The Dead Past (4 page)

It was the break I needed to ask her
her
name. "I was sorry to hear about Margaret," I said. It sounded flat and insincere because it was the kind of statement that can't be prettied up. I tried thinking of something else to say but it all sounded equally lackluster.

"Thank you," she said warmly, with a note of appreciation.

I knew Margaret had never had any children, but I played the hand out. "Were you her. . . ?”

“Niece. Her great-niece actually, her sister's grand-daughter, but I always called her my aunt. Anything else would have sounded distant, and we weren't. It's been a while since I've visited Felicity Grove, but we always kept in touch. My family's originally from San Diego." She seemed very much the child in that moment, and a needle jabbed at a memory at the bottom of my mental junk drawer. "Wait a second," I said. A tenuous, hazy image came into slightly more focus. "Is your name… Kathy?”

“Katie, yes.”

“Did you used to play with…
uhm
, like a little oven
thingie
that baked real cupcakes?”

“How do you know that!" she exclaimed, jade eyes beaming as brightly as her smile.

"I ate two or three of them."

Anna used to stop by to chat with Margaret on summer days when I was a boy. On a few visits Margaret had a shy girl sitting in the front of the store with an orchid in her hair, playing with tea sets and Barbie mobile homes and ersatz ovens. That's really all the recollections I could get a hold on, except for the fact that I had eaten a couple of the inedible cakes.

Katie grabbed my forearm and laughed. "That's right, I used to like visiting Aunt Margaret because there were so many kids to play with." She stared intently at me and motioned with her fingers as if she were slicing years off my face. "I think I remember you now."

She didn't, but it was a nice thing to say. "They tasted like foam.”

“Ugh, the worst, but I must've made a hundred of them.”

“How many did you eat?”

“None, of course. What, you think I've got a death wish?"

I enjoyed her mannerisms; personality shined through in her body language, and I liked the way it talked. She leaned back and crossed her arms, giving me the once over, then ran her forefinger along her bottom lip, which brought my attention even more fully to her mouth.

"I don't know your name," she said.

"Jonathan Kendrick."

"Pleased to meet you
again
, Jonathan."

"It's been…"

I spotted him through the window.

He was waving his arms wildly at me and skip-walking across the street, his raggedy overcoat flopping out behind him in the breeze. A truck horn blared and epithets were shouted, but he just happily waved to the driver.

I wasn't sure if Katie had ever met him before, but if she hadn't, I knew what she was going to think when he bounded in. Most people were immediately frightened, and you couldn't blame them.

I said, "Cripes," but didn't have time to tell Katie anything before the door burst open in a flurry of black motion, the bells jangling madly.

"Hello . . . ?" she asked, wheeling.

"I am
Crummler
!" he shouted, rushing her like he was blitzing a quarterback. "I am here!"

Katie virtually leaped into my chest with a muffled shriek, arms tightly hugging around my neck. I enjoyed this mannerism of hers even more than the others, though the choke-hold could easily crush my windpipe. She winced and looked over her shoulder at him, staring at the wild man standing three feet away.

"We've talked about personal space before,
Crummler
," I said.

Zebediah
Crummler
could have been the poster boy for the word "wiry." His body and his hair were wiry, and his mind was like a red-hot copper wire with too much juice going through it. He was always in motion and I couldn't imagine him in any state of repose. Impossible to imagine him not wound up tighter than a clock about to blow a few coils. He bounced and shivered and shuddered; yet for all that, most of the running current was internal, and you could see how it flowed through his veins. No one who knew him was afraid of him, but he made strangers leap onto kitchen counters or into the chests of the hopelessly romantic. Being in such proximity of sheer exuberance, when there is nothing visible to be exuberant about, can be a terrifying situation.

"I have returned!" Crummier yelled.

"From where?" I asked.

"Know you not, Jon?" he said, peering at me.

"I know not."

"Then I shall tell you."

"Oh lord," Katie whispered in my ear.

"I have been in battle," Crummier went on, his voice hushed. "With
forces
."

"I see."

"Jeez, what forces?" Katie asked.

"Know you not?"

"I know not," she said.

"This could get repetitious," I said.

"They fear me for I am
Crummler
! These forces of an ancient and dark domain." His eyebrows danced like horny caterpillars. "Who reign in far off dimensions where obsidian towers rise through the ochre night and desert winds blow the sand of ages across the ruins of a thousand lost civilizations and the world . . ."

I cut him off. "Do you want a ride back to the cemetery,
Crummler
? I'm heading that way."

"The cemetery?" Katie murmured out the side of her mouth.

"I would like for you to give me a ride back to the cemetery, Jon. My feet hurt. I have a hole in my shoe and the snow makes my toes cold."

"Okay," I nodded. "You know Anna's van right over there. The door on the passenger side is open. Wait for me and I'll be out in a minute."

He told me okay and went off much more calmly than he'd come in, glad that he had someone who'd listen to him. As if just now realizing she had her arms around me, Katie glanced down from my neck, let go and stepped away.

"In case you didn't catch it," I said, "that was
Crummler
."

"I caught it, and he's going to catch a swift kick if he ever comes in here like that again. You mind telling me if I have that to look forward to every afternoon?"

There was a dropped hint in that statement that said she was planning on remaining in Felicity Grove indefinitely.

"I take it you've never seen him before."

"No, wouldn't I remember? I must've missed him because he's been in that dark domain for so long."

I chuckled and she did too, letting out a lot of nervous laughter, and then we stood facing each other for a few seconds before
Crummler
began beeping the van horn. "It was nice meeting you," I told her.

"I'm sorry we didn't have tulips. But I promise I'll track down those orders for you. Why don't you come back in a couple of days and see if they're here?"

Yeah, why not?

~ * ~

I drove
Crummler
to a shoe store and bought him a pair of work boots before I took him back to the cemetery. Someone without much wit had dubbed the place
Felicity Grave
, and to the town's shame, the name stuck. I listened to
Crummler's
excited prattling the way an adult is forced to listen to a child's jabbering about cartoons or comic books or squirrels chasing nuts in the back yard. Every once in a while I let out an "ooh" and an "ah." He rallied back and forth with himself, shifting gears between highly detailed stories of knights and demon dragons to what he had for breakfast—franks and beans—to a ghost that walked the edge of the graveyard and scared him by flinging willow branches at his shack, to how warm his feet were, to an assortment of other weird mental meanderings.

I liked
Crummler
because he kept the cemetery more well-kept than a gardener keeps his azaleas. It was not hyperbole to say that his job was his life;
Zebediah
Crummler
had been a ward of the state for decades, and his lost existence before he came to Felicity Grove was nothing but the confines of orphanages, foster homes, and mental hospitals around New York State. Like a snapping electrical line, his manic persona needed grounding, and being caretaker of the graveyard gave his life meaning. You could hear the excitement in his voice when he talked of visitors who'd commented on the landscaping, the pure joy of being indispensable.
Crummler
meant something to himself as much as he did to the town, and I didn't think I could say that about more than a handful of other people I knew.

He got out of the van and walked with me to the graves of my parents. He said, "Say hello to your folks for me, Jon." I promised him I would and watched him race across the snowdrifts back to his home.

I kneeled in the snow, touching the tombstones out of some sense of respect. Sometimes I thought
Crummler
must actually clean each grave separately, a feather duster in one hand and a polishing rag in the other. The trees were trimmed, evergreens pruned, the leaves always raked so that the cemetery looked more like a park than a place for the dead. The snow and ice added new sculptures to this museum, and I wasn't sure whether I should be embarrassed by the pleasure I felt in simply spending a little time here.

The frozen earth crackled and rustled beneath my feet as I walked back to the van.
Crummler
waved from his shack near the surrounding stone wall, fenced-in by spiked gates like those at Dracula's castle. It only added to the eccentricity of the place, as though we should all know that graveyards are only a kind of playground where you ate franks and beans and ran into ghosts with willow swatches.
Crummler
kept waving and waving, both arms in the air as if he was guiding planes to safe landings. He laughed and called out more of his
Crummler
talk, frantic and hysterical and filled with meanings I would never understand.

I hoped.

It began snowing again as I drove back to Anna's. The wind rose to beat and twine the wafting flakes into spiraling sheets around the van. An odd mood descended, partly darkened by recalling murder yet buoyed by meeting Katie, and this time I got to do it without the foam cakes.

I got out of the van feeling like one of those skaters in a glass globe, the world shaken up stuck behind transparent walls. Stasis, for the moment, but something would give soon. The spot where Richie
Harraday
had died on the lawn had already been covered with fresh snow. I clopped slush off my shoes, and walked into the foyer. Anubis snapped forward growling until he recognized me, then settled back on his haunches at Anna's side, mildly perturbed. My grandmother put Agatha Christie's final novel,
Sleeping Murder
, on her reading stand and grimaced sadly at me.

"Uh-oh," I said.

Her lips were thin, like my father's had been, and smoothed out thinner still. "You were right, Jonathan. It doesn't pay to be too pushy with our local constabulary."

"And just what does that mean?"

"I may have already committed the first faux pas of this case."

I couldn't stand it when she called our—
experiences
or whatever the hell they were—cases. They weren't cases. A case was what you put suits in, or books. It was twenty-four beers packed into cardboard. It's what lawyers take to make money, and what prosecutors fail at too often. But for those exceptions, I didn't want to think that cases have anything to do with me.

"What happened, Anna?"

"I held off from immediately phoning the morgue. Instead, I spent the afternoon reading until a few minutes ago when I called Wallace and inquired into what progress had been made in determining
Harraday's
death."