Cemetery Lake: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “Emma,” he says. “Her name is Emma.”

  “My daughter’s name is Emily,” I say, as if she’s still alive. At first I’m not sure why I say it, but then it comes to me. I want to live. I don’t want to die out here. I want the chance to make things right.

  “Emma. Emily,” he says. He doesn’t expand on the thought, but he’s really thinking about it. Thinking hard. Maybe drawing some parallels between the two names.

  “I still have a wife,” I add. “Her name is Bridget.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry about what happened to your daughter,” he says, “but that makes what you did even worse. Don’t you get that? It doesn’t make me sympathize with you, it only makes me angrier.”

  “And so it should.”

  “There you go again,” he says. “You’re trying to diminish the moment.”

  “Are you really a lawyer?”

  “What?”

  “You talk like one,” I tell him.

  “I’m a divorce lawyer.”

  “And when you came to the prison, you gave them your name, right?”

  “I had to so I could bail you out. But they don’t know I’m the one who brought you out here.”

  “You don’t think they’ll figure it out? You don’t think they’ll work out that the lawyer, who they’ll soon realize is the father of the girl I hurt, was the last person to have seen me? It’ll take them all of about thirty seconds to figure out. And you went into town and bought yourself some black-market weapons. That shows premeditation. That’s bad for you.”

  He thinks about it for a few seconds. “Fuck,” he says.

  “See, you’re being driven by emotion, not logic. You should have known that. It’s a pretty simple equation, and you looked right over it. Don’t do this. Don’t throw away your life.”

  He takes a step forward. He keeps the gun pointing at my face. But the cold and the nerves are too much for him to control, and his hand is shaking badly. His breathing is ragged. He’s fighting with the same decision I had back when the roles were reversed, only it was a decision I didn’t fight with. I was comfortable holding a gun. I just aimed and fired.

  “I’m going to do it,” he says.

  “You’ve got no argument from me.”

  “Shut up, damn it. Let me think.”

  I stay on my knees and I force myself to keep looking at the gun, and it terrifies me. His face is taut with pain, his mouth forms a grimace as he runs through the scenarios in his mind. One, he walks away with blood on his hands; the other, he walks away feeling a little unsatisfied. I decide against giving him any more advice. He’s a big boy. He can make up his own mind. As I wait, the sounds of the forest fill in the silence. Birds, mostly. The breeze shifting branches around. A falling pinecone cracks against a fallen branch somewhere.

  It takes him a minute. It’s painful to watch. Painful to stare at the gun as it rises and falls slightly as his arm shakes. The entire time I keep thinking he’s going to pull the trigger, or accidently pull it. In the end he takes a step back. Then another. But he keeps the gun pointing at me.

  “If she dies,” he says, “we’re coming back out here.”

  He backs away, turns, and then I am alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I lie on my side and bring my knees to my chest and squirm around to bring my hands up under my feet. It doesn’t work. I roll around, but the plastic ties are securing my wrists, and there isn’t enough room to stretch my arms all the way around. I get back to my knees and sit down, stretch my legs out, and start rubbing them back and forth across a mossy rock. The moss scrapes away and exposes an edge for me to saw against. It takes only about a minute for the binding to snap through. I do the same with my wrists, then pull the syringe needle out of my arm. I toss it on the ground next to my busted cell phone.

  I head in the same direction as the lawyer. My clothes are damp and cold. Donovan Green, if that’s his real name, may not have finished me off with a bullet, but that doesn’t mean I’m getting out of here alive. Unless I can rub some bandages together and make a fire, I’m going to freeze to death out here. The trees and ferns brush at me, scraping my hands and snagging my clothes. Small grazes lead to cuts and then to bleeding. My head is still throbbing, and my chest is sore from the Taser barbs. My hand hurts the most: the finger with the ripped-off nail feels as if it’s on fire.

  The lawyer has left a path, and for a moment I wonder if Father Julian would suggest this is the path I created two years ago, the path in which there can be no redemption. I keep my eyes on the ground and follow the twin lines that have been cut into the dirt by my dragging feet. I figure he would have parked nearby, not wanting to drag me far in these conditions, and a moment later I hear a car pass by. I pick up the pace and break through some trees and onto a road. Red taillights are disappearing in the distance.

  The mud has had a snowball effect on my shoes, and I kick and scrape them against a tree to break it off. With no other options, I dig my hands into my pockets and start walking. No other cars come past as I walk in the same direction as the one I saw. I still don’t even know where I am. My teeth are chattering and every minute or so my body gives an involuntary spasm that lasts a couple of seconds. Quentin James would have had a similar walk if I’d have let him, except his would have been in nicer conditions. I brought him out on a sunny day, a warm day, as sure as hell a nicer day to die than today.

  I reach an intersection and a couple of cars go by. I wipe my sleeve at my face to clean away some blood. I start to have an idea where I am. Nobody pulls over to offer me a lift, and I don’t put my bite-scarred thumb out to ask for one.

  The road heads toward the city and, eventually, toward home. It’d be a fifteen-minute trip if I was driving. Walking, it’s going to take me a few hours. At least. If I was driving I’d be doing eighty kilometers an hour out here. I figure at the very least I deserve to be walking. At the very least I’m lucky to be alive. And there’s that word again. Luck.

  The day becomes evening and the evening is dark. The rain begins again. It gets heavy for a while and washes the mud and dirt down my body before lessening to a drizzle. My joints grow increasingly numb. My feet feel like slabs of ice. The walk is a sobering end to a day and to a way of life.

  It’s almost midnight when I get home. I don’t have my keys and I hadn’t even thought about them until now. They’re in my car, and my car is in an impound lot somewhere, or maybe a wrecker’s yard. I sit down on the front step and lean against the door. I’m exhausted. The soles of my shoes have small stones and slivers of glass buried into the tread. I feel like I could fall asleep here. I feel like I want to cry.

  I rest for a few minutes before getting up and walking through to the backyard. I grab a rag and a roll of duct tape from the garden shed, wrap the rag around a small rock, put the tape across the window to muffle the sound, then smash the glass.

  While the shower warms up I find a bottle of bourbon and sit down in the living room. I wonder what Quentin James would have done had I let him walk home. Would he have taken a drink? I figure he’d have needed one. Would he have kept on drinking until one day he killed again? I carry the bottle into the kitchen. I grab a glass. I fill it to the brim and then I pour the rest of the bottle down the sink. I scour the house for more bottles. There are plenty of them, a few with just enough in them to make me feel warm if I allowed it. I tip them all down the sink, and then I drop every single empty in a recycling bin outside. I head back inside and stare at the one glass I filled.

  I strip out of my clothes and throw them into the washing machine. The shower is still going, steam flooding into the hallway. I walk around the house, picking up other clothes I’ve worn over the last few months and I stuff as much as I can into the machine. I set it going. I stand in the kitchen with only a towel wrapped around me. I stare at the drink. I put my hand on the glass. It’s cold and smooth. Just one more drink and then I’m done. That’s all.

  I have it halfway up to my l
ips when knocking comes from the front door. I set the glass back onto the counter. I head down the hallway. A red and blue light is arcing through the windows and lighting the walls. There are two possibilities. One I can live with. It means one of my neighbors made a call because they heard somebody breaking in. The second one means Emma, the sixteen-year-old girl I hurt last night, has died. Maybe I poured away all that bourbon too soon. I have the urge to run back to the kitchen and grab that last drink.

  Instead I head to the door. I’m as nervous as hell when I open it. It’s Landry.

  “You’re going to have to come with us, Tate,” he says, ruling out possibility number one.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she,” I say.

  “What? No, no, it’s not about that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Just get dressed, Tate,” he says. “We’ll talk about it at the station.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “I said we’ll talk about it at the station.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you unless you tell me what this is about,” I tell him.

  He sighs. “It’s about Father Julian.”

  “What? Look, this is bullshit. I haven’t been near him all day.”

  “You’re coming with us.”

  “It’s true. I’ve been in jail half the damn day, and I spent the other half with my lawyer. He can vouch for me.”

  “Tate, it’s simple. Don’t stand there and pretend you don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  He sighs again, this time much deeper, and this time he slowly shakes his head to stress just how tiring he is finding me. “Come on, do you really want to play this game?”

  “Humor me.”

  “Okay, fine. We went to speak to Father Julian this afternoon. You remember Father Julian, right? He’s the man you’ve been stalking? Well, we were going to ask him if you were there last night on account of the fact we’re pretty sure you were. And I’m sure he would have said yes.”

  “Would have?”

  “See, that’s the problem, Tate. He’s dead. Somebody murdered him last night. And right now my money is on that somebody being you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I try to figure out what he’s saying. I don’t even know when last night was. Technically it’s just been; it’s after midnight now. But he doesn’t mean today. He means yesterday. Technically. He’s talking about twenty-four hours ago. A lot has happened since then. It feels like two days have passed since I followed Father Julian from the church, but it’s only been one. Hell, it’s probably only a few minutes either side of that.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to need to come with us, Tate,” he says.

  I look down at my towel. I look at my dirty feet and the lines of blood on my chest. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Landry looks me up and down. “No?”

  “No.”

  “You’re saying even though he had a restraining order against you, even though you were picked up at the church the morning of the day he died breaking that order, even though you were caught on film there yesterday evening, and even though you crashed your car, drunk, a few minutes from the church around the same time Father Julian died, that you had nothing to do with it?”

  I don’t bother answering. It’s hard to defend yourself when you’re wearing only a towel. But I figure Landry or one of his buddies must have been dropping by the house on and off all day since I was signed out of the courthouse in the afternoon. That means Julian wasn’t found till around then at the earliest. Any earlier and I’d never have been released.

  “Put on some clothes, Tate. You’re coming with us.”

  “I’m calling my lawyer.” I think of Donovan Green, but can’t really imagine him being happy to take my call.

  “Get him to meet you at the station.”

  I have nothing to put on except a pair of shorts and a T-shirt that have been building up dust in the corner of the bedroom. Everything else is in the washing machine. I throw on a jacket and my running sneakers. We step outside. It’s cold. I can see faces in neighboring windows.

  I’m put in the back of the car and driven away, and this time I’m handcuffed. Landry stays behind with some others to go through my house. At the station I’m reacquainted with the interrogation room. They lock me in, and the call I get to make to my lawyer isn’t brought up again, but that’s okay. I haven’t been having a good day with lawyers. I rest my head on my arms and close my eyes, knowing I’m going to be waiting here a while.

  Landry comes in an hour later, and he has Schroder with him. That means one of them is going to be my friend while the other puts on the pressure. I already know who will play which role, and I figure they know I’ll know that too. They set up a video camera and point it so it covers all three of us. I can hear it recording. Schroder sits opposite me and Landry stands. It’s pretty cold in here, especially as I’m dressed for summer.

  Schroder sits a folder on the table and opens the cover. There are photographs of Father Julian in there. His head has been beaten in, blood all over his face and neck. His clothing is disheveled. One eye is open, but the other is closed because of the way his face is pressing against the floor. He doesn’t look like he died easy. Not like I could have earlier on today out in the woods. His open eye has a tiny pool of blood in it. Schroder starts to lay the photos out on the table. There is a close-up of Father Julian’s mouth. His lips are open; his teeth are exposed and bloody. Behind them is a deep darkness.

  “Some ground rules first,” Schroder says. “You know how this goes, you’ve been on this side of the table, so we’re not going to try and play you,” he says, trying to play me. “We’re just gonna lay out the facts and you’re gonna get to state your case. That sound good to you?”

  I shrug. “Sure. What about my lawyer? You think it’ll sound good to him?”

  “You can have a lawyer if you want one. We’re not going to feed you that bullshit line about only guilty men wanting them,” he says, which is his way of feeding me the line anyway.

  “Let’s just get this over with then.”

  He slides a piece of paper over to me. “Just sign this,” he says.

  I don’t read it over. I just check a few of the words to make sure it’s the same form I used to slide over the table to people. It’s a waiver, saying I’m happy to talk without a lawyer present.

  “What’s the problem?” Landry asks. “You decided maybe you’ve got something you don’t want to share with us?”

  I sign the form. The alternative is to phone Donovan Green and get him down here.

  The form disappears back into the folder. The photographs of Father Julian remain.

  “The message is clear,” Landry says.

  “What message?”

  He looks at Schroder and shrugs, as if he really can’t believe what he just heard. Schroder lays out a few more photographs.

  “You didn’t want him to talk,” Schroder says. “And you wanted to leave him a message. That’s why you cut out his tongue.”

  “Hang on a second,” I say, leaning forward.

  “Why are you in such a mess?” Landry asks. “You’re covered in blood. In dirt. What have you been doing? You’ve been burying something?”

  “I was in an accident last night.”

  “And you were cleaned up. All the clothes you were wearing today are in your washing machine. They all have blood on them too?” Schroder asks.

  “You’d have been better off dumping them, Tate,” Landry says. “All those years busting people for this same kind of shit, I’d have thought you’d have learned more.”

  “When the hell did you make it a law that a man can’t start cleaning up after himself?”

  “The way you’ve been lately,” Landry says, leaning against the wall, “we’ve all thought it was a law you’d made.”

  I look at their positions. One sitting. One standing. One my friend, the other my enemy. The acting is goi
ng to be a stretch for only one of these men. Soon Landry will pace behind me, in and out of view, then he’ll lean over me. The game they said they wouldn’t play they’re already playing. They have to. They don’t know how to do it any other way.

  “Why don’t you tell us about Julian?” Schroder asks. “Why were you following him?”

  “I haven’t been following him, and I certainly didn’t do this to him. First of all, if I was trying to leave a message by cutting out his tongue, the only person that message could be for would be you guys, right? It’d be stupid of me to have done that.”

  “Listen to him,” Landry says, looking at Schroder, but really talking to me. “He thinks there’s some sense in all of this.”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Try selling us another story,” Landry says. “Nobody in this room has any false pretenses about what you’re capable of, Tate. We know you’re the reason nobody has heard from Quentin James in two years.”

  “Look, Tate, cut us some slack here, okay?” Schroder says. “You know how it works. You can sit there all night stonewalling us, but in the end we’ll learn what we need to from you. Why don’t you save us all some time?”

  I look at the photos of the dead priest. There are eight of them. “Why? So you can pin this bullshit on me?”

  “If you didn’t kill him, then what’s the problem?” Schroder asks. “The evidence will prove that.”

  “Depends on how you’re going to look at the evidence,” I say. “Seems to me you’re already looking at it and don’t have a clue how to read it properly.”

  “We’re wasting our time,” Landry says. “I say we lock him up and tell his fellow prisoners he used to be a cop. Let them loosen him up.”

  “Yeah, good one, Landry.”

  “Why were you following him?” Schroder asks.

  “Like I said, I wasn’t following him.”

  Schroder presses on. “What were you doing before the accident?”

  “I wasn’t following him.”

  “We need to show him a few things,” Schroder says, then he stands up and walks out of the room. Landry doesn’t fill the empty seat. He pushes his hands against the top of it and leans forward.