cut.

I told her, "The lady bartender said she'd call the cops. The doctor at the hospital filled out a report, and I'll talk to Lowell this afternoon. If the guy has a reputation for being a troublemaker anywhere in the five counties, Lowell will find him."

Katie changed position, lifted a leg and braced her heel on the chair, wrapped her arms around her knee. "You sound as if you respect him a great deal."

"I do. He saved my life once."

Obviously she wanted to hear more about that and my grandmother's current "case," but it must've been equally obvious that I didn't want to continue in that particular vein. She didn't press. I admired anyone with the strength to curb curiosity, a talent I didn't have.

Katie spoke for a while about herself, describing her past with broad strokes; an Army brat before her family settled in San Diego, writing music was a hobby, and she was one of the few people who actually liked those paintings of cigar-chomping dogs. "Ta da," she said when she'd finished.

We were silent then for several minutes; I wanted to know about her too, but now wasn't the time to ask more personal questions, so soon after my own discourse. She was one of the few women I've known who I felt comfortable with in silence. No need to fill the empty space because it really wasn't empty.

10:45. Katie stirred and maneuvered closer to me, brushing my pant leg, face ridiculously near mine while she poured herself another cup of coffee. "Would you like more?" she asked, and I waved off. Probably the perfect time to lean forward and kiss her, but I've been gun shy about first kisses since I'd stuck my lips out like a guppy for a woman who merely wanted to get close enough to gaze into my eyes because she'd been receiving obscene phone calls from guy claiming his were "the color of saffron." My brown eyes either passed or failed, depending on your viewpoint, and she snapped her mouth away at the last second, leaving me sucking wind.

It wouldn't be that way with Katie, but at the moment my face was a bit too much like raw hamburger.

"Why did you decide to take over this shop?" I asked. "You were gearing up for a career in medicine and this seems a complete one-eighty."

"It's a reversal of sorts, that's for certain," she said. "You're probably waiting for me to tell you about seeing too much horror in the wards, viscera and pain and disease and all that, until my will was broken by staring into a terminally ill child's eyes, losing my faith in the world. Nothing so melodramatic as that. The truth is much simpler and a lot less entertaining. I could make the grades but I wasn't sure if I could make the cut."

"I'm not sure I know what that means."

"If I'd stuck to my guns I could've finished well in my class and gone on to a residency, but I don't think I would've made an especially good doctor. Or even a nurse. The pressures were enormous if you want to do it right. The ranks kept thinning every semester. There's a lot more to the medical profession than learning the parts of the body and writing prescriptions in an illegible scrawl. I didn't enjoy the baggage and finally gave it up before I wasted more of my time and tuition money."

"Is this what you want to do?"

"For the present I like running this shop more than I thought I would. I enjoy helping the men pick out the right assortment for their wives or girlfriends." I told her about Margaret letting me skimp on my prom date's corsage and she nodded. "That was her, all right. On my sweet sixteen you should have seen the arrangement she had flown out to me. It took up the whole dining room table, and the house smelled like Eden for a week."

"Glad you're staying for a while."

She glanced out the window. "I can't get over this town. The entire first week I couldn't get my foot in the door without shoveling. Now, it's like spring outside." She caught herself. "Seems I'm talking about the weather anyway."

"It's cold," I repeated.

"Uh-huh."

"It's because of the Canadian winds flowing off Lake Ontario. When they come on strong they play havoc with the system and turn rain into snow, and snow into blizzards. It's the Lake Effect. When there's no wind, like today, you can finally feel the sunshine, the temperature the way it should be.”

“Thank God. I'm not used to this kind of freeze. I'm missing the beaches badly. I haven't lost much of my tan yet, though, with the sunlight reflecting off the snow.”

“Would you like to go out to dinner tomorrow night?" I asked.

"Sure," Katie said, smiling, jade eyes alive with sensitivity. "Just tell me one thing, Jonathan. Who are the tulips for again?"

~ * ~

Usually, because of the high winds up on the slopes, flowers didn't last long in the cemetery. Petals were stripped and
Crummler
immediately did his duty and cleaned the remains. Once I watched a plastic bouquet get kicked from grave to grave for about half an hour, wire prongs sticking for a while before flipping end over end to the next plot, as if spirits passed sentiment along.
Crummler
eventually chased it down and replaced the bouquet where it had originally been intended. He knew the spot, and he cared.

I put the tulips in front of the tombstones of my parents.

After six years, I had not completely gotten used to the fact they were gone. I thought I had cleared up all unfinished business when I'd found their killer, but now I understood that a part of me would never be at rest. Maybe, in some fashion it's better that way.

Phillip
Dendren
was my father's best friend and business partner in real estate for two decades. He'd taught me how to ride a bike and drive a car, and there were times I told him things I could never reveal or express to my Dad. He was there for me and my mother when the bottle got such a grip on my father that I could hardly recognize him anymore.

But long after my Dad had sobered and fought back his demons, a passing interest in gambling took a tighter hold on Uncle Phil. From what I later learned, he ran up exorbitant debts and dug a well for himself too deep to climb from. He never asked to borrow money from my father, who not only would have lent it to him, but being a reformed alcoholic also would have understood the consumptive nature of addiction. Perhaps Phil was more ashamed to face my Dad than he was to kill him.

After Anna roused from her coma and convinced
Broghin
to go searching three weeks late for a murderer in a gray Caddy, I began the hunt for the killer myself. The police went to work looking for a crazed driver, and coincidence gave
Broghin's
theory some credence: two counties to the east, in the mill town of
Walkerwood
, there had recently been a similar type of thrill-killing. A black truck driver had been forced off the road, robbed, and beaten to death with a flashlight.
Broghin
sought a connection.

I've tried to imagine what I would have thought and felt if the police had captured Phillip
Dendren
instead of my confronting him that night at Jackals. I'm certain I would have found at least a passing moment of sympathy, or more appropriately, pity, but I could never forgive the pure premeditated nature of his actions. They weren't those of a man enslaved, but rather of someone who coming into his own, discovering how much he enjoyed the foulness of his own weak nature.

Not only was Phillip
Dendren
my father's business partner and friend, but he was also my Dad's attorney. Six months before he ran my parents' car off the Turnpike, my father had gone to him to have his will slightly amended because I'd just turned twenty-one; perhaps that had inspired
Dendren
to murder.

My father trusted him implicitly and wouldn't have bothered to read before signing;
Dendren
realized this and made his own additions, bestowing nearly the whole of the business to him in the event of my father's death. He was smart and slick and more imaginative than I would've given him credit for, because he made it look perfect in the paperwork, as if my Dad gave everything to
Dendren
so that he could watch over my mother and me. How sweet. And because Anna was in a coma and I was in jail for throwing a chair at the sheriff,
Dendren
had the two of us sewn up away from the action so that we couldn't question the execution of my parents' estate. By the time we were released from our respective prisons, neither cared enough to bother with the legalities. He'd wrapped the package nice and tight with a big, bright bow.

Even now it tears the hell out of my guts when I think too hard about the ease with which my Uncle Phil had reached down and wrung my mother's neck.

Suspicion was further thrown off him by the fact that he was very nearly the victim of a hit and run himself—by a car driven by the men he owed a cool quarter million. So that it actually appeared as if there was a psychotic driver on the loose. Gunning for anyone, and everyone.

But
Dendren
made his mistakes; little things mostly, but they helped trip him up. Like lying about why he didn't visit me in jail, claiming he was busy taking care of business, and then my discovering he hadn't been seen in town for weeks and had asked another associate to wire him money in New Jersey. On a couple of occasions I noticed slight stains on his shoes and grease under his nails. A page on his desk filled with numbers and equations that made no sense. They were just nosy questions I had, little hints here and there. Nothing, in the long and short run, but it went into the recesses of my subconscious.

After a month of staking out
Walkerwood
I'd stumbled onto the flashlight killer, who'd already murdered two more people; he was a deranged gas station attendant named Cuthbert who killed drivers by the quarter moon, and I'd been saved from him by Lowell's exceptional timing. In a mountain cabin retreat Cuthbert had tried to crown me and his own sister, and Lowell had been forced to shoot him dead.

Solved, so far as the police were concerned, but the anomalies, the differences between the deaths, stuck too far out for me. I admitted my suspicions to Uncle Phil, who always listened and supported me through the whole painful ordeal. Fearing I'd learn the truth soon, he invited me over for dinner and a movie and let me crap out on the couch. In the morning, after just about my only good night of rest in the four months since the death of my parents, I got into my car and started to drive home with disconnected brake lines.