Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER FIFTY

The logs are chronological and well detailed, and there are far more confessors here than there are victims of Father Julian’s blackmailing. Before going any further, I head back two years into the dates and I find my name. Seeing it there brings everything into focus, as though any doubts I’ve had, or wanted to have, are peeled away, exposing the reality and grounding me to it. I find the correct tape. I put it into the machine, not sure that I’m prepared to hear myself from so long ago, not prepared to hear the man I used to be. I cue it up to the time stamp Julian listed. I’m not sure, either, where I stand on my belief of God, or where I stood on the matter two years ago. Part of me didn’t believe in God, another part hated Him, and a third made me sit inside that confessional booth with the need to tell somebody what I’d done. Since then I have learned to live with my own secrets.

I catch the last few seconds of somebody else’s confession, there are a few moments of silence, and then my voice. It sounds different. It sounds emotional, which comes as a surprise. At the time I thought I was completely detached.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

I close my eyes, and for a moment I’m back there, back in the confessional, dirt beneath my fingernails and a shovel in the trunk of my car. The gun I used was stripped down and buried out in the forest too. Father Julian’s voice plays from the tape and at the same time I remember his words, voicing them in my mind a moment before I hear them. He sounds calm. We could have been talking about anything, and at the time I remember being curious about what might have been the worst confession he’d ever heard. Was mine going to be it? Or would mine be tame? And if Father Julian was listening to the confessions of cold-blooded killers, why in the hell wasn’t he doing something about it?

“What does it make you, Father, when you commit a sin and feel nothing?”

“I think that-”

“Does it make me human? Am I still a man, Father Julian, or am I a monster?”

“The fact you are here answers your question,” he said. “However, what you do next also counts.”

“I’m not going to the police.”

“You need-”

“He killed her, Father,” I say. “He killed her and he probably would have killed others.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“But it doesn’t make it wrong either.”

I press stop and the voices shut off. If I could go back in time, would I do the same thing again? I don’t know. I think of Patricia Tyler and her request of a promise-Make him pay, she told me. Make it so he can never hurt another girl ever again.

I eject the tape and start unspooling the thread, not needing-or more accurately not wanting-to hear the rest of what I had to say. I can learn nothing from it. All it can do is make me hurt.

I carry the tape outside and touch a match to it. It shrinks and melts and the recorded memory burns away. Father Julian never blackmailed me and I figure he never blackmailed anybody else who was confessing to murder. It would have been too dangerous for him. I think of him coming around to my house. I think of him sitting on the porch with me as we spoke about my wife. He knew of the anger building up inside of me. After my confession he never came around again.

I sit back down inside. I start drumming my fingers, and then I go back into the list of names. I scroll through them, looking for something else, and soon I find Sidney Alderman’s name. I check the date. It’s a week after his wife died. I hunt out the tape and cue it up, interested in what he has to say, hoping he is going to say something that will help me.

“I guess you would call it a sin,” Alderman says. His words are slurred. He’s been drinking. “Does that make us even?”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Drinking? Yeah, and why the hell not? She’s gone. I need something to keep me company.”

“You still have your son.”

“My son? You mean your son, don’t you?”

There is a pause that stretches out long enough for me to think the rest of the tape is going to be blank, but then Father Julian’s voice cuts back across the speaker and the conversation continues.

“She told you,” Julian says.

“Part of me always knew. Or at least suspected.”

“I’m sorry, Sidney.”

“That’s it? You don’t want to give me an excuse? You don’t want to tell me you accidentally fucked my wife and got her pregnant?”

“Please, Sidney, I didn’t mean anything to happen.”

I press stop. Just what kind of man was Father Julian? How many marriages did he end? This man, this man who would come and see me, who would tell me everything was going to be okay, who would tell me everything was part of God’s plan. What kind of man was he? I press play. Both men are dead, one because of me, and perhaps the other because of me too. The two ghosts of Recent Past carry on talking. Neither could know they would end up sharing more than just Lucy Alderman, that they would share a similar fate.

“Yeah, well I didn’t mean anything to happen either,” Sidney Alderman says.

“What are you talking about?”

“Bruce. . He’s, well, he’s different now. I see him differently. He’s not my son and I don’t know what to do about it. One thing I do know is, I don’t want you anywhere near him.”

“Are you going to leave?”

“Leave? No. I’m not going to leave. See the thing, Father,” he says, almost spitting out the word Father, “is this. She’s dead because of you. And I want you to know that. I’m going to be here every day for the rest of my life and you’re going to see me around, and you’re going to remember.”

“What do you mean she’s dead because of me?”

“Come on, Father. You can figure it out. You read the papers, right? That guy who killed her, he said she stepped out from nowhere. Well that ain’t quite true. She was pushed out from nowhere.”

Silence for a few seconds. Not just from the tape, but from my house. I can’t hear anything. I realize I’m holding my breath.

“You pushed her?” Father Julian asks.

“I hated her. She lied to me. She cheated on me. She kept the same fucking lie all those years. Were you still screwing her, Father?”

“You killed her?”

“You can’t do anything about it except see my face every day. I want that guilt to kill you. It’s killing me. Does that make us even?”

“I. . I don’t. .”

“I thought it would make me happy,” Alderman says, “but the funny thing is, it doesn’t. In fact I feel worse. I love her so much. I blame you, and I want to kill you, but I don’t have the courage.”

“Sidney, you need to-”

“Don’t tell me what I need to do! You know, I even bought a gun. I was going to use it on her and then on you. But I can’t. What happened to Lucy, well, that will hurt you more than what I could ever do.”

“What about Bruce?”

“Don’t you dare tell him any of this. Any of it.”

I press the stop button. The caretaker’s grief is ten years old, but it still sounds fresh. Two months ago he told me he always thought about what I’d done after my daughter was killed and wished he’d had the courage to do the same thing to the person who killed his wife.

I think about what he did and I wonder if it justifies what I did to him. I wonder if there is some symmetry there-him lying on top of the coffin of the woman he loved, the woman who betrayed him, the woman he killed.

I decide that it does. At the very least it makes me feel better. It makes me look up from the bottom of the abyss. There is a way out of this.

I eject the tape, put it back into the plastic cover and set it aside. I go through the rest of the log, looking for names that will stick out, knowing there has to be something here though I can’t think what. That’s part of the problem: all I’ve been doing is thinking, and suddenly I’m hitting a wall. There’s an answer somewhere in this list of names, it’s in these tapes, but I’m so involved in it all that I can’t see anything for what it is.

What am I missing?

I get up and walk out of the room. I leave it all behind me-the names, the numbers, the tapes, and the dates, knowing that I need to clear my head so I can at least. .

The dates!

Of course!

I head back into the room and I look at the time line I’ve created. If the killer confessed, then presumably he did so on the same day or in the days immediately following the girls’ disappearances. The first date I look at is the day Henry Martins was buried. The log says there was a confession that night. The log says the confession was made by Paul Peters. I find the corresponding tape and jam it into the machine. I wind it forward. Suddenly I feel more apprehensive about what I’m about to hear than I did of the other two confessions. This could be the recording of a man who did nothing more than steal his neighbor’s apples, or it could be the confession of a monster. I press play.

It’s the monster.