Cemetery Girl

by David Bell

  “What does she want with you?” Buster asked. “You making a will?”

  “Her daughter was murdered about ten years ago. She was just sixteen. They caught the guy and convicted him.”

  “They fry him?” Buster asked.

  “Life in prison. No parole. Are you sure you didn’t meet Liann right after Caitlin disappeared? She was at our house a lot.”

  “I wasn’t around much then,” he said.

  I studied his face for a moment. He took a long drink of his beer and ignored my interest. “Anyway,” I said, “she really tried to help us out. She’s become something of a crusader and an advocate on behalf of missing or murdered children and their families. She likes to see that the bad guys get punished. She doesn’t handle the prosecutions, of course, but she advises the families, sort of an informal legal counselor. That’s what she’s been doing for us. She tries her best to help victims’ families sort through all the mess of their cases. Dealing with the cops, dealing with the media. She tries to keep our spirits up. And she believes in justice.”

  “A lawyer.” Buster made a gagging face.

  “She’s not really a lawyer to me. She’s more of a friend. Like I said, an advocate.”

  He kept making the face, so I ignored him. I wrote back and asked where she wanted to meet.

  The Fantasy Club.

  “Hmm.” I stared at the screen. “She wants to meet me in a strip joint.”

  “Interesting place to meet a missing-children’s advocate.”

  “Who knows? She meets a lot of interesting people in these cases. She gets to know the victims and their families pretty well. She seems to know everything and everybody. I just wish I knew what she wanted to tell me. She can be so fucking secretive sometimes, like she’s in the CIA. Jesus.”

  “Drink up. It’ll help pass the time.” Buster drained half his cup on the first try, then polished off the rest and poured more. He nodded, encouraging me. “Tell me why we’re bailing on the graveside service.”

  “I didn’t say any of that stuff at the church, that stuff about heaven. That idiot, Pastor Chris, made it up. Or Abby did. But it’s not just the stuff from church,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  The beer tasted good. Real good. I felt myself reaching my limit. My stepfather-Buster’s father-drank. He drank and he raged at us and he usually passed out on the couch. I never acquired the habit, but Buster did.

  “I knew Abby was going to buy the headstone,” I said. “Hell, I knew how much it cost. But she promised me it wouldn’t be up yet. She promised me. And it was there the other day when I went to the cemetery, the day I talked to you on the phone while I was walking Frosty.” Just saying his name caused a spasm of guilt in my chest. Where was Frosty? In an abusive home? Sitting in his own filth, waiting for the gas chamber? “The headstone has her name on it. My little girl. And it says she died four years ago. It’s a big fucking thing, too. You can’t miss it. Can you believe that?”

  “Which part?”

  “Any of it.”

  Someone put coins in the jukebox, and a country song came on too loud. The steel guitar whined and someone else shouted in protest. The bartender bent down behind the bar and, mercifully, the volume dropped.

  Buster put down his cup and steepled his fingers in front of his face. He looked thoughtful, sincere. “Have you ever thought-? And I’m only saying this because I do care about you. I really do. I mean, I know I can be a royal screwup. I know Abby can’t stand me and all that. Hell, maybe you can’t stand me either. I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “I can stand you. Most of the time.”

  He smiled. “Thanks.”

  “And I think I know where you’re going with this. .”

  “You know the odds,” Buster said. “But it’s probably true. There was never a ransom demand. She probably did die that day. There’s been no evidence to the contrary.”

  I closed my eyes. Even in the noisy bar, I could imagine the screams. Caitlin’s voice. High. Cracking. Stretched to its limit. Daddy!

  “I don’t like to think we lost her that day,” I said.

  “That’s fine. I understand. What are the cops saying?” He reached behind him, to an empty table, and grabbed a bowl of peanuts.

  “Very little. When we do hear from them, it’s the same stuff. They have one detective on it. The feds have pulled out. They call it an active case, but what does that mean? I know they have other things. Newer cases.”

  “They still think she ran away?”

  “It makes it easier on them, right? If she ran away, there’s no crime. She’d be sixteen now. .” I paused.

  “We can drop it if you want,” Buster said.

  I nodded.

  Our food came. Buster salted his fries and started eating. I stared at my plate, my appetite uncertain.

  “I stopped by your house on the way to that crazy church,” he said. “I thought I might catch you. I knocked and knocked, but nothing.”

  “We were at the church already.”

  “I know that. But Frosty didn’t bark.”

  I shook my head. “He’s gone.”

  “But you were just walking him the other day. He died? What happened?”

  I shrugged. “I took him to the shelter. He’s an older dog, set in his ways. They said there’s a chance someone will adopt him, but if not, well, they euthanize the dogs eventually.”

  “Did he get sick?”

  I shook my head.

  Recognition spread across his face. “Abby wanted him gone?”

  I didn’t respond. I picked up a french fry and popped it in my mouth.

  “And you did it? You took him to the pound?”

  “I did it for Abby. And for me. He was Caitlin’s dog. He was a reminder of what we lost. If it helps us to turn the page. .”

  “Jesus. That’s cold.”

  “The dog who knew too much. Except how to tell us what he knew.” I emptied my cup and poured more beer for Buster and myself.

  “How are things with you and Abby?”

  I started eating my lukewarm food. “The same.”

  “That good?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “Let me ask you something, and if I’m crossing a line here, just let me know.”

  I laughed. “Would that stop you?”

  “No.” He signaled the waitress for another pitcher. “But I’m just wondering. . do you two still do it? I mean, do you sleep in the same bed? Do you fuck?”

  The pitcher came. “Put that on my brother’s tab,” I said.

  “You can put it all on my tab. My treat.” He winked at me. “I guess I owe you a few.” He didn’t refill his cup. “Well?”

  “I know you’re trying to provoke me now. It always ends up this way with you.”

  “You don’t fuck? Ever?” He shook his head. “I don’t know how anyone could live that way. I just have to get something, you know? I can’t live without it.” He kept shaking his head. “See, I’m really just trying to find out why you stay married to someone who you don’t have anything going on with. She’s at that freaky church; you’re a college professor. She wants to do this whole funeral thing. You don’t. She thinks Caitlin’s dead. .”

  “She hasn’t worked for a long time. She gave up teaching when Caitlin was born.”

  “ S o? ”

  “Our lives are intertwined. It’s not as easy as you make it sound.”

  “Isn’t it?” He pushed away his plate and drank more. He let out a hissing burp. “I think it is easy. Easy for me to see anyway. The dog’s gone. The headstone’s been laid. People are moving on. Remember when Dad died? My dad? Remember how you cried at the funeral?”

  “I didn’t cry.”

  “You did.”

  “Not for him, I didn’t.”

  Buster sighed. “He raised you.”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  Buster leaned back. He brought his hand up and scratched his jaw. I could tell he was angry. Whenever we talked ab
out my stepfather, one or both of us ended up full of anger. But Buster managed to swallow his this time. When he spoke again, his voice was even.

  “Here’s my point-it wasn’t long after the old man died that you went off to grad school. You started a new life, a new career. You met Abby. You had a baby. It was like his death liberated you in a way. You know, they say we don’t fully become ourselves until our parents die. Maybe that’s why I’m something of a late bloomer.” He spoke the last sentence without a trace of irony. “Maybe you have the chance for a new life here. Now. If you just. . accept things. .”

  I stared at him across our dirty, cluttered table. I thought about walking out-hell, I thought about punching him. But instead, I just signaled for the waitress, who brought the check.

  “Give it to him,” I said. “We’re finished here.”

  Chapter Three

  “Do you mind making a stop?”

  “Where?” Buster asked.

  When Buster saw the animal shelter, he sighed. “You’re kidding, right? He’s dead.”

  “Just give me a minute.”

  In the lobby, I smelled the accumulated odors of hundreds of caged animals. Their fur, their waste, their food. Their fear and desperation. The door at the back, the one that led to the cages, muffled the sounds, but I could still hear a faint chorus of barks and yelps. I asked the woman working at the counter about Frosty, and she seemed immediately confused by my request.

  “He’s your dog?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And he was lost?”

  “No, I brought him here. He’s a yellow Lab. Frosty’s his name. I wanted to get rid of him, but now I want him back.”

  She pursed her lips like the nuns from my grade school.

  “Well, I’ll see,” she said. “But this doesn’t happen often.” She stopped at the door to the cages and looked back at me. “You’ll have to pay the adoption donation even if he is your dog.”

  I nodded my assent. While she was gone, I looked around the lobby. The faces of dogs and cats in need of homes stared back at me from one bulletin board, and next to that another one held flyers advertising missing pets. We didn’t make a new flyer for Caitlin this year. The police created an age progression image, one showing Caitlin at age fifteen, and it was so warped and distorted-the eyes too large, the hair artificial-I couldn’t bear to look at it. I thought it belonged in a mortician’s textbook, an example of what not to do to preserve the image of a loved one. But the police distributed it anyway, and from time to time I came across a faded, wrinkling copy in the corner of a coffee shop or stuck to a community bulletin board downtown.

  The woman reappeared so quickly I knew she bore bad news.

  “He’s gone,” she said matter-of-factly, as though talking about a housefly.

  “I thought you kept them for a week-”

  “He’s been adopted,” she said. “Someone got him yesterday.”

  “Okay, can you just tell me who it is? I need him back.”

  She shook her head, the lips pursed again. “We can’t do that, sir.”

  “But he’s my dog.”

  “You brought him in here. You gave him away.”

  “It was a mistake. A misunderstanding.” I leaned against the counter, letting it support most of my weight. I felt drained by the day. And guilty. I’d hoped having Frosty back would lift me.

  “We can’t give out that information. It’s private.”

  “I know, but-”

  “We can’t just have people coming in here and getting personal information about our clients.”

  “Okay, okay. I get it.”

  “We have plenty of other dogs here,” she said. “Good dogs.” She seemed suddenly cheery and upbeat. “Is this for a family? Are you looking for a dog for your children?”

  “No, just for me, I guess. And I only wanted that dog.” There was nothing more to say, so I turned and left.

  When I climbed back into the car, Buster didn’t say anything. He dropped it into gear and drove me home, the voice of the talk radio host our only companion. Buster stopped at the curb in front of the house, but neither one of us got out.

  “Thanks for coming today,” I said. “I’m glad you made it.” I extended my hand, which he shook.

  “That’s what brothers do for each other,” he said.

  “I didn’t even ask what you’re doing these days.”

  He shrugged. “A cell phone company. Sales. It pays the bills. Look, I know why you’re asking about that-”

  “No-”

  “I plan on paying you back. All of it, all five thousand.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Abby?”

  I paused. “She cares about it. But she’s also given up on you. She tells me she’s written off that money, like it was a business expense.”

  He started tapping his right hand against the rim of the steering wheel. “The price of being related to me.”

  “Something like that.”

  “How about you? What are you doing with your time off? Writing a book? Who’s it about this time? Melville? Moby Dick? Dicky Moe?”

  “Hawthorne. His short fiction. You know, it sounded like there was a woman with you when I talked to you on the phone the other day. Are you dating someone?”

  “Why the sudden interest?”

  “I just don’t want us to be pissed at each other. I know the stuff with your dad is tough. For both of us maybe, but certainly for me. I still dream about him, about him coming into our room at night, drunk and angry. The way he’d come after us, swinging at us. I see his figure there in the dark. Sort of a hulking presence. I can’t forget it.”

  “We’re not going to solve all this sitting here in the car.”

  “Do you remember the same things?” I asked. “At least tell me that.”

  He didn’t hesitate. “No, Tom. I don’t remember it that way at all. Sorry.”

  “We used to huddle together in the dark,” I said. “Hell, you used to try to protect me. You’d lay on top of me and keep me safe. Are you going to tell me you don’t remember? You’re really going to stick to that? Really?”

  “I’m not sticking to anything,” he said. “It’s a fact.” He looked at the console clock. “I have to get back home, okay?” I opened the door, and before I was out he added, “But, Young Goodman Tom, if you do decide to change your life-really change your life-give me a call. You have my number.”

  Chapter Four

  In the weeks and months after Caitlin disappeared, rumors had started to spread. New Cambridge, Ohio, is a small college town of about fifty thousand people, mostly middle class, mostly quiet and pleasant. It was primarily populated by professors and their families and students who came and went based on the academic calendar. Bad things didn’t happen in New Cambridge, at least not bad things that people knew or talked about.

  But even if friends tried to insulate us from the gossip, we still heard what people said: Caitlin was pregnant, and we’d sent her away. Caitlin met a lover over the Internet and ran off with him. Caitlin fell victim to an online predator who’d kidnapped her. Or Caitlin simply ran away. Tired of the boring life in a small college town, she’d taken matters into her own hands and run off for greener pastures. California or New York. Seattle or Miami.

  The police, of course, interviewed all of our friends and family, and they talked to a handful of my students and examined police records, but they found nothing. In those first days and weeks after Caitlin didn’t come home from her walk, the police treated us with the due deference owed to the parents of a missing and possibly murdered child. They spoke to us in soothing tones, they offered us platitudinal encouragement-which actually felt wonderful to hear-and they answered our calls and questions promptly. But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear.

  It began with Buster and his indecent exposure rap. He lived an hour away in Columbus and wasn’t in New Cambridge the day Caitlin disappeared-as far as we knew-but he couldn’t provide a rock-solid
alibi. He said he was at his house. An ex-girlfriend claimed to have spoken to him on his cell phone an hour before the disappearance, but she didn’t know where he was while they talked. For a while, Buster became something of a suspect, even though the police refused to call him that to either Abby or me. He endured some heated questioning, and some not so subtle threats in the interview room. While he never requested a lawyer or offered anything close to a confession, and while no evidence linked him to the commission of a crime, word leaked to the newspaper that Caitlin’s uncle-unnamed-was a person of interest in the case.

  I never offered a particularly strong defense of my brother. Not to Abby and not to the police. I did tell them I didn’t believe he would harm Caitlin. In fact, he was a surprisingly doting uncle to Caitlin, one who often sent birthday gifts and, on the rare occasions when he visited us, went out of his way to talk to Caitlin as though she were more adult than child.

  “But that’s just it, Tom,” Abby said to me on one of the days Buster was going a few rounds with the cops. “He paid so much attention to Caitlin. Didn’t it seem out of character to you?”

  It did. It really did. And I allowed the suspicions of the police and Abby’s doubts to become my own to such an extent that they never fully went away, even when the police finished with him and let him go. I still found myself returning to those questions again and again: Where was he that day? Why did he seem to care about Caitlin so much? Was his indecent exposure charge really just a drunken misunderstanding?

  But if my doubts about Buster remained alive, even in the back of my mind, the police-absent any conclusive proof of his involvement-moved on to other things. They examined every scrap of mail, every phone call, every bill and financial statement we possessed, and none of it led anywhere-except for the computer we’d purchased for Caitlin, the one she used in her room. There were no unusual e-mails, no evidence that she made contact with a man who might have lured her away or taken her. But Caitlin had been searching the Web the day she disappeared, and in the hours before she walked out the door with Frosty, she’d visited Web sites for Seattle, horses, Amtrak, the U.S. presidency. I didn’t see anything nefarious or unusual in this list. A curious child surfed the Internet, following her train of thought wherever it might go. I do the same thing every day.