Текст книги "Cemetery Lake"
Автор книги: Paul Cleave
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 24 страниц)
chapter nine
I turn my cellphone on and wait for it to ring, but it doesn’t.
Could mean people are getting killed elsewhere in the city and the reporters flocking there have forgotten about me. Could be the police know who put the bodies in the water and don’t feel they need to let me know. Could be Tracey hasn’t noticed the missing ring on the dead girl’s finger and I’m sailing through trouble-free waters. Could be none of that. Might simply be a poor signal.
Or that taking it for a swim has finally caught up with the inner components.
I go through the motions of changing gears and avoiding
other cars before realising I’m not heading home, or even to my office, but back to the cemetery where my day suddenly became
interesting. Where there is death there is life – at least at the moment. Police cars are scattered across the landscape but mostly localised by the lake. They are no longer guarding the entrance.
I ignore them and head to the opposite side of the cemetery where the dead are still at peace.
I make the walk through the dark without need of a torch. It’s a walk I could make with my eyes closed. The grass is wet and
soon the bottoms of my pants and shoes are wet.
It’s been two months since I last stood over my daughter’s
grave. After her funeral, I never wanted to come back. Seeing the smooth headstone with the brass plate carved with her name and the dates hurt too much. But it hurt even more staying away. The doctors tell me they don’t think Bridget knows that Emily is dead or even that Emily ever existed. I hope they’re right – though I’m not sure what kind of person that makes me. Emily didn’t have
the good luck to become catatonic but the bad luck to be killed: she had twice as many bones in her body broken as my wife; she hit the pavement just as hard, just as awkwardly, and just like that she was gone. No luck there at all, unless you count bad luck.
The tears don’t come as much these days. The pain is part of
who I am now. Getting rid of it would be like losing a limb.
The flowers in the grave have wilted and died. The coffin
beneath the earth is child sized, and the mere fact there is a market for child-sized coffins in this world proves it’s a fucked up one – and for the briefest moment I think about the condition the coffin is in, whether it’s as dented and damaged as the one pulled out of the ground earlier today, or whether its smallness helped it withstand the weight of the earth above it. Then I wonder if she is even in there.
I don’t bother to tell Emily about my day because she can’t
hear me. Emily is dead, and none of the romanticised ideas I have at Death Haven reach out here.
I walk towards the lake and come to a stop near the police tape. It seems that every year the people who manufacture this stuff have to add another mile to the roll to keep up with the Christchurch crime rate. A good year for them means a bad year for the rest of us. The scene looks like an archaeological dig. There are more cranes and trucks than before. Strings of lights around the edges of me tents are glowing brightly as if a pageant is going on in the middle of it all – except that here the performers are Women and men in different coloured overalls marching back and forth, cataloguing death along with the different types of samples that come with it. There is a mound of dirt from another coffin that has been dug up. I thank God that Emily is buried far away from this scene; and then I curse Him for making me bury her in the first place. Then I think of the irony of that statement since I know there can’t possibly be a God – or, if there is, that He abandoned this city a long time ago.
I’m about to duck under the tape when an officer who wasn’t
here earlier in the day approaches me and tells me I can walk no further.
“I just want to know how things are going,’ I say.
The officer gives me his practised stone-cold glare, and tells me to read tomorrow’s paper. I feel like hitting him.
“Has anybody spoken to the caretaker yet?’
‘Listen, mate, none of this is any of your business.’
“I came to visit my daughter,’ I say, about to play the sympathy card. ‘Her grave is here.’
His eyes narrow, and he looks like he is about to tell me that having a dead daughter doesn’t give me a free invitation to go wherever the hell I please, but slowly he seems to become aware it’s the type of comment I’d make him regret saying.
‘I’m sorry, mate, but you’ve picked a bad time to come.’
‘Yeah, well, she picked a bad time to die.’
He doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing, figuring
this is best, and I figure he’s right. I stay at the line of police tape, trying to make eye contact with anybody who will tell me anything, but there’s too much going on for that to happen. The officer keeps looking at me like I’m a shoplifter. I feel his eyes on my back the entire way as I walk to my car. He’s probably
wondering if I’m for real.
The cemetery grounds are like a golf course, separated into
many sections divided up by hedges and trees and bushes. The
main road through it branches off to these different areas, and one of the bigger branches leads to the Catholic church, which sits left of the cemetery, back some forty metres from the road.
A belt of trees forms a horseshoe barrier around its sides and back, so that if you’re at the lake or even in other parts of the cemetery you might not even know it was there. This is the church that
once held a ceremony for my dead little girl, but more recently gave me somewhere to serve the priest with an exhumation order for Henry Martins.
I park as close as I can to the huge oak doors that could pass entry to a fairytale giant and I walk up the stone steps. The wooden door on the right swings open easily and noiselessly. Inside the church the temperature seems to drop another degree with every step I take. Most of the lighting is coming from candles, with a few overhead lights dimly illuminating the chapel. There are dozens of pews, all of them empty except for one at the very front where a man is staring ahead, lost in thought, seemingly unaware or uncaring of my presence.
I walk down the aisle, letting my fingertips tap the pew backs along the way. Left and right are tapestries of Jesus and stained glass windows of Jesus and paintings of Jesus. Somewhere around here there’s probably a gift shop with coffee cups with a smiling Jesus. At the head of the church behind the altar is a large wooden crucifix with a large wooden Jesus carved onto it. Jesus doesn’t seem to care that he’s hanging on a slight angle, or that he’s being promoted so heavily.
Before I reach the end of the aisle one of the boards beneath
me creaks, and the priest turns suddenly. He steps out from the pew and smiles at me, but after a few seconds the smile falters, and I realise how hard it must be for him to maintain his composure under the strain not just of this day but of every day. Priests don’t see the same violence that cops do, but they sure as hell hear about it – and worse. They’re the ones trying to pick up the pieces of a broken family looking to blame more than just the man or the disease that took away their loved ones.
Father Stewart Julian, a man in his mid to late fifties who has been here for as long as I can remember, offers me his hand. He has a notepad in his other hand that he hasn’t written a thing on, and a newspaper folded on the pew where he was sitting. His soft face, grey hair and black eyebrows give him a kind look, but at the moment he looks tired. Still, I figure in his day, if Father Julian hadn’t become a priest, he would’ve had women all over him.
Awful day, Theo,’ he says, shaking his head, proving just how
awful the day really is. ‘Just awful.’ His voice is low and easy to listen to. ‘It’s been long and it’s already late. You wouldn’t believe how many hours I’ve had to spend talking to police. Or to families of those who have loved ones buried here. They keep calling, Theo, scared that their mothers and fathers and sons and daughters are being desecrated. The calls finally stopped an hour ago, and since then I’ve been looking for a distraction.’ He waves the notepad a little. ‘Have you seen this?’ he asks, and picks up the newspaper.
‘Seen what?’ I ask, pretty sure that the distraction was a
hundred miles away, because that’s where Father Julian seemed to be looking before he heard me.
‘This,’ he says, and he points to the article.
‘I’ve seen it.’ It’s a newspaper article about the advertising campaign for McClintoch Spring Water. Promotional billboards
have been erected across the country and advertising spots taken out in newspapers. The ads say, ‘What would Jesus drink?’ and
show Jesus turning wine into water with McClintoch Spring
Water labels on the bottles.
‘I just don’t understand,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Times are changing,’ I say, hoping my answer will apply here.
‘Father, I was hoping you could help me out.’
‘Helping you out, Theo, has led to a very long day’
‘You’d rather have left things as they were?’
‘Well, no, of course not. But I think I need more notice before I help you out so I can plan some holiday time.’
We sit facing each other, mimicking each other’s position with our elbows resting on the top of the pew. The pews are solid
wood, worn a little around the edges, but they’ve held up over the years in the way that only expertly crafted furniture from sixty or seventy years ago can. Wooden Jesus is looking down at us,
wooden nails in his wooden hands. He’s holding up well too.
‘It’s been one heck of a day for me,’ he says. ‘For all of us.
Sometimes I wonder …’ He doesn’t finish his sentence, just lets it trail off, making me think he’s wondering lots of things, and I don’t blame him. We’re all wondering lots of things. Foremost he is probably wondering where God fits into all of this.
‘You’re starting to think retirement might be on the cards?’
His smile comes back for a few seconds – there are a few
creases around the edges of his eyes – but then he sighs. “Theo, no, not yet. If I’m looking older than normal, it’s the day. It’s been a long one.’
‘For all of us, Father. What can you tell me about the caretaker who helped me this afternoon?’
‘Bruce? Bruce Alderman? Why are you asking?’
‘I want to talk to him.’
‘Ah,’ he says, and slowly shakes his head. Suddenly he doesn’t look as tired as he does sad. ‘You think he’s responsible. Well, I can’t tell you anything more than I’ve already told the police.’
‘And what did you tell them?’
‘That Bruce is a good man, and this sort of depravity, well…
it’s simply beyond him.’
It’s been my experience that depravity isn’t beyond as many
people as we’d like to think, and I’m pretty sure Father Julian knows that.
I adjust my position on the pew. Well made doesn’t mean
comfortable. ‘Did you tell them where they could find Bruce?’
‘I didn’t know’
‘Guilt makes men run, Father.’
‘So does fear. Nobody would like to see what he saw.’ ‘But fear doesn’t make them steal a truck and go into hiding.’
“I wish I could simply ask for your trust in this, Theo. I can guarantee you, Bruce isn’t a bad kid. And he couldn’t have known those poor people were going to rise up from the lake.’
“He knew what we were digging up.’
‘Of course he did. You had an exhumation order.’
“Have you ever heard of a girl by the name of Rachel Tyler?’
He thinks about it for a few seconds. ‘She went missing two
years ago,’ he says.
Her body was found in Henry Martins’ coffin.’
The look of horror on his face settles in his features, and he doesn’t look comfortable with it. In fact he looks downright sick.
He reaches out and grabs the back of the pew, as if to stop himself from tipping off and falling into an abyss that is opening beneath him.
‘She was murdered,’ I add. ‘And whether your caretaker did it
or not, he certainly knows something. Please, Father, you have to help me.’
He lets go of the pew, rubs his palm across the side of his face, then lifts both hands into the air as if the gesture can ward me off.
“I … I wish I could help, but there’s nothing I can say’
‘Would you like me to bring you a photograph of Rachel?
Show you what was done to her?’
The church seems to get colder as his horror turns to disgust, almost anger, and my stomach starts to knot. ‘That sort of parlour trick is beyond you, Theo. If I could help you, I would, just as I helped you two years ago when you were lost.’
‘Rachel has nobody to speak for her. I need to do what I can.’
‘She has God.’
‘God let her down.’
‘You must have faith, Theo.’
‘Faith lets everybody down.’
‘People let themselves down.’
I want to argue, but there is no argument a priest hasn’t heard and isn’t ready for. Their answers may not make sense, but they are a doctrine, there to be repeated over and over, as if the very repetition makes their case. I could take a photograph out of my wallet and show him my wife and my daughter, but of course
Father Julian remembers them. I could ask him where God
was during their accident, but Father Julian would have some
dogmatic answer that God-loving and God-fearing people love
to use – most likely the generic ‘God works in mysterious ways’
one that I want to scream at every time I hear it.
‘You’re right,’ I concede, ‘but none of this goes towards helping me find your caretaker. He saw us digging up something that
made him run.’
‘I still find that hard to believe,’ Father Julian says, but I’m starting to convince myself that the look on his face suggests it isn’t that hard for him at all. ‘Unfortunately, Theo, as I keep saying, I don’t know where he is.’
‘Start by telling me where he lives.’
‘The police have already been there and, to be honest, I’m not comfortable giving you information. You’re not a cop any more.
This isn’t your investigation.’
‘No, this has become my investigation. Two years ago I had
an excuse to raise Henry Martins’ coffin and I never did. That means…’
“I know what that means. You think that if there are other
people out there, you could have prevented it. Maybe this is
true.’
‘It is true,’ I say, a little shocked at how quickly he has come to this conclusion.
‘Two years ago,’ he repeats. ‘Exactly two years ago?’
“Pretty much.’
‘You can’t blame yourself,’ he says, but his eyes seem to betray his real feelings. ‘The accident – that was two years ago, correct?
Was it the same time?’
‘I still should have done more,’ I say. ‘But I lost my focus.’
‘You lost your family,’ he says. ‘And you lost control. This isn’t your fault, Theo.’
‘There are going to be more girls out there in those coffins,
Father. Three of them. I feel it. I can’t make it right, but I also can’t let it go.’
He looks down at the floor as if there is some internal debate warring inside his head. When he looks up he seems to have aged a few years. He thinks this day is hard on him, but if I drove him to Rachel Tyler’s house tomorrow to meet her parents he’d realise his was easy in comparison.
“I suppose you could talk to his father. He may be able to offer you something.’
I recall the article that I read about Sidney Alderman before I left my office for the morgue. The old man’s retirement last year It made the newspaper, but it wasn’t really news, it was just
one of those human interest stories that are interesting to the people who knew Alderman and not to anyone else.
‘Does he live nearby?’
‘Closer than you can imagine,’ he says. “Promise me you’ll be
careful. Promise me you’re looking for Bruce to question him,
not punish him.’
I shrug. ‘Punish him? I don’t follow you.’
Again Father Julian sighs, then slowly shakes his head. ‘Don’t take the law into your own hands, Theo. Vengeance is God’s, not yours, you know that.’
He follows me to the church doors and gives me directions to
where I can find Sidney Alderman. I thank him and he wishes me a good night, and again he tells me to be careful. I tell him I’m always careful.
He shakes my hand before he leaves, and when he takes his
away I see that he is shaking. Then he disappears back through the doors. God’s working day is still not over.
chapter ten
The rain has disappeared. For now. And the night has set in. I sit in the car with the heater going, trying to collect my thoughts, wondering why I’m chasing down Bruce the caretaker when
I ought to be home chasing down some pizza with Jim the
bourbon. I don’t know, maybe it’s just that my life isn’t interesting enough to be at home getting drunk in front of reruns of bad
comedies and reruns of bad news that happens every day. That’s the problem with the news. The victims have different names,
the presenters wear different outfits, but the stories are the same.
Some of us put our hands up and say that’s enough; we try
to make a difference. When I was on the job we would arrest
one killer and another would appear. It was like the sorcerer’s apprentice Mickey Mouse cutting evil broomsticks in half, only to have each half grow whole and carry on doing whatever it was evil broomsticks did.
The inside of the windscreen is fogging up, so I redirect the
heater to take care of it. My reflection, slowly appearing on
the warming glass, looks pale green from the dashboard lights. I take a small detour on the way out, heading back past the crime Scene that was once a tranquil lake in the middle of a tranquil cemetery. The machinery is moving around – I can hear and
see it – and I wonder what unlucky girl is being dug from the ground by a giant metal claw.
The cemetery road veers away from the machinery, from the
lake, from my daughter, and towards more darkness and more
trees and fewer gravestones, before taking me out onto the street.
From there it’s a thirty-second drive to Alderman’s house, and most of that is taken up with hedgeline views of the edge of the cemetery. There are only a few houses nearby. One is old and
looks like it is ready to fall down; another looks brand new, as if it was built yesterday. I figure the houses in this area are, like many, slowly getting replaced. New replacing the old. The new
then slowly becoming the old. Then the new becoming so old it
becomes condemned. Hard to imagine, I guess, that any house
becomes that way when it’s getting built. But I suppose the same thing happens with people too. It’s the cycle of life.
I strain to read the numbers on the letterboxes, but at last
I park outside and walk up the driveway, the murky light from
the streetlights detailing more of the house with every footstep.
Warped weatherboards and chipped concrete tiles, the windows
smeared with grime, or cracked, The windowsills uneven. There is no garden, just grass and weeds and mud. The concrete foundation and steps leading up to the front door are flecked green with
mildew, and it’s the first time I’ve become aware that concrete can actually decay. There are no lights on inside. If a house could look as if it has cancer and is in its dying stages, then it’s this one.
When I knock on the door the house creaks and I have the
sudden fear it might topple over. Somebody inside yells for me to go away. I keep knocking, using the heel of my hand to keep the impact loud and annoying. Another thirty seconds go by. Then a minute.
‘Jesus Christ, man, what the hell do you want?’ The voice
comes from behind my knocking.
It’s turning into one of those long days when I’m not in the
mood for personality clashes, so instead of telling him to open up the goddamn door before I kick it in, I grab a business card, identify myself and tell him I have a few questions.
‘I’ve had questions all day,’ he answers. ‘People only ever come to my door if they want something. I’m sick of people wanting
something. How about what I want, huh? I want people to leave
me the hell alone. Jesus, doesn’t it look like I want to be alone?
You see any invites?’
‘It won’t take long.’
“No’
‘That’s a real shame,’ I say, ‘because it’s cold out here. I’m going to have to keep myself warm somehow, and the best way
to do that is to keep pounding on your door.’
There is a small shudder as the door catches, then frees from
the frame before swinging open.
The man confronting me is the man I saw pictured earlier this
evening in the article about the retired caretaker. I reach out and offer Sidney Alderman my card, but he leaves me hanging.
‘I know who you are,’ he says. ‘You’re the cop who had to bury his daughter.’
He spits the comment at me as though it’s some kind of insult, and I’m unsure how to respond. The fact this man remembers me
makes me shudder. Two years ago he covered Emily’s coffin with dirt. How the hell did he remember? The way he says it makes
me want to hit him.
He grins, his aged face stretching dozens of wrinkles in dozens of directions. He has a few days’ worth of grey stubble; his hair is dishevelled, as are his clothes. He looks like he just spent a week in the desert. If I saw him two years ago I don’t recall it. His eyes are unreadable in this light.
He smells of cheap beer and even cheaper vodka, and there is
another smell there too, something I can’t identify, but it makes me think of old men hanging out in hospitals and homes gathering a collection of old diseases.
“I’m looking for your son,’ I say.
Only you’re not a cop any more, are you, Tate,’ he says.
‘ You don’t have to be a cop in this world to want to look for somebody,’ I point out. ‘That’s why they have phonebooks.’
‘Then let your goddamn fingers do the walking,’ he says, and
starts to close the door.
I stop it with my foot.
‘What happened?’ he asks. ‘You get sick of the donuts?’ He
starts to laugh, then scratches at his belly as if he has just come up with a real humdinger. ‘No, they fired you, right? Why was that again?’
He keeps grinning at me. His teeth look like they haven’t seen fluoride in years.
‘Sure is a nice place you got here,’ I say – and hell, maybe the day isn’t long enough after all, because here comes that personality clash. ‘You in the middle of renovating?’
‘Yeah. It’s a real fucking palace,’ he answers, but his laughter doesn’t have an ounce of humour in it. It’s as though he’s heard other people do it, maybe on TV or on the radio, and he’s trying to imitate it. ‘Somebody died, right? Isn’t that why they fired you?’
‘Where’s your son?’
SNobody knows. The police have been here all afternoon,
right? They’ve gone through this place and asked me the same
damn things over and over, and my answer didn’t change for
them and it ain’t changing for you.’
‘Your boy is guilty of something. Things will go easier for him if he starts helping himself here. Tell me where he is and I can start to help him.’
‘You’re a fucking joke,’ he says, sneering for a few seconds and then grinning like the madman he’s turning out to be. I feel sick knowing this is the man who covered my little girl’s coffin with dirt. Sick he was anywhere near her.
‘You can’t hide him for ever.’
‘You finished?’
I think about Bruce Alderman and how he was behaving while
we dug up the coffin, and I think about him driving away in
the stolen truck with the coffin sliding off the back and hitting the ground. I think about how he has perhaps behaved his entire life. This man was his role model. Maybe the world should be
thankful there were only four corpses found in the lake and not a hundred.
‘You know, I am going to find him,’ I say, ‘only now it’s going to be the hard way’
“I don’t fucking care about making your life easy’
“I’m not talking about hard for me. You should have given him
up, Alderman.’
Instead of getting angry Alderman starts to laugh again. ‘You’re just a fucking cliche,’ he says. ‘And on top of that, you have no authority here.’ He composes himself immediately, as if the laugh was as fake as the concern he’s displayed over the years filling in and digging out holes. ‘They never found him, did they?’
‘What?’
“You know what I’m talking about.’
I slip my business card back into my pocket. I’m glad he didn’t take it. I don’t want this guy touching my card; I don’t like the idea that my name could be in print anywhere inside this house of the damned – worse, I don’t like the idea of his fingers brushing against mine.
“I’ll find your son,’ I promise.
‘Ya think so?’
“I know so.’
He shrugs, as if it doesn’t bother him either way. Maybe it
doesn’t. Maybe he really doesn’t care, and that’s always been the problem for his son. Already I can see Bruce Alderman being
found not guilty on a plea of insanity. With this man as his father, there isn’t a jury in the world who would be unsympathetic.
It’s been a pleasure,’ I say, and I back away from the door,
keeping my eyes on him. He stares at me as if he is trying to unlock some great mystery. The only mystery here is how somebody so
antisocial can have worked these grounds for so many years. He Closes the door.
“I’m ashamed at myself, angry with him. I came here to
intterview the bastard yet the only thing I achieved was to let him crawl under my skin. And I can’t take it out on either of us.
I reach the footpath, unlock the car and swing the door open.
And that’s when it happens. I sense it immediately. It’s a sprinkling of goose bumps that covers my arms and the back of my neck, and at first I think it’s just a residual feeling that anybody leaving that house would get; but then something touches my back. I know
it’s a gun even though I’ve never felt one pushed there before.
‘S-s-slowly,’ he says, ‘just move s-sl-low-ly’
‘Where?’
‘Driver’s s-seat. Climb in.’
I do as Bruce Alderman says, trying to stay as calm as possible as he climbs into the seat behind me.
