At four in the morning I give up on sleep and sit at the table drinking coffee. I keep going over what I’ve just done, as if by picturing each detail there might still be the chance to go back and change it.
Two years ago, after I spoke to Quentin James, I slept like the dead. I got home and made some dinner, I watched some TV, and an hour after midnight I went to bed. It was a new day and I was a new man, and when I slipped between the sheets I closed my eyes and pictured my family and I fell asleep. There were no nightmares. No questions. No guilt. I remember waiting for the guilt. I went and spoke to Father Julian and confessed my sins and waited for it to kick in, but it didn’t. I slept like a baby that night.
But not this time.
I drive back to the cemetery. The night is cold and daylight is still a few hours away. On the way I throw yesterday’s clothes into a dumpster, just as hundreds of guilty men before me have done. At the gravesite where Rachel Tyler was dug up I stand next to the corner of the lake and I think about the choices that have made me who I am. Then I realize they were choices made for me. Quentin James started me down this road. He gave me no option but to drive him out to the middle of nowhere and leave him behind. What else could I have done? Let him serve his time in jail so he could kill again when they set him free? Fuck those people who think that alcoholism is a disease. Cancer is a disease. Tell people with cancer that alcoholism is a disease and see what their views are. It’s all about choice. People choose to drink. They don’t choose to get leukemia. So James had only himself to blame. He chose to keep drinking. He could have chosen to stop. Could have chosen to get help. He chose the path I took him down.
I kick a clump of dirt into the water and watch it disappear. Do I have limits? Do I kill the next person I suspect is a murderer? Hell, what about the next time I have to stand in line somewhere and I get sick of waiting? Gun down those ahead of me? Shoot the guy servicing my car because he tries to stiff me on the bill?
The crime scene still has tape fluttering in the breeze. It isn’t really a crime scene. It’s more of a depraved scene, where the dead were replaced by a different dead. The digging equipment has gone. The tents have been taken down. The grass has been trampled flat. The circus that came to town has left. I stare out at the lake. I wonder how deep it goes, and how it was down there in the water for the divers. I go over the last two days, trying to filter everything until the answers are clear, but if there are any answers I keep missing them.
When I move away from the water, I don’t look back. I reach the caretaker’s grave and I stand next to the turned-over dirt, and I listen to the wind and the early morning and I listen for a voice coming from beneath my feet. There is none. I drive to the church. I leave my car running and walk up to the big doors and start banging on them, breaking the promise I made to Father Julian that I’d never return. There is no response, so I walk around the side and start banging on a much smaller door.
Father Julian yells at me to hang on. A few moments later the door unlocks, then swings open. He is wearing a pair of faded pajamas and a robe. His hair is stuck up on one side.
“Theo. What are you doing here? Do you know what time it is?”
“You have to help me,” I tell him.
“Help you? I’ve done enough of that lately.”
“Please, this is important. Sidney Alderman, was it him?”
“I can’t . . .”
I reach out and grab hold of his arm, and rest my other hand on his shoulder. I grip him tightly and pull him forward so our faces are almost touching. “Was he the one?”
“Theo—”
“If he was, you don’t have to tell me. You wouldn’t be breaking the confessional seal,” I say, and I can hear the desperation in my voice. “But if he isn’t, if he didn’t confess, you can tell me. God won’t care about that.”
“What have you done, Theo? What have you done?”
“Tell me.”
He looks into my eyes, because at this distance there is no alternative. Slowly he then starts to shake his head. “Go home, Theo.”
“Not until you tell me.”
He reaches beneath my grip and pushes me in the chest. I stumble back and don’t fall down, but I feel like I’ve fallen anyway. Back into the abyss.
“Bruce buried those girls for somebody,” I say. “Was it his father?”
“This has gone on long enough.”
“Was it for you, Father?” I ask, unsure where the question is coming from. “Did you kill those girls? Was Bruce burying them for you? Sidney said to ask you about it. He said you knew a lot more than you were saying. How deeply are you involved? Did you kill those girls? Or are you just happy to protect the man who did?”
“Get out of here, Theo. Get the hell out of here or I’m calling the police. I mean it.”
He takes a step back and slams the door.
I stand in the same spot for half a minute, wondering if the exchange really happened the way I recall it—whether Father Julian had Bruce bury those girls—and questioning what insanity has come over me to think such a thing.
I’m sure he watches me from somewhere inside the church as I make my way back around to the car. I feel dizzy, and I feel sick, and my stomach feels hollow, as if I haven’t eaten in months. I climb into my car, and I drive away from the graveyard, certain now that the man I killed was certainly one sick son of a bitch, but he was also innocent of murder. I drive away, thinking how much right now I could really do with a drink.