Beyond the Grave

by R. W. Wallace

  “Not exactly, no,” Caroline agrees. “But by the time he started training, I was busy with my own studies, making my own way in the world. When we were no longer in the same school, I didn’t have as much insight into what he was doing and who he was hanging out with. I guess I assumed that since I didn’t hear of any other incidents from our parents, he had changed for the better.”

  “He got a law degree, right?” Doubira asks.

  Caroline and I both nod. “Took him four years instead of three, but yes, he got a law degree. So he’d know all the rules of our society.”

  “And know how to toe the line,” Evian finishes for her.

  “This is not making you look good, dude,” Clothilde comments from behind me.

  “I told you I have things to atone for,” I reply, my voice not quite steady.

  She sighs and I know without looking that she’s kicking her feet extra hard because she’s annoyed. “You’ve atoned plenty by solving crimes out of a cemetery for thirty years. You’re good, Robert. You’re not supposed to pay for being an idiot for all eternity.”

  I love her for thinking that, and for saying it to me, but I don’t agree.

  The story Caroline is telling is only the beginning.

  “I’m afraid I can’t really tell you much more than that,” Caroline says. “Little by little, we lost contact, especially when I got married and started a family.”

  “But you think he was still like this when he died?” Evian asks. “That he was prone to follow the lead of whoever he thought was ‘the coolest’?”

  Caroline looks out the window, to stare sightlessly at a small, blossoming cherry tree in the corner of her garden. “One can hope he pulled it together after a while. But the last time I saw him, he was very boisterous, telling everybody about his recent promotion and how he was sure he’d get another one really soon. He was still showing off, looking for approval. He could have simply been very good at his job. But it’s just as likely that he’d hitched his wagon onto someone who promised him the moon.”

  Evian nods. Even though I know she can’t actually see me, I’m having trouble looking at her eyes, afraid of eye contact. Having my character presented to her in such an abominable light makes me want to run and hide.

  I want her to like me, to respect me.

  Just like I wanted in high school, dammit. Will this never go away?

  “I don’t suppose he mentioned any names when he was bragging about his promotion?” Evian says.

  “I’m afraid my memory isn’t good enough to remember the details of a conversation I had thirty years ago, Madame,” Caroline answers with a sad smile. “But I don’t think so. I think he stayed vague, probably on purpose.”

  “Was he close with his brothers? Do you think they would know any names?”

  I speak up to answer Evian. There’s no point in having them waste time in visiting either of my brothers, even if I am curious about where they’ve ended up. “They’ll know even less than Caroline. I never told them anything.” For fear they would judge me and mock me.

  “No,” Caroline answers. “I don’t think they’d be very helpful. I’m not sure if it’s really a universal rule, but in our family, the whole ‘men don’t talk about their feelings’ was a real thing. I’m not sure any of them would have ever really known each other if they hadn’t had me as a mediator.”

  “Men,” both Clothilde and Evian say in chorus.

  Doubira chuckles in response but I hang my head.

  Getting called out on being a loser sucks.

  Thirty-Five

  To say I’m feeling under the weather during lunch and in the metro on our way back to the city center would be an understatement. I don’t listen in on the officers’ discussion and I don’t respond to any of Clothilde’s prodding.

  I’m stuck in my head, going round in circles.

  Circles I’m all too familiar with.

  I spent my entire life feeling insignificant. Nobody really saw me. So I did my best to be seen, to get ahead. I will be the first to agree that my methods were far from perfect, but I tried.

  And failed spectacularly.

  Now, I already knew this. It’s why I’ve hung around as a ghost for so long, because I’m convinced I need to atone for my past sins before I’ll be allowed to move on to the afterlife. I knew it when I woke up as a ghost in my casket and came to terms with it before ever being released into the cemetery, where I met Clothilde.

  But that was so long ago. Our lives in the cemetery might have been boring at times—there were only so many things to do in that place, after all—but I got on with my life. Quasi-afterlife. I forgot about the details of everything I had done and just moved on to work on the remedy.

  Today I got all that history slapped in my face.

  And it hurts.

  Everybody I knew thought I was a loser. My bosses, who gave me orders to not do my job correctly, knowing perfectly well that was something I could deliver on. My mom thinking I never thought for myself and only followed others around blindly. My mom being right about that.

  And now my sister. My beloved sister, who would always love me—who loved me despite of my constant feeling of inferiority.

  I’m feeling inferior.

  I growl in frustration and dig my hands into my hair, wishing I could feel the pull on my scalp. I’m on the metro with the others, standing halfway into a young student who’s bopping his head to the rhythm of some rap I can barely hear from his earphones, not caring if he feels it or if I’m very obviously not part of the world of the living.

  I’m dead, and insignificant, and incompetent.

  “All right, that’s enough!” Clothilde’s yell makes me jump away from the young man with the earphones and straight into an elderly lady clutching a shopping bag to her chest.

  Evian jerks straight and scans the people around her, looking for threats.

  “Jeez, you scared the hell out of me,” I tell Clothilde, a hand to my heart—not that it’s been beating for the last thirty years.

  “I’ve been trying to talk to you for ten minutes.” Clothilde is also standing through someone but I can only see his bent legs sticking out of her knees, the rest of him is hidden behind her. “If talking doesn’t get through, I’ll yell.”

  “No need to get so angry. I needed some time to think.”

  “Think. Think.” She basically spits the word. Her eyes are blazing and her hair is moving as if she’s standing in a storm. I’ve seen Clothilde angry before, but it’s a rare occurrence. “What you’re doing isn’t thinking. It’s wallowing in self-pity.”

  I take an unneeded breath to yell right back and tell her that’s not true—except I realize it is.

  So I shut my mouth.

  Clothilde pokes a finger into my chest. “I thought you were better than this, Robert. I thought you’d changed. That’s what you told me, right? That this stuff that everybody says about you, it was true back when you were alive? But when you died, you changed and now you’re a better man, a better police officer. Right? Or have you been faking it for thirty years and now the real you is coming crashing back?”

  I’m reeling. First everybody from my past paints the least flattering picture of me ever, and now Clothilde, the only person who knows the present me, is also weighing in?

  I again take a deep breath. I’m not going to just take hit after hit like this and not fight back.

  Then Clothilde’s words register. She’s not actually accusing me of being a bad person. She’s accusing me of going back to being the loser that I used to be.

  “Shit, you’re right.” I deflate and slump, to the point where Clothilde holds out a hand to make sure I don’t fall to the floor. “I’m completely stuck in my head.”

  “Well, you need to get out of there,” Clothilde says matter-of-factly. “It doesn’t seem like it’s a very go
od place to hang out. Come back here, to the present. And help us solve the case of your own murder, you idiot.”

  I chuckle at her affectionate insult.

  I realize how lucky I am to have Clothilde with me for this adventure we’ve set out on. She’s the only one who knows the real me, the person I’ve become as a ghost.

  I don’t know what I would have become if she hadn’t been here to knock some sense into me. If she hadn’t been here to see me.

  Glancing over at Evian and Doubira, I see they’ve managed to grab seats next to each other and are having a whispered discussion with bent heads. They look like they’re at ease with working together, like they trust each other.

  I also wanted that trust. I wanted to be part of the group, part of a community. I wanted to be a trusted partner, someone they could count on.

  When my character was smeared by everyone who knew me thirty years ago, that hope crumbled and died. Evian will never trust me, will never respect me. She might be able to hear me on some level because of her high sensitivity, but she is too smart to believe those feelings over all the other facts she’s come across.

  Me being me, I’d really like for her to like me. Give me her approval.

  Yep, going round in circles again.

  “I don’t know how to get rid of this,” I confide to Clothilde.

  “You probably won’t,” she replies with a shrug. She’s leaning close to the young man I was standing halfway through earlier, trying to listen in on his music. “Feelings suck, everybody knows that. You just gotta live with it.”

  I crack a smile. “That’s your advice? Live with it?”

  I’m treated to an eye roll and her gaze comes back to lock eyes with me. “Live with it. Deal with it. Don’t let it hold you back. You can’t live for other people’s approval, Robert. Aim for your own. That’s the only one that matters.”

  Thirty-Six

  By the time they’re back at the police station, the work day is almost over. Emeline asks Malik to find them a meeting room and get Nadine Tulle to join them. She can’t put off telling the woman to stop looking into the dead girls any longer.

  Malik delivers, and ten minutes later, they are seated around a scratched and worn table in a meeting room in the station’s basement. Unfortunately there is no daylight, but Malik promises there is no way the room can be watched and the risk of someone dropping in on them is as good as non-existent.

  Emeline can’t quite figure out what got into her this afternoon but at least it seems to be calming down now. She was more excited than she should have been to meet with Robert Villemur’s sister. Then, when Caroline painted her brother in such a bad light, Emeline was disappointed—a lot more than the situation warranted.

  And on the metro ride back, she felt downright gloomy. Until she suddenly felt rather hopeful, for no apparent reason.

  This case is messing with her head.

  Not enough to stop her from working on it and giving it one hundred percent, though.

  “We have some news for you,” Emeline says to Nadine once they’re all seated and the door is securely closed. “But if you don’t mind, I’d like to first hear what you’ve found during your research.”

  “Sure.” Nadine gives a sharp nod, making her blond braid jump against her chest. She opens the laptop she brought with her and types in a long password. “Have you had the chance to look at what I gave you yesterday?”

  Emeline feels the beginnings of a blush but fights it back. “Sorry, no. I was too tired yesterday and today there hasn’t really been time, especially if I want to use my personal computer.”

  “That’s not a problem,” Nadine says. “The data will still be there when you have the time to look at them. Do you have the USB drive with you?”

  Emeline pats through her pockets. “Yes, I think so.” She did put it in a pocket this morning, right? It’s probably a good thing she made a bracelet of the finger bones, or she would have forgotten them somewhere by now.

  “Ah, here it is.” She pulls the small drive out of her pants pocket and hands it to Nadine.

  “Great.” The tiny woman makes quick work of fitting the drive into a slot. “I’ll copy over the stuff I found today, so now you have everything.” As she hands the drive back, she looks between Emeline and Malik with a gleam in her eye. “Would you like a quick run-down of my findings?”

  “That’s why we’re here, Tulle,” Emeline says and adds in a smile to take the sting out of her words. It’s not even five in the afternoon but she’s already getting too tired to be overly diplomatic.

  It’s a good thing Spangero caught her in the morning, all things considered.

  Nadine folds her laptop closed, apparently not needing it for support. “First, about the girls who were ruled as suicides. I’ve added to both the raw data and the findings.

  “I believe I’ve found all the deaths that could be victims of the same serial killer, going all the way back to 1988. I even tried searching a little earlier and found a couple of hits the year before, but nothing before 1987. In my opinion, that’s the time when the whole thing started.”

  Emeline nods but doesn’t interrupt. The woman is good. She was told not to go beyond Clothilde Humbert’s time of death, but had extended her search a little further anyway and might have found a very important clue. If they could find the first victim, that was sure to help understand the origin of the murders and the murderer alike.

  “I’ve retrieved all the data I could on all the cases,” Nadine continues. “And cross-referenced pretty much everything. By taking into account the likeliness that the girl had, in fact, committed suicide, the opinions of the family and friends, the names of the officers working the case and seeing if they were involved in any other suspect cases, the location the girl was found in, and the speed at which the case was opened and closed, I’ve extracted a list of thirty-four victims that I consider likely to have been the victims of our serial killer. Fifteen of the victims you had exhumed earlier are on the list. The rest have been excluded because they did not meet all the criteria.”

  She folds her hands on top of her laptop. Emeline suspects she does it to avoid that nervous habit of pulling on her hair. “I’ve also added information to the file on Robert Villemur,” Nadine says. “The guy seems to have been a follower, dating all the way back to high school.”

  Emeline’s eyebrows once again shoot up in surprise. No wonder the woman’s nervous. They’re not supposed to have access to this kind of information, especially since Villemur was a minor at the time and didn’t have a criminal record. Some minor vandalism isn’t enough to open his files.

  She decides not to say anything. The information is too valuable.

  And ignorance is bliss.

  “So I’ve compiled a list of all the people whose orders he might have followed, especially over the last three to five years before he disappeared,” Nadine says. “You’ll have all his direct bosses, but also the ones he was rumored to have spent time with.”

  She clenches her fingers and licks her lips. “I collected some information on who he spent the most time with in that last year before his disappearance. A couple of them are still active, so it might be worth it to talk to them.”

  Emeline narrows her eyes at the young woman. “You can’t possibly have found that last information in our system. Did you call someone?” If she did, Emeline needed to know, so she’d be aware of not having the element of surprise.

  Another lick of the lips. “I talked to the guy who was his partner at the time. I didn’t tell him Villemur’s body had been found, or anything about the investigation, really. I’m pretty sure he thinks we’re looking into a case that his partner might have been involved with at the time.”

  “Which is exactly what we’re doing,” Emeline says.

  “Right. Yes.” She gives up on the folded hands and reaches up to throw her braid
over her shoulder. “I’m sorry if I gave away too much. I hope I haven’t ruined anything for you. But I got the feeling he had things to say about Villemur so I gave him a crumb. And you’ll definitely want to talk to him—he seems convinced his partner was involved in something illegal before he died.”

  Emeline pushes back the disappointment at Tulle having made her first mistake. It happens to everyone, at one point or another in their career, when the enthusiasm to solve the case takes the upper hand. She probably wanted to please Emeline and Malik—and she genuinely seems to know she went a step too far. Berating her won’t do any good.

  “I’ll find the name of the person in your report?” Emeline asks.

  Nadine nods.

  “Okay. Now, to our news.” Emeline takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. She isn’t sure how much to share with Nadine. She shares everything from this case with Malik because he’s her partner. If she doesn’t trust him, she won’t be able to do her job.

  But Nadine is more of an outsider. She’s very good at doing research but she’s not part of the Judicial Police force. Doubira clearly trusts her but she’s very young, even younger than him.

  Emeline decides to share but to keep some distance. Tulle will have to prove herself over time. “The case of the wrongly ruled suicides will have to be put on hold for a little while,” she says. “I’m sure we’ll be getting back to it in no time, but right now the focus is on the upcoming trial of Monsieur de Villenouvelle, and the six girls we know he raped and probably killed. We’ll let that case run its course and once it’s done, we’ll get back to the other similar cases.”

  Tulle looks upset, like she’s about to ask why. To avoid saying outright that she has decided not to share the information, Emeline pretends not to notice, and plows ahead.

  “We will, however, look into the death of Robert Villemur. I intend to find out how he died and what, if any, his relationship was with Clothilde Humbert. There’s a reason they were buried together, I’m absolutely sure of it. I’m sure we’ll be needing your help again in the future—if you’re still willing to help?”