The Life We Bury (12 page)

What I remembered most about my Grandpa Bill were his hands, powerful bulldog paws with stubby fingers as thick as lug nuts, fingers that pulsed with agility as he worked on the small engines that he repaired. I remembered him holding my hand in his when I was little, and the feeling it gave me that everything would be okay. I remembered how he moved through the world with utter patience, giving attention and purpose to every task he performed, whether it was cleaning his glasses or helping my mother through a bad day. He had been there for her in my earliest memories, his whispers drowning out her shouts, his hand on her shoulder able to tame a storm. She had always been bipolar—that's not a condition you can suddenly catch like the flu—but when my Grandpa Bill was alive, the waves never grew into whitecaps.

He used to tell me stories about fishing the Minnesota River, up near Mankato where he grew up, hauling in catfish and walleye by the boatload, and I would dream of the day when I might go fishing with him. Then, when I was eleven years old, that day came. My grandpa borrowed a boat from a friend of his and we launched at the landing at Judson to float down the river with its slow yet powerful current, the plan being to end up at a park in Mankato before nightfall.

That spring, the river had overflowed its banks with the snow runoff, but by July, when we went fishing, it had settled down. The flood had left behind a scattering of dead cottonwood trees jutting up from the river bottom, their branches breaking the water's surface like skeletal fingers. Grandpa Bill kept the motor of the little fishing boat idling so we could maneuver around the trees when we needed to. Occasionally, I would hear the screech of wood on aluminum as a branch, hiding
just below the surface, scraped against the hull. The sound frightened me at first, but Grandpa Bill acted like it was as natural as the breeze rustling the leaves around us. That made me feel safe.

I caught my first fish within the first hour, and I lit up like it was Christmas. I had never caught a fish before, and the feel of catching that fish, the twitching of my rod, seeing him lift out of the water flipping and flopping, thrilled me. I was a fisherman. The day meandered beneath a clear blue sky with him catching a few fish and me catching a few more. I think he fished without bait some of the time just to let me get ahead.

By noon we had a decent stringer of fish. He told me to drop the anchor so that we could keep our lines in the water as we ate our lunch. The anchor, which was attached to the boat at the bow—where I sat—dragged along the bottom of the river for a ways until it finally caught and brought our boat to a halt in the middle of the river. We washed our hands with water from a canteen, and Grandpa Bill pulled ham-and-cheese sandwiches out of a plastic grocery bag. We ate the best sandwiches I'd ever tasted, washing them down with bottles of cold root beer. It was a glorious lunch, eaten in the middle of a river at the apex of a perfect day.

When my Grandpa finished his food, he folded his sandwich bag into a small wad and carefully placed it in the grocery bag, which had now become our trash bag. Then, when he finished his root beer, he put his empty bottle in the bag, using the same deliberate motion. He handed the bag to me so that I could follow his lead. “Always keep the boat clean,” he said. “Don't leave trash lying around or the tackle box open. That's how accidents happen.” I listened with one ear as I sipped my root beer.

Once I drained the last of my drink, Grandpa Bill told me to pull up the anchor—another thing I had never done before. He had turned his attention to the motor, pumping a little ball in the gas line to get it ready to start. He wasn't watching as I laid my empty bottle on the floor of the boat. I would throw it away later, I told myself. I gripped the nylon rope that tethered us to the anchor and pulled. The anchor did not budge. I pulled harder and felt the boat edge upstream, the anchor still not moving. The boat had a flat stem plate for a bow, so I braced
my feet against the stem and pulled hand over hand, pulling the boat slowly toward the anchor until my progress ground to a halt. Grandpa Bill saw my struggles and coached me to pull left and right, to work the anchor loose, but the thing would not come up.

Then, behind me, I heard Grandpa Bill stir in his seat. I felt the boat rock. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw him making his way forward to help me. As he stepped over a bench seat that separated us, he put his foot down on my empty bottle. His ankle twisted, curling his foot sideways. He tilted and fell backward, his thigh crashing against the side of the boat, his arms swinging at the air, his torso wrenching around to face the river as he hit. The splash drenched me as the river swallowed my grandpa.

I screamed his name as he disappeared into the murky water. I screamed twice more before he popped to the surface, grabbing for the boat, his hand missing the edge by the width of a penny. His second attempt wasn't even close. The current had him, and it pulled him away from me as I sat there holding on to that stupid anchor rope, never realizing that if I had let go of the rope, the boat would have floated downstream alongside my grandpa, at least for twenty feet or so. By the time he righted himself, he had moved well beyond the reach of the boat, even if I had released the anchor rope.

I yelled and prayed and begged for him to swim. It all happened so fast.

Then everything soared to a whole new level of bad. Grandpa Bill began to thrash around in the water, his arms flailing, clutching at the surface of the river, his leg pinned in place by something hidden in the wet darkness. Later, the sheriff would tell my mother that his boot caught on the branch of a dead cottonwood tree just beneath the surface of the river.

I watched him struggle to keep his face above the water as the current pushed him under. He didn't have his lifejacket zipped shut. It pulled at his arms, tangling them above his head, his upper body tugging against the trapped boot. It was only then that it dawned on me to release my rope. I let it go and paddled with my hand until the rope
snapped tight about thirty feet upstream of my grandfather. I could see him scratching and tearing to pull free of the life jacket. I couldn't move. I couldn't think. I just stood there and watched and yelled until my grandfather stopped moving and floated limp in the current.

I told Carl my story, choking back my tears, pausing repeatedly to let my chest settle. It wasn't until I finished that I noticed that Carl had laid his hand on my arm in an attempt to comfort me. To my surprise, I didn't pull away from him.

“You know, it wasn't your fault,” he said.

“I don't know that at all,” I said. “That's the big lie I've been trying to tell myself for the past ten years. I could have put the bottle in the trash bag. I could have let go of that rope when he fell in. I had a knife in the tackle box; I could have cut the boat loose and saved him. Believe me, I've gone over it a million times. I could have done a hundred things differently. But I didn't do anything.”

“You were just a kid,” Carl said.

“I could have saved him,” I said. “I had the choice to try or to watch. I chose wrong. That's all there is to that.”

“But—”

“I don't want to talk about it anymore,” I snapped.

Janet tapped me on the shoulder and I turned with a jerk. “I'm sorry, Joe,” she said, “but visiting hours are over.” I looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was ten minutes past eight. I had been talking for the entire visit, and I felt drained. My mind spun as the memory of that terrible day swirled and bounced unfettered in my head, cut loose from its moorings by Carl Iverson. I felt cheated because we had never gotten around to talking about Carl. And, at the same time, I felt a sense of relief for having told my secret to someone.

I stood and apologized to Janet for overstaying my permitted time. Then I nodded to Carl in place of saying goodbye and made my way out. As I walked out of the lounge, I paused to look back at Carl. He sat motionless, facing his reflection in the dark glass, his eyes closed tight as though holding back a deep pain, and I found myself wondering if it was the cancer again or if this time it was something else.

To calm down, I cranked rock classics from my car's beat-up speakers on the drive home. I sang along with a string of one-hit wonders until I managed to force the dark thoughts out of my head, replacing them with thoughts of the puzzle that Carl had mentioned. Sure, the idea of a puzzle intrigued me, but it was the notion that I had another excuse to spend time with Lila that made me feel better about things. When I got back to the apartment, I dug through the box and found two files that held pictures taken of the burning shed. I spent half an hour making sure I had the right pictures then I packed the files under my arm and headed to Lila's apartment.

“You like games?” I said to Lila.

“That depends,” she said. “What ya got in mind?”

Her response caught me off guard, and for a second there I thought that I detected a flirty smile. It nearly made me forget why I came. I smiled back and stumbled over myself. “I got some pictures,” I said.

She looked a bit confused, then showed me to her dining-room table with a nod of her head. “Most guys bring flowers,” she said.

“I'm not most guys,” I said. “I'm special.”

“No argument there,” she said.

I spread out a series of photographs, seven pictures in all. Of the seven, the first three showed the fire raging out of control with no firefighters on the scene yet. Those pictures were poorly framed, haphazard in the use of lighting, and one of them was terribly out of focus. The second set of photos showed the firefighters working the blaze and had been taken by a better photographer. The first of these showed the firefighters pulling a hose off the truck, the shed burning in the background. Another showed the water from the fire hose as it first hit the
shed. Two more showed the firefighters spraying water on the fire from two different angles. One of these last two pictures was the one I'd seen in the newspaper article at the library.

“So what's the game,” she said.

“These pictures here…” I said, pointing at the first three pictures. “They came from the file of a witness named Oscar Reid. He lived across the alley from Carl and the Lockwoods. He saw the flames and called 911. While he waited for the cavalry to arrive, he grabbed an old instamatic and snapped a few pictures.”

“Instead of—oh, I don't know—grabbing a water hose?”

“He told the detective that he thought he might be able to sell a picture to the newspaper.”

“A real humanitarian,” she said. “And these?” She pointed at the other four pictures.

“These were taken by an actual newspaper photographer, Alden Cain. He heard the fire call over a scanner and ran over there to get some shots.”

“Okay,” she said. “So what am I looking for?”

“Remember in grade school, the teachers used to give out pictures that looked alike but weren't? And you had to spot the differences between them?”

“That's the game?” she said.

“That's it,” I said, lining the pictures up side by side. “What do you see?”

We studied them carefully. In the early photos, flames shot out of a shed window that faced the alley and the photographer. The roof of the shed was intact, and thick black smoke rolled out of spaces where the two-by-four rafters rested on the walls. In the later photographs, the fire rose in a twisting swirl, like a whirlwind from a hole in the roof. The firefighters arrived and had just started dousing the flames with water. Cain stood in pretty much the same spot as Reid because the angles and backgrounds of the pictures were very similar.

“I don't see any anomalies,” I said, “other than the firefighters moving around.”

“Me neither,” Lila said.

“Carl said to look at things that should be the same in each picture, so don't look at the fire because that changes as it grows.”

We looked more carefully at the pictures, examining the background for any slight alteration. Other than an increase in light from the growing flames, Carl's house looked the same in every photo. Then I looked at the Lockwood house in the Reid photos: a standard two-story, blue-collar home with a small back porch, a set of three windows on the top floor, and a window on either side of the back door. I looked at the Lockwood house in the Cain photos. Again, it was brighter because of the flames, but otherwise nothing had changed. I went back and forth from one picture to another, wondering if Carl had played a joke on me.

Then Lila saw it. She lifted two pictures off the table, one by Cain and one by Reid and inspected them. “There,” she said, “in that window to the right of the back door of the Lockwood house.”

I took the pictures from her and looked at the window, going back and forth between the Reid photo and the Cain photo until I finally saw what she saw. The window to the right of the back door had a set of mini-blinds covering it from top to bottom. In the Reid picture the blinds fell to the bottom of the window. In the later picture, the one taken by Cain, the blinds had been lifted a few inches. I pulled the image closer and saw what looked like the shape of a head and maybe a face peering through the gap.

“What the hell?” I said. “Who is that?”

“That's a good question,” she said. “It looks like someone peeking out the bottom of the window.”

“Someone was in the house?” I said. “Watching the fire?”

“That's what it looks like to me.”

“Who?”

I could see Lila reaching back into her memory to conjure up the testimony of the Lockwood family. “There're only a handful of possibilities.”

“More like a shop teacher's handful,” I said.

“A shop teacher's handful?” Lila asked, looking puzzled.

“You know…he's missing some fingers…so there're fewer options.” I forced a chuckle.

Lila rolled her eyes and went back to work. “Crystal's stepfather, Douglas Lockwood, said that he and his son were at his car dealership that evening. He was doing paperwork and Danny was detailing a car. He said that they didn't get home until after the fire had been put out.”

I added what I remembered. “Crystal's mom worked the late shift at Dillard's Café,” I said.

“That's right,” Lila added, as if showing off her superior grasp of the details. “Her boss, Woody, confirmed it.”

“Her boss, Woody? You're making that up.”

“Look it up,” she smiled.

“That leaves the boyfriend, what's-his-name?”

“Andrew Fisher,” she said. “He testified that he brought Crystal home after school, drove through the alley, dropped her off, and left.”

“So where does that leave us?” I said.

Lila thought for a minute and then counted on her fingers. “I see four possibilities: first, that's not really someone peeking out the window, but I have to believe what I see, so I'm discarding that one.

“I see a peeker, too,” I said.

“Second, it's Carl Iverson—”

“Why would Carl kill her at his house and then watch the fire from the Lockwood house?”

“I didn't say these were probabilities—just possibilities. It is possible that Carl went to the Lockwood's house after he started the fire. Maybe he knew about the diary and wanted to find it. Although it makes no sense for him to start the fire before looking for the diary.”

“No sense at all,” I said.

“Third, there's a mystery man, someone who the police never thought about, someone who isn't anywhere in this box of files.”

“And fourth?”

“And fourth, someone lied to the police.”

“Someone like…Andrew Fisher?”

“It's a possibility,” Lila said with a defiant exhale. I could tell that she wanted to hold firm to her belief that Carl Iverson murdered Crystal Hagen, but I could also see her trying on these new clothes, slipping into the possibility that something had gone terribly wrong thirty years ago. We sat in silence for a while, unsure of what to make of this revelation, neither of us mentioning the tremor we felt pulse through the ground beneath our feet. It was as though we both saw the crack in the dam take shape, but we didn't understand its ramifications. It would not be long before that crack gaped open, releasing its torrent.