Cemetery Lake

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 goddamn 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.

I stop it with my foot.

“What happened?” he asks. “You get sick of the doughnuts?” He starts to laugh, then scratches at his belly as if he has just come up with a real humdinger. “No, they fired you, right? Why was that again?”

He keeps grinning at me. His teeth look like they haven’t seen fluoride in years.

“Sure is a nice place you got here,” I say-and hell, maybe the day isn’t long enough after all, because here comes that personality clash. “You in the middle of renovating?”

“Yeah. It’s a real palace,” he answers, but his laughter doesn’t have an ounce of humor in it. It’s as though he’s heard other people do it, maybe on TV or on the radio, and he’s trying to imitate it. “Somebody died, right? Isn’t that why they fired you?”

“Where’s your son?” I ask him.

“Nobody knows,” he says. “The police have been here all afternoon, right? They’ve gone through this place and asked me the same damn things over and over, and my answer didn’t change for them and it ain’t changing for you.”

“Your boy is guilty of something. Things will go easier for him if he starts helping himself here,” I say. “Tell me where he is and I can start to help him.”

“You’re a joke,” he says, sneering for a few seconds and then grinning like the madman he’s turning out to be. I feel sick knowing this is the man who covered my little girl’s coffin with dirt. Sick he was anywhere near her.

“You can’t hide him forever,” I tell him.

“You finished?”

I think about Bruce Alderman and how he was behaving while we dug up the coffin, and I think about him driving away in the stolen truck with the coffin sliding off the back and hitting the ground. I think about how he has perhaps behaved his entire life. This man was his role model. Maybe the world should be thankful there were only four corpses found in the lake and not a hundred.

“You know, I am going to find him,” I say, “only now it’s going to be the hard way.”

“I don’t care about making your life easy.”

“I’m not talking about hard for me,” I say. “You should have given him up, Alderman.”

Instead of getting angry Alderman starts to laugh again. “You’re a cliché,” he says. “And on top of that, you have no authority here.” He composes himself immediately, as if the laugh was as fake as the concern he’s displayed over the years filling in and digging out holes. “They never found him, did they?”

“What?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

I slip my business card back into my pocket. I’m glad he didn’t take it. I don’t want this guy touching my card; I don’t like the idea that my name could be in print anywhere inside this house of the damned-worse, I don’t like the idea of his fingers brushing against mine.

“I’ll find your son,” I promise.

“Ya think so?”

“I know so.”

He shrugs, as if it doesn’t bother him either way. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe he really doesn’t care, and that’s always been the problem for his son. Already I can see Bruce Alderman being found not guilty on a plea of insanity. With this man as his father, there isn’t a jury in the world who would be unsympathetic.

“It’s been a pleasure,” I say, and I back away from the door, keeping my eyes on him. He stares at me as if he is trying to unlock some great mystery. The only mystery here is how somebody so antisocial can have worked these grounds for so many years. He closes the door.

I’m ashamed at myself, angry with him. I came here to interview the bastard yet the only thing I achieved was to let him crawl under my skin. And I can’t take it out on either of us.

I reach the sidewalk, unlock the car, and swing the door open. And that’s when it happens. I sense it immediately. It’s a sprinkling of goose bumps that covers my arms and the back of my neck, and at first I think it’s just a residual feeling that anybody leaving that house would get, but then something touches my back. I know it’s a gun even though I’ve never felt one pushed there before.

“S-s-slowly,” he says, “just move s-s-low-ly.”

“Where?”

“Driver’s s-seat. Climb in.”

I do as Bruce Alderman says, trying to stay as calm as possible as he climbs into the seat behind me.