Crackpot Palace (28 page)

“You started the party without me?” said Stan.

“I had a realization today,” she said to him, leaving her shoes on the floor and curling her legs up under her flowered skirt. “Come here and I'll describe it to you.” She patted the empty seat next to her on the sofa.

“Oh yeah?” he said. He walked into the dining room and left his things on the table, draped his jacket over the back of a chair. “A realization, no less.”

He sat down and put his arm around her. She sipped her drink. “A lot of people come to the library during the day who are out of work,” she said. “They have no place else to go, nothing to do. They come and, even if they haven't read anything since grade school, they start reading again.”

“Well, that's good,” said Stan.

“Sure,” she said, and shrugged Stan's arm off to lean forward. She poured him a drink and handed it to him. She lit a cigarette, took a drag, and gave that to him. “But I noticed today that the people who don't have anything to do but read, read differently than the ones who are still working.”

“How?” asked Stan, giving her back the cigarette.

“With a kind of desperation,” she said.

“You mean, like it's a chore?”

“Worse than a chore,” she said. “I thought up a phrase for it this afternoon: infernal labor.”

“Why?”

“I don't know what it boils down to in the end,” she said. “I have to think about it some more. I heard you were up by the creek this morning.”

“News travels in Midian,” he said.

“A young woman?” she asked.

He nodded. “I can't figure out what killed her. It's the damnedest thing. She's preserved somehow. Like a saint.”

“Intriguing,” she said.

“Intriguing but frustrating.” He stood up, went to the dining room, and returned with the green cardboard box. He set it on the table before her and sat down again. “Cynthia,” he said. “You may find this strange.”

“Stranger than you?” she said.

He reached forward and lifted the lid off the box.

“What is it?” she asked, peering inside. A moment later, she said, “Oh, that is disturbing.”

“It's a death mask,” he said. “The young woman.”

She took it in her two hands, and brought it up to stare at it face-to-face.

“Smell it,” he said.

She wrinkled her nose and looked at him.

“Do it,” he said and nodded.

She brought the thin plaster visage closer. “Like a garden,” she said and smiled.

“And the smile?” asked Stan.

Cynthia took a long look, holding the face at arm's length. “Not
always
nice,” she said. She put the mask back in the box.

“I haven't seen that smile yet,” he said.

“What ones have you seen?” she asked.

He took up his drink and listened to the music.

L
ater, just after midnight, Stan had a dream about the war, the shrapnel in his foot, the mustard gas poisoning of the wound, the amputation, the pain, and he woke to it, grunting.

“What is it?” said Cynthia.

Stan rolled to a sitting position at the edge of the bed. “It's the goddamn foot,” he said. “Two nights in a row.”

“Is there something you can take for it?” she asked.

“I'll get it,” he said. “Just go back to sleep.” He lifted himself onto his good foot and then slowly brought the ivory one to the floor. Ever so gently, he applied pressure until it could bear his weight without making him scream. He hobbled to the doorway, grabbed his robe, and went for his bag. “Two nights in a row,” he said and downed three pills at once with a shot of Old Overholt. Then he picked up the mask and the cigarettes. In his study, he listened to the wind and the clock. The ghostly ache was far worse than usual. Cynthia had asked him earlier why he'd made the mask, and he hadn't been able to answer. Now, groggy and high, he found all kinds of answers.

At dawn Cynthia helped Stan from his study to the bed. He lay his head on the pillows, and she spread the blanket over him. He could barely keep his eyes open to say good-bye. She was already wearing her coat and hat before he managed to get the word out. She kissed him and, as always when she stayed overnight, left early, not wanting to be seen by the neighbors as she made her way up the street.

Flat on his back, staring at the ceiling like a body in the pool at Hek's Creek, Stan remembered the last time he'd asked her to marry him. A month earlier, in the library, just after closing. He was helping her in the stacks. She was squatting down, arranging a bottom row while he reshelved books from a cart next to him. He said simply, “Will you marry me?” It was his second try in as many years.

She laughed and stood up. “You're sweet,” she said. She drew closer to him and put her arms around his waist. He kissed her. She hugged him and stepped away, bringing her hands up in front of her. “No,” she said.

“A peculiar woman” was how de Vries had described her. Stan's relationship with the librarian had begun in the last year of the doctor's life. The old man had ticked off the reasons for his negative assessment—her clock garden, her voluminous reading, her insistence on being heard. “A good heart, but peculiar,” he'd said. “And not all that good-looking.”

As for her part, Cynthia said of de Vries, “He has a brilliant mind and a ponderous ego.”

At the time, Stan had pretended not to understand either of them, but now he wondered as he drifted into a swiftly moving dream of the summer flood.

Five hours later, the phone rang and its persistence pulled him from the depths. As he lifted the receiver next to the bed, he checked the alarm clock. It was 11:15
A.M
.

Bleary, rubbing his eyes, he propped himself on his elbow and said, “Lowell.”

“Coroner,” said Groot.

“Yes, Detective,” said Stan.

“I'm in a pay phone at the Rexall in Hekston.”

Stan was about to ask why, but the events of the previous day came back to him. “Did you find something?” he asked.

“Are you busy today?” asked Groot.

“What have you got?”

“I want you to come up here and identify a body.”

“A dead one?”

“Not exactly. Meet me at the Windemere bar down by the river, next to the factory. Veersland Street.”

“It'll take me about an hour to get there.”

“Twelve thirty. I'll be way in the back in a booth,” said Groot and hung up.

Stan replaced the receiver and fell back into the bed and the lingering scent of Cynthia's perfume. Now that he was fully awake, he discovered he was nauseated from the whiskey and pills. He lay still for five minutes but eventually rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. Twenty minutes later, he'd puked, showered, and shaved. Staring into the mirror, he rinsed the razor and took in his weary eyes and pale complexion. The ghost of a pain was making him old.

H
e dressed in the brown suit, the mustard tie, the gold bee clip, gathered his bag and the camera, and stepped out the front door into a brisk, blustery day. He got in the old Chrysler and headed north, out of town. Soon the blocks of houses became pasture. The cows gave way to fields of dry cornstalks, which gave way to nothing but deep woods on either side of the cracked highway. Leaves tumbled and blew and the brooding clouds moved swiftly, suddenly revealing beams of sunlight and just as quickly swallowing them.

The journey to Hekston may have been beautiful, especially that time of year, but the town itself held a bad old memory that never faded, no matter how many years had passed or how many times Stan visited there on business. It had happened sometime after he'd started with de Vries, in the winter of '21. The road was dirt back then. The doctor was summoned by the police about a murder, the victim of which they'd just discovered. At that time, Stan worked in the doctor's office and only assisted him in the autopsy room. This time, de Vries had said, “I want you to come along.” Stan was excited at the prospect. The murderer was still at large.

The victim, Mrs. Obalan, a large, middle-aged woman, bloated, with skin the palest green, lay in a blood-drenched sheer nightgown on her dining room table. Her throat was slit and a chunk of flesh had been torn from her upper arm, another from her left cheek. De Vries hadn't been in the room a minute before he pointed to the brutal wounds and said, “Teeth marks.” Sullivan, Hekston's chief of police, a big, dull-looking man with a neck beard, leaned closer to see what the doctor was indicating. He nodded. “Are ya saying he ate her?” De Vries pointed to a pool of vomit on the floor. “I'm afraid it was a repast too rich,” said the coroner with a smile. Stan could hardly bear the sight of the woman's remains, but when the mess on the floor was pointed out, he got dizzy. He'd seen men slaughtered by the dozen in France and nearly died himself, but this was something else entirely. He backed away into the living room of the apartment and just made it to the couch before passing out.

Later, while the doctor was filling out paperwork in Sullivan's office and Stan was sipping a cup of black coffee that the chief had promised, “always helps when you're caught between a shit and a sweat,” one of the Hekston cops came in and said, “We got a report Obalan is holed up in that old carriage house behind the church.” The chief took his feet off the desk and grabbed his hat. Standing, he said, “You want to come along, Doc?” De Vries said, “Of course.” He and Stan rode in the back of the chief's car. The officer who'd brought the news sat up front in the passenger seat.

Night was falling fast and it had begun to lightly snow when they pulled up in front of the church. There was a patrol car there and a cop standing by the corner of the building. Sullivan got out of the car holding a flashlight. He drew his gun and motioned for de Vries and Stan to follow at a distance. As they came up to the corner of the church, the cop who'd been standing lookout turned and put his finger to his lips. He pointed toward the carriage house, and whispered, “In there. I seen him moving around before it started to get dark.”

Sullivan and his men trotted across the open field. They held up outside the broken door and the flashlight beam came on. As the police entered the dilapidated building, de Vries grabbed Stan's arm and pulled him out of the sheltering shadows of the church. He fell once as they crossed the field, but the doctor helped him up and supported him the rest of the way. By the time the coroner and his apprentice reached the carriage house the police had already passed through two rooms. In the third, an empty garage, Sullivan and his men stood just inside the doorway. The chief pointed the flashlight into a corner of the darkness. There sat a heavyset man in his late forties, balding, with a gray mustache, his back against the wall. He wore a white, sleeveless undershirt, the front covered in dried blood, which was also smeared across his lips and cheeks.

He stared, glassy-eyed, into the beam of light, and said, “She made me sick.”

Sullivan aimed and fired. Stan didn't have a chance to look away. The bullet struck Obalan in the right temple, slamming his head back into the wall. His body twitched twice but remained seated. The wound smoked for a moment, appearing in the glow of the flashlight like a spirit leaving the body. There was hardly any blood.

After the echo of the gunshot died away, de Vries said, “Innocent until proven guilty, I assume.”

The chief shrugged and said, “A clear-cut case of resisting arrest.”

Nothing nearly as harrowing would happen on the job again. In the years that followed, Stan learned that the position of coroner was a relatively quiet one, lonely afternoons spent discovering and recording the secrets of those in whom life had lost interest. Still, the memory of that day in Hekston, with its pathetic horror and de Vries turning a blind eye to Obalan's summary execution, never diminished.

S
tan pulled into town and headed down toward the river. Bad memory notwithstanding, Hekston didn't look that much different from Midian. People were on the street, going about their business, steam billowed from the factory. He passed the grade school and saw a gang of kids gathered in a ring, playing at some game. A flag flew outside the municipal building.

He found the Windemere, a sagging wooden establishment with a wraparound porch, on the bank of the Susquehanna. Its sky-blue paint was chipping and its windowpanes were smeared. Stan figured it had obviously been a house at one time prior to the turn of the century. As he climbed the steps to the front door, he checked his watch to make sure he wasn't late.

Inside, it was dark, and it took a moment for his vision to adjust. He stood in the entrance and watched the forms of three old men on stools cohere out of the shadows. The light behind the bar was dim. A white-haired woman in a plaid flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up, waved Stan over and said, “What'll you have?”

“I'm just here to meet someone,” he said.

“A stout fella?”

Stan nodded. “That could be him.”

“Go on,” she said and nodded toward the dark back of the place.

He stepped around some tables and peered down a long row of booths. Way at the end, just barely visible, a leg jutted into the aisle. As he approached that table, he heard Groot's voice.

“You're punctual,” he said.

“The job drives you to it,” said Stan as he took a seat on the bench across from the detective. “Who are we hiding from?”

Groot said, “I gave Loaf a few pictures of the girl to pass around Midian and I came up here at daybreak. I showed the girl's picture everywhere. No one knows her. Never seen her. I drove over to where Hek's Creek comes off the Susquehanna and it's moving pretty fast. By then it was around ten thirty. I decided to stop and get some lunch, so I came in here for a sip. While the woman up there was drawing my beer, I showed her the photo. I asked her, ‘Do you recognize this person?' She said, ‘No.' But when I went to sit down, she told me, ‘Wait, let me see that again.' She looks at it, smiles, and says, ‘Yeah, I've seen her.' ”