Authors: Michael Koryta
About
a hundred yards from where Harrison was working, I found an enormous monument
with a granite lion resting on top. The lion was lying down with its front paws
stretched forward, its head up. The carving job was exquisite. I couldn't
imagine how long something like that took. The name on the stone read simply
DAYKIN. No first name, no dates. It was probably a family monument, I decided
as I looked around the other stones and saw the Daykin name repeatedly. The
patriarch making his claim.
I sat
in the grass beneath the lion and leaned back until my head rested against the
stone. Out across the way, Harrison's weeder buzzed and his shoulders swung
back and forth methodically. What a place for a murderer to work.
That
thought took me back to Harrison's apartment, to the night Ken and I had made
our initial visit and Harrison first told us he worked in a cemetery, told us
that it suited him. Ken's response—
how unsettling.
"How
unsettling." I said it aloud and laughed. Man, what a line. How
unsettling. I laughed again, softer this time, an under-the-breath chuckle, and
then I laid my head back against the stone again and closed my eyes and tried
to find a moment of peace. It was there, sitting upright in a graveyard with my
head on a piece of granite, that I finally fell asleep.
I
woke only minutes later, but it felt longer than that, and I came around slowly,
like that moment of awakening was at the end of a long, difficult climb. When
my eyes opened it took me a second to place myself, and then I realized that
Harrison was out of view and I could no longer hear the sound of his machine. I
pushed off the stone and looked around and saw him not ten feet away, standing
with his arms folded across his chest, watching me.
"Hello,
Lincoln," he said. "I'm going to assume this is not a
coincidence."
I
thought about getting to my feet, but what was the point— Instead, I just
leaned forward, rested my arms on my knees, and looked up at him. "Great
place to work."
"I
like it."
I
nodded up at the lion above me. "Hell of a cat, too."
"Do
you know who he was—"
"Daykin—"
I shook my head.
"A
railroad man," Harrison said. "Specifically, a conductor. He was one
of the conductors on Lincoln's funeral train. John Daykin. This is one of my
favorite monuments in the cemetery."
"You
know them all—"
"More
than you'd think," he said.
"You
keep the graves clean," I said, "and Mark Ruzity carves them. Can you
explain that—"
"Alexandra
taught us the importance of honoring the dead. Mark took up the carving as his
way of doing that. By the time I left Whisper Ridge, he'd met people out here,
and got me the job. Not so sinister, really. I hate to disappoint you."
"You
know that he's talked to Sanabria—" I said. "There's a photo of it,
Harrison. Ruzity and Sanabria together around the time your beloved Alexandra
and Joshua disappeared. You were on the phone with Sanabria then,
yourself."
He
didn't respond. I looked away from him and out across the sea of weathered
stones left to mark lives long finished.
"They
haven't made an arrest in Ken's murder yet, Harrison."
"If
I could tell them who to arrest, I would."
"Yeah—"
"Why
are you here— Why would you sit here and watch me work—"
"I
need an answer," I said, "to just one question, Harrison. There are
so many questions I think you can answer, but I need just this one: Why me— Why
did you have to come to me— I ignored your first letter, so you wrote me more.
I ignored those, so you came to see me. Why—"
"You've
already asked me that."
"I
know it. This time I'd like you to tell me the truth."
He
sighed and lowered his weed trimmer to the ground, straightened again, and took
a rag off his belt and ran it over his face and neck, soaking up the sweat from
the morning's rapidly rising heat.
"It
was the truth then, and it will be the truth this time, too," he said.
"I came to you because of what I'd read. Because of what I hoped you would
be."
"What
was that—" I said. "Supposing I believed you, which I do not, what
was it that you thought I would be, Harrison—"
"Someone
who knew how to see the guilty."
"What—"
"Not
how to find the guilty, Lincoln. How to see them. How to… consider them. The
people behind the crime. I'm a murderer. I get that. Well, Joshua Cantrell was
murdered, and not by me. I wanted to know who did it—and why."
"That's
not what you asked me to do."
"No,
and that was my mistake. I held on to the truth when I shouldn't have, but I
wanted to get you to the house."
"Why
was that so damn special— Why did I have to see the house—"
He
spread his hand, waved it around us. "You see all these stones— What are
they—"
I sat
and stared up at him, searching his face and trying, yet again, to come to a
judgment about him. I wanted to believe him.
"What
would you call them—" he said. "These stones."
Graves.
"That's
beneath the stone. What are the—"
"Markers,
monuments."
He
nodded. "Joshua Cantrell has one. You've seen it. That house is his
monument. She left it for him, Lincoln. Something to sit in his memory."
It
was the same comparison Ken Merriman had made. The sort of comparison that came
easily when a house had been outfitted with an epitaph.
"Home
to dreams," I said.
"Yes.
Dreams she'd shared with her husband. It's important to remember the dead. Alexandra
understood that, and so do I. It's why I work here, Lincoln—and before you ask
the question, yes, I think of the man I killed. I remember him. Every single
day, I think of him, and of what I took from him and those who loved him. It's
important to remember."
"You
know that she left the house so Joshua would be remembered. You're sure of
that."
He
nodded.
"Do
you know who killed him—"
He
shook his head. I watched for the lie and couldn't find it.
"I
wanted to know," he said. "That's why I came to you. You wish I never
had, and I'm sorry about that. I picked you because I hoped you'd see past my
prison sentence, see past my crime. The police can't do that. Neither could
you, and that's all right. I took a chance with you. It didn't work out.
Sometimes they don't."
"It
didn't work out for
you
— Ken's dead, Harrison."
"That
wasn't me. I'm sorry about it, more sorry than I can probably make you believe,
but it was not me who killed him."
A car
passed on the road, circling slowly through the cemetery, and neither Harrison
nor I spoke until it was gone.
"Why
were you talking to Dominic Sanabria—" I said.
"When—"
"Any
of the times. You called him when Cantrell was killed, you called him when the
body was found, you called him just before Ken was killed."
He
hesitated before saying, "At first I was trying to get information out of
him. Trying to get in touch with Alexandra."
"What
did you tell him the day before Ken was killed—"
"I
told him that you were done with the case. He'd called me earlier to say that
his sister and her memory needed to be left alone. That was when I asked you to
quit. I was worried for you, and I didn't want to be the one who put you in
harm's way. I didn't trust Dominic."
"All
of that might be believable, Harrison, but there's one call missing in that
explanation. Why did you call him when the body was found— When it was found
and
before
it was identified."
He
looked uncomfortable, failed to meet my eyes for the first time. "I really
can't speak of that."
"You
piece of shit." I shook my head in disgust. "You know things that
could help, and you won't say them. You don't really want to see anything
resolved, don't give a damn about Ken or Cantrell or anybody else. It's all
some sort of sick game to you."
"It's
not that at—"
"Then
tell the rest of it!"
I got to my feet, shouted it at him.
He
stood in silence and watched me. I waited for him to speak, and he did not.
After a few minutes of staring at him, I shook my head again.
"I
made a promise," he said, his voice very soft, "to someone who
mattered more to me than anyone I've ever known. Can you understand that— I
gave my
word."
"To
Alexandra— She's gone, Harrison. Gone, and maybe dead. She's been gone for
twelve years. You want to let your promise to her prevent justice—"
No
confirmation, no denial, no response.
"Why
do you have such loyalty to that woman—" I said, weariness in my voice.
He
didn't answer right away. I stood beside the Daykin monument, resting one hand
on the lion's side, and I waited. Finally he spoke.
"It's
never really quiet in prison," he said. "People think of it as a
quiet place, solitary, but it's not. Doors bang, and guards walk around, and
the other prisoners talk and shout and laugh and cough. It's loud all the time.
Even at night, you hear sounds of other people. You're never really
alone."
He
paused, and I didn't say anything. Another car drove past.
"You're
never alone," he said again, "and it's not an easy place to be. It
shouldn't be, right— It's a place where you're sent to be punished, a place
that's supposed to painful. You walk around with other murderers, with rapists,
drug dealers. Some violent people, some crazy people. You're one of them, and you've
got a role to play. You've got to seem more violent and more crazy than them.
You got to be the
craziest
man in the place, understand— Because
otherwise you will not survive."
He
wet his lips, shifted in the grass.
"I'd
been in for four years before I decided I couldn't finish. I just gave up, knew
there was no way I could make it to the other side. There was a cleaning
detail, and I got assigned to that, and I started stealing Drano. They had a
big bottle, I knew I'd never get that out, so I emptied toothpaste tubes and
filled them with the stuff, brought them back to my cell. You have any idea how
hard it is to fill a toothpaste tube with Drano— Takes dedication, I assure
you. I waited until I had three of them filled. I did
not
want to have
too little to do the job. I thought there would probably be enough in those
three tubes to kill me."
"You're
still here," I said. "So it wasn't enough—"
"I
think it would have been. I didn't take it."
"Why
not—"
"It
got quiet," he said. "The night I was going to take it, the place got
quiet. For one hour. I can tell you that almost exactly. I was waiting, and I
was scared, and then it got quiet. I had one silent hour. I couldn't believe
it. Nobody was talking, or moving, or screaming, and in that hour I remembered,
for the first time in a long time, that this was not all that I was. I'd killed
somebody, and it was a terrible thing, and I was in this terrible place and I
would be for years to come, but that was not all I was. If I committed suicide
in there, though, if I died in that place, then it would be different. That
would be my identity, all the world would ever know or remember about me, that
I was another murderer who died in the place where murderers belong."
He
took the rag off his belt again, ran it over his face, soaked up the fresh
sweat on his forehead.
"I
told that story to Alexandra Sanabria a few weeks before I was released,"
he said. "She put out her hand and took mine, and she promised me that we
would take that one hour and make it my life. That everything I had been and
pretended to be aside from it would no longer matter."