Cemetery Lake: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  If Rachel was the only girl to have been killed I’d be looking at the case in an entirely different way. But she wasn’t. What she was, though, was the first. I think about this. I try to strip the case back to the basics. The day Rachel went to her grandmother’s funeral was the day all of this began. Her trip to the graveyard was the catalyst for everything that followed. Something must have happened that day.

  I call Mrs. Tyler and she doesn’t sound upset to hear from me. If anything, she sounds glad I’m calling. At some point in the last twenty-four hours it seems she’s come to terms with a lot of things, and she senses the momentum and wants to be a part of it.

  “The day of your mother’s funeral,” I say, “was there anything different? Anything out of the ordinary happen?”

  She thinks about it, but can’t come up with anything. “I don’t even know what I should be trying to remember.”

  “Did anybody approach Rachel? Or you? It’s my guess that somebody recognized her that day. Maybe they questioned her about it.”

  “If they did, she never told me.”

  I look at the other girls, and then I hide their pictures and details away and try to forget about them for the moment, focusing only on Rachel. Everything comes back to her and, more importantly, back to that day. If somebody did approach her, it could have been Father Julian, or Bruce or Sidney Alderman. The grudge Sidney Alderman had against Father Julian for sleeping with his wife makes him a likely candidate. Could be Sidney knew a lot more about Julian than the priest ever expected. Could be Sidney knew other women who got pregnant too.

  “When you were going to Father Julian’s church,” I say, “back in the beginning, do you remember any other women who were pregnant?”

  “Umm . . . No, not that I can think of.”

  “Anybody with a really young child?”

  “Umm, yeah, there was one. There’s Fiona Chandler.”

  “Was she married?”

  “No. She used to be, but her husband left her before the baby was born. It was an awful thing to do. She never spoke about him, and she married again a few years later.”

  “Tell me about her husbands.”

  “I don’t know anything about the first one. Like I said, she never spoke of him. Her second husband, Alec, he was very nice. But one day ten years ago he just got up and collapsed on the floor. It was a heart attack. She never married again, it was very sad. Well, still is very sad. Why—why are you asking me this?”

  I don’t answer. I give her a few seconds, and she gets there by herself.

  “Oh my God,” she gasps. “Are you, are you saying that . . . that Stewart, that he got Fiona pregnant too? Was it his baby?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Oh no, oh no.” She starts to cry.

  “I need to get hold of her.”

  “You . . . you don’t understand,” she says. “You have no idea.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Her sobs start to grow louder. “You . . . Oh my God,” she says, and it’s all she can say over and over as the words intermix with tears and sobs. In the end she barely manages to compose herself enough to carry on. “You need to know something,” she says. “I don’t even know how to say it, but . . . but you need to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  And she does, and suddenly I understand everything.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  It comes back to Henry Martins. I asked Patricia Tyler eight weeks ago if she knew the name, and she didn’t. If only she had, if only she’d known the name of Fiona Chandler’s husband, the one who left her, then most of this could have been avoided. There was never any reason to suspect a link between the dead girl and the man who owned the coffin she was dumped into. Nothing links the others—it was just a matter of putting girls into the ground and using the coffins of those who had just died, making the digging easier. I’ve spent those eight weeks making death and making misery, but now things are going to change. Henry Martins was Fiona Chandler’s first husband. He left her when Father Julian got her pregnant. He moved into a different world from her, he met another woman, he fell in love with a woman who wouldn’t cheat on him, and he had a family. Twenty something years later I stood by his grave and watched his coffin get pulled from the dirt.

  “Hey, hey, you can’t come in here!”

  The answers have come crashing down on me and the white noise is back. There are images and words screaming from every corner of my mind, and this is the way it sometimes gets when an investigation is coming to a close, the way it gets when the adrenaline is rushing and the high that comes is only an arrest away. Only this time my hands are shaking and I feel like a fool, so the high may not arrive.

  I’ve just broken a dozen road rules getting here. The rain is pouring down, hitting the roof with the sound of land mines. I push my way into the hallway. If Henry Martins hadn’t found out about his wife’s affair, if he hadn’t left her and had raised the boy as his own, then none of this would be happening. The girls, the priest, the Alderman family, even good old Henry himself—they’d probably all still be alive. For the briefest of moments I wonder if there would be other ripple effects if those people were still around, whether one of them could have crossed paths with my wife or with Quentin James two years ago and delayed one of them for the ten seconds it would have taken to prevent the accident.

  “Hey, you deaf? You can’t come in here.”

  “Where is he?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Maybe you’re the one who’s deaf. Where the hell is he?”

  “He’s gone, man.”

  I push Studly against the wall. He’s added a couple of piercings to the collection since I last saw him. I feel like pushing him right through the wall and strangling the skinny little bastard, but the anger I feel isn’t toward him, it’s toward myself for having been so easily deceived. It’s toward David for being the one to have deceived me. Two months ago his pain was so raw, so unbearable, so believable. How the hell did I fall for such an act? Even as a cop I would have missed it. As did the other cops who spoke to him.

  “Gone? Where?”

  “He moved out. A few days ago. And he owes me rent.”

  I let Studly go. He pushes himself off the hallway wall and puffs his chest out, trying to look a lot tougher than he is, trying to look as though he let me start manhandling him.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “How the fuck would I know?” he asks, sounding tougher now that I’ve let him go.

  I shove him into the wall again, and make my way down to David’s bedroom. Last time I was here the place looked like a bomb had gone off. The furniture is still here, but everything else has gone.

  “He told me to keep it,” Studly says, “but bro, that stuff ain’t worth shit.”

  “He ever bring other women here?”

  “No. He’s never been with anybody since—well, since Rachel went missing.”

  “She’s not missing anymore.”

  “Yeah, he told me.”

  I look around the bedroom, but there’s nothing here to help. I tip the bed up. I search through bedside drawers. I pull the corner of the carpet away on the chance this hidey-hole is more genetic than I first thought, but there’s nothing there.

  “Dude, you’re destroying the place.”

  “You sure he’s not seeing anybody else?”

  Studly shrugs. “Man, I’m not his mother.”

  “Well, hopefully she’ll know more than you.”

  “I doubt it. He hasn’t spoken to her since Rachel went missing. Far as I can tell, he hates her. Man, really fucking hates her.”

  “I wonder why,” I say, but I already know.

  “Yeah,” he says, trying to sound as if he knows too, but he has no idea. Nobody could.

  “When did he go?” I ask.

  “I told you, man—a few days ago.”

  “When exactly? Tuesday? Wednesday? Thursday?”

  “I don’t know.”

&nbs
p; “You don’t know?”

  “Man, I don’t even know what today is.”

  I push past him again and start going through the rest of the house.

  “Hey, man, you can’t go through everything,” he protests.

  “Then tell me where he is.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s your friend, right?”

  “He owes me rent,” he says.

  “Then you owe him nothing. Take a guess. Where do you think he’s going?”

  “I remember him saying something about meeting a woman. He had a date. But it was a weird date. I remember that.”

  “If it was weird enough to stick out, why the hell can’t you remember the details?”

  “I was, man, you know . . . I was kind of, well, in a different state.”

  “You were stoned.”

  “Best as I remember, yeah.”

  “You get her name?” I ask.

  “Nah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Could it have been Deborah?”

  “Sure, it easily could have. But it just as easily could have been Susan. Or Nicola.”

  “That’s real helpful.”

  Studly shrugs. “That’s all I know, man. Hey, you find him you tell him he owes me rent, okay?”

  “Look, this is important,” I say, and I hand him one of my business cards. “You remember something, you give me a call.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” he says, and he screws the card into his pocket. I figure in five minutes he’ll forget it’s even there.

  “Okay, let’s do this your way,” I say. “Got some scissors?”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  “I’m not going to cut you. If I wanted to do something fun I’d just shoot you. Now, scissors? Come on, dude, hurry up.”

  He heads into the kitchen and shows back up a few seconds later. I reach into my pocket and pull out the money my mother gave me. I count out two one-hundred-dollar notes. I cut the scissors across them, separating the notes into halves. I hand him a half from each note, along with the scissors, and I pocket the other two halves.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with these?”

  “They’ll help you think. You gotta come up with something useful and I’ll give you the rest.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  I sit in my car, but don’t drive anywhere. I think about Rachel Tyler, and I think about David Harding, and I wonder who felt the most revulsion when they found out the truth. For the years they were dating, there is no way David or Rachel could have known they were brother and sister. As they shared the same bed, as they held each other in the night, as they spoke of dreams and fears, there was no way they could have known.

  Rachel & David forever.

  That’s what was inscribed on the ring.

  Then somehow David found out. The truth made him sick. It would make anybody sick, and it would make anybody angry too. I wonder if he ever knew that type of reaction was within him, that depth of anger. Did he blame her? Did he blame himself? Or just Father Julian? David has his own abyss, and maybe he didn’t even know it, not until that day. He killed Rachel because he could not handle the fact his sister was his lover. Most men would have felt the anger, the embarrassment, the pain, but what is the normal reaction? To move on, to try and forget about it? To never talk about it, to bury those memories and emotions as deep as they can be buried, and then never mention them again? Or find a shrink, to admit it wasn’t their fault, to process it, and process it to the point where it becomes just one of those things, like missing the deadline on your tax return or spilling red wine on the carpet.

  David’s rage took him beyond Rachel Tyler and to other girls he had never met, then it led him to kill Father Julian and to planting the murder weapon in my house. He chose me because he saw me on the news, but the thing about David was he was caught in the student world—a world where he slept in every day and missed the news report the morning following my car accident. He didn’t know to move the murder weapon back out of my garage.

  I start driving away from the house. Other possibilities start to filter their way through my thoughts as I drive to Fiona Chandler’s house.

  “I never told him who his father was,” Fiona Chandler tells me while I stand on her doorstep.

  “So your maiden name is . . .”

  “Harding,” she says. “Then it became Martins, and now it’s Chandler. Some good names and bad memories.”

  She invites me in out of the rain and we stand in her hallway with the door open. She sucks in a deep lungful of cigarette smoke, then blows it into the air, aiming for outside. It forms a small cloud as it hugs the cold air and slowly moves toward me.

  “How did David react when you told him about his father?”

  “I never told him, not the complete truth. He thinks Henry Martins is his father. He doesn’t know about Father Julian.”

  “I’m pretty sure he does.”

  “That’s impossible. David was already angry for a lot of reasons. He didn’t have the easiest of lives. He was abandoned by two men he never knew. I didn’t need to tell him everything, so I only ever told him about Henry. I told him that Henry left me when I was pregnant, but I never told him that Henry wasn’t his father. He asked if Henry made child support payments. Henry didn’t, and even though Father Julian offered to, I didn’t want his money. He had ruined my life, and I never wanted anything to do with him. So all David knew was he had a dad who wanted nothing to do with him and wouldn’t help support him.”

  “Why’d you keep going to the church if you wanted nothing to do with Father Julian?”

  She shrugs. “I know it doesn’t make sense. It’s just that, well, I kept thinking he’d leave the church behind to be with me. But he didn’t.”

  “And you never told Patricia of your affair with Father Julian?”

  “It wasn’t the sort of thing you went around telling,” she says. “Perhaps these days, but not back then.”

  “Did David find Henry? Talk to him?”

  “He wanted to. And that just made him angrier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It happened the same week I told David about him. Just one of those things, I guess. He wanted to visit Henry and talk to him because he thought Henry was his dad. He wanted to confront him, I suppose, but he never got the chance. Henry died that same week. It was an awful coincidence, and I guess David felt abandoned all over again.”

  “So when was the last time you saw him?”

  “I went to Patricia’s mother’s funeral. David came along, of course. David and Rachel met when they were kids through Patricia and me. It was one of those relationships you could see coming up before it ever started. Anyway, it was a few days after that I think Rachel disappeared. It was around the same time Henry died—I can’t remember exactly the details. I’d call David, but he’d never want to speak to me. After a while he stopped taking the calls. Time just kind of went by after that. To be honest I don’t really know what happened. The shock and the loss, I guess, but that’s when family should become closer, right?”

  She stares at me for some kind of confirmation, and I slowly nod.

  “Except he was losing people—he lost Rachel, he lost a dad he thought he was about to meet. Yet these things seemed to rip us apart. Believe me, I tried. I really did. But there’s only so much you can do. David, well, he had his own life. He was in control of it and I couldn’t change his decision. Can you believe that? I did the best I could, but in the end it wasn’t good enough and his anger toward being abandoned became anger against me, and, well . . . well, I should have told him sooner. If I had told him when he was a small boy, maybe he would still think of me as his mother and not some . . . I don’t know, monster or whore or incubator or whatever it is he thinks I am.”

  My cell phone starts ringing.

  “I should take this,” I say, and pull the phone out of my pocket. “It’s important.”

  I take a few steps back from the doorway and flip ope
n the phone. I don’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

  “Yeah, man, it’s Oliver.”

  “Who?”

  “Oliver. You were just at my house?”

  “Oliver? Oh, Studly,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I got something for you.”

  “Yeah, money does the memory wonders, right?”

  “How do I know I’ll get it?” he asks.

  “Do I look like the kind of guy who would lie to you?”

  “Honestly, man, you look like a guy capable of anything.”

  “Then maybe you should think about that and tell me what you remembered.”

  “Okay, okay, dude, but you gotta gimme the other halves of those notes, man.”

  “I guarantee it. Now tell me.”

  “I want them now.”

  “No, the only thing you want now is to not piss me off.”

  “Okay, okay. Look, David said something weird the other day. I mean, it might not mean anything, right, but this girl he was seeing. Like I said, he only just met her, right? So to me it seems a little odd he’d say that.”

  “You haven’t told me what he said.”

  “Oh, yeah, man, you’re right. Shit. My point is, who takes a person they’ve just met to a funeral? That’s what he said. He said he was taking her to a funeral on Sunday, but that’s weird, right? You don’t have funerals on Sunday. Anyway, that’s where he’s going to be tomorrow, though I don’t know what funeral.”

  “It’s Sunday today.”

  “It is? Oh, shit, man, that’s awesome! Do I still get my money?”

  “No, because nobody gets buried on a Sunday.”

  “Shit, man, that’s why it sounded so weird to me. But that’s what he said.”

  “Then you’re wrong. Unless . . .” I look up at Fiona Harding. “I gotta go,” I say, the message for both her and Studly.