by Curran, Tim
Rose did. He was back in five minutes.
Shaking rain off himself and sipping from his steaming Styrofoam cup, he said, “Now, where was I? Okay, Eddie tells me to take the kids and get Child Protective Services on the horn. So I do. I wait outside with them for CPS to show, just twiddling my thumbs and trying to make conversation with them. Yeah, right. The little one is crying, the other two are just staring into space. CPS shows and we go through the whole nine yards before they take the kids. Meanwhile, where in the hell is Eddie? Another car shows, a couple detectives from Major Crimes. What’s their interest? They don’t say. Up we go to talk to Eddie. We get up there. No Eddie. No mother. No nothing. But, Christ, it smells bad in there. I mean just fucking rotten.”
“And that was it?”
“That was it. Jesus, Pat, what the hell gives here? Where’s Eddie? What the fuck is going on here?”
“Wish I knew.”
Rose wished he knew, too. You partner with a guy for three years, you get tight. You get so you start to care. Sometimes you start socializing outside of work. Cookouts on the weekend, maybe a little fishing or what not. That’s how it was with Rose and Eddie Stokley. They’d gotten to be good friends. There was a chemistry between them and now this. And even a real tough guy macho hardcase felt something like this right in the guts like a good kick when something happened to your partner. Especially when you didn’t know what, but your gut instinct told you it was bad. Plenty bad.
“He was a good guy, that Eddie,” Rose said. “A real good guy.”
“Quit talking about him in the past tense.”
“What? Hell’s that mean?”
“I mean, quit talking about him like he’s dead,” Marcus said.
Rose blinked and then blinked again like maybe something wet wanted to come rolling out of his eyes and he simply could not allow it. “Christ, Pat. Eddie was the best man at my fucking wedding. He loaned me five grand so we could make the down payment on our house. I’m his kid’s godfather. He was the best, just the best.”
“There you go again,” Marcus said, scowling. “Quit that past tense shit. You don’t know that anything happened to him. He’s just gone missing. That’s not good, but it don’t really mean anything.”
But Rose just shook his head. “I wish I could believe that, Pat. But Eddie…something happened to him and it’s something bad. That’s all I’m saying. I can feel it.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Don’t I know it.” Rose finished his coffee and rubbed his tired eyes. “I’ll tell you something, Pat. Eddie was acting funny all day. Just not himself, you know? Something was eating at him. He knew something was going to happen. He knew it, he felt it.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, Pat, sometimes a guy knows. Remember Joey Hill over to the Crandon Precinct? Sure you do. That guy was a riot. An absolute riot. One joke after the other. Everybody loved that old sonofabitch. That day that fucking punk opened up on him with that shotgun and wasted him, old Joey was not himself. I know. Haines, his partner, told me so. Not just that day but for two days before Joey was not himself. He didn’t smile, he didn’t joke. He didn’t do much but stare. Acted like a guy that was waiting for a phone call that would tell him his mother had just died. He knew it was coming, Pat. He did. You think that’s bullshit? Well, Haines was with him when he died, poor Joey gutshot in the street, blood all over the place. You know what Joey told Haines before he rolled over? He said, ‘I knew it…I knew it was coming for me.’ And that’s right from the horse’s mouth.”
Marcus wiped a finger across his lips. “Quit it, will ya? You’re fucking depressing me here.”
And of all things, that made Rose laugh. A dead, dry sort of laughter. “You want depressing? Oh, I can give you depressing, Pat. You know where I spent the last hour before I came out with you? I was with Eddie’s wife. I was there with Peggy and you know what that was like? Not good, not good. I kept telling her that Eddie would show up, saying all the crazy bullshit you’re saying to me, but she wasn’t buying it. I told her he might have got fucking amnesia or something. Goddamn, you should have heard the silly shit I was coming up with. But she knew, she knew. She told me she knew he was dead. But she didn’t have to tell me that, now did she? She said Eddie was acting funny this morning. Not himself. All jittery or something and I saw it, too.” Rose wiped his eyes again. “No, Pat, he knew. He knew today was the day. Christ, it gives me the willies to think about it.”
“So quit thinking about it. He’ll turn up. We’ll find him.”
“I’m not so sure we’re gonna want to find him,” Rose said under his breath.
The radio squawked and Marcus was glad for the diversion. When cops got together, sometimes they started talking about shit like this. Omens and portents, all that jiggy superstitious nonsense. Some cops were just plain superstitious, but they would not admit it around anybody but other cops. That’s the way the brotherhood worked.
“Ten-four on that, Dispatch,” Rose said into the mic, replacing it on the dash. “How do you like that? We got to go over to the Hope Street boneyard. Vandalism or something. Jesus. Caretaker called it in.”
“It’s only three blocks from here,” Marcus said.
He pulled a U-turn in the street which was no problem because there was hardly anyone out. The rain had lessened to a drizzle. He took his time. They passed through the business district and onto 5th Avenue which would connect them with Hope Street. A few people were out on the walks, but not many. Most of the houses looked buttoned-up and battened-down. On the lower end of Hope, the houses were few and far between. There was a baseball field and an Amvets lodge, a little park with a creek cutting through it. Vacant lots and then the cemetery coming out of the grayness at them, enclosed by a high stone wall.
Rose sighed. “I need this shit with the day I been having. A visit with the Cryptkeeper of all things.”
“Oh, shut up, Dave,” Marcus said, maybe a little more sternly than he had intended.
Maybe Rose had just gotten back to the cesspool of Witcham after two weeks in sunny Florida, but Marcus had been there since the rains started. Since that explosion out at the Fort Providence base and the flooding began and all the weird things had started happening. Dispatch said vandalism, but Marcus had seen enough bad shit by that point to be able to read through the lines just fine. Dispatch said vandalism, but what they meant these days was desecration. It had been reported in a couple other graveyards in the past few days. Graves opened, crypts defiled. Maybe it was the storm making people loony and maybe it was something else entirely.
He pulled the patrol car through the gates and slowed to a crawl. All those stones and markers winding off into the gray, wet haze made a chill run up his spine. Everything was colorless and almost surreal, tombs and monuments hung with wreaths of pale mist. The road thick with fallen leaves. Everything was so silent, so empty, they could have been the last two men on earth. And if that was the case, this was a hell of a place to pass the time.
“Hate these places,” Rose said. “Reminds me of when I was a kid and my Uncle Tony ate the gun. He got back from Vietnam and he couldn’t cope. Blew his brains out. It was bad, real bad. I remember that funeral. It was a day like this. Just rainy and misty, real creepy. Everybody crying at the graveside. God. After that, things were funny in our neighborhood. Real funny. Kids started saying crazy shit. Shit that scared the hell out of me.”
“What sort of shit?” Marcus asked, knowing he was going to regret it.
Rose shook his head, sighed. “Ah, you know how kids are. Make up things. Started saying how they were seeing Tony around the neighborhood. Just standing around in the vacant lot where we’d played ball and stuff. Standing there with his uniform on, smiling, most of his head shot away. One night, there was a knock on the door and when my mom answered it, there was nobody there. My brother started screaming, saying it was Uncle Tony, Uncle Tony. He’d seen him looking through the window at him. And our bedroom was on the seco
nd floor. How do you like that? One time, we heard footsteps coming up the stairs, only when we opened our door, there wasn’t nobody there—”
“All right already, Dave. Jesus H. Christ.”
“I’m just making conversation.”
Marcus looked over at him. “We’re in a cemetery and the best you can do is a ghost story?”
Rose chuckled. “I see your point.”
Marcus wheeled the patrol car past the chapel and a couple grim, lichen-encrusted statues of Jesus and Mary, following the winding dirt road over to the caretaker’s shack. It was set in a copse of big oaks, stripped now, yellow leaves floating in puddles and the hollows of sunken graves. Nothing out there but rows of tombstones, old ones mostly, worn and leaning and dripping. A collection of mossy crypts flanking them. A pick-up truck was parked next to the shack.
Marcus pulled the car to a stop. He grabbed the mic. “Dispatch? This is Fifteen. We’re at Hope Street Cemetery location. Leaving car. Standby.”
“Ten-four, Fifteen,” came the reply.
They got out into that chill mist which seemed immediately to go up the backs of their raincoats until it found their spines. A gentle rain fell. Fingers of ground fog slithered amongst the tombstones like snakes. You could hear the patrol car idling, water dripping onto the fallen leaves and the plastic rain-bonnets of their hats, but nothing more.
Rose knocked on the shed door. “Hello? Police here.”
There was no answer.
“Well, this caretaker can’t be too excited to see us. Vandalism. What happened? Somebody spray paint naughty words on the stones?”
“Stop it,” Marcus said. “Show some respect.”
“Respect, he says. After the day I had, you’d think you’d show me a little sympathy, Pat. Goddamn Eddie. Fuck am I gonna do without Eddie?”
“Don’t start that again.”
Marcus pushed past him and let himself into the shed. There were racks of tools and shovels, lawnmowers and weed-eaters, bags of fertilizer, the usual. There was a rich, dark smell in there of mown grass and black earth. A little desk was pushed against the wall. It was crowded with papers and a few magazines. A paperback western was opened as if it had just been set aside. On the wall above the desk there was a calendar with a blonde in blue-jean cut-offs exposing her impressive breasts.
This is what Rose was looking at. “Look at those jugs, Pat.”
But Marcus was not interested. He was not a religious guy really, but the idea of a young woman thrusting out her breasts in a place like this seemed sacrilegious or something. He bet that model never thought she’d be showing her goods in a graveyard shed.
There was a cup of coffee on the desk next to a Thermos. “Still warm,” he said. “I bet our boy hasn’t been gone long.”
Rose pulled his eyes off the lady’s charms. “Well, where the hell is he?” He walked over to a little window that looked out towards those old tombs. “Don’t see nobody around.”
Marcus didn’t either.
And that was starting to bother him in ways he could not adequately fathom. On the surface, it seemed to mean nothing: the caretaker had stepped out for a moment or two, that’s all. Nothing to get worked up about. But much deeper, in places Marcus did not wish to plumb, he was certain it meant something. That the silence here was trying to tell him something. Maybe it was trying to warn him away.
Knock it off, he told himself. You’re getting as bad as Rose. You start believing in omens and premonitions and that kiddie campfire shit, it’s time to hang it up.
Rose turned away from the window. “Let’s give it five minutes. He don’t show, we take off. To hell with this guy.”
Now Dave was talking sense. For what else could they really do? Marcus was going to tell his interim partner just that, but when he looked over at him, he saw something outside the window. Not something, really, but somebody. Just a glimpse of face looking in at them. But the effect was immediate. He gasped and almost fell over.
“Jesus Christ, Pat…you okay?”
Marcus licked his lips. “Yeah…I just saw somebody.”
Rose swung around. He peered out the window. Not only peered out, but pressed his face up against the rain-spattered pane and looked long and hard. Marcus felt his throat narrow to a pinhole. He wanted to tell Rose not to do that, not to get so goddamn close. That’s how thick the paranoia in him was. Like maybe he thought something might reach through the glass and take hold of him.
“Don’t see anybody,” Rose said. He shrugged and walked over to the door.
“What’re you doing?” Marcus asked him.
“I’m seeing if I can catch our caretaker,” he said. “Why? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
But Marcus just shook his head. That image…glimpsed for the briefest of moments…turned something inside him. Made his stomach tighten and a chill run down his spine. “It…I don’t think it was the caretaker.”
Rose stopped as he was reaching for the doorknob. He looked at Marcus, not sure what any of this was about. “You’re kind of freaking me out here, Pat.”
“Sorry. I guess that face startled me.”
“Why?”
He swallowed. Why, indeed? How was he suppose to answer that in any way that made sense? Was he supposed to tell Rose that that face was not right somehow? That it was too pale? Too skullish? The grin too crooked? That it was just wrong in every way imaginable?
In the end, he said nothing.
Rose just stared at him and at that precise moment when he was probably going to call Marcus a nut, there was a loud pounding on the door that made him retract his outstretched hand as if the door had suddenly gotten too hot.
“This is bullshit,” Rose said.
He took hold of the knob, opened it and threw the door open.
21
Marcus felt his heart skip a beat. He didn’t know what he was expecting out there, but there was nothing. Just the rain falling from the roof overhang, a few wisps of that mist. The graveyard beyond. Nothing else.
“You sure you saw somebody?” Rose said.
“I thought I did.”
They both went out the door and Marcus steeled himself, pumped up something inside him so he wouldn’t get the heebie-jeebies. He walked out the door feeling like the big tough cop of ten years he in fact was.
“Hey!” Rose said. “Somebody out here?”
Together, they circled the shack and looked in the pick-up truck. But there was no one and Marcus was beginning to think there never had been.
“This is just some day,” Rose said. “You know? Just some kind of day.”
“Tell me about it.”
They went back to the patrol car. Rose got in and Marcus circled around to the driver’s side. He was going to get in, too, but he suddenly felt a tingling along the back of his throat and had the oddest feeling that a hand was poised to touch him there. He swung around. Nobody, nothing.
Rose got back out. “Hey, look over there.”
Someone was standing in the road just up from the shack. The rain started up again, falling in a gray sheet, but they both saw someone there. Rose in the lead, they started in that direction. They could see it was a girl of all things. Maybe eight or ten, dressed in a little green plaid skirt and white knee socks.
“Hey, kid!” Rose said. “C’mere.”
The girl just stood there and the closer they got, the more certain Marcus became that hers was the face that had peeked in at him. She was just a little thing. Dead leaves were stuck to her dress. She had red pigtails. There was a crest sewn to the breast of her white shirt.
“Pat,” Rose said. “That’s a school uniform. That’s one of the missing girls from Holy Covenant.”
Yes, it had to be.
They were maybe twenty feet from her, close enough to see that her face was positively anemic. Just white. Her lips were black and there were gray circles under her eyes.
“Hey, little girl,” Rose said.
She smiled and turned away from t
hem, taking off amongst the headstones.
“Hey!” Rose said. “Come back!”
And Marcus wanted to say, just let her go, but his voice didn’t want to come. He was smelling a rank, stagnant odor like something that might come from a drainage pipe. It was the girl’s smell.
At the perimeter of headstones they lost her. She was out there, they knew that much. Perhaps crouched behind a marker or hiding behind a tree.
Rose took off his hat and shook the rain from it. “This just keeps getting better. First fucking Eddie disappears, now I’m playing hide-and-go-seek with a Catholic schoolgirl. You see her face, Eddie? She looks sick or something. White like that.”
Or dead.
“Piss on it,” Marcus said, feeling like a bag of conflicting nerves. “We’ll call it in. I’m not chasing her in this downpour.”
“I hear you.”
It sounded good in theory, but Marcus knew it would not work. The girl wanted them to follow her. That was what this was about. She was one of those missing girls and she wanted to show them where the others were and he honestly did not want to know where that was. And, as if on cue, the girl’s head popped up from behind a headboard-shaped marker. She was smiling, rain rolling down her ghastly white face.
“Fuck,” Rose said. “All right, little girl, you wanna play, we’ll play.”
Marcus cut off to the left and Rose went to the right. They would circle around her, flush her out like a rabbit in a hedge, and catch her. See what this was all about.
You know what it’s about, Marcus thought. You know exactly what this is about. You can pretend otherwise all you want, Pat, but you know the shit happening in this city. Those girls disappeared because something got to them. Something you don’t want to think about. And now they’re back.
Here.
In this cemetery.
Where else would things like them go?
Marcus heard Rose on his walkie-talkie as he threaded through the monuments and stripped trees. He was telling Dispatch that there was no one at the Hope Street Cemetery location, but that they had sited a juvenile. Might have been one of the missing kids from Holy Covenant. The little girl was staying put, looking positively obscene as she hugged that marker, her pale hands encircling it and that pale face grinning lifelessly like a doll’s. Her eyes were black and deep. They did not blink.
