Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It’s a connection that was there two years ago, but nobody was looking for it. Nobody even knew to look for it. Why would they? No way could they have known Rachel Tyler was going to be found one day buried in a cemetery. No way could they have known that going to her grandmother’s funeral would send her into the scope of her killer. Is that what happened?

My cell phone rings, which is good news for me, since it means it’s up and running. I look at the display, but don’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“What are you doing fucking with my investigation?”

“Who is this?” I ask, even though I already know.

“Who the hell do you think? You visited the Tylers.”

“Look, Landry, I was. .” But I don’t know how to finish.

“Jesus, Tate, what the hell are you playing at here? You’re going to seriously mess things up for us.”

“I know what I’m doing,” I tell him.

“If you knew what you were doing you’d still be carrying a badge. You’re going to mess things up, and if it wasn’t Bruce Alderman who killed those girls, that means we’ve still got a serious investigation on our hands. Which means there’s going to be a trial once we catch the guy, and suddenly we’re going to have to explain your actions at the trial. How’s that going to make you look? Or us? You think any defense lawyer worth more than ten cents isn’t going to be able to shred our case apart because you’ve fucked up all our evidence? Sidney Alderman is sure you killed his son. Come on, Tate, you gotta be more careful. You can’t let this bullshit happen.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“I know that. We all know it,” he says. “But not Alderman. He’s sure you pulled the trigger. You might want to watch your back.”

“It was an empty threat,” I say, not believing it.

“Maybe. I’d still watch it anyway. He’s building up some Dutch courage.”

“What do you mean?”

“He went straight from the morgue to a bar,” he says. “He’s drinking himself into a state, and I don’t know whether it’s a better or a worse one.”

“Let me guess. You gave him a lift?”

“That’s a shitty question, Tate. I’m trying to help you out here.”

“Okay. Okay, I get the point.”

“I don’t think you do,” he says, “because somehow you got her ring.”

“What?”

“Rachel Tyler. You got her ring. You showed it to her parents.”

“Bruce gave it to me.”

“Bullshit. You had it yesterday afternoon. How’d you get it? You steal it out of the coffin? Where are you right now?”

I was outside the cemetery about thirty seconds ago, but now that I know Sidney Alderman isn’t home, I’ll give his house a visit instead. “I’m at home.”

“No you’re not. I’m at your house and you’re not here.”

“Good one, Landry. I’m standing in my driveway and you’re nowhere around.”

I’m pretty sure we both know the other one is bluffing.

“Stay out of my case, Tate. Your name comes up one more time, and I’m going to take some action. Got that? You could do time here, man. You’re compromising things. You stole evidence, which, by the way, I want back.”

“Okay, I’ll. .”

But he’s already hung up. I step out of my car and look up and down the street, suddenly worried that Landry might be watching me after all. There’s no sign of anybody. He was right about one thing, though. My name is about to come back up in about twenty minutes when he goes and talks to David. Things, like he said, are fucked up.

I knock on the door and nobody answers. So I move from window to window, peering inside, but since even sunlight can’t seem to penetrate the grime there isn’t much chance I can see anything. A guy like Sidney Alderman would come out and tell me to go to hell if he knew I was looking through his windows. That means he definitely isn’t here. I try the back door. It’s locked. So is the front. I get out the key Bruce left for me and try both doors, but it doesn’t fit. It’s not even close to fitting.

There are still plenty of ways to get inside, and I opt for the less subtle approach of kicking in the back door. It opens easily enough, bouncing back off the wall and almost closing again, stopped only by the busted-up jamb. The cops will know who did it. But if I’m right about things, it won’t matter. They’ll be glad I did it.

The first thing I can smell is alcohol. I move up the hallway. The carpet is worn and the floorboards beneath it groan. There are three bedrooms, one messy, one tidy, and one completely empty-not a single piece of furniture or poster on the wall. Of the two in use, the tidy one is tidy only in comparison to the messy one, and the way things are all slightly out of whack in there suggests the police have been rummaging around looking for something and one of the Aldermans has rummaged around putting things back. I figure whatever evidence Bruce had hidden under his bed is now sitting on a desk somewhere in the police station.

The kitchen is swamped with dirty dishes and empty beer cans. In the lounge there are bottles and cans on every available horizontal plane. Sidney Alderman had a hard night. The arms of the lounge suite have been ripped up at the front, suggesting the presence of a cat, but there is no food bowl around, so maybe it got sick of the living arrangements and moved out. I’m surprised, though, to see photo albums scattered across a coffee table-Alderman didn’t seem the type to get hung up on family moments. I pull on a pair of latex gloves before opening the cover on the top one. Color photographs of happier times are arranged neatly in the pages. A man, a woman, a child. The Alderman nuclear family. They all look happy. Smiles, relaxed, candid moments, posed photos for birthdays and Christmas. Sidney Alderman is a different man here, the type of man who back then was mostly likeable.

I keep going. I already have a feeling about what is coming up. The man and woman and child start to get older. They grow. They still look happy. I recognize the house in the background of some of these shots. Summer photos. Winter photos. Snapshots from school plays and school sports. I move from one album to another. The house is neat and tidy and looks welcoming. It looks well maintained. Fresh paint, clean windows, no broken roof tiles.

Fashions change. The eighties become the nineties. Some of the furniture is updated. The carpet in one photo is that awful orange and brown Axminster stuff from the late sixties and becomes that awful, flecked, pale green stuff from the early eighties. The TV is updated. A cat appears in some of the pictures, a black thing with a swath of white fur around its neck.

The parents get older, and the kid gets taller and starts taking on the features of the man I met and saw die yesterday. Sidney Alderman looks like a happy man. Looks happy in the holiday photographs. Beaches and boats and fishing lines. Ugly shirts and bad haircuts and boxy-looking cars with poor fuel consumption. The house stays the same. The smiles stay the same. On to the next photo album. More holiday snaps.

Then Alderman’s wife is no longer around. The smiles are forced and thin, and the gaps in time between photos start to extend. No more holidays. No more happy moments. Just forced moments. Like birthdays and Christmases that nobody wants to be at. The wife doesn’t come back, and the decaying state of the house in the photographs suggests she isn’t going to. The years pass with only a few moments caught on film, but nothing heartwarming-the participants are going through the motions, they’re drawing on the memories of how these events ought to be, drawing on them so they can remember how to smile. At the back of the photo album is a collection of newspaper clippings.

My cell phone rings and breaks my focus. It’s another number I don’t recognize. I answer it, but nobody speaks back. I don’t say anything either. There’s a slight hissing sound that every cell phone in the country must get, the kind of hissing that can never fool you into thinking you’re talking on a landline.

Then, after ten or twenty seconds, a voice comes on the line. “You took away my son.” The words are slow and solid, as if each is its own sentence, as if he’s struggling to say them and has to concentrate really hard. “You took away my son,” he repeats when I don’t answer him.

I look down at the albums and the empty booze bottles. Alderman found out last night that his son was dead. There’s no way in the world the police decided not to inform him immediately. No way they figured it was the sort of thing they could put off until they swung by this morning to take him to the morgue. It’s got to be why these photo albums are out. I remember doing the same thing, and even now I sometimes still do it. I wonder if over the last few hours he’s come to the conclusion that I’m to blame for everything-for his wife leaving him, for his house wearing down, for his son killing himself, and for his son burying others.

“I wanted to help him. I didn’t want him dead. But I didn’t kill him. He killed himself. That was his choice and I had nothing to do with it.”

“You killed him.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“You killed him because you’re a killer,” he says. “It’s in your nature. You said last night you were going to find him. You said if I helped you, you’d go easier on him, but I didn’t help you so you went hard. You went as hard on him as you could.”

“He killed himself out of guilt,” I say. “You knew what he was doing.”

“He wasn’t doing anything.”

“How many are out there?” I ask.

He returns to saying what he says best. “You killed him.”

“How many others? Is it just the four?”

“The police are lying to protect you, just like they protected you two years ago, just like the reporter said.”

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I tell him.

“I saw him this morning. He was laid out on a piece of steel. He was broken. He wasn’t my boy anymore. It wasn’t Bruce. It was some thing with its head all busted up. You jammed that gun into him and pulled the trigger.”

“You know I didn’t do that.”

“Don’t tell me what I know,” he yells. “You don’t have the right to tell me what I know! He was my boy! My boy! And you killed him.”

“He killed himself.”

“I’ve always thought about what you did,” he says, “and I always wished I had the courage to do the same thing.”

“What?”

“When Lucy died. It was the same thing, you know. But I did nothing. I let it eat me up all these years and I did nothing. But not this time.”

I unfold the newspaper clippings. They’re not big articles, because it wasn’t a big enough story to hit the front page. Just like with my family. They’re small stories jammed in the back pages with the opinions and reviews and the who-gives-a-damn sections of the paper. Alderman’s wife, Lucy, was killed by a learner driver who was still mixing up the difference between yielding and not yielding. There’s a quote: “She just came out of nowhere.” It’s similar to my own story, but not that similar. Though maybe enough that there could have been a bond between Alderman and me. His wife went shopping for groceries and lost her life because of an accident. It was a run-of-the-mill routine: you climb into your car and an hour later you’re cut out of it. No malice. No intent. Just bad luck combining for everybody involved. A left turn instead of a right, ten seconds earlier or ten seconds later: any of those, and she’d still be alive. Similar in some ways to my own story. Different in others. My wife and daughter weren’t driving. They were walking. It wasn’t a learner driver who hit them, but an experienced one. He was experienced in a lot of areas. Mostly proficient in drinking more than he was in driving. He had a criminal record a mile long. He was a repeat offender. He would be pulled over and fined. His car and his license would be taken off him and he would get them back. It became a routine. He just kept on going back out on the roads, and the world just kept on letting him. When the fines increased, it didn’t matter. He just kept on paying them, racking up his mortgage account with drunk-driving conviction payouts. There wasn’t anything the criminal system was prepared to do about it except take a collective breath each time to see if this would be the one when he killed somebody. Nobody cared. As long as he paid his fines, he was a source of income. He was revenue. He was good for the country.

The connection between Alderman’s wife and my own is a strong one in some ways, but not in others. We both lost our own lives the day we lost parts of our family. He spiraled into an abyss that he is still in now. I have an abyss of my own. I figure if Alderman had done something all those years ago, maybe he would be a different man. But like he said, he did nothing. I figure if I’d done nothing, I’d be a different man too.

Better men? We could be. Or we could be worse.

“You took the law into your own hands,” he says. “You did it after the accident, and you did it again last night. You killed my son. You killed him for doing nothing. Ten years ago, when Lucy died, I did nothing. Not this time. This time you are going to pay. Your wife is going to pay. And this time your friends in the department can’t do a damn thing to help you.”

The temperature in this impossibly cold house drops even further. It’s like somebody has just strapped a block of ice onto my back. I can feel the weight of it pushing me down. I tighten my grip on the phone. The air is thick and damp and tastes like sour sweat, and all the words in the newspaper article seem to swirl around as if the ink is wet and running.

“You better be kidding right now, you son of a bitch.”

“You think the police are kidding and my son isn’t really dead? What do you think, Tate?”

“My wife has nothing to do with this.”

“How can you be so stupid as to think bad things don’t happen all the time to innocent people? You know that first hand. You experienced it last night when you killed my boy. You experienced it two years ago. And you’re experiencing it right now.”

The phone goes dead. I look at the display. The battery hasn’t gone flat. Alderman has hung up.

I dial him back. He doesn’t answer.

I hit the driveway running. I reach the car and the tires shriek a little and leave some rubber behind. I speed past the cemetery where a patrol car is just entering the gates. The driver looks back over his shoulder, but he doesn’t turn around and try to pull me over. The cemetery and the patrol car quickly get smaller in my mirror. I call the nursing home where my wife lives-if live is an appropriate word. She resides, maybe, not lives. A nurse I’ve spoken to only a few times answers the phone. I ask for Nurse Hamilton. A moment later she comes on the line.

“Theo? What can I help you with?”

“It’s Bridget.”

“What about her?”

“I think she’s in danger,” I say, and I hold the phone between my ear and neck so I can change gear. “I need you to go and check on her.”

“Danger? What kind of danger?”

“Can you just check to make sure she’s okay? Then stay with her until I get there.”

“But. .”

“Please, I’m on my way. Just go and check on her.”

“Fine, but I can tell you now there aren’t any problems. We provide excellent care, as you know, and-”

“I’ll stay on the line,” I say, hoping it will hurry her up. It does.

I continue to speed. I wish I had my car from two years ago with the siren installed. I wish I could flash and sound it at the surrounding traffic to get them the hell out of the way.

I hit three green lights in a row; I run through two oranges. And I slow down for a red before accelerating between cars to a chorus of blasting horns.

Nurse Hamilton comes back. I hear her pick up the phone, but she doesn’t say anything. It’s as though she’s on the other end of the line composing her thoughts. Trying to figure what she needs to say. Figuring it because there’s a problem.

“Carol?”

“Bridget is in her room,” she says.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” she says.

“Is somebody with her right now?”

“We have very adequate staff here, Mr. Tate,” she says, speaking formally, as if giving testimony to a jury.

“That’s not why I’m calling. Look, it’s hard to explain, but I’m almost there. Please just do me the favor of staying with her until I arrive.”

“Very well, Theo. We’ll-”

I don’t hear the end because the phone cuts out. I look at the display and watch it going through the motions of powering down. I try to revive it so I can call Landry or Schroder, but the battery is completely drained.

I get to the nursing home ten minutes later. The day has cleared up even more, bits of blue sky threatening to grow as the afternoon moves on. I look around at the other cars, trying to figure if one of them is out of place, but I don’t even know what Alderman would be driving.

Inside, I rush past the nurses’ station. The woman at the desk recognizes me as the guy who rang not long ago and gives me the sort of look that suggests I’ve ruined her afternoon.

Bridget is sitting in front of the window the same as any other day. Being here in the early afternoon is no different than being here in the early evening. She’s not watching TV. Not getting up and taking a shower or doing a crossword puzzle. Her world is twenty-four seven and there are no breaks. I rush to her and hug her and she doesn’t hug back, but that’s okay.

“This is all very out of the ordinary,” Carol Hamilton says.

I pull back and hold Bridget’s hand. “Has anybody come here to visit her?”

“Nobody who hasn’t visited before.”

“What about somebody else? Anybody unknown show up to visit, anybody at all?”

“What is your point, Theo?”

My point is simple for me, though perhaps not for her. Still, I decide to give it a go.

I explain the conversation I had with Alderman, touching only on a few of the points, and even then only briefly. She takes it all in stride, as I figure only a cop or a nursing-home professional could-both have seen way too much to be surprised anymore. In the end she points out that nothing bad has happened, therefore the man who threatened Bridget must have been lying, must have been making a desperate attempt to upset me because of his son. The care home is a top-rate facility, she reminds me, and they let nothing happen to their charges. She does make a concession about being more vigilant, and tells me to call the police. I tell her that I will.

She leaves me alone with Bridget. I don’t want to leave her here. Not anymore. I want to be able to take her with me, but where to? Back to my house? How would I even begin to look after her? No. She’s safer here.

Carol comes back. “There’s a phone call for you. You can take it in the office.”

I follow her back downstairs.

“Hello?”

“How did it feel, huh?” Alderman asks. “To think she was dead? To think I had done something to her? That’s how I feel, you bastard. You killed my son, so for me the feeling is always there. It’s going to stay the same. I wanted you to know how it was going to feel. I wanted you to imagine the loss. And not the same loss you suffered two years ago. But the kind of loss that’s deliberate, the kind of loss you can only experience when one human being goes out of his way to kill someone you love. Hurts, doesn’t it? But I just did you a big favor and left your wife out of it. It wasn’t her fault. I still want to make you suffer though. I want your pain permanent. And you still have another family member who won’t care what I do to her.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You took my son,” he says. “You still owe me.”

He hangs up.

I hand the phone back to the nurse, extending my arm without really seeing her. The desk, the paintings, the window into the office behind her-they all seem to lose detail and disappear.

“Theo?”

I know Carol is speaking to me, but I don’t look at her. The phone has gone from my hand, but I’m still holding out my arm ramrod straight.

“Theo?”

She touches my shoulder and the contact seems to work. I look at her and she starts to say something, but I don’t wait to hear what it is. I cover the foyer with large strides and the heavy door weighs nothing as I pull it open.

I make the drive back to the cemetery in about the same amount of time I made it from the cemetery to the nursing home. People toot at me and give me the finger. I race through intersections and run red lights when there are gaps in traffic. When I reach the cemetery I have this hollow feeling in my stomach, similar to the one that was there the day my daughter died. It’s a feeling that grows worse when I bring the car to a stop. I run toward Emily’s grave, though the pile of dirt next to it already tells me what I’m going to find. All these cops out here and nobody stopped Alderman from desecrating her grave. But why would they? They were never there to protect her from dying. Just as I wasn’t there. And in this case it simply would have looked from a distance as if Alderman was doing his job. Just digging a hole. Just moving on with life after losing his son-if they even saw him at all. And looking toward the lake, I can already tell they couldn’t. There was no way.

I stand at the edge of the grave. I know now there were two reasons Alderman threatened my wife. The first was to scare me. The second was to send me away from the cemetery. That means he was watching me all along. He was waiting.

My little girl’s coffin is down there. The lid is open and Emily is gone.