Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

At first I’m not sure where I am. I wake up feeling exhausted and confused, and then it comes rushing back to me-not just the last day, but the last two years. These moments are the worst. Sometimes I can wake up and for the first two or three seconds everything is okay-I’m going to roll over and Bridget is going to be there and Emily is going to be in the lounge watching TV. Then those two seconds pass and the reality kicks in and it hurts all over again, the pain as intense in those moments as it was two years ago.

I get out of bed, still feeling groggy. I turn on my cell phone and find a message waiting. It’s Landry. I figure if I don’t ring him back real soon he’s likely to show up. I carry the phone through to my office and sit down on my desk. For the second time within days everything I’ve built up has been taken away. All I have left are the newspaper stories I printed out at the library, along with the new time line I was making and some notes. I look at the articles with the pictures of the girls, and all I can think about is their killer’s confession. These young women are looking to me to find them justice. There is still hope for them. It’s a different kind of hope, but I promise not to abandon them.

I phone Landry back.

“You’re holding out on me, Tate.”

“I told you everything I know.”

“But you didn’t give me everything you have.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The tapes,” he says. “We’re one short. According to the log Father Julian kept, you’re on it.”

“Yeah, well, I was. And that was a confession between me and my priest. Try and sound as angry as you want, Landry, but you know there’s no way in hell I’d let you have that tape.”

“Because of what was on it? The date suggests it was around when Quentin James went missing. The timing suggests a whole lot of things, Tate.”

“What do you want, Landry? You gotta be ringing me for more than just this.”

“When was the last time you saw Casey Horwell?”

“What? I don’t know. Why?”

“Come on, when?”

“Yesterday. She blindsided me at my house. She had a bunch of accusations she wanted to share.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Why? Should I be turning on the news and seeing the story? You know she’s bullshit. Most of what she-”

“She’s missing,” he says, interrupting me.

“Missing?”

“Yeah. Nobody has seen her in twelve hours.”

“That doesn’t constitute being missing,” I say. “She’s probably just sleeping off a hangover somewhere.”

“Maybe. But you don’t sound upset about it.”

“Upset? Why would I be upset? You think something has happened to her?”

“Her producer said that last night Casey contacted her. She said she had a lead she was going to follow up, and it involved you. And her cameraman said you threatened her. Did she come back and see you last night?”

“You were here last night. Did you see her?”

“After I left.”

“I turned my phone off and went to bed. That’s it. I never heard from her. And I didn’t threaten her. I warned her about her source. Somebody was feeding her information about the case. And there’s a good chance it’s the same somebody who framed me for murder. Don’t you think it’s possible he wanted to tie up one more loose end? After all, that’s what he’s doing, right? He got rid of Father Julian, he’s after his last sister, and Horwell got herself caught up in all of that because she was too arrogant to see she was being played.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s more than just a maybe. You need to find out who her source was.”

“Her producer didn’t know. Either that or she wouldn’t tell me.”

“It’s the same guy who was on the tape. You can feel it, right? You feel it the same way I feel it. You know that’s what happened.”

“Okay, I’ll check it out,” he says. “But here’s what I need you to do. You need to stay the hell away from everybody today, okay? Everybody.”

“What about Deborah Lovatt? You need to find her.”

“I know, but the simple truth is that we don’t know she’s missing yet.”

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“No, I’m not kidding you,” he says.

“She’s been gone longer than Horwell.”

“Before you get too bent out of shape, Tate, we are looking for her. And the best thing you can do right now is stay out of the way.”

He hangs up.

I sit out on the deck, trying to put some distance-even if it’s only thirty minutes and fifteen meters away-between me and my notes. For some reason everything I’m learning is becoming white noise. I can’t focus on any one thought, and I can’t remember the last time I felt this way. I would have been working a homicide. It would have been years ago. My life was different and I was different. The names that come from the tapes, the bank statements, the burials-there are facts here that for the moment aren’t facts at all, but shapes floating around in the back of my mind with nowhere to fit, each piece swirling just a little too far out of reach. I try thinking about something else, but it only makes the images move faster, and there’s nothing I can do to stop them.

I head down to the office and I stare at the girls and I try filtering through everything again, looking for something that doesn’t seem to be here. Most of all I look at Rachel. In a way she is the one I think about the most. She is the one I saw stuffed into that coffin with the dirty diamond ring next to her hand. Hers is the pain I think about the most. I hold her picture and study her features, and the white noise I was hearing earlier starts to disappear.

If Rachel was the only girl to have been killed I’d be looking at the case in an entirely different way. But she wasn’t. What she was, though, was the first. I think about this. I try to strip the case back to the basics. The day Rachel went to her grandmother’s funeral was the day all of this began. Her trip to the graveyard was the catalyst for everything that followed. Something must have happened that day.

I call Mrs. Tyler and she doesn’t sound upset to hear from me. If anything, she sounds glad I’m calling. At some point in the last twenty-four hours it seems she’s come to terms with a lot of things, and she senses the momentum and wants to be a part of it.

“The day of your mother’s funeral,” I say, “was there anything different? Anything out of the ordinary happen?”

She thinks about it, but can’t come up with anything. “I don’t even know what I should be trying to remember.”

“Did anybody approach Rachel? Or you? It’s my guess that somebody recognized her that day. Maybe they questioned her about it.”

“If they did, she never told me.”

I look at the other girls, and then I hide their pictures and details away and try to forget about them for the moment, focusing only on Rachel. Everything comes back to her and, more importantly, back to that day. If somebody did approach her, it could have been Father Julian, or Bruce or Sidney Alderman. The grudge Sidney Alderman had against Father Julian for sleeping with his wife makes him a likely candidate. Could be Sidney knew a lot more about Julian than the priest ever expected. Could be Sidney knew other women who got pregnant too.

“When you were going to Father Julian’s church,” I say, “back in the beginning, do you remember any other women who were pregnant?”

“Umm. . No, not that I can think of.”

“Anybody with a really young child?”

“Umm, yeah, there was one. There’s Fiona Chandler.”

“Was she married?”

“No. She used to be, but her husband left her before the baby was born. It was an awful thing to do. She never spoke about him, and she married again a few years later.”

“Tell me about her husbands.”

“I don’t know anything about the first one. Like I said, she never spoke of him. Her second husband, Alec, he was very nice. But one day ten years ago he just got up and collapsed on the floor. It was a heart attack. She never married again, it was very sad. Well, still is very sad. Why-why are you asking me this?”

I don’t answer. I give her a few seconds, and she gets there by herself.

“Oh my God,” she gasps. “Are you, are you saying that. . that Stewart, that he got Fiona pregnant too? Was it his baby?”

“It’s possible.”

“Oh no, oh no.” She starts to cry.

“I need to get hold of her.”

“You. . you don’t understand,” she says. “You have no idea.”

“What are you talking about?”

Her sobs start to grow louder. “You. . Oh my God,” she says, and it’s all she can say over and over as the words intermix with tears and sobs. In the end she barely manages to compose herself enough to carry on. “You need to know something,” she says. “I don’t even know how to say it, but. . but you need to know.”

“Tell me.”

And she does, and suddenly I understand everything.