Beyond the Grave

by R. W. Wallace

  Malik straightens in his chair and his eyes gleam. “Oh! Uh…yes, I do know someone. A young woman named Nadine Tulle who’s scarily good at searching through archives. And she’s nice, too. But…” He searches through the scattered papers, discarding everything until he holds one up in triumph. “We know who Monsieur X is!”

  Emeline feels the familiar rush of satisfaction she has every time she makes a breakthrough on a case. Then it’s topped by whooping joy and glee.

  Where did those feelings come from?

  She’s tempted to look over her shoulder because the feeling of having someone looking at her has been pretty much constant since she started working this case, but she refrains. Her colleagues are going to think she’s paranoid if she keeps literally looking over her shoulder.

  Maybe she is becoming paranoid.

  Emeline shakes the thought away and reaches for the sheet of paper.

  “Robert Villemur,” she reads aloud. “Born in 1953, unmarried, no children. Went missing in 1988. He was a police officer.” She looks up to meet her colleague’s gaze.

  Malik nods. “It’s probably the only reason we had his DNA on file.”

  “Any link between him and Mademoiselle Humbert?”

  “Yes.”

  Emeline’s head snaps up from where she bent back down to read the document in her hand. “Yes?”

  “I asked Nadine to have a quick look when I got the names earlier. She was only able to spend about fifteen minutes on the search, but she did find a link. Lieutenant Robert Villemur was the police officer who investigated Mademoiselle Humbert’s death, and ruled it a suicide.”

  Emeline’s eyebrows shoot up and she looks back at the sheet of paper announcing that the exhumed skeleton belonged to Robert Villemur as if it would have an answer to her numerous questions.

  “And he was buried right next to her. With no headstone and no official records.” She sighs. “A revenge crime?”

  Malik lifts his shoulders and blows out his lips to show he doesn’t know either, making him look approximately fourteen.

  Emeline settles back in her chair, trying to find some calm to let her subconscious think. Sometimes, critical thinking is necessary, to make links and follow logical deductions. But oftentimes, her subconscious did the best work. She just needs to let it do its thing, work with the information she doesn’t consciously know she has, make connections that wouldn’t make sense to the critical part of her brain.

  Her best work was done while staring into space.

  This time, though, she gets nothing. Except the need to get moving, do something, figure out what the hell is going on with these killings.

  “All right,” she says finally, realizing that Malik has let her do her spaced-out thinking in peace. “You can tell me the rest on our way out.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to visit Robert Villemur’s closest relatives.”

  Seventeen

  The relief at discovering that they managed to identify my body is quickly replaced by worry when they find the fact that I was the police officer to declare Clothilde’s death a suicide. I realized this when Clothilde’s mother came through our cemetery as a ghost some time ago and she gave me the information I needed to connect the dots, but I never told Clothilde about it.

  Now, as I look to her to gauge her reaction, I’m met with an eye roll.

  “I already knew.”

  I freeze. “You knew? How?”

  “I remember hearing your name.” She shrugs.

  “How did you hear anything?” My voice is getting ridiculously high. “You were dead!”

  Another shrug. “I was already a ghost. Couldn’t move more than a centimeter or so away from the body, but I could watch.”

  “You…but that’s not…how on earth…” I shut my mouth with a snap. This girl will never cease to amaze me.

  “I’m sorry I failed you,” I say finally. “Even though I didn’t know you yet, I feel like I failed you as a friend. If I’d done my job correctly, you might not have been stuck in a cemetery for three decades. All those other girls could still be alive.”

  Clothilde cocks her head and gives me a lopsided smile. “If you’d been a better detective, they wouldn’t have put you on the case. They needed someone to confirm it as suicide quickly. That happened to be you.”

  My mouth falls open. “How…?”

  “People don’t watch what they say around dead bodies.” Clothilde waggles her eyebrows. “Unfortunately, they weren’t detailed enough for me to be one hundred percent certain of which of them had actually done the deed. It was either the lawyer or the other guy. Or both.”

  I’m about to ask for more details when Evian says they’re going to see my family.

  All thoughts of how bad I was at my job when I was alive fly straight out the window.

  I’m not ready.

  I haven’t seen a single member of my family since I died, and quite a few of them not for years before that. I wasn’t the best son, brother, or nephew.

  I wonder who they’re planning on seeing. Is everybody still alive? Have they changed? Do they remember me? Will it mean anything to them to get confirmation that I’m dead?

  The door to the meeting room slams shut behind Evian and Doubira and I’m pulled after them in a manner that’s not particularly agreeable. One moment I’m frozen in the meeting room, the next I’m outside the door, watching the two police officers walk down the hall toward the open space where their desks are.

  Clothilde is waiting for me in the hallway, leaning a shoulder against the wall and her sharp eyes trained on me. “You okay there, Robert?”

  “Yeah.” I blow out a long breath. “Moving a bit fast, is all.”

  She nods. “I’m kind of curious about why they’re looking into you first, actually. I’m the one with the obvious ties to their ongoing case.” She starts walking after Evian and Doubira and I follow her lead. I’d rather not be pulled around like a puppet with strings again if I can avoid it.

  “Maybe that’s why,” I say. “The mystery of it all. My body clearly wasn’t supposed to be down there, so curious minds will want to figure out why. And there is sort of a link between me and the case.”

  She glances at me as she walks straight through a desk so she can stay on a level with me instead of going in front of or behind me. “You think the link is important? I figured it was happenstance that you were the one to open and shut my case in five seconds flat.”

  “It could have been. Or I could somehow have been in league with the guy who killed you. Or on the verge of arresting him. Who knows? If there’s a link, I think it’s a good idea to check it out. In a way, your death is just another dead girl in a long list of dead girls. It helps them set the time line, realize how long this has been going on, but it’s not certain it will bring anything else to the table.”

  We reach Evian’s desk. Nobody bothers to sit down—except for Clothilde who jumps up on the grandmotherly officer’s desk and starts swinging her legs.

  “Where is this Nadine person?” Evian asks Doubira, keeping her voice low so they won’t be overheard, or possibly not to bother anyone. “Can we talk to her before we take off?”

  “She’s one floor down,” Doubira replies and whips out his phone from the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ll ask her to come up.”

  Two minutes later, a tiny woman who barely reaches Evian’s shoulders and with a blond braid reaching down to her slim waist strides purposely over to Evian’s desk. “How can I help?” she says in lieu of any kind of greeting.

  Evian looks her up and down, a slight twitch of her lips the only indication that her first impression of the woman is a good one. “I was told you’re the woman to go to if I need some research done?”

  Nadine Tulle flashes a smile that should, in any other circumstance, qualify as sweet
. But since we’re at the police station, and she’s in uniform, her no-nonsense style, and the tone of her reply, it comes off as almost predatory. “You’ve heard right. What do you need?”

  Evian hands over two sheets of paper from the autopsy report to the other woman. “Please don’t show these to anyone else, or share information with anyone.” She raises a hand to stop the offended retort that is clearly on the tip of Tulle’s tongue. “I know you won’t but it’s something I prefer to always say anyway, just in case.”

  She points to Clothilde’s name on one of the reports. “This girl was raped and probably murdered by Gérard de Villenouvelle, the guy who’s on trial for the murder of six other girls in the past ten years. You know the case, yes? Clothilde here seems to have suffered the same fate, but thirty years earlier. I want you to search through the intervening years, and find me all the cases that could be the work of the same serial killer.”

  Spots of color appear on Tulle’s cheeks. She’s excited about the prospect of looking into this and clearly understands the importance of the task she is given.

  “Grandma here is quite interested in that conversation, by the way,” Clothilde says. She has moved closer to the elderly police officer, who seems to be engrossed in something on her own computer screen.

  “She’s been staring at the same thing since we came over here,” Clothilde tells me, her gaze flat. “She’s either very stupid and can’t understand what’s in that document she’s reading or she’s totally eavesdropping.”

  I turn to Evian to whisper something in her ear to get her to ensure their privacy but she’s already on it. With a confused gaze at the grandmotherly officer, she pulls Tulle toward a corner and lowers her voice.

  “I also need you to look into this guy,” she says and taps a finger on the second sheet of paper. “He was a police officer here thirty years ago and seems to have had some sort of link to Clothilde Humbert’s demise. I want to know what the link was, who the people he worked with were, if he had any link to de Villenouvelle, everything.”

  She stares out at the open-plan office, which now is at least half-full, police officers milling to and fro, filing documents, drinking coffee, discussing last night’s rugby game, and reading reports.

  “I also want to know the names and basic histories of all the officers who were in any way involved in declaring all those young girls’ murders as suicides,” she says. “Always search for a link with de Villenouvelle.”

  “Sure thing,” Tulle says, nodding quickly, making her braid do a little dance down her back. “Do you want me to call you if I find anything?”

  “Call Doubira if you find something you judge urgent,” Evian replies. “Otherwise, we’ll drop by here again tomorrow morning at the latest to get an update on your progress.”

  Tulle doesn’t waste any more time and with a nod to Doubira she’s out the door and on her way down to her own office to start working.

  “Seems like you found the right person for the job,” Evian says to Doubira as she comes back to her desk. She throws a worried glance at the elderly officer, who is still staring at the same page on her screen, with Clothilde leaning down next to her, pretending to focus just as fiercely on whatever document the woman has open.

  Doubira nods but I can see the pride he takes in getting a compliment from his partner. “We trained at ENSOP together. That girl is like a human Google with access to the police database.”

  “Where are we going?” Evian asks him and pulls on her jacket.

  “Uh…” After a short hesitation, Doubira pulls up a page on his phone. “I have the addresses for Villemur’s mother, one sister, and two brothers. One brother lives in Bordeaux but the other family members are in Toulouse.”

  I wonder which brother turned traitor and moved to Bordeaux but most of my brain is fixated on another fact.

  My mother’s still alive.

  “Let’s start with the mother,” Evian says.

  Eighteen

  My mom still lives in the same house on the outskirts of the Toulouse city center. The house looks like it hasn’t had any maintenance in the last thirty years. The roughcast that used to be off-white is now rather brown, with black tracks below the windows and the gutters. The palm tree next to the garage clearly hasn’t had any sort of maintenance in at least a decade. Weeds sprout up in the cracks of the path leading to the front door. And one of the shutters on the second floor has lost all its paint and is hanging off only one of its hinges.

  The neighborhood is the same and it isn’t. I recognize the streets, the primary school, most of the houses. And then every fifty meters or so, I discover a new apartment building that has shot out of seemingly nothing, making the whole area feel a lot more compact and crowded than it used to be. The pharmacy and post office are still there, but the local supermarket has been replaced with a real estate agent, and the bar around the corner has been walled shut with cinderblocks and I see at least three layers of tags.

  I can’t believe my mother and siblings let everything fall into disrepair like this. My dad died when I was twenty-one and although it was rough on my mom, she stepped up and did everything around the house like a pro, including house repairs. I do realize that she’s much older now—I make a quick calculation and end up on a staggering ninety-one years—but she could have had one of my siblings do it, or paid a professional.

  The mom that I knew would have rather died than let this eyesore stand so visibly unattended.

  I briefly wonder if the house has perhaps been abandoned, but a light is on at the back of the house, probably in the kitchen. And when Evian rings the doorbell, the light in the living room comes on after a twenty-second lag.

  Evian sends a glance at Doubira. “Have you ever done this before?”

  “Done what?” The young man looks lost for the first time since I met him.

  “Told someone their son is dead.”

  “Oh.” Doubira looks at the door, then at the light behind the curtained window, his mouth hanging open. “You think she…”

  “Don’t worry,” Evian reassures him. “I’ll do the talking.” She pauses and takes a deep breath. “On an intellectual level, she probably knows her son is dead. But as long as there’s no body, the heart usually keeps believing, hoping. It doesn’t matter if it’s three days after a disappearance or thirty years. It’s still going to be difficult news to receive.”

  I eye the front door with some trepidation. I have done this type of house call before. Telling someone that their loved one is dead is awful, but I only had to do it with people I didn’t know. I had to be the bearer of bad news and suffer their pain, but then I could leave, go back to my job, my life, and more or less push those people’s pain away.

  But now? I’m standing in front of my own front door, waiting for my own mother to open it. Waiting for Evian to tell her that I’m dead.

  “You okay, there?” Clothilde asks. She’s standing right next to me, her youthful features set into a serious mask. “You flickered.”

  Like I’ve seen many other ghosts do when under extreme pressure or when they were particularly emotional.

  “I’ll be fine,” I tell her. I take a deep breath, even though it does me no good since I haven’t needed air in thirty years, and square my shoulders.

  Clothilde looks down and I follow her gaze. Her hand moves to mine, as if to hold it. She can’t, of course, not without my cooperation, since we don’t have physical bodies. I play along and open my hand to hers—when we both insist in our minds that the other’s hand is real, we can, somewhat, hold onto each other.

  And even though I can’t feel her, it helps.

  Finally, after what feels like an eternity but was probably less than two minutes, a clanging of keys sounds behind the door, and the door slowly pulls open.

  Maman.

  The last time I saw her she was just past sixty. Now she�
�s ninety-one. The difference shows—it’s shockingly evident she’s now an old woman—but she’s also still the same.

  Her hair is mostly white but there’s still a hint of its original dark blond color. Her nose is slightly crooked from when her brother broke it when she was twelve and her eyes are as startlingly blue as I remember. Her movements might be slow, and she’s carrying a lot more weight than she used to, but her mind is still sharp.

  “What can I do for you, officers?” she asks.

  I gulp as her voice brings back a flood of memories. Some good, some bad, but all proving her love for me. At least, that’s how I see it now, so many years later.

  “We have some news about your son, Robert,” Evian says. “Would you mind if we come in?”

  My mother shuffles aside while holding the door open, to let Evian and Doubira into the living room, and Clothilde and I follow closely.

  “She has your eyes,” Clothilde says as she passes my mother. “Or I guess you have hers.”

  Evian’s gaze shoots to my mother’s face but I see no reaction on my mother. Guess she’s not as sensitive as Evian. Not many people are.

  I lift a hand to touch my mother’s cheek. It’s not something I ever did while I was alive but this might be my last chance and she can’t see or feel me anyway. Then I move away to let Evian do her job in peace.

  “Robert?” my mother says, her voice cracking.

  At first, I think she did feel me, but I quickly realize her eyes are on Evian. She knows what’s coming.

  “We recently discovered his body,” Evian says. She’s kind of cold and distant but also compassionate. She’s good at this. “He’s been dead for thirty years. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  Nineteen

  It’s very slow, and almost impossible to see, but my mother is slowly deflating. Her hand, still on the doorknob, tightens so the knuckles turn white and the veins on the back of her hand stand out in stark contrast to her spotted white skin. I can’t even put my finger on what is happening exactly, but it’s like she’s folding in on herself, becoming smaller. My mother, who was always bigger than life itself.