Cemetery Lake (15 page)

nothing. I let it eat me up all these years and I did nothing. But not this time.’

I unfold the newspaper clippings. They’re not big articles,

because it wasn’t a big enough story to hit the front page. Just like with my family. They’re small stories jammed in the back

pages with the opinions and reviews and the ‘who-gives-a-damn’

sections of the paper. Alderman’s wife was killed by a learner driver who was still mixing up the difference between giving way and not giving way. There’s a quote: She just came out of nowhere. It’s similar to my own story, but not that similar. Though maybe enough that there could have been a bond between Alderman and

me. His wife went shopping for groceries and lost her life because of an accident. It was a run-of-the-mill routine: you climb into your car and an hour later you’re cut out of it. No malice. No intent. Just bad luck combining for everybody involved. A left turned instead of a right, ten seconds earlier or ten seconds later: any of those, and she’d still be alive. Similar in some ways to my own story. Different in others. My wife and daughter weren’t driving. They were walking. It wasn’t a learner driver who hit them, but an experienced one. He was experienced in a lot of

areas. Mostly proficient in drinking more than he was in driving.

He had a criminal record a mile long. He was a repeat offender.

He would be pulled over and fined. His car and his licence would be taken off him and he would get them back. It became a routine.

He just kept on going back out on the roads, and the world just kept on letting him. When the fines increased, it didn’t matter.

He just kept on paying them, racking up his mortgage account

with drunk-driving conviction payouts. There wasn’t anything

the criminal system was prepared to do about it except take a

collective breath each time to see if this would be the one when he killed somebody. Nobody cared. As long as he paid his fines, he was a source of income. He was revenue. He was good for the country.

The connection between Alderman’s wife and my own is a

strong one in some ways but not in others. We both lost our

own lives the day we lost parts of our family. He spiralled into an abyss that he is still in now. I have an abyss of my own. I figure if Alderman had done something all those years ago, maybe he would be a different man. But like he said, he did nothing.

I figure if I’d done nothing, I’d be a different man too.

Better men? We could be. Or we could be worse.

‘You took the law into your own hands,’ he says. ‘You did it

after the accident, and you did it again last night. You killed my son. You killed him for doing nothing. Ten years ago, when Lucy died, I did nothing. Not this time. This time you are going to pay. Your wife is going to pay. And this time your friends in the department can’t do a damn thing to help you.’

The temperature in this impossibly cold house drops even

further. It’s like somebody has just strapped a block of ice onto my back. I can feel the weight of it pushing me down. I tighten my grip on the phone. The air is thick and damp and tastes like sour sweat, and all the words in the newspaper article seem to swirl around as if the ink is wet and running.

‘You better be fucking kidding right now, you son of a bitch.’

‘You think the police are kidding and my son isn’t really dead?

What do you think, Tate?’

‘My wife has nothing to do with this.’

‘How can you be so stupid as to think bad things don’t happen

all the time to innocent people? You know that first hand. You experienced it last night when you killed my boy. You experienced it two years ago. And you’re experiencing it right now.’

The phone goes dead. I look at the display. The battery hasn’t gone flat. Alderman has hung up.

I dial him back. He doesn’t answer.

I hit the driveway running. I reach the car, and the tyres shriek a little and leave some rubber behind. I speed past the cemetery where a patrol car is just entering the gates. The driver looks back over his shoulder but he doesn’t turn around and try to pull me over. The cemetery and the patrol car quickly get smaller in my mirror. I call the care home where my wife lives — if ‘live’ is an appropriate word. She resides, maybe, not lives. A nurse I’ve spoken to only a few times answers the phone. I ask for Nurse

Hamilton. A moment later she comes on the line.

‘Theo? What can I help you with?’

‘It’s Bridget.’

‘What about her?’

“I think she’s in danger. I need you to go and check on her.’

‘Danger? What kind of danger?’

‘Can you just check to make sure she’s okay? Then stay with

her until I get there.’

‘But…’

‘Please, I’m on my way. Just go and check on her.’

‘Fine, but I can tell you now there aren’t any problems. We

provide excellent care, as you know, and …’

‘I’ll stay on the line,’ I say, hoping it will hurry her up. It does.

I continue to speed. I wish I had my car from two years ago

with the siren installed. I wish I could flash and sound it at the surrounding traffic to get them the hell out of the way.

I hit three green lights in a row; I run through two oranges.

And 1 slow down for a red before accelerating between cars to a chorus of blasting horns.

Nurse Hamilton comes back. I hear her pick up the phone but

she doesn’t say anything. It’s as though she’s on the other end of the line composing her thoughts. Trying to figure what she needs to say. Figuring it because there’s a problem.

‘Carol?’

‘Bridget is in her room,’ she says.

Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

is somebody with her right now?’

‘We have very adequate staff here, Mr Tate,’ she says, speaking formally, as if giving testimony to a jury.

‘That’s not why I’m calling. Look, it’s hard to explain, but

I’m almost there. Please just do me the favour of staying with her until I arrive.’

‘Very well, Theo. We’ll

I don’t hear the end because the phone cuts out. I look at

the display and watch it going through the motions of powering down. I try to revive it so I can call Landry or Schroder, but the battery is completely drained.

I get to the care home ten minutes later. The day has cleared up even more, bits of blue sky threatening to grow as the afternoon moves on. I look around at the other cars, trying to figure if one of them is out of place, but I don’t even know what Alderman

would be driving.

Inside, I rush past the nurses’ station. The woman at the desk recognises me as the guy who rang not long ago and gives me the sort of look that suggests I’ve ruined her afternoon.

Bridget is sitting in front of the window the same as any other day. Being here in the early afternoon is no different than being here in the early evening. She’s not watching TV Not getting up and taking a shower or doing a crossword puzzle. Her world is

twenty-four seven and there are no breaks. I rush to her and hug her and she doesn’t hug back, but that’s okay.

‘This is all very out of the ordinary,’ Carol says.

I pull back and hold Bridget’s hand. ‘Has anybody come here

to visit her?’

‘Nobody who hasn’t visited before.’

‘What about somebody else? Anybody unknown show up to

visit anybody at all?’

‘What is your point, Theo?’

My point is simple for me, though perhaps not for her. Still, I decide to give it a go.

I explain the conversation I had with Alderman, touching

only on a few of the points, and even then only briefly. She takes it all in her stride, as I figure only a cop or a care-home nurse could — both have seen way too much to be surprised any more.

In the end she points out that nothing bad has happened, therefore the man who threatened Bridget must have been lying, must have been making a desperate attempt to upset me because of his son.

The care home is a top-rate facility, she reminds me, and they let nothing happen to their charges. She does make a concession about being more vigilant, and tells me to call the police. I tell her that I will.

She leaves me alone with Bridget. I don’t want to leave her

here. Not any more. I want to be able to take her with me, but where to? Back to my house? How would I even begin to look

after her? No. She’s safer here.

Carol comes back. ‘There’s a phone call for you. You can take

it in the office.’

I follow her back downstairs.

‘Hello?’

‘How did it feel, huh?’ Alderman asks. ‘To think she was dead?

To think I had done something to her? That’s how I feel, you

bastard. You killed my son, so for me the feeling is always there.

It’s going to stay the same. I wanted you to know how it was

going to feel. I wanted you to imagine the loss. And not the

same loss you suffered two years ago. But the kind of loss that’s deliberate, the kind of loss you can only experience when one

human being goes out of his way to kill someone you love. Hurts, doesn’t it? But I just did you a big favour and left your wife out of it. It wasn’t her fault. I still want to make you suffer though.

I want your pain permanent. And you still have another family

member who won’t care what I do to her.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You took my son,’ he says. ‘You still owe me.’

He hangs up.

I hand the phone back to the nurse, extending my arm without really seeing her. The desk, the paintings, the window into the office behind her — they all seem to lose detail and disappear.

‘Theo?’

I know Carol is speaking to me, but I don’t look at her. The

phone has gone from my hand but I’m still holding out my arm

ramrod straight.

‘Theo?’

She touches my shoulder, and the contact seems to work.

I look at her and she starts to say something, but I don’t wait to hear what it is. I cover the foyer with large strides and the heavy door weighs nothing as I pull it open.

When I reach the cemetery I have this hollow feeling in my

stomach, similar to the one that was there the day my daughter died. It’s a feeling that grows worse when I bring the car to a stop. I run towards Emily’s grave, though the pile of dirt next to it already tells me what I’m going to find. All these cops out here and nobody stopped Alderman from desecrating her grave.

But why would they? They were never there to protect her from

dying. Just as I wasn’t there. And in this case it simply would have looked from a distance as if Alderman was doing his job.

Just digging a hole. Just moving on with life after losing his son — if they even saw him at all. And looking towards the lake, I can already tell they couldn’t. There was no way.

I stand at the edge of the grave. I know now there were two

reasons Alderman threatened my wife. The first was to scare me.

The second was to send me away from the cemetery. That means

he was watching me all along. He was waiting.

My little girl’s coffin is down there. The lid is open and Emily is gone.

All the oxygen is sucked out of me. I stare down at the coffin with the silk linings and soft pillow, and the world outside of the grave fades away and goes black. There are crumbs of dirt where my

daughter should have been. The brass handles have pitted, the

glossy sheen of the wood long since gone. There are cracks and dents in the wood. My first reaction is to climb down and make sure with my hands as well as my eyes that Emily isn’t in there.

My second reaction is to scream. Instead I fall back to the third reaction, the one I had two years ago when I got the call about the accident. I drop to my knees and start to weep and try to

convince myself this isn’t really happening.

It should be simple to know which is worse — my wife

missing or my daughter — but suddenly I don’t know. Suddenly

they both seem as bad as each other. I guess the worse of the two is the one that is happening. I’ve dealt with a lot over the years, but never somebody’s dead child being stolen from a graveyard.

Kidnapped. I don’t even know if that’s the term for it.

I have no real idea what to do. No real direction to take. A

dead child is every parent’s worst nightmare. What is it when all the nightmares come true?

I have lost Emily. Again.

Two years ago it had been on a Tuesday. Tuesdays are a nothing day. People don’t make great plans for a Tuesday. They don’t get married. Don’t leave for holiday. They don’t organise house

warmings. But the fact is one in seven people dies on a Tuesday.

One in seven is born. What better day to lose your family? Is

there a worse day? That Tuesday should have been like the others.

I kissed my daughter and my wife on the way out the door, and

the next time I saw them Emily was lying on a metal slab with a sheet tucked up to her neck so I could see her face. Bridget was in a world between life and death, hooked up to machinery and

surrounded by doctors.

Hours earlier they had gone out to see a movie. It was two

o’clock in the afternoon, and Disney was entertaining my daughter on the big screen with animals that could talk and evade capture and do taxes and everything else clever animals can do. It was school holidays. My wife was a teacher, so it was holidays for her too. At quarter to four the movie ended and my wife walked my

daughter outside along with dozens of other parents and children.

They walked around the shopping complex footpath towards her

car. It was ten to four, and already Quentin James was drunk. It was ten to four in the middle of the afternoon, and Quentin James was behind the wheel of his dark blue SUV that he had paid a

four-hundred-dollar fine to get back that morning. He had no

driver’s licence but that didn’t stop him paying the fine; it didn’t stop the courts from handing over the keys. I can only imagine how it happened — bits of imagery I added together with details from eye witnesses. The SUV swerving through the car park. The SUV jumping the curb onto the footpath. My wife and daughter