I turn my cell phone on and wait for it to ring, but it doesn’t. Could mean people are getting killed elsewhere in the city and the reporters flocking there have forgotten about me. Could be the police know who put the bodies in the water and don’t feel the need to let me know. Could be Tracey hasn’t noticed the ring missing on the dead girl’s finger and I’m sailing through trouble-free waters. Could be none of that. Might simply be a poor signal. Or that taking it for a swim has finally caught up with the inner components.
I go through the motions of changing gears and avoiding other cars before realizing I’m not heading home, or even to my office, but back to the cemetery where my day suddenly became interesting. Where there is death there is life—at least at the moment. Police cars are scattered across the landscape, but mostly localized by the lake. They are no longer guarding the entrance. I ignore them and head to the opposite side of the cemetery where the dead are still at peace.
I make the walk through the dark without need of a flashlight. It’s a walk I could make with my eyes closed. The grass is wet and soon the bottoms of my pants and shoes are wet.
It’s been a while since I last stood over my daughter’s grave. After her funeral, I never wanted to come back. Seeing the smooth headstone with the brass plate carved with her name and the dates hurt too much. But it hurt even more staying away, and I ended up visiting her grave two or three times a week for the first year, and less often since then, and not at all in two months now. The doctors tell me they don’t think Bridget knows that Emily is dead or even that Emily ever existed. I hope they’re right—though I’m not sure what kind of person that makes me. Emily didn’t have the good luck to become catatonic, but the bad luck to be killed: she had twice as many bones in her body broken as my wife; she hit the pavement just as hard, just as awkwardly, and just like that she was gone. No luck there at all, unless you count bad luck.
The tears don’t come as much these days. The pain is part of who I am now. Getting rid of it would be like losing a limb.
There are flowers on her grave that have wilted and died, put there I imagine by either my parents or Bridget’s parents. The coffin beneath the earth is child sized, and the mere fact there is a market for child-sized coffins in this world proves it’s a messed-up one—and for the briefest moment I think about the condition the coffin is in, whether it’s as dented and damaged as the one pulled out of the ground earlier today, or whether its smallness helped it withstand the weight of the earth above it. Then I wonder if she is even in there.
I don’t bother to tell Emily about my day because she can’t hear me. Emily is dead, and none of the romanticized ideas I have at Death Haven reach out here.
I walk toward the lake and come to a stop near the police tape. It seems that every year the people who manufacture this stuff have to add another mile to the roll to keep up with the Christchurch crime rate. A good year for them means a bad year for the rest of us. The scene looks like an archaeological dig. There are more cranes and trucks than before. Strings of lights around the edges of the tents are glowing brightly as if a pageant is going on in the middle of it all—except that here the performers are women and men in different-colored overalls marching back and forth, cataloging death along with the different types of samples that come with it. There is a mound of dirt from another coffin that has been dug up. I thank God that Emily is buried far away from this scene, and then I curse Him for making me bury her in the first place. Then I think of the irony of that statement since I know there can’t possibly be a God—or, if there is, that He abandoned this city a long time ago.
I’m about to duck under the tape when an officer who wasn’t here earlier in the day approaches me and tells me in his sternest voice that I can walk no further.
“I just want to know how things are going,” I say.
The officer gives me his practiced stone-cold glare, and tells me to read tomorrow’s paper. I feel like hitting him.
“Has anybody spoken to the caretaker yet?” I ask him.
“Listen, mate, none of this is any of your business.”
“I came to visit my daughter,” I say, about to play the sympathy card. “Her grave is here.”
His eyes narrow, and he looks like he is about to tell me that having a dead daughter doesn’t give me a free invitation to go wherever the hell I please, but slowly he seems to become aware it’s the type of comment I’d make him regret saying.
“I’m sorry, mate,” he says, “but you’ve picked a bad time to come.”
“Yeah, well, she picked a bad time to die.”
He doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing, figuring this is best, and I figure he’s right. I stay at the line of police tape, trying to make eye contact with anybody who will tell me anything, but there’s too much going on for that to happen. The officer keeps looking at me like I’m a shoplifter. I feel his eyes on my back the entire way as I walk to my car. He’s probably wondering if I’m for real.
The cemetery grounds are like a golf course, separated into many sections divided up by hedges and trees and bushes, and it’s easy to get lost in here. The main road through it branches off to these different areas, and one of the bigger branches leads to the Catholic church, which sits left of the cemetery, back some forty meters from the road. A belt of trees forms a horseshoe barrier around its sides and back, so that if you’re at the lake or even in other parts of the cemetery you might not even know it was there. This is the church that once held a ceremony for my dead little girl, but more recently gave me somewhere to serve the priest with an exhumation order for Henry Martins.
I park as close as I can to the huge oak doors that could pass entry to a fairy-tale giant and I walk up the stone steps. The wooden door on the right swings open easily and noiselessly. Inside the church the temperature seems to drop another degree with every step I take. Most of the lighting is coming from candles, with a few overhead lights dimly illuminating the chapel. There are dozens of pews, all of them empty except for one at the very front where a man is staring ahead, lost in thought, seemingly unaware or uncaring of my presence.
I walk down the aisle, letting my fingertips tap the pew backs along the way. Left and right are tapestries of Jesus and stained glass windows of Jesus and paintings of Jesus. Somewhere around here there’s probably a gift shop with coffee cups with a smiling Jesus. At the head of the church behind the altar is a large, wooden crucifix with a large, wooden Jesus carved onto it. Jesus doesn’t seem to care that he’s hanging on a slight angle, or that he’s being promoted so heavily.
Before I reach the end of the aisle one of the boards beneath me creaks, and the priest turns suddenly. He steps out from the pew and smiles at me, but after a few seconds the smile falters, and I realize how hard it must be for him to maintain his composure under the strain not just of this day but of every day. Priests don’t see the same violence that cops do, but they sure as hell hear about it—and worse. They’re the ones trying to pick up the pieces of a broken family looking to blame more than just the man or the disease that took away their loved ones.
Two years ago he was there for me. Two years ago he tried to help me pick up the pieces of my life, only I didn’t want his help. Not really. I wanted to pick up those pieces in my own way.
Father Stewart Julian, a man in his mid to late fifties who has been here for as long as I can remember, offers me his hand. He has a notepad in his other hand that he hasn’t written a thing on, and a newspaper folded on the pew where he was sitting. His soft face, gray hair, and black eyebrows give him a kind look, but at the moment he looks tired. Still, I figure in his day, if Father Julian hadn’t become a priest, he would’ve had women all over him.
“Awful day, Theo,” he says, shaking his head, proving just how awful the day really is. “Just awful.” His voice is low and easy to listen to, a voice well suited for the radio. “It’s been long and it’s already late. You wouldn’t believe how many hours I’ve had to spend talking to police. Or to families of those who have loved ones buried here. They keep calling, Theo, scared that their mothers and fathers and sons and daughters are being desecrated. Word has gotten out about the bodies in the water, and people are thinking they might be people who were buried here. The calls finally stopped an hour ago, and since then I’ve been looking for a distraction.” He waves the notepad a little. “Have you seen this?” he asks, and picks up the newspaper.
“Seen what?” I ask, pretty sure that the distraction was a hundred miles away, because that’s where Father Julian seemed to be looking before he heard me.
“This,” he says, and he points to the article.
“I’ve seen it.” It’s a newspaper article about the advertising campaign for McClintoch spring water. Promotional billboards have been erected across the country and advertising spots taken out in newspapers. The ads say, What would Jesus drink? and show Jesus turning wine into water with McClintoch spring water labels on the bottles.
“I just don’t understand,” he says, shaking his head.
“Times are changing,” I say, hoping my answer will apply here. I like giving my priest vague answers, the same way he used to give me vague answers. When my daughter was killed and my wife lay in a state close to death, he’d tell me it was part of God’s plan. “Father, I was hoping you could help me out.”
“Helping you out, Theo, has led to a very long day.”
I nod. Yes it has. “You’d rather have left things as they were?”
“Well, no, of course not. But I think I need more notice before I help you out so I can plan some holiday time.”
We sit facing each other, mimicking each other’s position with our elbows resting on the top of the pew. The pews are solid wood, worn a little around the edges, but they’ve held up over the years in the way that only expertly crafted furniture from sixty or seventy years ago can. Wooden Jesus is looking down at us, wooden nails in his wooden hands. He’s holding up well too.
“It’s been one heck of a day for me,” he says. “For all of us. Sometimes I wonder . . .” He doesn’t finish his sentence, just lets it trail off, making me think he’s wondering lots of things, and I don’t blame him. We’re all wondering lots of things. Foremost he is probably wondering where God fits into all of this.
“You’re starting to think retirement might be in the cards?”
His smile comes back for a few seconds—there are a few creases around the edges of his eyes—but then he sighs. “No, no, not yet. If I’m looking older than normal, it’s the day. It’s been a long one.”
“For all of us, Father. What can you tell me about the caretaker who helped me this afternoon?”
He cocks his head a little and pushes his shoulders back for a few seconds as if ironing out a crick in his back. “Bruce? Bruce Alderman? Why are you asking?”
“I want to talk to him.”
“Ah,” he says, and slowly shakes his head. Suddenly he doesn’t look as tired as he does sad. “You think he’s responsible. Well, I can’t tell you anything more than I’ve already told the police.”
“And what did you tell them?” I ask.
“That Bruce is a good man,” he says, “and this sort of depravity, well . . . it’s simply beyond him.”
It’s been my experience that depravity isn’t beyond as many people as we’d like to think, and I’m pretty sure Father Julian doesn’t need me to point that out to him.
I adjust my position on the pew. Well made doesn’t mean comfortable. “Did you tell them where they could find Bruce?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t know.”
“Guilt makes men run, Father.”
His head goes from shaking to nodding. “So does fear, Theo. Nobody would like to see what he saw.”
“But fear doesn’t make them steal a truck and go into hiding.”
He stops nodding. Now he just keeps his head perfectly still. “I wish I could simply ask for your trust in this, Theo. I can guarantee you, Bruce isn’t a bad kid. And he couldn’t have known those poor people were going to rise up from the lake.”
“He knew what we were digging up.”
“Of course he did. You had an exhumation order.”
“No, it was more than that. He knew we were digging up something more.”
“Something more?”
“The body we dug up wasn’t Henry Martins’s,” I tell him.
“I saw the exhumation order, Theo. I’m sure that’s who—”
“It wasn’t Martins in the coffin,” I tell him.
“But . . .” he says, and doesn’t know how to continue. Not for about five seconds, and then he says, “So where is Henry Martins? Was . . . oh, oh no, he was one of the bodies in the water, wasn’t he?”
“I don’t know that,” I tell him, “but it’s likely.”
“Then the coffin was empty?” he asks, in a tone of voice that suggests he’s hoping his question comes with a yes attached to the end.
“No. It wasn’t empty. It contained the body of a young woman by the name of Rachel Tyler.”
The look of horror on his face settles in his features so heavily I’m worried they might set there. He doesn’t look comfortable with it. In fact he looks downright sick. He reaches out and grabs the back of the pew, as if to stop himself from tipping off and falling into an abyss that is opening beneath him.
“She was murdered,” I add. “And whether your caretaker did it or not, he certainly knows something. Please, Father, you have to help me.”
He lets go of the pew, rubs his palm across the side of his face, then lifts both hands into the air as if the gesture can ward me off. “I . . . I wish I could help, but there’s nothing I can say.”
“Would you like me to bring you a photograph of Rachel? Show you what was done to her?”
The church seems to get colder as his horror turns to disgust, almost anger, and my stomach starts to knot. I wish I hadn’t said that to him. He’s too good a man to say shitty things to. This is the guy who got me through the hardest time of my life. This is the guy who would ring me every day after my daughter died and, when he couldn’t get hold of me, he’d come around to my house to make sure I wasn’t going to do anything stupid. Sometimes he’d bring me cooked meals. Sometimes he’d sit and have a beer with me. Ninety-five percent of those times we wouldn’t talk about God or religion or the Big Plan. We’d just talk about life. We’d talk about my wife and my daughter.
Before I can apologize, he stands up and looks down at me, and he doesn’t look angry, he looks disappointed, and that’s far, far worse. “That sort of parlor trick is beneath you, Theo. If I could help you, I would, just as I helped you two years ago when you were lost.”
“Please, sit back down,” I tell him.
“Rachel has nobody to speak for her. I need to do what I can,” I tell him.
“She has God.”
“God let her down.”
He sits back down. He breathes out heavily. “You must have faith, Theo.”
“Faith lets everybody down.”
“People let themselves down.”
I want to argue, but there is no argument a priest hasn’t heard and isn’t ready for. Their answers may not make sense, but they are a doctrine, there to be repeated over and over, as if the very repetition makes their case. I could take a photograph out of my wallet and show him my wife and my daughter, but of course Father Julian remembers them. He knew them before they were killed and after. I could ask him where God was during their accident, but Father Julian would have some dogmatic answer that God-loving and God-fearing people love to use—most likely the generic God works in mysterious ways, which I want to scream at every time I hear it.
“You’re right,” I concede, “and I shouldn’t have said that about showing you a picture of Rachel. But you need to help me find your caretaker. He saw us digging up something that made him run.”
“I still find that hard to believe,” Father Julian says, but I’m starting to convince myself that the look on his face suggests it isn’t that hard for him at all. “Unfortunately, Theo, as I keep saying, I don’t know where he is.”
“Start by telling me where he lives.”
“The police have already been there and, to be honest, I’m not comfortable giving you information. You’re not a cop anymore. This isn’t your investigation.”
“No, this has become my investigation. Two years ago I had an excuse to raise Henry Martins’s coffin and I never did. That means . . .”
“I know what that means. You think that if there are other people out there in coffins they shouldn’t be in, then you could have prevented it. Maybe this is true.”
“It is true,” I say, a little shocked at how quickly he has come to this conclusion.
“Two years ago,” he repeats. “Exactly two years ago?”
“Pretty much,” I tell him, knowing where he’s about to go.
“Then you know you can’t blame yourself,” he says, but his eyes seem to betray his real feelings. “The accident—that was two years ago, correct? Was it the same time?”
“I still should have done more,” I say. “But I lost my focus.”
“You lost your family,” he says. “And you lost control. This isn’t your fault, Theo.”
“There are going to be more girls out there in those coffins, Father. Three of them. I feel it. I can’t make it right, but I also can’t let it go.”
He looks down at the floor as if there is some internal debate warring inside his head. That debate rages on for almost a minute. I don’t interrupt him. When he looks up he seems to have aged a few years. He thinks this day is hard on him, but if I drove him to Rachel Tyler’s house tomorrow to meet her parents he’d realize his day was easy in comparison.
“I suppose you could talk to his father,” he says. “He may be able to offer you something.”
I recall the article that I read about Sidney Alderman before I left my office for the morgue. The old man’s retirement last year had made the newspaper, but it wasn’t really news, it was just one of those human interest stories that are interesting to the people who knew Alderman and not to anyone else.
“Closer than you can imagine,” he says. “Promise me you’ll be careful. Promise me you’re looking for Bruce to question him, not punish him.”
I shrug. “Punish him? I don’t follow you.”
Again Father Julian sighs, then slowly shakes his head. “Don’t take the law into your own hands, Theo. Vengeance is God’s, not yours—you know that. You know that better than anybody,” he says.
He follows me to the church doors and gives me directions to where I can find Sidney Alderman. I thank him and he wishes me a good night, and again he tells me to be careful. I tell him I’m always careful.
He shakes my hand before he leaves, and when he takes his away I see that he is shaking. Then he disappears back through the doors. God’s working day is still not over.