Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

It comes back to Henry Martins. I asked Patricia Tyler eight weeks ago if she knew the name, and she didn’t. If only she had, if only she’d known the name of Fiona Chandler’s husband, the one who left her, then most of this could have been avoided. There was never any reason to suspect a link between the dead girl and the man who owned the coffin she was dumped into. Nothing links the others-it was just a matter of putting girls into the ground and using the coffins of those who had just died, making the digging easier. I’ve spent those eight weeks making death and making misery, but now things are going to change. Henry Martins was Fiona Chandler’s first husband. He left her when Father Julian got her pregnant. He moved into a different world from her, he met another woman, he fell in love with a woman who wouldn’t cheat on him, and he had a family. Twenty something years later I stood by his grave and watched his coffin get pulled from the dirt.

“Hey, hey, you can’t come in here!”

The answers have come crashing down on me and the white noise is back. There are images and words screaming from every corner of my mind, and this is the way it sometimes gets when an investigation is coming to a close, the way it gets when the adrenaline is rushing and the high that comes is only an arrest away. Only this time my hands are shaking and I feel like a fool, so the high may not arrive.

I’ve just broken a dozen road rules getting here. The rain is pouring down, hitting the roof with the sound of land mines. I push my way into the hallway. If Henry Martins hadn’t found out about his wife’s affair, if he hadn’t left her and had raised the boy as his own, then none of this would be happening. The girls, the priest, the Alderman family, even good old Henry himself-they’d probably all still be alive. For the briefest of moments I wonder if there would be other ripple effects if those people were still around, whether one of them could have crossed paths with my wife or with Quentin James two years ago and delayed one of them for the ten seconds it would have taken to prevent the accident.

“Hey, you deaf? You can’t come in here.”

“Where is he?” I ask.

“What?”

“Maybe you’re the one who’s deaf. Where the hell is he?”

“He’s gone, man.”

I push Studly against the wall. He’s added a couple of piercings to the collection since I last saw him. I feel like pushing him right through the wall and strangling the skinny little bastard, but the anger I feel isn’t toward him, it’s toward myself for having been so easily deceived. It’s toward David for being the one to have deceived me. Two months ago his pain was so raw, so unbearable, so believable. How the hell did I fall for such an act? Even as a cop I would have missed it. As did the other cops who spoke to him.

“Gone? Where?”

“He moved out. A few days ago. And he owes me rent.”

I let Studly go. He pushes himself off the hallway wall and puffs his chest out, trying to look a lot tougher than he is, trying to look as though he let me start manhandling him.

“Where’d he go?”

“How the fuck would I know?” he asks, sounding tougher now that I’ve let him go.

I shove him into the wall again, and make my way down to David’s bedroom. Last time I was here the place looked like a bomb had gone off. The furniture is still here, but everything else has gone.

“He told me to keep it,” Studly says, “but bro, that stuff ain’t worth shit.”

“He ever bring other women here?”

“No. He’s never been with anybody since-well, since Rachel went missing.”

“She’s not missing anymore.”

“Yeah, he told me.”

I look around the bedroom, but there’s nothing here to help. I tip the bed up. I search through bedside drawers. I pull the corner of the carpet away on the chance this hidey-hole is more genetic than I first thought, but there’s nothing there.

“Dude, you’re destroying the place.”

“You sure he’s not seeing anybody else?”

Studly shrugs. “Man, I’m not his mother.”

“Well, hopefully she’ll know more than you.”

“I doubt it. He hasn’t spoken to her since Rachel went missing. Far as I can tell, he hates her. Man, really fucking hates her.”

“I wonder why,” I say, but I already know.

“Yeah,” he says, trying to sound as if he knows too, but he has no idea. Nobody could.

“When did he go?” I ask.

“I told you, man-a few days ago.”

“When exactly? Tuesday? Wednesday? Thursday?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Man, I don’t even know what today is.”

I push past him again and start going through the rest of the house.

“Hey, man, you can’t go through everything,” he protests.

“Then tell me where he is.”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s your friend, right?”

“He owes me rent,” he says.

“Then you owe him nothing. Take a guess. Where do you think he’s going?”

“I remember him saying something about meeting a woman. He had a date. But it was a weird date. I remember that.”

“If it was weird enough to stick out, why the hell can’t you remember the details?”

“I was, man, you know. . I was kind of, well, in a different state.”

“You were stoned.”

“Best as I remember, yeah.”

“You get her name?” I ask.

“Nah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Could it have been Deborah?”

“Sure, it easily could have. But it just as easily could have been Susan. Or Nicola.”

“That’s real helpful.”

Studly shrugs. “That’s all I know, man. Hey, you find him you tell him he owes me rent, okay?”

“Look, this is important,” I say, and I hand him one of my business cards. “You remember something, you give me a call.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he says, and he screws the card into his pocket. I figure in five minutes he’ll forget it’s even there.

“Okay, let’s do this your way,” I say. “Got some scissors?”

“Fuck you, man.”

“I’m not going to cut you. If I wanted to do something fun I’d just shoot you. Now, scissors? Come on, dude, hurry up.”

He heads into the kitchen and shows back up a few seconds later. I reach into my pocket and pull out the money my mother gave me. I count out two one-hundred-dollar notes. I cut the scissors across them, separating the notes into halves. I hand him a half from each note, along with the scissors, and I pocket the other two halves.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with these?”

“They’ll help you think. You gotta come up with something useful and I’ll give you the rest.”