Cemetery Lake: A Thriller Page 6

  I walk down the aisle, letting my fingertips tap the pew backs along the way. Left and right are tapestries of Jesus and stained glass windows of Jesus and paintings of Jesus. Somewhere around here there’s probably a gift shop with coffee cups with a smiling Jesus. At the head of the church behind the altar is a large, wooden crucifix with a large, wooden Jesus carved onto it. Jesus doesn’t seem to care that he’s hanging on a slight angle, or that he’s being promoted so heavily.

  Before I reach the end of the aisle one of the boards beneath me creaks, and the priest turns suddenly. He steps out from the pew and smiles at me, but after a few seconds the smile falters, and I realize how hard it must be for him to maintain his composure under the strain not just of this day but of every day. Priests don’t see the same violence that cops do, but they sure as hell hear about it—and worse. They’re the ones trying to pick up the pieces of a broken family looking to blame more than just the man or the disease that took away their loved ones.

  Two years ago he was there for me. Two years ago he tried to help me pick up the pieces of my life, only I didn’t want his help. Not really. I wanted to pick up those pieces in my own way.

  Father Stewart Julian, a man in his mid to late fifties who has been here for as long as I can remember, offers me his hand. He has a notepad in his other hand that he hasn’t written a thing on, and a newspaper folded on the pew where he was sitting. His soft face, gray hair, and black eyebrows give him a kind look, but at the moment he looks tired. Still, I figure in his day, if Father Julian hadn’t become a priest, he would’ve had women all over him.

  “Awful day, Theo,” he says, shaking his head, proving just how awful the day really is. “Just awful.” His voice is low and easy to listen to, a voice well suited for the radio. “It’s been long and it’s already late. You wouldn’t believe how many hours I’ve had to spend talking to police. Or to families of those who have loved ones buried here. They keep calling, Theo, scared that their mothers and fathers and sons and daughters are being desecrated. Word has gotten out about the bodies in the water, and people are thinking they might be people who were buried here. The calls finally stopped an hour ago, and since then I’ve been looking for a distraction.” He waves the notepad a little. “Have you seen this?” he asks, and picks up the newspaper.

  “Seen what?” I ask, pretty sure that the distraction was a hundred miles away, because that’s where Father Julian seemed to be looking before he heard me.

  “This,” he says, and he points to the article.

  “I’ve seen it.” It’s a newspaper article about the advertising campaign for McClintoch spring water. Promotional billboards have been erected across the country and advertising spots taken out in newspapers. The ads say, What would Jesus drink? and show Jesus turning wine into water with McClintoch spring water labels on the bottles.

  “I just don’t understand,” he says, shaking his head.

  “Times are changing,” I say, hoping my answer will apply here. I like giving my priest vague answers, the same way he used to give me vague answers. When my daughter was killed and my wife lay in a state close to death, he’d tell me it was part of God’s plan. “Father, I was hoping you could help me out.”

  “Helping you out, Theo, has led to a very long day.”

  I nod. Yes it has. “You’d rather have left things as they were?”

  “Well, no, of course not. But I think I need more notice before I help you out so I can plan some holiday time.”

  We sit facing each other, mimicking each other’s position with our elbows resting on the top of the pew. The pews are solid wood, worn a little around the edges, but they’ve held up over the years in the way that only expertly crafted furniture from sixty or seventy years ago can. Wooden Jesus is looking down at us, wooden nails in his wooden hands. He’s holding up well too.

  “It’s been one heck of a day for me,” he says. “For all of us. Sometimes I wonder . . .” He doesn’t finish his sentence, just lets it trail off, making me think he’s wondering lots of things, and I don’t blame him. We’re all wondering lots of things. Foremost he is probably wondering where God fits into all of this.

  “You’re starting to think retirement might be in the cards?”

  His smile comes back for a few seconds—there are a few creases around the edges of his eyes—but then he sighs. “No, no, not yet. If I’m looking older than normal, it’s the day. It’s been a long one.”

  “For all of us, Father. What can you tell me about the caretaker who helped me this afternoon?”

  He cocks his head a little and pushes his shoulders back for a few seconds as if ironing out a crick in his back. “Bruce? Bruce Alderman? Why are you asking?”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “Ah,” he says, and slowly shakes his head. Suddenly he doesn’t look as tired as he does sad. “You think he’s responsible. Well, I can’t tell you anything more than I’ve already told the police.”

  “And what did you tell them?” I ask.

  “That Bruce is a good man,” he says, “and this sort of depravity, well . . . it’s simply beyond him.”

  It’s been my experience that depravity isn’t beyond as many people as we’d like to think, and I’m pretty sure Father Julian doesn’t need me to point that out to him.

  I adjust my position on the pew. Well made doesn’t mean comfortable. “Did you tell them where they could find Bruce?”

  He shakes his head. “I didn’t know.”

  “Guilt makes men run, Father.”

  His head goes from shaking to nodding. “So does fear, Theo. Nobody would like to see what he saw.”

  “But fear doesn’t make them steal a truck and go into hiding.”

  He stops nodding. Now he just keeps his head perfectly still. “I wish I could simply ask for your trust in this, Theo. I can guarantee you, Bruce isn’t a bad kid. And he couldn’t have known those poor people were going to rise up from the lake.”

  “He knew what we were digging up.”

  “Of course he did. You had an exhumation order.”

  “No, it was more than that. He knew we were digging up something more.”

  “Something more?”

  “The body we dug up wasn’t Henry Martins’s,” I tell him.

  “I saw the exhumation order, Theo. I’m sure that’s who—”

  “It wasn’t Martins in the coffin,” I tell him.

  “But . . .” he says, and doesn’t know how to continue. Not for about five seconds, and then he says, “So where is Henry Martins? Was . . . oh, oh no, he was one of the bodies in the water, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t know that,” I tell him, “but it’s likely.”

  “Then the coffin was empty?” he asks, in a tone of voice that suggests he’s hoping his question comes with a yes attached to the end.

  “No. It wasn’t empty. It contained the body of a young woman by the name of Rachel Tyler.”

  The look of horror on his face settles in his features so heavily I’m worried they might set there. He doesn’t look comfortable with it. In fact he looks downright sick. He reaches out and grabs the back of the pew, as if to stop himself from tipping off and falling into an abyss that is opening beneath him.

  “She was murdered,” I add. “And whether your caretaker did it or not, he certainly knows something. Please, Father, you have to help me.”

  He lets go of the pew, rubs his palm across the side of his face, then lifts both hands into the air as if the gesture can ward me off. “I . . . I wish I could help, but there’s nothing I can say.”

  “Would you like me to bring you a photograph of Rachel? Show you what was done to her?”

  The church seems to get colder as his horror turns to disgust, almost anger, and my stomach starts to knot. I wish I hadn’t said that to him. He’s too good a man to say shitty things to. This is the guy who got me through the hardest time of my life. This is the guy who would ring me every day after my daughter died and, when he couldn�
�t get hold of me, he’d come around to my house to make sure I wasn’t going to do anything stupid. Sometimes he’d bring me cooked meals. Sometimes he’d sit and have a beer with me. Ninety-five percent of those times we wouldn’t talk about God or religion or the Big Plan. We’d just talk about life. We’d talk about my wife and my daughter.

  Before I can apologize, he stands up and looks down at me, and he doesn’t look angry, he looks disappointed, and that’s far, far worse. “That sort of parlor trick is beneath you, Theo. If I could help you, I would, just as I helped you two years ago when you were lost.”

  “Please, sit back down,” I tell him.

  “You can’t—”

  “Rachel has nobody to speak for her. I need to do what I can,” I tell him.

  “She has God.”

  “God let her down.”

  He sits back down. He breathes out heavily. “You must have faith, Theo.”

  “Faith lets everybody down.”

  “People let themselves down.”

  I want to argue, but there is no argument a priest hasn’t heard and isn’t ready for. Their answers may not make sense, but they are a doctrine, there to be repeated over and over, as if the very repetition makes their case. I could take a photograph out of my wallet and show him my wife and my daughter, but of course Father Julian remembers them. He knew them before they were killed and after. I could ask him where God was during their accident, but Father Julian would have some dogmatic answer that God-loving and God-fearing people love to use—most likely the generic God works in mysterious ways, which I want to scream at every time I hear it.

  “You’re right,” I concede, “and I shouldn’t have said that about showing you a picture of Rachel. But you need to help me find your caretaker. He saw us digging up something that made him run.”

  “I still find that hard to believe,” Father Julian says, but I’m starting to convince myself that the look on his face suggests it isn’t that hard for him at all. “Unfortunately, Theo, as I keep saying, I don’t know where he is.”

  “Start by telling me where he lives.”

  “The police have already been there and, to be honest, I’m not comfortable giving you information. You’re not a cop anymore. This isn’t your investigation.”

  “No, this has become my investigation. Two years ago I had an excuse to raise Henry Martins’s coffin and I never did. That means . . .”

  “I know what that means. You think that if there are other people out there in coffins they shouldn’t be in, then you could have prevented it. Maybe this is true.”

  “It is true,” I say, a little shocked at how quickly he has come to this conclusion.

  “Two years ago,” he repeats. “Exactly two years ago?”

  “Pretty much,” I tell him, knowing where he’s about to go.

  “Then you know you can’t blame yourself,” he says, but his eyes seem to betray his real feelings. “The accident—that was two years ago, correct? Was it the same time?”

  “I still should have done more,” I say. “But I lost my focus.”

  “You lost your family,” he says. “And you lost control. This isn’t your fault, Theo.”

  “There are going to be more girls out there in those coffins, Father. Three of them. I feel it. I can’t make it right, but I also can’t let it go.”

  He looks down at the floor as if there is some internal debate warring inside his head. That debate rages on for almost a minute. I don’t interrupt him. When he looks up he seems to have aged a few years. He thinks this day is hard on him, but if I drove him to Rachel Tyler’s house tomorrow to meet her parents he’d realize his day was easy in comparison.

  “I suppose you could talk to his father,” he says. “He may be able to offer you something.”

  I recall the article that I read about Sidney Alderman before I left my office for the morgue. The old man’s retirement last year had made the newspaper, but it wasn’t really news, it was just one of those human interest stories that are interesting to the people who knew Alderman and not to anyone else.

  “Does he live nearby?”

  “Closer than you can imagine,” he says. “Promise me you’ll be careful. Promise me you’re looking for Bruce to question him, not punish him.”

  I shrug. “Punish him? I don’t follow you.”

  Again Father Julian sighs, then slowly shakes his head. “Don’t take the law into your own hands, Theo. Vengeance is God’s, not yours—you know that. You know that better than anybody,” he says.

  He follows me to the church doors and gives me directions to where I can find Sidney Alderman. I thank him and he wishes me a good night, and again he tells me to be careful. I tell him I’m always careful.

  He shakes my hand before he leaves, and when he takes his away I see that he is shaking. Then he disappears back through the doors. God’s working day is still not over.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The rain has disappeared. For now. And the night has set in. I sit in the car with the heater going, trying to collect my thoughts, wondering why I’m chasing down Bruce the caretaker when I ought to be home chasing down some pizza with Jim the bourbon. I don’t know, maybe it’s just that my life isn’t interesting enough to be at home getting drunk in front of reruns of bad comedies and reruns of bad news that happens every day. That’s the problem with the news. The victims have different names, the presenters wear different outfits, but the stories are the same. Some of us put our hands up and say that’s enough; we try to make a difference. When I was on the job we would arrest one killer and another would appear. It was like the sorcerer’s apprentice Mickey Mouse cutting evil broomsticks in half, only to have each half grow whole and carry on doing whatever it was evil broomsticks did.

  The inside of the windshield is fogging up, so I redirect the heater to take care of it. My reflection, slowly appearing on the warming glass, looks pale green from the dashboard lights. I take a small detour on the way out, heading back past the crime scene that was once a tranquil lake in the middle of a tranquil cemetery. The machinery is moving around—I can hear and see it—and I wonder what unlucky girl is being dug from the ground by a giant metal claw.

  The cemetery road veers away from the machinery, from the lake, from my daughter, and toward more darkness and more trees and fewer gravestones, before taking me out onto the street. From there it’s a thirty-second drive to Alderman’s house, and most of that is taken up with hedge line views of the edge of the cemetery. There are only a few houses nearby. One is old and looks like it is ready to fall down; another looks brand new, as if it was built yesterday. I figure the houses in this area are, like many, slowly getting replaced. New replacing the old. The new then slowly becoming the old. Then the new becoming so old it becomes condemned. Hard to imagine, I guess, that any house becomes that way when it’s getting built. But I suppose the same thing happens with people too. It’s the cycle of life.

  I strain to read the numbers on the mailboxes, but at last I park outside and walk up the driveway, the murky light from the streetlights detailing more of the house with every footstep. Warped siding and chipped concrete tiles, the windows smeared with grime, or cracked, the windowsills uneven. There is no garden, just grass and weeds and mud. The concrete foundation and steps leading up to the front door are flecked green with mildew, and it’s the first time I’ve become aware that concrete can actually decay. There are no lights on inside. If a house could look as if it has cancer and is in its dying stages, then it’s this one.

  When I knock on the door the house creaks and I have the sudden fear it might topple over. Somebody inside yells for me to go away. I keep knocking, using the heel of my hand to keep the impact loud and annoying. Another thirty seconds go by. Then a minute.

  “Jesus Christ, man, what the hell do you want?” The voice comes from behind my knocking.

  It’s turning into one of those long days when I’m not in the mood for personality clashes, so instead of telling him to open up the god
damn door before I kick it in, I grab a business card, identify myself, and tell him I have a few questions.

  “I’ve had questions all day,” he answers. “People only ever come to my door if they want something. I’m sick of people wanting something. How about what I want, huh? I want people to leave me the hell alone. Jesus, doesn’t it look like I want to be alone? You see any invites?”

  “It won’t take long.”

  “No.”

  “That’s a real shame,” I say, “because it’s cold out here. I’m going to have to keep myself warm somehow, and the best way to do that is to keep pounding on your door.”

  There is a small shudder as the door catches, then frees from the frame before swinging open.

  The man confronting me is the man I saw pictured earlier this evening in the article about the retired caretaker. I reach out and offer Sidney Alderman my card, but he leaves me hanging.

  “I know who you are,” he says. “You’re the cop who had to bury his daughter.”

  He spits the comment at me as though it’s some kind of insult, and I’m unsure how to respond. The fact this man remembers me makes me shudder. Two years ago he covered Emily’s coffin with dirt. How the hell did he remember? The way he says it makes me want to hit him.

  He grins, his aged face stretching dozens of wrinkles in dozens of directions. He has a few days’ worth of gray stubble; his hair is disheveled, as are his clothes. He looks like he just spent a week in the desert. If I saw him two years ago I don’t recall it. His eyes are unreadable in this light.

  He smells of cheap beer and even cheaper vodka, and there is another smell there too, something I can’t identify, but it makes me think of old men hanging out in hospitals and homes gathering a collection of old diseases.

  “I’m looking for your son,” I tell him.

  “Only you’re not a cop anymore, are you, Tate,” he says.

  “You don’t have to be a cop in this world to want to look for somebody,” I point out. “That’s why they have phone books.”

  “Then let your Goddamn fingers do the walking,” he says, and starts to close the door.