Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER SEVEN

Averageville. That’s where the Tylers live. All the houses on the street are well kept, but there is nothing special, as if any one resident was too scared to make their house stand out above another. No huge homes with giant windows, no expensive cars parked outside, no Porsches or BMWs suggesting a world of big money and high debt. No beat-up cars sitting on blocks, no car parts scattered across dying lawns. Doctors and lawyers and drug dealers live elsewhere. This is typical living in suburbia, where robberies are high, but homicides are low. It’s a pleasant place to live. Sure as hell beats some of the alternatives.

I slow down and glance at the mailboxes, getting an early idea how much further I have to drive. This wasn’t my case when the bodies floated up. It wasn’t my case when the caretaker took off. But it became my case the moment the coffin opened and Rachel Tyler’s body made a suggestion that there are others out there who could still be alive if not for my mistake. I glance at the geranium cocktail next to me, and for a few seconds I think about my wife. I like to think that I know what she would want me to do, but I can’t be sure. It’s been a long time since she gave me any advice.

I step out into the light rain in front of a single-story house that was mass-produced back at the start of the townhouse era. Things are tidy, but a little run down. The garden has a few weeds; the lawn is a little long; the entire house looks a little tired.

The door is opened by a woman in her late forties, early fifties. She looks like she has been on edge for the last two years, expecting news at any moment. She is like the house-tidy, neat, but tired.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Tyler?”

“Yes. .”

I can tell she isn’t sure whether I’m here to sell her encyclopedias or God, or whether I’m here to bolster or destroy her hopes for her missing daughter. Slowly I reach into my pocket and take out a business card. Her eyes widen and her mouth drops slightly as I hand it across, and when she reads it her mouth firms back up. She doesn’t seem sure what to say. Doesn’t seem to know whether to be happy or scared that I’m on her doorstep.

“My name is Theodore Tate,” I say, “and I’m a private investigator.”

“That’s what the card says,” she offers, without any sarcasm.

“Can I have a few minutes of your time?”

“Do you know where she is?” she asks, already sure of the reason for my visit.

“This is about Rachel,” I say, “but not directly. Please, if we can step inside, I can tell you more.”

She fights with the beginnings of a sentence; perhaps the struggle is with the hundreds of questions trying to come out at once, a hundred different ways in which to ask if her daughter is still alive. I bet she’s rehearsed this moment time and time again, but the reality is crushing her, confusing her. She steps back and I move inside.

The hallway is warm and homey. There are dozens of photographs of Rachel on the walls, ranging over the nineteen years she spent in this world. There are pictures of her as a baby, her mother holding her tightly. The years have taken their toll on Mrs. Tyler. There are shots of Rachel next to a tricycle, in a sandbox, going down a slide. There is a man in some of them, holding Rachel’s hand, or swinging her at the park, or helping her blow out a cake with eight candles on it. Rachel gets older. So do her parents. Fashions change and the three grow older, but the smiles are always there, keeping the parents young. One of these photos should have been with her missing persons report, but probably Mrs. Tyler couldn’t part with any of them. I’m sure Rachel’s bedroom will be just as she left it, the same posters on the walls, her favorite stuffed toys waiting for her on her bed, maybe even a stockpile of Christmas and birthday presents from missed occasions. It’ll be like a time capsule.

Patricia Tyler leads me through to the lounge.

“Is your husband home?” I ask, praying she isn’t going to tell me they are separated or, worse, that her husband has died from the pain of losing his daughter to a mystery, that he has spent the last six or eight or ten months in the ground.

“He’s at work. He sometimes works late,” she says, sounding sad about it. I can’t imagine she ever sounds any other way. “Mostly, actually, these days. I should phone him, I guess. Should I?”

“If you’d like.”

“What. . what am I going to tell him?” she asks.

“Perhaps we should sit down for a few minutes first.”

“Sure, okay, sure, I don’t know where my manners are. Can I get you a drink? Tea? Coffee?” She starts to stand back up. “Anything, just name it.” She’s halfway out of the lounge when she pulls up short; then, fidgeting her hands, she slowly turns back to look at me. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says, and starts to cry.

She’s not the only one who doesn’t know what they’re doing, and I suddenly wish I hadn’t come. I feel the urge to hold her while she cries and an equally strong urge to turn and run back down the hallway and get the hell out of this street. I end up standing still.

“Please, just tell me why you’re here,” she asks.

I can no more easily tell this woman her child is dead than I could show her pictures of the corpse. I cannot tell her about Cemetery Lake, about a woman whose decayed remains look like they belong to Rachel. I can’t mention the exhumation, can’t detail my swim with the corpses, can’t mention it’s the same cemetery I almost buried my wife in two years ago after the accident. I reach into my pocket and produce the small plastic bag with Rachel’s ring. She takes it without a word, then slowly sinks down into a chair opposite me. I sit down too. For a long time she says nothing.

“It turned up today in an investigation,” I say, and she finally manages to pull her eyes away from it and look back up at me. “Do you recognize it? Does it belong to Rachel?”

“Where did you find it?” she asks. “Who had it?”

“Nobody had it on them,” I lie, feeling bad and concerned with the way this is going. But of course what other way was there?

“But how, then?”

“Please, I need to ask you a few questions. The inscription, it says Rachel amp; David forever.”

“Was it David?” she asks, her voice raising. “Did he give you the ring?”

“No. Nobody had it. I found it.”

“Where?” she asks, almost demanding now.

“Please, Mrs. Tyler, can you tell me about David?”

“How did you know to come here?”

“The inscription,” I say, but then suddenly realize my mistake. The only reason I’d check missing persons would be if I believed the ring belonged to somebody who was dead. Mrs. Tyler, thank God, doesn’t make the connection. “Please, tell me about David.”

“David gave it to her for her birthday.”

“Is David her boyfriend?” I ask, careful not to say was.

She nods. “I’ve already told the police all I know.”

“But I’m not the police,” I say, “and that means I can approach things differently.”

She takes a few seconds with that, slowly nodding as she thinks it over. “You think she’s dead, don’t you,” she says. It’s not a question.

I think of the flowers in the passenger seat of my car, and I regret not driving out to see my wife first. I could have talked to her. Told her about my day. Told her how much I missed her. Could have held her hand and told her everything.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Then what makes you think you can help her?”

It’s interesting she has asked how I can help Rachel, and not her and her husband. Interesting isn’t the word. It’s devastating. This woman isn’t just holding out for the possibility that her daughter is alive-she’s holding on to the reality of it. But the question is more than that. It makes me think of exactly what I can do to help Rachel: nothing. Not now. I can’t even help the others who have followed.

“I would imagine Rachel wants as many people helping her as she can get.”

The point seems to hit home with her and she starts up again with the nodding, and then she starts up with telling me about her daughter. I realize I could be anybody in the world and she’d still be happy to speak about Rachel. She’d probably be the same way if I had been at the door selling encyclopedias or God. She talks for nearly twenty minutes and I don’t interrupt her. I know what it’s like to have lost somebody. I know what it is like to hold out hope. False hope is cruel, but perhaps not as cruel as no hope at all. It’s a judgment only those who have been there can make.

“And David?” I ask, after she has told me what she can about Rachel’s life, including in detail the days before she disappeared. “What can you tell me about him?”

“I thought he knew what happened,” she says. “For those few weeks I was sure she was living with him. See, they were living together, but not really. All her things were here, are still here, but she wouldn’t come home for days on end. When we didn’t see her for a week we tried contacting her, then him, but he said he hadn’t seen her. I thought he was lying, and that he was shielding her from us for something we must have done. But I knew, I knew something wasn’t right. I don’t know how, but I just knew. So Michael, my husband, called the police. We filed a missing persons report. We hadn’t heard from her in nearly a week. It wasn’t like her.”

“What happened when the police spoke to David?”

“Nothing. They said they had no reason to believe he was lying. Still, I wasn’t convinced. I would. .” she starts, then takes a few seconds to gather her thoughts. She looks down at her feet. “I would go to his house at different times, but there was never any sign of her. I would knock on his door in the middle of the night. After a while I began to see that David was just as distraught as we were, and I started leaving him alone. I don’t know if he really believes Rachel is still alive.”

She looks back up. I nod sympathetically. Then I throw a couple of names at her: Bruce Alderman and Henry Martins. She shakes her head and tells me she’s never heard of them, and asks me who they are. I tell her the names have come up, but I’m not sure where they fit into it, and that it may be unlikely they even do. She gives me a list of Rachel’s friends, places she liked to go, photographs of her, people she worked with, David’s address. She’s giving it all some real serious thought, hoping for a connection, hoping she is going to mention a name that’s the key to getting her daughter back.

She walks me to the door. She seems reluctant to let me go. I feel guilty I’ve deceived her, that I’ve given her more hope today than she had yesterday, and the guilt becomes a sickening feeling that makes the world sway a little as I make my way to the car. The police will identify Rachel Tyler. They will come here tomorrow or the next day, and they will tell Patricia that her daughter is dead. I can’t stop it from happening. I can’t prepare her for it.

It’s getting close to eight o’clock and within the next twenty minutes it will be dark, the thick clouds bringing the night earlier than usual for this time of year. The flowers in the front seat still look fresh enough to keep on growing. I start my car and pull away, the small voice inside my head questioning what in the hell I am doing and the bigger voice, the one I use every day to justify my actions, telling me I have no idea.