Cemetery Lake (17 page)

I go through the obituaries again, hunting out those who died

in the days leading up to the girls’ disappearances. Two of these people are no longer in their coffins, and are lying on morgue tables in different stages of decay, their bodies waterlogged and bloated or decayed.

I look at the timeline. I think about Emily. I think about

Bruce Alderman and about his father. Then I think about where I was two years ago and the difference I could have made. That was my chance to save these girls. Maybe Landry was right, and I am fucking everything up. I don’t know. All I know is that I have to find Emily.

My cellphone finally has a full charge. I go through the

memory of incoming calls, put Landry’s number into the address book function, and then dial his phone. He picks it up after half a ring.

“I was about to call you,’ he says. ‘Your name just keeps on

popping up. You need to stay the hell away from my

investigation.’

“I can help.’

‘Help? You seen the news lately?’

‘Look, that isn’t…’

“I don’t mean that fuck-up you made last night. I mean the

new one you’ve got on your hands today’

“I haven’t heard. What have I done now?’

‘Jesus, man, you must’ve really fucked off this Horwell chick at some point. What’d you do, sleep with her?’

‘Yeah, good one, Landry’

‘Turns out when people don’t like you, they really don’t like

you. I guess I’m starting to see why’

‘There a point here?’

‘She interviewed Alderman this morning. Had to be sometime

after he hit the bar, but looking at him it couldn’t have been long after. Didn’t seem to have many drinks under his belt.’

And?’

And it wasn’t good. It’s like she saw this fire burning inside him and just started throwing on more fuel. Hadn’t been for all those angles and splatter trajectories, even I’d be thinking you

were guilty. Anyway whatever anger he had about you before,

you can double it and double that again. Just keep an eye out.

And do us all a favour, huh? Stay indoors and turn off your phone until we get this thing nailed down. When it goes to court, we’re going to be looking at some defence lawyer pointing the finger at you and saying …’

‘Yeah — we covered this already’

‘Then why don’t I feel assured?’

I look down at the photographs and the newspaper clippings.

‘Look, Landry, I got something for you. You want to hear it or not?’

‘That depends on how you got what you got. Is this going to

backfire? If you’ve got anything and you’ve obtained it illegally, I don’t want to know about it, right? Otherwise it’ll blow up in our faces.’

‘Okay’

He doesn’t say anything and I don’t add anything else, and he

reads my silence accurately.

‘Jesus, Tate, you’re fucking unbelievable.’

‘You want the names of the other girls or not?’

‘Do me a favour and don’t tell me. There’s a hodine for

information. Ring it anonymously and give it to them, okay?

Ring from a payphone or something. Anything you give me from

an illegal search is poison. Fuck, Tate, you know that.’

‘I’m no longer a cop. Those same rules don’t apply’

‘Yeah, and this serial killer’s defence lawyer you don’t want me to keep reminding you about is going to …’

‘Right. No problem. So you don’t want my help.’

‘Help? Is that what you think you’ve been doing? I gotta go.

Make sure you …’

“I got something else.’

‘What? Jesus, Tate. You’re going to give me a fucking heart

attack.’

‘Look, this is something good. It’s something you can say you

came up with on your own, so you don’t have to …’

‘Come on, I know how to do my goddamn job.’

‘Rachel Tyler, before she died, visited Woodland Estates. Her

grandmother died. It’s the same cemetery’

Landry doesn’t answer. I can tell he hadn’t made this

connection.

I press on. “I think the others might have been there too.

I think that’s the connection. That’s what drew them to the

killer.’

‘You got anything to back that up?’

“Not yet. But I’m …’

“No buts, Tate. You’re off this thing. Go ahead and make that

call to the hodine, give us those names. Do it now.’

He hangs up without me telling him Alderman has my daughter.

And thats OK — I want to deal with Alderman myself.

The phone call I’m going to make will take most of their

legwork out of play. It’ll mean the contents of the other two coffins are no longer up for grabs. But that call can wait. First I’m going to find Sidney Alderman and do what it takes to get my daughter back, and that’s something I don’t need Landry’s help for.

The church is bathed in sunlight on one side and shade on the

other, the two halves separated by a thin line like good and evil. It looks like there’s probably a difference of twenty degrees between the two. The stained-glass windows look dull and fogged up with age. The concrete brick around the edges of the shady side has speckles of mould. The gardens have low-key and low-maintenance shrubs spaced out about a metre apart. There aren’t any weeds, but that’ll probably change now that Bruce is gone.

Mine is the only car out front, and there’s nobody inside the

church either. Except, of course, for Father Julian, who appears from a side door to the right of the altar when I’m about halfway up the aisle. Maybe I passed through a motion detector. Maybe

he’s been hanging out all day for the chance to trap some soul into a conversation about God. But the way he moves towards

me makes me think he’s been waiting for me to show up.

‘You’re here,’ he says gravely.

‘We need to talk.’

‘You’re right. We do.’ He looks paler than yesterday, as if a

chunk of his faith has slipped away during the night. Or been

stolen. ‘We need to talk about Bruce. Though to be honest I don’t know if I can. I don’t think I can talk to you.’

‘Father Julian, please, you have to …’

“I don’t know, Theo,’ he says, glancing at the large envelope

in my hand. Some of the colour is coming back to his face, and the look in his eyes suggests it’s coming back on waves of anger.

‘Bruce was … well, Bruce was like a son to me. What you’ve done …’

“I didn’t kill him.’

His expression doesn’t change. He looks as if he was prepared

to hear me say that, and equally prepared to dismiss it. He looks like a man straggling to stay in control. ‘This is not the time or especially the place for your lies.’

“I didn’t touch him.’

‘Oh, you didn’t touch him, did you?’ he says, his voice getting louder now, and I realise it’s the first time I’ve ever heard a priest yell. ‘Then how in the hell did he end up dead!’

‘He shot himself. There was nothing I could do.’

‘You sure found yourself able to do something two years

ago.’

‘That was completely different.’ Now I’m the one getting close to yelling. And you know that. You damn well know that.’

“I told you that Bruce was a good boy’ he says, his arms going out to his sides and his hands flicking forward, as if trying to discard something sticky from his fingertips. ‘I told you he had nothing to do with those girls dying. I told you! Why couldn’t you have listened? You’ve shown so much trust in me in the past, why couldn’t you have shown it now?’

‘Goddamn it, Father Julian,’ I yell, and the words don’t make

him step back — in fact he takes a small step forward. ‘I didn’t kill him! Why the hell don’t you pick up the phone and make a call

and speak to anybody down at the station or at the morgue and

ask them what happened? They’ll tell you.’

‘He was a good boy’ he says, much quieter now.

‘Maybe he was. Part of me certainly believes he was. So how

about you give me a hand here and help me clear his name? Bruce told me he was innocent; that he buried the bodies but that he

didn’t kill those girls. How about you help me, or are you too caught up with those assumptions of yours?’

He looks at me for what feels like a long time, as if inside

somewhere he’s searching himself for the right thing to do. The time it takes him suggests he’s either searching real hard or he’s slipping on just what the right thing is these days.

‘I’ll listen to you, Theo, just one more time. Then you have to promise me you’ll never come back here.’

‘Once you hear what I have to say, you won’t ask me to …’

He shakes his head and cuts me off. ‘Promise me,’ he says.

‘Under the eyes of God, inside His church, promise me you’ll

never come back here.’

It’s a tough decision, but I make the promise.

‘My office. We’ll talk there.’

I follow him through the side door. The corridor is dimly lit, and we pass other doors and plenty of draughts — churches are full of draughts. He leads me into a small, dusty office that is cluttered with old-looking books and mismatched furniture. He

takes a seat behind his desk. The sun has arced around in the sky and is shining direcdy on him. It makes his face look whiter, almost glowing. Like a halo. The dust particles floating in the air are all a bright white. The light makes the stubble on his face look patchy, and it takes some of the anger out of his eyes and makes them look tired. There’s a crucifix hanging on the wall behind him. Jesus has a downcast look about him, as if he’s bored by it all, as if he’s seen every church office there is to see and after two thousand years of it he’s about had his fill of churches. The entire office looks as though every night somebody sneaks in here and alters everything slightly It’s the same way my place looks when I can’t figure out where I left my wallet or keys. I sit down opposite him.

‘If I’d helped you last night, maybe…’ Father Julian hesitates.

‘Well, who knows?’

‘I didn’t kill him.’

Father Julian sighs. ‘What do you want from me, Theo? Did

you come for somebody to forgive you? Because you’ve come to

the wrong place.’

‘Did you know that Bruce owned a gun?’

“He doesn’t.’

‘It sure looked like he did.’

‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

“No. But think about it. If I was going to kill him, why would I take him back to my office? You think I’d shoot him in front of my desk so the whole world would know about it?’

“I … I suppose not. I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.’

‘You know me better than that. You know that if I was going

to kill him I’d have taken him somewhere else.’

His jaw tightens and his eyes narrow slightly, and the look he gives me is the kind of look I never want to be given again. It’s one of disgust and disappointment. Finally he leans back in his chair and forms a steeple with his hands, touching his fingertips to his chin. He looks like he’s praying. Jesus looks down on him but doesn’t seem to be listening.

‘Come on,’ I say. ‘You don’t have to like it, but it’s a good

point.’

He nods. ‘What else did Bruce tell you? Did he know who

killed the girls?’

“He didn’t say. He just said to talk to his father. The only person I can think of who Bruce Alderman would be burying those girls for is his father.’

‘You think Sidney killed them?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘So what do you want from me? To tell you about Bruce? I’ve

already told you, he was a good kid. There is one more thing,

though, and I want you to think deeply on this. Yesterday he was alive, and today he isn’t.’

I don’t answer him. I just let him have his say, knowing the

sooner he gets everything off his chest, the sooner I can get on with things, and the sooner I can get my little girl back into the ground. The world is definitely fucked up when the goal of the day is to bury your daughter.

‘What happened after Bruce’s mother died? What happened

to Sidney?’

‘What?’ He looks shocked.

‘His mother. Ten years ago, when she died, what were things

like?’

He breathes out heavily, reinforcing just how much of an

ordeal it is to have me here.

it was the same thing, I guess. It was like one day he was alive, the next day he wasn’t. Though it wasn’t even really that. It’s not like he was dead. He just became … lost. They both did.’

And?’

And what? People become lost when that kind of thing happens.

Come on, Theo, of all people you don’t need an explanation on

that. Sometimes people never recover, or they recover in the

wrong way. And some people are lost in a way you can’t ever put your finger on.’

I think of Sidney Alderman digging up my dead daughter.

I can safely say I could put my finger on dozens of different reasons why the old man is more fucked up than he is lost.

‘Did either of them ever give you a confession?’

‘Come on, Theo, you know I can’t answer that.’

‘There were four of them in that lake, Father. So far the police have identified only two. Soon they’ll know all four.’

‘Four girls,’ he says. ‘What a waste of young lives.’

‘Well, now’s your opportunity …’

Suddenly it hits me. Father Julian’s anger can’t all be directed at me. It must also be directed at himself.

‘Yesterday I said there could be others in the coffins, but

I never said they were all girls. Or that they were young.’

He starts to say something—probably to protest that somehow

he heard or that he guessed — but he gives up the pretence and says nothing.

‘Jesus, you knew! You fucking knew!’

‘Theo!’ he yells, banging his fist down on the table. ‘Enough!

How dare you use …’

‘How dare me?’ Now it’s my turn to bang my fist down on the

table. “How dare you! You knew all along and did nothing? You

did nothing? How can that be?’

He doesn’t answer, and the silence that falls between us then is unexpected, as if we’re both too aware that what we say next may damage irrevocably whatever relationship we have.