Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Nobody comes to my house during the night. I reckon the police will have narrowed down last night’s visitor to the church to one of three people-me, the killer, or a reporter. They’ll have found my jacket and my shoes, but even if they recognize them there’s nothing on them to say they’re mine, only DNA, and that’ll take weeks to arrive. Landry and Schroder will undoubtedly be thinking of coming to talk to me; they’ll be wondering if they can bluff me into admitting I went into the church, though they’ll know they can’t. I know the game. And anyway, all I have to say is the same person who planted the murder weapon in my garage also planted my clothes to try to complete the frame job, and that’s also what I’ll be saying in two months’ time when they get DNA from hair follicles caught in my jacket. Landry will have gone through all of this, hitting it from all sorts of different angles, without coming up with one that will help him cement a case against me. I’m betting that in the end he’ll know his argument and he’ll know my argument, and he’ll know that mine is stronger.

Of course all of this is moot if I can’t get back into the cemetery and dig Alderman up before Monday.

The overnight rain has stopped and for the moment the clouds are mainly dispersed. I open up the curtains and dump my sopping clothes into the washing machine. It seems that getting messed up at night is becoming a habit. Then I make coffee, wondering at what point in the human evolution coffee became such an important ingredient, and I figure if nothing else in this world, no matter what happens in the future, coffee will sure as hell be around a lot longer than religion. I carry the photographs I’ve pulled back out from under the carpet into my office. I go through them all again, but recognize only Bruce among the various boys and girls. Then I turn them over. They all have names and dates on the back. Just first names. The dates go back twenty-four years. I start flicking through them, the names rushing out at me from the past month, the names connecting the dots.

I put the photos down. I stand up and start to walk around my office, my breath quickening. Excitement is starting to build, the kind of excitement I haven’t felt in a long time, not since working homicides in my previous life, not since the thrill of feeling things coming together and knowing you’re heading for the finish line.

There are five girls in these pictures. Four of them share names with the dead girls who’ve been found. I have no idea where the fifth girl is, but I have a first name. Deborah. There are three boys too: Bruce, Simon, and Jeremy. I have no idea where Simon and Jeremy are either.

I go back to Rachel’s photo and turn it over. I remember the other photos I’ve seen of her on the wall of her parents’ house. Then suddenly I’m back in Father Julian’s office. Bruce was like a son to me, he’s telling me. Like a son. Were all these people like sons and daughters to Father Julian? I think they were. I remember looking at the pictures of the missing girls a month ago and thinking how similar they were, how their killer had a type. I was right and wrong. His type wasn’t based on characteristics the girls shared, or body type or age. It was based on who these people were. It was based on genetics. These people were targeted specifically because of who they are. Brothers and sisters. All of the victims, including Bruce, are related.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The house looks a little tidier than the last time I was here. I figure their lives are no longer on hold. The news they’d been dreading has arrived, and though they’re struggling with it, they’re starting to move forward.

“I don’t know whether to thank you or hate you,” Patricia Tyler says, and she really seems to be trying hard to make up her mind.

“Can I come in? Please, it’s important.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “The truth is I hardly know what to think anymore.”

I pull out the photograph from Father Julian’s collection. The rest are in the envelope, tucked inside my jacket pocket. I hand it over. I know immediately that she recognizes it. Her knuckles turn white as she holds it ever tighter.

“Where did you get this?” she asks, though I’m pretty sure she already knows.

“Please, can I come inside?”

She takes a step back for me to move in, and leads me down the hallway.

“Michael isn’t here,” she says, then pauses. “Thankfully.”

The photographs on the wall are all the same as the last time I was here, but I see them a little differently now. Michael Tyler, who is holding her hand when she is maybe five years old, doesn’t appear in any earlier photographs.

We sit down in the lounge. Patricia Tyler offers me a drink and I tell her I’d like some water. She gets up and returns a minute later, carrying two glasses. She sets them down carefully on a pair of coasters and I ask the question I came here to ask.

“You’re right,” she says. “It all seems like a lifetime ago. Longer, when I think about it really hard. Rachel was four when I met Michael and six when we got married. It was like starting a new life. I could only hope that Michael would one day look at Rachel as if she was his own.” She takes a sip of water. “He did see her that way too. He loved her, and the past years-well, they’re killing him as much as they’re killing me.”

“And Father Julian, he was Rachel’s biological father,” I say, and it isn’t a question.

“It’s been over twenty years, and you’re the first person to ever ask me about him.” She looks back down at the photograph. “I remember this moment,” she says. “It was the day Rachel turned two. I was leaving work early. My mother would look after Rachel while I was at work. She made a cake and we had a party, but Rachel didn’t understand the occasion.”

I remember a similar party for my own daughter. I remember getting carried away and buying too many gifts. Emily was excited tearing them open, but her concentration would drift from her new toy to the wrapping paper the toy had come in, and she would run around the room as if she was on a sugar high while friends and family watched and laughed and played with her. She would have five more birthdays. Rachel Tyler had seventeen more.

“This moment,” she says, and she twists the photo toward me for the briefest of seconds. Rachel is sitting in the corner of a room with her head resting on her knees, her arms wrapped around her legs, and her eyes either half-open or half-closed. “It was at the end of the day. I was getting ready to take her back home and she didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay with my mother, because she thought that it meant there would be more presents tomorrow.”

She pauses, and I have the feeling her mind is traveling down a path of a possibility not taken. She’s thinking that if she’d left her daughter at her mother’s house on that day nearly twenty years ago, Rachel would still be alive.

“I don’t even know why I took the photo,” she says. “I mean, I remember taking it, and I remember asking her to smile, but I don’t really know why I went about it. I’d already taken lots that day. I sent it to Father Julian. He’d asked for one. This, this is all about Father Julian, isn’t it? You having this photo. You took it from him. And he’s dead and Rachel’s dead and there’s something to that, isn’t there? That’s why you’re here.”

“What happened after you had the baby?”

“Things were already in motion before Rachel was born. We both knew I could never have an abortion. He wouldn’t allow it, and anyway, it wasn’t something I would have considered. I also knew he couldn’t be with me. I was going to be a single mother, but it wasn’t going to be the end of the world. I had to give up work for the first year and a half. Stewart told me he would support me. We set up bank accounts. Once I got married, Stewart didn’t have to pay as much, but he did keep paying. I never asked him for anything more, and he never asked to see Rachel.”

I think about this for a few moments, sure that there is something else here. If Julian did father those other children, was he paying child support to all of them? If so, how did he get the money? I keep the conversation moving along, but make a mental note to come back to this.

“Did Rachel know?” I ask.

“When she was old enough she figured out Michael wasn’t her real dad. She asked who her father was, but I never told her.” She takes a drink. “I could really do with something stronger. Can I get you something?”

“Water’s fine,” I say, and I take a sip to show just how fine it is.

“I guess water’s fine for me too. I know how it sounds, getting pregnant by a priest of all people, but, well, I don’t regret it. Things were different back then. Father Julian. . Huh, it sounds so funny when I call him that, doesn’t it? The father of my child, and here I am calling him Father Julian instead of Stewart. I wonder if that means anything.”

“I don’t know.”

“Look at me, I’m starting to ramble.”

“No, please, it’s all important.”

“Back then. . Stewart,” she says, managing to use Father Julian’s first name, “was a young man, and he was very, very striking. Almost insanely handsome. I think women were going to church just to see him, not to hear what he had to say. He had this-well, this magnetism-and it was more than just his looks. Everybody liked him; he was very charming, very likeable. But he was also lonely, really lonely, and seemingly vulnerable, and somehow that made him even more appealing. One day that loneliness became too much for him, for me, and we, we. . Well, you know the rest. Anyway, he would always be quiet after we. . you know, after we were together in that way. He was intense too, and even though he knew he was making a mistake, neither of us could help ourselves. He would tell me that when he was around me it was like somebody else was taking over, like he was a different man. I think he was a good man trapped in the wrong profession.”

“Did you ever tell him that?”

She smiles again. “More than once. But he said the priesthood was a calling, that he could help people, that he could do more good with a collar than without one. It was hard to watch. He was so dedicated to the church, it pained him every time we were together. In the end, I finished it, I had to. I didn’t want to, but what choice did I have? It was tearing him apart. A month after we stopped seeing each other, I found out I was pregnant.”

“What happened when you told him?”

“He wanted to do the right thing, only the right thing didn’t fall in line with his big picture of right things. It was like every day he was fighting a personal war within himself. I think that war was there his entire life. He was never going to leave the priesthood to be with me, and he couldn’t stay being a priest if others found out. So we both agreed to keep it quiet. I also stopped going to church.” She dabs her knuckles into the bottoms of her eyes and pulls away some tears before taking another sip of water.

“Did Michael know?”

“He knew. I had to tell him. Can you imagine if he hadn’t known? Every day he would wonder. He would think maybe I was sleeping with so many people that I didn’t know who Rachel’s dad was. I told him, and he wasn’t angry or disappointed. He was relieved, for some reason. I’m not sure why exactly. I think maybe knowing a priest had got me pregnant was much better than thinking I’d slept with some drug addict or criminal. Purer, or something. If that makes sense.”

It does, in a weird kind of way. “Did you keep in touch with Father Julian?”

“In the beginning, of course, but after I met Michael I didn’t really want to involve Stewart in my life anymore. He seemed to understand. Then the day Rachel turned sixteen he stopped the payments and I didn’t ask him why, because I knew. Sixteen was the cutoff date. I never saw him over those years. If it wasn’t for my mother, well. .”

“He presided over your mother’s funeral?”

“My mother had continued to go to his church. It’s what she would have wanted.”

“Your mother didn’t know who the father was?”

“I refused to tell her.”

“So Father Julian, he saw Rachel that day?”

She takes another sip of water, and when she pulls the glass back she seems to be studying the edge, looking for some microscopic flaw.

“He saw her. Then a week later she goes missing. That’s the connection, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here. If I had told Rachel he was her father, would things be different now? Is that the reason she’s dead? Because I took her to my mother’s funeral?”

I know what answer she wants to hear, but I can’t offer it to her.

“Do you know if Father Julian ever had any other children?” I ask.

“It’s my fault,” she says, and she starts to cry.

I clutch my glass of water, unsure whether to sit next to her, whether to put a hand on her shoulder and try to comfort her. “None of this is your fault,” I say, and it sounds generic because that’s exactly what it is. “But please, this is important. Did Father Julian have any other children?”

She leans back and stares at me. Tears are streaking her makeup. “Other children? I. . I never really thought about it. He could have, I suppose. But I doubt it.”

“How did he get the money to send you?”

“I. . I don’t know. But Father Julian is. . I mean was a good man. He would have done what it took.”

I pull the rest of the photographs out of my pocket and hand them over to her. “There are names on the back,” I say.

She looks through them, but doesn’t recognize any of them.

“There is no way these can all be his children,” she says, but I think she knows there is a way. I think she can see the resemblances too.

“These payments he made to you, they were credited directly into your account?”

“Of course. It was the only way.”

“Do you still have any of the statements?”

“I. . I suppose I do,” she says, and I’m sure she does. I’m sure Patricia Tyler is the sort never to have thrown away anything from the last thirty years.

“Would you mind finding me one?”

“Why?”

“Because if I can get his bank account number, then if he did father any other children I can find their names.”

“Do you think. .” She pauses, unwilling or unsure how to continue. “Do you think all these girls who died. . Do you really think they’re related?”

I hold her gaze. She stares right at me and I tell her yes. She pulls her hand to her mouth as if to hold it closed from whatever she wants to say next.

“Then you already know who these girls are,” she says. “They’ve been identified.”

“Not all of them.”

“What?”

“There are five girls in these pictures.”

“Five? Oh,” she says, and she gets it immediately. She gets that there is one more girl out there who I need to find. “I know where the bank statements are,” she says, and she disappears for a few minutes before returning with one from five years ago.

“It’s the last payment he made,” she tells me.

I look at the statement. It doesn’t have Julian’s name on it. Just his account number, along with the word Rachel.

“Can I take this?” I ask.

“Of course.”

I finish off my water and she walks me to the door. “The police, are they close to finding who killed him?” she asks.

“They’re getting there.”

“But you’re getting there quicker, aren’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Can you promise me something?” she asks.

“I’ll do my best,” I say, already knowing what she is going to ask.

“Promise me you’ll find him before something happens to that other girl. Promise me that when you find him, you’ll make him pay for what he has done. For Rachel. For the others. For all of us. Make him pay. Promise me you’ll make it so he can never hurt another girl ever again.”