The Dead Past (18 page)

He turned and spoke with the other deputies and ten minutes later
Broghin
came out and they all helped put Karen's body in Keaton Wallace's ME wagon. Then everybody left and I sat there and waited. I didn't know what I was waiting for. The wind tore a branch from the tip of a tree and it sailed across the rim of the thickets like a miniature witch's broom. The cops' tracks began to disappear. Before long the last trampled traces of where Karen's body had been were covered and filled in. The sky lightened with yellow and red. It kept snowing.

I kept waiting.

~ * ~

When I got out of bed it was nearly noon and my nose was running. I had a deep-rooted chill and shivered right through a twenty-minute hot shower. The swelling had gone down and the shiners were already fading. I had a date with Katie tonight and I wanted to look fairly presentable and take her someplace where they didn't sell Schlitz.

I called the store and got the answering machine. Debi must have had late classes, and if she didn't want to pull so many extra hours working, that was fine. I left a brief message and told her not to do anything vulgar with her boyfriend in front of the
Brontë
sisters. Hopefully, they were not already in the midst of such acts.

Anna was reading in the living room; I couldn't make out the title of the book because she'd taken the dust jacket off to keep from ruining it. Anubis trotted forward and stepped on my feet and urged me to take him for a walk in the park. I shoved him away and he shoved back, and we waltzed around like that for a while.

"Later," I told him. He gazed studiously at me as if he did not quite believe me but was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. He hunkered down beside Anna, and she said, "Good morning."

I sat on the couch close to my grandmother and asked, "How are you?"

Anna smiled sadly. "I should be asking you that, dear. I didn't know the poor girl and you did. I'd ask you to tell me something about her but I fear that sounds too much like an interrogation at the moment. How do you feel?"

''Fine," I said.

She frowned and reached over and took my face in her hands the way Katie had yesterday morning. I liked when lovely women did that for me. "Your face is doing much better today. By the end of the week the bruises will be completely gone. Is your chest all right?"

I nodded. "Yes."

She shifted in her wheelchair and said, "Please save the pat answers, Jonathan. We
Kendricks
are known for our stubbornness, not insensitivity, and especially not with each other. I saw you sitting on the porch last night alone and watchful like some dutiful soldier. In that terrible snow. It was nearly four-thirty when I went in to bed, and still you stayed. I've been worried about you."

"Anna, it's not that ..." She made a hush sound. I suddenly wondered when I'd stopped calling her Grandma and why.

"I can only imagine what you were feeling all that time while they took so long examining your friend without even touching her. Good lord, so many pictures, the photographer must have taken hundreds. What do they need so very many for?"

I really hadn't considered what I was feeling, or what I wasn't feeling; the chill remained. Karen and I hadn't been close—never lovers or even truly good friends but she was someone from my life, and to have her killed and thrown out on my lawn like a piece of trash... it struck at something in the same way it would everyone who knew her. Richie's death might've deserved my time and interest, but Karen's death deserved more. I wasn't certain what that was, or what I could do about it.

"I'm not sure," I said.

"I understand. As involved as we were in this before, the poor girl's murder . . ."

"Her name was Karen Bolan," I said.

Anna dropped her gaze and reached for a cup of tea on the bookstand. She knocked her book over and it fell between Anubis's paws. He drew back his head and peered down at the page so that it appeared he'd just read a story by Hemingway and was having trouble with the subtleties. I picked up the book and put it back on the stand. It was
The French Powder Mystery
by Ellery Queen.

"I know her name," Anna said. "I didn't mean to intimate that she had no identity."

"I know, I've just been taking semantics a bit too hard lately." I realized the abruptness of my remark. "I'm sorry." It seemed like I was apologizing a lot lately—and couldn't be sure if that was because I was letting my emotions get away with me or for the opposite reason. "I'm pissed off. I want to find the bastard who keeps using our yard like his own private cemetery. If it's that bastard with the crew cut I'm going to have to finish what he started." Anubis raised his head and jammed his nose beneath my hand. "I want to figure out if he's involved with these murders, and if so, why. If it's not him, I want to stop whoever keeps dragging us through this blood."

Anna saved her breath and simply said, "Yes.”

“But I don't know how to do it. This one isn't like the others. This is striking too close to home, like with Mom and Dad. It's unnerving."

She took it in stride; my grandmother has an inexhaustible well of resolve. Unlike me, she never wavered, not in her beliefs or precepts. Self-doubt was as foreign to her as the far side of Venus.

"Do you believe Karen and Richie might have been directly or indirectly connected?"

I shrugged. "Connected? How so?"

"Involved," she said.

"Lovers?"

"It's a consideration."

Karen Bolan sleeping with Richie
Harraday
? I tried to picture it—the girl with the golden smile and the kid with sideburns using up his condoms. She certainly had the flirtatious nature for at least entrancing him into such a relationship. Could they have been screwing around in Willie's bed while he was away on business, or would Richie have taken her fishing at the river like a couple of infatuated young sweethearts, or would Karen have taken him shopping at Victoria's Secret?

"I'm having a hard time with that one," I said. "Karen openly flirted with everyone. She may have had lovers on the side, I wouldn't be surprised, but Lowell said Richie was more or less a Momma's boy. Karen's playful, aggressive forwardness probably would have scared him off. Not that they would have ever traveled in the same circles to begin with."

"No one thought the boy could burglarize a home, either."

"Deena told me he had his secrets."

"Even after his demise," she added.

And what were
Broghin's
? "What did the sheriff have to say last night?"

"Pertaining to this case, very little."

"Exactly how little is little?"

"He asked the questions that were to be expected," she said. "If I had heard anything, if I knew the deceased, etcetera. We drank a cup of coffee and he spoke at length about Clarice and his children. He certainly is in love, though I'm curious as to what prompted him to go on in that vein, considering last night's circumstances."

A black thought creeping towards me finally sprang.
Broghin
had been acting so unglued and weird lately that I wondered if, after dealing with the underside of a sleepy town and seeing the rot that infected it beneath its pretty gingerbread borders, the gate to his own ugly side had lifted, and he was committing these murders himself.

Anna's gaze tangled with mine. "You're right to be suspicious, but whatever has been bothering Sheriff
Broghin
, I can assure you he is certainly not who we are looking for."

"You can't guarantee that."

"I can adamantly—"

"There are no assurances."

She knew I was talking about Phillip
Dendren
, whom we had both loved. She shook her head testily, looked up and scanned the various frames on the wall for my parents. The photographs were more than family, friends, and the past; the collage stood as a testament to a world when the illusion of implicit trust still existed.

"
Broghin
said nothing else?" I asked.

"Hardly."

"Doesn't he have any leads at all? Suspects? Anything? I figured you would have squeezed him for all the information you could have."

"One would think." She smiled pleasantly. "Perhaps I've become too convivial in my later years."

"He's a part of this, Anna."

“Hm.”

"He knows more than he's telling."

"I will agree to that, but I don't believe that constitutes his being personally involved in this case. He's afraid of something, and it is that fact, in itself, that disturbs me more than anything else thus far. There may be no assurances in life, but I have known him for much of my life, and he deserves more than a modicum of respect."

Lowell wasn't giving me the help I needed, and I wasn't getting anywhere fast by myself. Miss
Marple
and Ellery Queen would've found a bloody dagger, a piece of string, a burnt match in an ashtray, and the case would be solved quite conveniently. They would round up a short list of suspects and make them all sit in the library while they proceeded to expose the culprit. The killer would be revealed, and at that point make a brief struggle before confessing and being politely escorted out. There would be no hard feelings.

My stupid list didn't have so much as a name on it anymore. I decided to tell Anna about the note—the letter which may or may not have been written by
Broghin's
wife, and which may or may not have been left on Richie's
Harraday's
corpse—who may or may not have been murdered—depending on which cop you spoke to, and when, and whether or not you had ever thrown a chair at his head.

She reacted the way I expected her to. Her silver eyebrows arched demonically in a respectable imitation of Jack Nicholson. I explained about the dry spot on Richie's leg, Lowell's misgivings, and then his sudden turnaround. She nodded sagely and her features hardened. I could take a lecture, but I didn't want to hear one precisely at this moment. Her hand found Anubis's snout and her fingers brushed back and forth across his nose until he went into a sneezing fit.

"Why didn't you mention this to me sooner?”

“Because I'm still not sure what it means, if it means anything at all."

"But you feel it does. And rather than bring it to my attention and discuss this aspect of the case you decided to remain silent."

Case. I was really starting to hate that word. "Lowell says—"

She gave an exasperated huff. "Deputy Tully is obviously having a personal conflict, split between his loyalties and his honor. Anyone can see he's a man who deeply loves his job, his fellow officers, and his neighbors, and is not always capable of placing one in front of the other, as his duty calls for." She spoke as if she knew him well, and could easily break down his personality into the sum of his traits; but Lowell wasn't a man you could claim did much by way of the obvious. "You chose to keep me unaware of the note because you wanted to protect me."

"Yes."

"I don't enjoy the idea of you working on your own agenda, Jonathan. How do you expect to protect me when you keep me in the dark?"

"That's not true. I've told you nearly everything, there just hasn't been much."

She took a sip of her tepid tea and coughed and placed the cup down roughly. Tea spilled onto Anubis's back and he got up and sat behind her wheelchair, sick of getting things dropped on him. "Clarify it for me, Jonathan, if you feel that I'm not quite sharp enough to be told the full extent of what's occurred."

"You don't want it clarified."

She stared flatly at me. "What are you insinuating by that?"

"Nothing."