Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

David the boyfriend lives in a house that is almost as run down as Sidney the retired caretaker’s. The place hasn’t seen as much in the way of paint over the last few years as it has rust and spiders. The guttering has corroded away, the windows are covered in grime, the siding warped and unwelcoming. It’s in the middle of dozens of others, each one in need of a handyman’s touch or a wrecking ball. I can’t figure out how David still lives here. I can’t figure out how anybody could live here longer than a week. But maybe he likes it and it’s a simple case of me not getting it. Perhaps this is the stereotypical pop-culture way to live. Derelict is the new black. Grunge is in, being broke is in, making sure the house you live in looks like crap is in. He doesn’t own the place, but rents it, like all the other students in this area, which means he slips easily into the day-to-day routine of not giving a damn about the condition of the property, and the owners know one day they’re going to bulldoze or burn it down anyway and don’t care as long as the rent is paid. This isn’t suburbia; most of the people living around here are university students struggling to survive. Rachel Tyler was a student. I can’t imagine her staying here for more than a few days before returning home to grab a few things or a good night’s sleep or the chance to step out of a shower cleaner than when she stepped in.

A young guy with studs in his ears and lips and nose opens the door. He must have real fun going through the security foreplay before boarding a plane. He’s squinting because the cloudy glare is too bright for him. His T-shirt reads The truth is down there with an arrow pointed to his crotch. All of a sudden, the last thing I want to know is the truth.

“David Harding?” I ask.

“No, dude, he’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

The guy shrugs. “Studying, I think. Or sleeping.”

“Sleeping?”

“Yeah, man, you know, that thing you do in the morning after being out all night.”

“I thought people slept in the night,” I tell him.

“What planet are you from?” he asks.

“An older one. Does he sleep here?”

“Yeah, man.”

“So if he’s sleeping, could it be that he’s sleeping here right now?”

He seems to think about it. “It could, I suppose.”

“Then how about you put that university education of yours to some good use and figure it out for me.”

“Whatever, bro,” he says, then turns and walks up the hallway, grabbing the wall twice as he goes to make sure neither it nor he falls down.

I take a couple of steps inside, figuring Stud-Face here is happy for me to do so, but simply forgot to extend the invite. It’s colder inside than out-probably an all-year-round feature of these houses. The air is damp and the carpet, wallpaper, and furniture could do with a permanent dehumidifier. There are posters on the walls, but no photographs of friends or family. I can hear mumbling from the other end of the house, but can’t decipher it. It sounds like hangover talk.

I keep walking. The hallway takes me into a kitchen straight out of the start of last century, and with rotting food lying around that could be from the same era. The kitchen bench has a Formica top patterned with yellow flowers and strewed with the remnants of fast-food packets. The coffee pot is hot. I pour a cup just as Studly comes through. He doesn’t seem surprised at all that I’ve invaded his house and made myself at home. I figure it’s a student thing.

“He’s tired,” Studly says, summing up the hangover in an ambitious lie.

“He’s this way?” I ask, heading out of the kitchen and back into the hallway.

“Dude, I said he’s tired,” Studly says, louder this time. “He doesn’t want to talk.”

I turn around and stare at him, and there’s something in the way I look at him that makes him decide he doesn’t seem to mind anymore whether I go and wake David or not, as long as I’m not bugging him. He shrugs and goes about riffling through the fridge for something that could be food.

David Harding’s bedroom is dark and smells worse than the rest of the house. I turn the light on, but it doesn’t really help much. On the floor is a double mattress with no base. It looks like it’s had a dozen people jumping up and down on it. David doesn’t look up. He has his head buried in a pillow.

I crouch down next to him. “David.”

“Go away,” he says.

“I need to ask you some questions.”

“I don’t care.”

There are clothes scattered across the floor, pages from work assignments and textbooks piled on the desk and chair. Food wrappers and crumbs cover the carpet. I open the curtains and let in some light. He groans a little. I roll him over, and for the first time he takes a look at me. His hair is sticking straight up around the back and the left-hand side from where the pillow has crushed it. There’s gunk in the corners of his eyes. His skin is pale, suggesting he doesn’t get out much. There is something that looks familiar about him, and I put it down to the possibility I might have seen his picture in the papers when Rachel disappeared. He looks lost, the kind of lost only somebody in their twenties looks when they’re still at university racking up the degrees with no idea of what they really want to do in life.

“Drink this,” I say, handing him the cup.

“Go away,” he says, not taking it.

“It’s hot,” I say, “and you don’t want to risk me spilling it all over you.”

He sits up and takes it. “What the hell do you want?”

“To talk to you about Rachel.”

“Let me guess-her mom asked you to come here, right?” he says. “She still thinks I killed her.”

“I’m working for Rachel, not for her mother. Did you kill her?”

He looks ready to throw the coffee at me. “Get the hell out of my room.”

“I found her body.”

He stares at me for a few seconds without moving. Then he sits up straighter and tightens his grip on the coffee mug. “She’s dead?”

It’s such a simple question. There is no emotion there, just a look of complete surprise, his mouth slightly open and his eyes slightly wider. No tears, no anger, no frustration. Just acceptance. Acceptance of a question I think he’s been asking himself over and over-the big What if. What if she’s still alive? What if she isn’t? And finally the answer.

“She was found yesterday,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. I’m sure he doesn’t think I’m making this up, but he shakes it anyway, as if he can ward off the bad news. “Are you sure?”

I hand him the ring. He sits the coffee on the floor so he can look at it. He turns it over and reads the inscription. Then he slips it onto the tip of his finger and slowly spins it around, studying it from every degree.

“I gave her this,” he says. “It wasn’t long before she disappeared. I promised her that when we graduated I’d take her away from here and we’d never come back.” He smiles, then gives a short, half-second laugh that sounds more like a grunt. “It feels like a lifetime ago.”

“She hated it here? Why?”

“I don’t think she really did,” he says. “I guess that’s the thing about this city, right? You can love and hate it at the same time. I think she just felt claustrophobic here, you know? She wanted to see the rest of the world, and I was going to show it to her. Doesn’t every young person want the same thing? Where did you find her?”

“She was buried in a cemetery.”

He frowns, then commits to screwing his face up instead, as if he’s just bitten into something rotten and something dead. “Huh?”

“She had been put into somebody else’s coffin.”

His head is slowly shaking. “I don’t get what you’re saying. She was buried?”

The emotion is coming now. His hands are shaking a little, and his eyes are starting to glisten over, just as I’ve seen it dozens of other times in those who have lost loved ones.

“We were exhuming a body,” I say. “The person we thought we were digging up was missing. Rachel was there instead.”

The still shaking head. He’s hearing what I’m telling him, but it’s a struggle for him to process. Of course it is. He’s hearing that the girl he loved was murdered and stuffed into somebody else’s coffin. “Who were you digging up?”

“A guy called Henry Martins. Ring a bell?”

And still his head is shaking. “Why would it?”

“He was a bank manager. You sure you’ve never heard of him?”

Finally his head becomes still. “Does it look like I’ve ever needed a bank manager? How’d she die? Was she buried alive? Oh, Jesus, don’t tell me that.”

“I’m not sure,” I say, which is not actually telling him anything.

“You’re not sure?” he asks. “Did you see her?”

“Yes.”

“How’d she look?”

“She was still wearing the ring,” I say, which isn’t quite true.

“How’d she look?” he repeats.

“She’s been dead two years, David. That’s how she looked.”

He runs both his hands through his hair. “This isn’t right,” he says. He throws back the blankets and stands up. He’s wearing a pair of boxer shorts, and his body is pasty white. He pulls on a pair of jeans. The ring is still on his finger.

“It never is. Tell me what happened,” I say.

“What?”

“When you last saw her, tell me what happened.”

“Nothing happened. It was just a non-moment. I can’t even remember,” he says.

“Sure you can. Everybody remembers the last moments.”

David’s moment turned out to be like any other. He had dinner with her. They ate fast food while they studied. They went to bed together, though he tells me the house was tidier back then. They woke up together; he headed for class and she went to find some breakfast. It was a slice-of-life moment that has probably been playing over and over in his head for the last two years. He’ll have been thinking about all the factors that had to come together for this to have happened. He could have skipped class. His class could have been at a different time. Or hers could have been. They could have had breakfast together. They could have had dinner separately the night before. Any link in the chain could have been broken and the result would be that they’d still be together.

The reality is, of course, they could have broken up or he could have got her pregnant and left her for a life of less responsibility, or she could have cheated on him. Young love can lead anywhere. But it never should have led to this. He says he didn’t even know she was missing, that he figured she’d gone home that night and hadn’t called.

“Was she having any problems?” I ask.

“No. None that she told me about.”

“Anybody giving her a hard time? Hanging around? Anything at all out of the ordinary?”

“You don’t think I’ve been asked these questions? Man, I’ve been over this with so many other people, and I’ve been over it with myself every single day. I loved her. I still do.”

I nod. “Okay. Where’d she go for breakfast?”

“She ate at a university café. You guys already know that.”

I don’t feel the need to correct his impression that I must be a cop. “Humor me.”

He starts pacing the room. “She was spotted in there. She left around ten thirty. She ate bacon and eggs smothered in tomato sauce. I never figured out how she could eat that combination. Then she left. And that’s all anybody knows.”

“Was she supposed to meet anybody?”

He shakes his head. “She was going to class.”

“Was she seeing anybody?”

He stops pacing the room. He stares at me. It’s similar to the look I gave the cop in the cemetery last night. “What, like having an affair?”

“Was she?” I ask.

“Rachel would never have done that.”

“Would you?”

“Hell no. I loved her!”

“So you can’t think of anywhere else she might’ve gone.”

“I don’t know, man. If I did, I’d tell you. I’d have told you two years ago.”

“Okay, okay. Who else can I ask?”

“What?”

“She has to have had a best friend, right? Who would she talk to when she was complaining about you?”

“She didn’t complain.”

“Then you must’ve been the perfect boyfriend.”

“Alicia North. They’d go shopping all the time and they’d complain about men. Rachel said she did it more for Alicia than for herself. But Alicia didn’t see her that day. I think Rachel did it because she loved shopping. It was kind of annoying. She used to make all these damn impulse buys.”

“Where does Alicia live?”

He starts pacing the room again. “I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t spoken to her since.”

“Ever heard of a woman called Julie Thomas?”

“Julie Thomas? I don’t know. Is she a student here?”

“No.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard of her.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Why?”

“She went missing around the same time as Rachel. What about Jessica Shanks?”

“She go missing too?” he asks.

“You heard of her?”

He shakes his head.

“What about Bruce Alderman?” I ask.

“Alderman? Umm. . no, I don’t think so. Should I have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he kill Rachel?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Can’t you interrogate him or something?”

“He’s dead. He shot himself last night. But he said he didn’t do it.”

He stops pacing. “What? He shot himself? I. . umm. . Do you believe him? That he didn’t do it?”

“Enough to keep looking into it,” I tell him.

“Her mom thinks it was me.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t do it.”

I look into his eyes. There is sorrow there-I recognize it and I feel it-and though he doesn’t know it, that sorrow is a bond between us. He isn’t acting. His pain is real. Real enough that if I put him in the room with the man who killed Rachel, he would become a completely new man. He would cross a line that he could not turn back from, and it wouldn’t bother him. He’d cross it again and again if he could.

“I know.”

“And that Harry dude,” he says, “what happened to him?”

“Henry Martins. We’re not sure exactly. Look, David, don’t try to get back to sleep. The cops are going to be here soon. Just tell them what you know.”

He looks confused. “You’re not a cop?”

I hand him my card and take the ring back off him. “I used to be, but that was a long time ago.”