The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

“I was kind of…wild in high school. I used to get drunk at parties and do stupid shit. I wish I could tell you it was because I fell in with a bad crowd, but that wouldn't be true. At first it was silly stuff like dancing on tables or sitting on the guys’ laps. You know—flirting. I guess I liked how they looked at me.” She paused to gather up her courage, taking in a breath that fluttered as she exhaled. “Then…it became more than flirting. By the time I was a junior, I had lost my virginity to a guy who told me I was beautiful. Then he told everybody that I was easy. After that there were more guys and even more stories.”

  Her trembling grew to an uncontrollable shake. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her into me. She didn't protest, but instead turned her face into my sleeve and cried hard. I laid my cheek against her hair and held her while she cried. After a while the trembling subsided, and she took another deep breath.

  “When I was a senior, they started calling me Nasty Nash. Not to my face, but I heard them. And the sad thing is…it didn't stop me. I'd go to parties and get drunk and wind up in some guy's bed, or in the backseat of some piece-of-shit car. And when they were done, they would just kick me to the curb.” She rubbed the top of her arm, kneading it the way Jeremy sometimes rubs his knuckles when he's upset. She paused again to calm her trembling voice before going on.

  “Then, on the night of my graduation, I got messed up at a party. Somebody put something in my drink. I woke up the next morning in the backseat of my car, out in the middle of a bean field. I didn't remember a thing. Nothing. I hurt. I knew that I'd been raped, but I didn't know who did it or how many there were. The police found a drug called Rohypnol in my system. It's a date-rape drug. It makes it so that you can't fight back, and then it wipes out your memory. Nobody else remembered anything either. No one from the party would say how I left, or who I was with. I don't think they believed me when I said I was raped.

  “A week later someone e-mailed a picture from a phony e-mail account.” Lila started to shake again, and her breathing turned shallow. She gripped my arm as if to steady herself. “It was a picture of me…and there were two guys…their images were scrambled…and they were…they…” she broke down, crying uncontrollably.

  I wanted to say something to take the pain away, a task that I knew I could not achieve. “You don't have to say any more,” I said. “It doesn't matter to me.”

  She wiped her tears on her sleeve and said, “I have to show you something.” She nervously reached up, gripped the oversized collar of her sweatshirt, and pulled it down, exposing six thin scars—straight striations from a razor blade—cutting across her shoulder. She brushed her fingers over the scars to draw my attention to them. Then she lowered her head into the back of the couch, as if to turn her face as far away from me as she could. “That year that I took off before starting college…I spent that time in therapy. You see, Joe,” she said, her lips twitching upward into a frightened smile, “I have issues.”

  I brushed my cheek against the soft tickle of her hair, then I wrapped one arm around her waist, the other under her tucked-up knees, and lifted her off the couch. I walked her to her bedroom, laid her in bed, rolled a comforter up to her shoulders, and bent down and kissed her cheek, which creased with a slight smile.

  “I'm not afraid of issues,” I said, letting the words settle on her before I stood up to leave—although leaving was the last thing I wanted to do. That's when I heard her say, in a voice barely loud enough to reach me, “I don't want to be alone.”

  I swallowed my surprise, hesitating only a moment before walking around to the other side of the bed. I slipped off my shoes, lay down on the bed, and gently wrapped my arm around Lila. She squeezed my hand, pulling it up to her chest, holding it like she would hold a teddy bear. I lay behind her, breathing in her scent, savoring the faint beating of her heart against my fingertips, curling my body around her body. And although my presence in her bed came about because of her pain and sadness, it filled me with an odd sense of happiness, a sense of belonging, a feeling I had never felt before, a feeling so exquisite that it bordered on agony. I reveled in that feeling until I fell asleep.

  I woke the next morning to the sound of a hair dryer whirring in Lila's bathroom. I was still in her bed, still wearing my khakis and shirt, still not sure where things stood between us. I sat up, checked the corners of my mouth for drool, climbed out of her bed, and followed the scent of fresh coffee brewing. Before I got to her kitchen, I stopped in front of a framed poster to check my appearance in its glass. Tufts of hair stuck out of my head in all directions, like I'd been cow-licked by a drunken heifer. I splashed some water from the kitchen faucet onto my bed head to tame my hair a bit, just as Lila came out the bathroom.

  “I'm sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you?” She had changed into another oversized jersey and a pair of silky pink pajama bottoms.

  “Not at all,” I said. “Did you sleep okay?”

  “I slept great,” she said. She walked up to me, put one hand on my cheek, raised up on her tiptoes, and kissed my lips, a soft, slow, warm kiss, so tender it hurt. When she finished, she eased back a couple steps, looked into my eyes, and said, “Thank you.”

  Before I could say a word, she turned around to the cupboard, casually picking up two coffee mugs. She handed one to me and twirled the other on her finger as we waited for the coffeemaker to finish its magic. Could she tell that the taste of her kiss still lingered on my lips, that my cheek tingled where her fingers had touched it, that the scent of her skin pulled me toward her like gravity? She seemed unaffected by the current that had left me paralyzed.

  The coffeemaker dinged its success, and I filled our mugs, first hers then mine. “So, what's for breakfast,” I said.

  “Ah, breakfast,” she said. “Here at Chez Lila we have a terrific breakfast menu. The specialty du jour is Cheerios. Or I could have the chef whip up an order of Special K.”

  “What, no pannekoekens?” I asked.

  “And if you want milk with your Cheerios, you're gonna have to run to the store and get some.”

  “Do you have an egg?” I asked.

  “I have a couple of them, but no bacon or sausage to go with them.”

  “Bring your eggs to my place,” I said. “I'll whip us up some pancakes.”

  Lila grabbed the eggs from the fridge and followed me to my apartment. As I got the mixing bowl and ingredients out of the cupboard, she went to the coffee table where the Carl Iverson project lay sorted into piles.

  “So, who do we track down next?” Lila said as she flipped through the piles, not looking at anything in particular.

  “I think we should track down the bad guy,” I said.

  “And who's that?”

  “I don't know,” I said, as I measured pancake mix into a bowl. “When I look at that stuff my brain hurts.”

  “Well, we know Crystal died sometime between when she left school with Andrew Fisher and when the fire department got there. And we know that the diary entries were about a stolen car and not about Carl seeing Crystal and Andy Fisher in the alley. So whoever was blackmailing Crystal had to know about them crashing the GTO.”

  “That has to be a pretty short list.

  “Andrew knew, of course,” she said.

  “Yeah, but he wouldn't have told us about it if he was the one in the diary. Besides, the diary suggests that someone else figured it out.”

  “Daddy Doug ran the car lot,” she said, “Maybe he didn't buy the whole car-theft hoax.”

  “It's also possible that Andrew bragged to someone, maybe let it slip that he and Crystal were the ones that crashed into that cop car. I mean if I pulled a stunt like that, I would've been itching to tell my buddies. He'd have been king shit at school.”

  “Nah, I don't buy the coincidence.”

  “Yeah, me neither,” I said.

  “There's gotta be something in these piles that points the way.”

  “There is,” I said.

  “There is?” She leaned forward on the
couch.

  “Sure. We just gotta solve the code.”

  “Very funny,” she said.

  A knock at the door interrupted our conversation, and I turned the heat down on the pancakes. My first thought was that the slob from the night before, or one of his friends, had tracked me down. I pulled a flashlight from the kitchen drawer. Holding it in my right hand, I planted my foot behind the door, giving it six inches of leeway. Lila looked at me as if I had lost my mind. I hadn't told her about ripping into that guy at the bar, or about the two friends that charged after me. I opened the door to find Jeremy in the hall.

  “Hey, Buddy, what…” I let the door swing wider and saw my mother around the side. “Mom?”

  “Hi, Joey,” she said, giving Jeremy a light shove through the door. “I need you to watch Jeremy for a couple days.” She made a slight movement, as if turning to leave, but stopped when she saw Lila sitting on my couch, wearing what looked to be pajamas.

  “Mom! You can't just show up here—”

  “Now I get it,” she said. “I see what's going on.” Lila stood up to greet my mother. “You're shacking up with little miss thing here, leaving your brother and me to fend for ourselves.” Lila wilted back onto the couch. I grabbed my mother, who was halfway into the apartment, and forced her back into the hallway, shutting the door behind us.

  “Where do you come off—” I started.

  “I'm your mother.”

  “That doesn't give you the right to insult my friend.”

  “Friend? Is that what they call ’em these days.”

  “She lives next door and…and I don't owe you an explanation.”

  “Fine,” she shrugged. “You do whatever you want, but I need you to watch Jeremy.”

  “You can't just show up here and drop him off like this. He's not an old shoe you can toss around.”

  “That's what you get for not taking my calls,” she said, turning to leave.

  “Where're you going?”

  “We're heading to Treasure Island Casino,” she said.

  “We?”

  She hesitated. “Larry and me.” She headed down the stairs before I could chew her out for still being with that asshole. “I'll be back on Sunday,” she hollered over her shoulder. I took a deep breath to calm down and then went back into the apartment with a smile—for Jeremy's sake.

  I finished making pancakes for all three of us, and we ate them in the living room. Lila joked with Jeremy, calling me Jeeves the Butler as I served them their breakfasts. Although the thought of my mother dumping Jeremy off without warning pissed me off, I couldn't deny the joy of having him here, sitting with Lila and me, especially after the guilt trip of the play. I used to roll my eyes when people told me they were homesick. The thought of missing my mother's dank apartment was as incomprehensible as driving a nail through my ankle for the fun of it. But that morning, as I watched Jeremy laughing with Lila, calling me Jeeves, eating my pancakes, I realized that a large part of me was homesick, not for the apartment but for my brother.

  After breakfast, Lila went to her apartment to retrieve her laptop to do some homework. I didn't have any DVDs, or even a checkerboard, so Jeremy and I played Go Fish with a modified deck of playing cards, sitting on the couch, using the cushion between us as a tabletop.

  At one point, Lila was tapping away on her computer with the speed of a concert pianist. Jeremy stopped playing cards to watch her, seemingly mesmerized by the flutter of keystrokes. After a few minutes, Lila looked up from her keyboard and stopped typing.

  “Maybe I think you're a good typer, Lila,” he said.

  Lila smiled at Jeremy. “Why thank you. That's a very sweet thing to say. Do you know how to type?”

  “Maybe I took a keyboarding class with Mr. Warner,” Jeremy said.

  “Do you like typing?” she asked.

  “I think Mr. Warner was funny.” Jeremy smiled a big smile. “Maybe Mr. Warner made me type ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’” Jeremy laughed and Lila laughed, which made me laugh.

  “That's right,” Lila said. “That's what you have to type. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Jeremy laughed even harder when Lila said it.

  Lila went back to work on her laptop, and Jeremy returned to our game of Go Fish, asking for the same card over and over until I would draw it from the deck. Then he would go to the next card and do the same.

  After a few minutes Lila stopped typing, her head snapping up like she had been bitten by a bug or hit square in the face by an epiphany. “It has every letter of the alphabet in it,” she said.

  “What has what?” I said.

  “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. They use that sentence in keyboarding class because it has every letter of the alphabet in it.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Crystal Hagen started using her code in September 1980…her freshman year of high school…when she was taking a typing class with Andy Fisher.”

  “You don't think…” I said.

  Lila pulled out a notepad and wrote the sentence down, crossing out the second time that a letter would appear. Then she put a number under each letter.

  I found Crystal's diary and handed Lila the first page of code that I came to, September 28. Lila started replacing the numbers with letters. D-J-F-O…I shrugged my shoulders; another dead end I thought…U-N-D-M…I sat up a little straighter, spotting at least one complete word…Y-G-L-A-S-S-E-S.

  “DJ found my glasses!” She yelled, thrusting her notes at me. “It says DJ found my glasses. We did it—Jeremy did it. Jeremy, you solved the code.” She jumped to her feet and grabbed Jeremy's hands, pulling him off the couch. “You solved the code, Jeremy!” She jumped up and down, which caused Jeremy to jump up and down, laughing, not knowing why he was excited.

  “Who is DJ?” I said.

  Lila stopped jumping, and we both reached into the file box at the same time, pulling out transcripts. She grabbed the transcript with Douglas Lockwood's testimony and I grabbed Danny's. At the beginning of each witness's testimony, they were asked to give their full name, date of birth, and the spelling of their last name. I frantically flipped through the pages until I found Danny's direct examination.

  “Daniel William Lockwood,” I read. I closed my transcript and looked at Lila. “His middle name's William. It's not Danny,” I said.

  “Douglas Joseph Lockwood,” she said, her face beaming, barely able to contain her excitement. We looked at each other, trying to grasp the enormity of what we had just learned. Crystal Hagen's stepfather had the initials DJ. DJ is the person who found Crystal Hagen's glasses. The person who found Crystal's glasses was forcing her to have sex. And the person forcing her to have sex was the person who killed her. It was simple deduction. We had found our murderer.

  Because we needed to take care of Jeremy, Lila and I waited until Monday before we took our information to the police. In the meantime, the three of us celebrated our own little Thanksgiving, complete with mashed potatoes, cranberries, pumpkin pie, and Cornish game hens, which we told Jeremy were mini-turkeys. It was probably the best Thanksgiving he or I had ever experienced. By Sunday evening, my mom had run out of money at the casino and came to pick up Jeremy. I could tell that he didn't want to go. He sat on my couch ignoring our mother until she finally turned stern and ordered him to stand up. After they left, Lila and I organized the diary notes and the transcript pages that we would take to the police the next day after class. We were barely able to contain our excitement.

  The Minneapolis Police Department's Homicide Division has an office at Minneapolis City Hall, an old castle-like building in the heart of the city. Ornate archways gave the building's entrance a brief taste of classic Richardsonian architecture before dissolving into corridors more reminiscent of a Roman bathhouse than Romanesque Revival. Five-foot marble sheets lined the walls. Above that, someone had painted the plaster a color that seemed to combine fuchsia with tomato soup. The hallway ran the length of the block, turne
d left, and ran another half block or so before passing room 108, the office of the Homicide Division.

  Lila and I gave our names to a receptionist who sat behind bulletproof glass, then we took a seat to wait. After about twenty minutes, a man entered the waiting area, a Glock nine-millimeter on his right hip and a badge clipped to his belt on the left. He was tall with a thick chest and biceps like he pumped iron in a prison yard. But he had compassionate eyes that softened his tough appearance and a gentle voice, a notch or two softer than I expected. Lila and I were the only two people in the waiting area. “Joe? Lila?” he asked, extending his hand.

  We each shook it in turn. “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “I'm Detective Max Rupert,” he said. “I was told you have information on a homicide case?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “It's about the murder of Crystal Hagen.”

  Detective Rupert looked away as if reading names from a list in his head. “That name doesn't ring a bell.”

  “She was killed back in 1980,” Lila said.

  Rupert blinked hard a couple times, cocking his head to the side like a dog hearing an unexpected sound. “Did you say 1980?”

  “I know you may think we're a couple of crackpots, but just give us two minutes of your time. If you think we're full of crap after two minutes, we'll leave. But if we make sense, even a little bit, then there may be a murderer running free.”

  Rupert looked at his watch, sighed, and gave a flick of his fingers, waving us to come with him. We walked through a room full of cubicles and turned into a room with a simple metal table and four wooden chairs. Lila and I sat on one side of the table and opened up our red-rope folder.

  “Two minutes,” Rupert said, pointing at his watch. “Go.”

  “Um…Uh,” I didn't think he would take me literally about the two minutes, and it flustered me at first. I gathered my thoughts and began. “In October of 1980, a fourteen-year-old girl named Crystal Hagen was raped and murdered. Her body was burned in a tool shed belonging to her next-door neighbor Carl Iverson, who was convicted for her murder. One of the key pieces of evidence was a diary.” I pointed at the red-rope folder, and Lila pulled the diary out.