The house still smells of alcohol and the air is damp. The furniture bugs me in a way that furniture shouldn’t be able to do. I want to set fire to the place. Pour gasoline all over the walls and floors and the clawed-up lounge suite and turn the whole fucking lot to ash. Preferably with Sidney Alderman in here. Preferably with him gagged and tied and very aware of what is going on.
Only he isn’t here. He’s off somewhere with my daughter doing God knows what. Burying her somewhere, I guess. Or dumping her in another lake or a river or an ocean.
The photo albums have all disappeared. It tells me Alderman knew I was here and was figuring I’d come back. I start looking through the house again. I go through his drawers and his cupboards, but I don’t find anything useful, because anything useful the police will already have found. I pull everything apart. I dump files and trash and books on the floor as I go, but there’s nothing. I push everything aside roughly, making a mess, enjoying the process of damage. It’s not enough to take away any of the pain, but for the short term it will have to do.
I head back out to my car and grab the charger for my cell phone. I plug it into a socket next to Alderman’s toaster and watch as my phone starts to power up. I leave it charging while I check the bedrooms. Bruce Alderman said the proof was under his bed, but he may as well have said that a year ago. The two bedrooms in use have completely distinct personalities. It’s obvious to see which one belongs to the old man and which to the son. The father’s bedroom has wedding pictures up on the wall. It has underwear scattered across the floor. It has a busted-up clock radio lying on a pile of old newspapers. There are booze bottles stacked along the windowsills. The curtains are grimy and old. The bed hasn’t been made; the pillow case is blackened in the middle from sweat and dirt and whatever product the old man once ran through his hair. The loss of his wife was so hard on the guy that he never recovered. He lost control of his own life, and ten years later he’s still losing control.
I walk into Bruce’s room. It’s like walking into a cheap motel room that prides itself on doing the best with what it has. The bed has been made. Books are stacked almost neatly on the bedside table. Three pairs of shoes are lined up beneath the window. Sneakers, dress shoes, work shoes. I look under the bed. Whatever evidence was there has gone. I check the closet and go through the pockets of whatever is hanging there. Then the drawers. I’m not tidier than the police. I pull the drawers all the way out and check beneath them for any taped-up envelopes or photographs he has hidden there. But there’s nothing. I pick up and riffle through the books. Nothing falls out of them. I check the titles on the spines. He read a mixture of fantasy and sci-fi, but there doesn’t appear to be any serial killer novels or FBI handbooks about how to avoid getting caught. There are shoeboxes stacked in his wardrobe that are full of mostly junk—a Rubik’s cube, small plastic Smurfs, old coins, even some old shoes.
I check under the bed again, just in case, but there’s nothing there at all. Just dust. Which doesn’t make sense. People always squirrel crap away under their beds. Bruce Alderman has nothing, except the thick dust, and there are no clean patches where items have been removed. I drag the bed out from the wall.
The corner of the carpet is easy to pull up, because it’s been pulled up before. Plenty of times, I’m guessing, which is why he never stored anything under the bed, because then he would have had to drag stuff out and stack it up and then unstack it and push everything back, all of that to gain access to his secret hiding place. There are four A4-sized envelopes side by side under the carpet, each one very thin. I pull the carpet all the way back, but there is nothing else.
I spill the contents of the first envelope onto the bed. I open the other three. They’re all the same. Different articles cut from different newspapers, nearly twenty of them covering the different women. A separate envelope for each of the four girls. The dates begin two years ago and end two days ago. There are articles for the three girls I’ve identified, and for the fourth one I haven’t. Her name is Jennifer Bowen. I now know all four names.
Four women missing from Christchurch, but the world kept on spinning. Nobody took a moment to figure out what in the hell was going on. Four women from four different backgrounds, all of them young—born within five years of each other—and no one made the connection. They didn’t make it because they didn’t want to. The articles are full of suggestions. The girls were wayward. They were runaways. The articles about Rachel Tyler suggest she fought with her boyfriend. They hint that the boyfriend could have been responsible. They mention the dead grandmother and lead a path for the reader to believe she could have run away because she was upset. They suggest lots of things and confirm nothing, just throwing out ideas in the hope that if they cast a wide enough net they might cover something correctly.
I slide all the articles from all of the envelopes into the one. They don’t do much to back Bruce Alderman’s claim that he didn’t kill these women. All four of them could have died in here. And Emily? Did Bruce’s father bring Emily back here before driving her away? Did he carry her corpse and rest her on the couch while he packed some things together? No. He would have dumped her in the trunk of his car. He wouldn’t have been careful about it.
I take my phone and step outside. The lake, the church, the land of the dead—none of it can be seen from anywhere on this property, not unless I was to take the ladder out of the shed and climb up on the roof or scale the fence. I do the latter.
The property backs onto the cemetery. The police, the excavations, the canvas tents, and crime scene techies—these things don’t reach Alderman’s house. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to grow up in a house where the view over your back fence was of trees and granite headstones. Surely it had to be disturbing. Surely it couldn’t have been healthy. I wonder if this environment is what made Bruce Alderman a sick man. Whether it made Sidney Alderman a sick man. Or whether it was the loss of their mother and wife that made them so.