Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER TWO

The case never made the news because it was never a case. It was a slice of life that happens every day, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. It made the back pages where the obituaries are listed, along with the John Smiths of this world who are beloved parents and grandparents and who will be sorely missed. It was a simple story of man-gets-old-and-dies. Read all about it.

It happened two years ago. Some people wake up every morning and read the obits while downing scrambled eggs and orange juice, looking for a name that jumps out from their past. It’s a crazy way to kill a few minutes. It’s like a morbid lottery, seeing whose number has come up, and I don’t know whether these people find relief when they get to the end and don’t find anybody they know or relief when they do. They’re looking for a reason; they’re looking for somebody, wanting to make a connection and to feel their own mortality.

Henry Martins. I pulled those stories from the newspaper database this morning just like I did two years ago, and read what people had to say about him when he died, which wasn’t much. Then again, it’s hard to sum up a person’s life in five lines of six-point text. It’s hard to say how much you’re going to miss them. There were eleven entries for Henry over three days from family and friends. Nobody made my job easier by throwing a Glad you’re dead in with their woeful sorrows, but each obituary read like the others: boring, emotionless. At least that’s the way they come across when you don’t know the guy.

Henry Martins’s daughter came into the station a week after the old man was buried. She sat down in my office and told me her dad was murdered. I told her he wasn’t. If he had been, the medical examiner would have stumbled across it. MEs are like that. It was easy to see she already had both feet firmly on the road of suspicion, and I told her I’d look into it. I did some checking. Henry Martins was a bank manager who left behind a lot of family and a lot of clients, but his occupation wasn’t an opportunity for him to line his pockets with other people’s money. I looked into his life as much as I could in the small amount of time I could allot for his daughter’s “hunch,” but nothing stood out as odd.

Two years later, and Henry Martins’s coffin is behind me on chains as the wind increases in strength. And Henry Martins’s wife is trying to avoid anybody with a badge now that her second husband has died, his blue fingernails the first indication that he was poisoned. Henry’s daughter hasn’t spoken to me because I’m no longer in the same position I was two years ago. It’s easy to let my mind wander and think of things that might have been. I could have done more back then. I could have solved a murder, if that’s what happened. Could have stopped another man from dying. The jury is still out on whether Mrs. Martins had bad luck or bad judgment when it came to men.

The rain gets heavier, creating a thousand tiny ripples on the surface of the water. The caretaker is backing away, keeping his eyes on the water. Slowly the elements seem to disappear-so do the voices, and the vibrations. All that is left are the three corpses floating ahead of me, each one a victim of something-a victim of age, foul play, bad luck, or maybe a victim of a cemetery’s lack of real estate.

The three workers have all come over beside me. Their excited bursts of started but stilted observations have ended. We’re standing, the four of us, in front of the water; three people are in it: it’s like we’re all pairing up for a social, but with one person left over. The occasion demands quiet, each of us unwilling to say anything to break the silence building between us. More dirt slides into and mixes with the water, turning it cloudy brown. One of the bodies sinks back out of view and disappears. The other two are drifting toward us, swimming without movement. I’m not about to jump in and pull them out. I’d do it, no doubt there, if the bodies were flailing about. But they’re not. They’re dead, have been for maybe a long time. The situation may seem urgent, but in reality it isn’t. Both are face down, and both appear to be dressed, and not badly dressed either. They look as though they could be on their way to an event. A funeral or a wedding. Except for the ropes. There are pieces of green rope attached to the bodies.

The digger driver keeps squinting at the two corpses, as if his eyes are tricking him. The truck driver is standing with his mouth wide open and his hands on his hips, while his assistant keeps glancing at his watch as if this whole thing might push him into overtime.

“We need to haul them in,” I say, even though both bodies are nudging against the bank now.

I had planned on staying dry today. I had planned on seeing one dead body. Now everything is up in the air.

“Why? They’re not exactly going to go anywhere,” the truck driver says.

“They might sink like the other one,” I point out.

“What are we going to grab them with?”

“I don’t know. Something,” I say. “A branch, maybe. Or your hands.”

“I’m not stopping you from using your hands,” he says, and the other two nod quickly in agreement.

“Well, what about rope?” I ask. “You gotta have some of that, right?”

“That one there,” the truck driver says, looking at the corpse closest to us, “already has some rope.”

“Looks rotten. You gotta have something newer in the truck, right?” I ask, and we all look over at the truck just as we hear it start.

The caretaker is sitting in the cab.

“What the hell?” the driver asks. He starts to run over to it, but he isn’t quick enough. The caretaker gets it into gear and pulls away fast. The coffin isn’t secure. It starts to slide. It makes a grating sound, like heavy sandpaper dragged slowly against a floorboard. It hits the edge and starts to slide over it, then for a moment it looks like it’s going to hang there, that it’s going to defy gravity, but then momentum and physics kick in as the tipping point is reached and a moment later it goes crashing into the ground.

The driver keeps running after the truck even though the distance is growing. “Hey, come back here, come back here!”

“Where’s he going?” the digger operator asks me, and I assume he means the caretaker and not the guy chasing him.

“Anywhere but here is my guess,” I say, which is both extremely vague and extremely accurate. I pull my cell phone from my pocket. “You got some rope in the digger?”

“Yeah, hang on.”

He wanders over to the digger. I phone the police station and get transferred to a detective I used to know. I tell him the situation. He tells me to sober up. Tells me of course there are going to be bodies out here in the cemetery. It takes a minute to persuade him the bodies are coming up from the depths of the lake. And another minute to convince him I’m not joking.

“And bring some divers,” I say, before hanging up.

The digger operator has made it back. He hands me the rope. The truck driver is back too; he’s swearing as his partner uses a cell phone to call their boss for someone to come and get them. I tie an arm-length branch around the end of the rope and make my way down the gently sloping bank, intending to throw the branch just past the nearest corpse to bring it closer, but it turns out the slippery grass beneath my feet has other ideas. One moment I’m on the bank. The next I’m in the water.

My feet are submerged in mud, the water up to my knees. Something grabs my ankle and I lever forward, my arms slapping the surface next to the corpse before I start sinking. I pull my legs from the mud, but there is nothing to stand on. This lake is a Goddamn death trap, and now I know why it’s full of corpses. These people came to grieve for the dead and ended up joining them. The water is ice cold, locking up my chest and stomach and cramping my muscles. My eyes are open and the water is burning them. There is only darkness around me, compounded by the silence, and I can sense hands of the dead reaching to pull me deeper, wanting me to join them, wanting fresh blood.

Then suddenly I’m racing back to the surface, my hand tight around the rope that is pulling me up. I kick with my feet. Point my body upward. And a second later I’m right next to a bloated woman in a long white dress. It looks like a wedding dress. I push away from her, and the three men help me onto the bank. I sit down, gasping for air. Both my shoes are missing.

“Goddamn, buddy, you okay?”

The question sounds like it is coming from the other side of the lake, and I’m not sure which one of them asked it. Maybe all three of them in unison. I lean over my knees and start coughing. I feel like I’m choking. I’m shivering, I’m angry, but mostly I feel embarrassed. But none of the men are laughing. They’re all leaning over me, looking concerned. With two floating corpses nearby, it’s easy to understand why nothing here is a joke.

“There’s something else you need to know,” the digger operator says when I’ve stopped coughing enough to hear him. “I was trying to tell you before,” he says, slipping that last part into the conversation as if each word is its own sentence, and his face screws up slightly as if each word has its own taste too, and none of them good. He makes it sound like whatever he has to say is going to be worse than what just happened, and I can think of only one thing that could possibly be.

“Yeah?”

“Marks. On top of the coffin,” he says.

“How did I know you were going to say that?”

Now it’s his turn to shrug. He doesn’t come up with any suggestions of mind reading. “Thin lines,” he says. “Like cuts. They look like shovel cuts,” he says.

“From a shovel,” I tell him. He gives me a funny look. I ignore it. My mind is running a little slow from the swim it just took. “You think this coffin has been dug up before?”

“I’m not just thinking it, I’m saying it. There are definitely marks on the coffin that nobody here caused. Shit, I wonder if she’s empty.”

She. Like a plane or a boat, because the coffin in a way is a vessel taking you somewhere.

We walk over to it. The coffin has survived the fall pretty well. There’s a large crack running from the bottom corner along the side from the impact, but we can’t see into it. I’m tempted to open her up, see what cargo she has or if she’s been plundered, but the approaching sirens kill the idea.

I watch as the two police cars arrive, along with an ambulance and a pair of station wagons.