After the Journal article ran, Wolski called to say he’d gotten an anonymous tip from a caller who’d seen Dee in the Menomonee Falls cemetery the day she left Leif and me in Riverwest.
“Wolski wants to know if we want to go out and canvass the cemetery,” Peter said. He was holding the phone against his chest and winding the cord around his forearm. By this point, we had begun to sink into a very specific, very desperate kind of existence.
“We?” I asked. “Jesus, isn’t that his fucking job?”
Ma and I were eating strawberry rhubarb pie at the kitchen table. She pushed crumbs around with the tines of her fork. Lately, it had been difficult to get her to eat anything except pie. Peter eyed Ma with her half-eaten plate. He shrugged.
“Let’s go today,” Ma said. “This is our first real lead since—” She paused. They both turned to me, and I realized what a disappointment I’d been to them. They’d hoped to find Dee holed away with me in Riverwest, or they’d hoped I’d know more about the night she disappeared, the days and the weeks after. I was crushed that I knew only slightly more than they did.
“We can be there in an hour,” Peter said into the phone. “Any chance of getting a second detective out there?” He nodded grimly; I knew Wolski had told him there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of it.
Ma tossed the rest of her pie in the trash can.
The cemetery was well kept, thoroughly manicured, and even in late July, very green. There wasn’t a fallen tombstone, or a brown patch of grass, or a wayward plastic bag in the whole sprawling place. The tombstones sprouted from the ground in straight even rows. Ma and Suze and Peter and I walked the winding footpaths and sweated in the afternoon heat. Peter said to look for anything suspicious, but there wasn’t a single leaf of grass out of place. This was the kind of cemetery where visitors were encouraged to plant flowers at the foot of a grave rather than bringing their own, because cut flowers browned and needed to be collected as trash. But what then could people bring when they went to visit a grave? I always found it comforting to have something in my hands when we went to visit Dad’s grave. I liked to bring a worry stone that I’d worn smooth over the course of the year. Here, I didn’t see mementos at any of the graves. If there was something out of place, we would see it. At the top of a gentle hill, we saw a funeral underneath two big oaks. A man, a woman, and a child stood graveside while the undertakers lowered a heavy metal casket into the ground with a crank. The man held a shovel like he’d never had cause to use one. There was a priest reading from some papers, but we were too far away to hear the words.
Wolski came late and he came alone. We’d covered almost the entire area when he found us peering down on the burial below. He half jogged over to us, I suppose to give an air of urgency, or because he felt awkward walking while we all watched his approach. Suze lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his direction.
“I don’t think we can smoke here,” Wolski said.
Suze inhaled deeply.
“We’re done,” Peter said.
Wolski shook his head. “I was just speaking to a few of the groundskeepers—do you know who runs this place?” Wolski was often nauseatingly rhetorical. “This guy’s parents.” He held up the terrible sketch of Frank I’d helped the police artist, a buddy of Wolski’s, draw a few weeks back. I didn’t know if it was my memory or the artist’s lack of skill, but the sketch was . . . disturbing. It was accurate enough, but he looked a lot less sleazy in the sketch than he had in person. Wolski was smug; he bobbed his head. “I was just speaking with them. They said his name isn’t Frank, it’s Anthony, but they call him Tony. And as far as they know, he lives in Ohio now.”
At the bottom of the hill, the man tossed a shovelful of dirt over the top of the casket, then accidentally dropped the shovel into the grave. The shovel clattered against the casket, and the noise shook a few birds from the oak trees. The child screamed, and the woman clamped her hand tightly over the child’s mouth; she rubbed his upper arm vigorously but would not hug him. The child screamed louder and shook the rest of the birds from the trees. He kept on until the man hit the child and he stopped. I thought suddenly of Leif. We hadn’t spoken for a week or more. The birds flew from the trees and toward the undertakers’ house. There was a thin gray line of ashy smoke funneling from a brick building and into the sky.
“What’s that building over there?” I asked.
Wolski followed my gaze. “The crematorium.”