Cemetery Lake (14 page)

‘It was awful.’ Patricia Tyler’s tears start to come now. For

a few moments she does nothing to try to stop them, just lets

them roll down her face as if she hasn’t noticed them. Then she raises a handkerchief and tries to dab them away, but they keep on coming. ‘Can you imagine that? Our daughter is missing, possibly dead — or, as it turns out, she was. Or is.’

‘Both, actually’ her husband interjects, and he looks close

to tears too, and he shrugs a little, as if unsure why he made the comment. I know the moment I leave they will fall into an

embrace neither of them will ever want to break.

And those heartless thugs at the bank register us with a debt

collection agency’

‘Do you have that last credit card statement?’

‘We have everything,’ she says.

‘Can I see it?’

‘Why?’

‘It might tell me where Rachel was that day, or in the days

before.’

‘The police already have a copy of it. It didn’t lead them

anywhere.’

‘But it might lead me somewhere.’

She doesn’t argue the point. She just walks out of the room,

leaving me and her husband alone in uncomfortable silence until she returns with the bill. She hands it over to me. I scroll down.

Clothes, CDs, more clothes. Petrol.

‘These are all standard places she went?’

‘They’re on all of her bills.’

‘Where was her car found?’

At the university. It was where she always parked it.’

And the florist?’ I ask, stopping my finger next to the purchase she made a week before she disappeared.

‘She bought flowers for her grandmother.’

‘Anything else here stand out?’ I ask.

‘Nothing.’

‘Okay. Can I take this with me?’

‘Don’t lose it,’ she says.

She walks me to the door. Michael Tyler stands up, seems

about to join us, but sits back down. The hallway is warm and

there seem to be more pictures of Rachel hanging up than there were when I was here last night, as if the Tylers thought they could use them to keep the bad news at bay.

‘The man last night. The reporter said his name was Bruce

Alderman. You haven’t said it, but you think he’s innocent, don’t you? That’s why you’re here.’

I think of the look in Bruce’s eyes before he pulled the trigger.

I think of the key in his pocket with my name on the envelope.

“I don’t think he did it,’ I admit.

‘Will you find who did?’

‘I’ll try. I promise.’

I’m halfway down the pathway when it strikes me. I turn back

around and Patricia is still standing there watching me, watching the person who two years after her daughter went missing came

along and told them all was lost.

‘The flowers for her grandmother. Was there an occasion?’

‘My mother died a week before Rachel disappeared. It was

one of the reasons the police thought she’d run away. Rachel and

my mum were close. For the first few years my mother helped

raise Rachel. The police assumed she was depressed and needed

to get away. She bought flowers to take out to the cemetery for the funeral.’

‘Which cemetery?’

‘Woodland Estates.’

Woodland Estates. The cemetery with the lake. The cemetery

with my daughter.

The cemetery where Rachel Tyler was found.

It’s a connection that was there two years ago but nobody was

looking for it. Nobody even knew to look for it. Why would

they? No way could they have known Rachel Tyler was going to

be found one day buried in a cemetery. No way could they have

known that her going to her grandmother’s funeral was sending

her into the scope of her killer.

My cellphone rings, which is good news for me, since it means

it’s up and running. I look at the display but don’t recognise the number.

‘Hello?’

‘What are you doing fucking with my investigation?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Who the hell do you think? You visited the Tylers.’

‘Look, Landry, I was …’ But I don’t know how to finish.

‘Jesus, Tate, what the hell are you playing at here? You’re going to seriously fuck things up for us.’

“I know what I’m doing.’

‘If you knew what you were doing, you’d still be carrying a

badge. You’re going to mess things up, and if it wasn’t Bruce

Alderman who killed those girls, that means we’ve still got a

serious investigation on our hands. Which means there’s going to be a trial once we catch the guy, and suddenly we’re going to have to explain your actions at the trial. How’s that going to make you look? Or us? You think any defence lawyer worth more than ten

cents isn’t going to be able to shred our case apart because you’ve fucked up all our evidence? Christ, Sidney Alderman is sure

you killed his son. Come on, Tate, you gotta be more careful. You can’t let this bullshit happen.’

“I didn’t kill him.’

‘I know that. We all know it. But not Alderman. He’s sure you

pulled the trigger. You might want to watch your back.’

‘It was an empty threat.’

‘Maybe. I’d still watch it anyway. He’s building up some Dutch courage.’

‘What do you mean?’

“He went straight from the morgue to a bar. He’s drinking

himself into a state, and I don’t know whether it’s a better or a worse one.’

‘Let me guess. You gave him a lift?’

‘That’s a shitty question, Tate. I’m trying to help you out

here.’

‘Okay Okay, I get the point.’

“I don’t think you do. Because somehow you got her ring.’

‘What?’

‘Rachel Tyler. You got her ring. You showed it to her parents.’

‘Bruce gave it to me.’

‘Bullshit. You had it yesterday afternoon. How’d you get it?

You steal it out of the coffin? Where are you right now?’

I was outside the cemetery about thirty seconds ago, but now

that I know Sidney Alderman isn’t home, I’ll give his house a visit instead. ‘I’m at home.’

“No you’re not. I’m at your house and you’re not here.’

‘Good one, Landry. I’m standing in my driveway and you’re

nowhere around.’

I’m pretty sure we both know the other one is bluffing.

‘Stay out of my case, Tate. Your name comes up one more

time, and I’m going to take some action. Got that? You could do time here, man. You’re compromising things. You stole evidence which, by the way, I want back.’

‘Okay, I’ll…’

But he’s already hung up. I step out of my car and look up

and down the street, suddenly worried that Landry might be

watching me after all. There’s no sign of anybody. He was right about one thing, though. My name is about to come back up in

about twenty minutes when he goes and talks to David. Things,

like he said, are fucked up.

I knock on the door and nobody answers. So I move from

window to window, peering inside, but since even sunlight can’t seem to penetrate the grime there isn’t much chance I can see

anything. A guy like Sidney Alderman would come out and tell

me to go to hell if he knew I was looking through his windows.

That means he definitely isn’t here. I try the back door. It’s locked.

So is the front. I get out the key Bruce left for me and try both doors, but it doesn’t fit. It’s not even close to fitting.

There are still plenty of ways to get inside, and I opt for the less subtle approach of kicking in the back door. It opens easily enough, bouncing back off the wall and almost closing again,

stopped only by the busted-up jamb. The cops will know who

did it. But if I’m right about things, it won’t matter. They’ll be glad I did it.

The first thing I can smell is alcohol. I move up the hallway.

The carpet is worn and the floorboards beneath it groan. There are three bedrooms, one messy, one tidy and one completely empty

— not a single piece of furniture or poster on the wall. Of the two in use, the tidy one is tidy only in comparison to the messy one, and the way things are all slightly out of whack in there suggests the police have been rummaging around looking for something

and one of the Aldermans has rummaged around putting things

back. I figure whatever evidence Bruce had hidden under his bed is now sitting on a desk somewhere in the police station.

The kitchen is swamped with dirty dishes and empty beer

cans. In the lounge there are bottles and cans on every available horizontal plane. Sidney Alderman had a hard night. The arms of the lounge suite have been ripped up at the front, suggesting the presence of a cat, but there is no food bowl around, so maybe it got sick of the living arrangements and moved out. I’m surprised, though, to see photo albums scattered across a coffee table — Alderman didn’t seem the type to get hung up on family moments.

I pull on a pair of latex gloves before opening the cover on the top one. Colour photographs of happier times are arranged neatly

in the pages. A man, a woman, a child. The Alderman nuclear

family. They all look happy. Smiles, relaxed candid moments,

posed photos for birthdays and Christmas. Sidney Alderman is

a different man here, the type of man who back then was mostly likeable.

I keep going. I already have a feeling about what is coming

up. The man and woman and child start to get older. They grow.

They still look happy. I recognise the house in the background of some of these shots. Summer photos. Winter photos. Snapshots

from school plays and school sports. I move from one album

to another. The house is neat and tidy and looks welcoming. It looks well maintained. Fresh paint, clean windows, no broken

roof tiles.

Fashions change. The eighties become the nineties. Some of the furniture is updated. The carpet in one photo is that awful orange and brown Axminster stuff from the late sixties, and becomes that awful flecked pale green stuff from the early eighties. The TV is updated. A cat appears in some of the pictures, a black thing with a swath of white fur around its neck.

The parents get older, and the kid gets taller and starts taking on the features of the man I met and saw die yesterday. Sidney Alderman looks like a happy man. Looks happy in the holiday

photographs. Beaches and boats and fishing lines. Ugly shirts and bad haircuts and boxy-looking cars with poor petrol consumption.

The house stays the same. The smiles stay the same. On to the

next photo album. More holiday snaps.

Then Alderman’s wife is no longer around. The smiles are

forced and thin, and the gaps in time between photos start to

extend. No more holidays. No more happy moments. Just forced

moments. Like birthdays and Christmases that nobody wants to

be at. The wife doesn’t come back, and the decaying state of the house in the photographs suggests she isn’t going to. The years pass with only a few moments caught on film but nothing heartwarming — the participants are going through the motions,

they’re drawing on the memories of how these events ought to

be, drawing on them so they can remember how to smile. At the

back of the photo album is a collection of newspaper clippings.

My cellphone rings and breaks my focus. It’s another number

I don’t recognise. I answer it, but nobody speaks back. I don’t say anything either. There’s a slight hissing sound that every cellphone in the country must get, the kind of hissing that can never fool you into thinking you’re talking on a landline.

Then, after ten or twenty seconds, a voice comes on the line.

‘You took away my son.’ The words are slow and solid, as if each is its own sentence, as if he’s struggling to say them and has to concentrate really hard. ‘You took away my son,’ he repeats when I don’t answer him.

I look down at the albums and the empty booze bottles.

Alderman found out last night that his son was dead. There’s no way in the world the police decided not to inform him immediately.

No way they figured it was the sort of thing they could put off until they swung by this morning to take him to the morgue. It’s got to be why these photo albums are out. I remember doing the same thing, and even now I sometimes still do it. I wonder if over the last few hours he’s come to the conclusion that I’m to blame for everything — for his wife leaving him, for his house wearing down, for his son killing himself, and for his son burying others.

“I wanted to help him. I didn’t want him dead. But I didn’t kill him. He killed himself. That was his choice and I had nothing to do with it.’

‘You killed him.’

“I didn’t kill him.’

‘You killed him because you’re a killer. It’s in your nature. You said last night you were going to find him. You said if I helped

you, you’d go easier on him, but I didn’t help you so you went hard. You went as hard on him as you could.’

‘He killed himself out of guilt. You knew what he was doing.’

“He wasn’t doing anything.’

‘How many are out there?’ I ask.

‘You killed him.’

“How many others? Is it just the four?’

‘The police are lying to protect you, just like they protected you two years ago, just like the reporter said.’

‘You don’t even know what you’re talking about.’

“I saw him this morning. He was laid out on a piece of steel.

He was broken. He wasn’t my boy any more. It wasn’t Bruce. It

was some thing-with its head all busted up. You jammed that gun into him and pulled the trigger.’

‘You know I didn’t do that.’

‘Don’t tell me what I know,’ he yells. ‘You don’t have the right to tell me what I know! He was my boy! My boy! And you killed

him.’

“He killed himself.’

‘I’ve always thought about what you did,’ he says, ‘and I always wished I had the courage to do the same thing.’

‘What?’

‘When Lucy died. It was the same thing, you know. But I did