Cemetery Girl

by David Bell

  I waited. Finally she said, “But it happens too soon sometimes, right?”

  “It does. Like me and you. Are you reconsidering?”

  “No.” She looked up. “Not at all.” She shrugged. “What about Mom?”

  “She’s a big girl.”

  “Will the two of you stay married?”

  “No. But we aren’t going to stay married whether you’re here or not.” I felt relieved having said it out loud. “Does that bother you?”

  She shook her head hard, almost too hard. She looked like she wanted to make sure I knew how little it bothered her. Abby knocked lightly on the bedroom door. Caitlin and I both jumped a little. I wondered how long she’d been out there and what she’d heard, but when I opened the door for her, she didn’t look angry.

  “What are you two talking about?” she asked.

  I looked back at Caitlin. “I was just telling Caitlin what Detective Ryan said.”

  “Oh.”

  “She heard most of it from up here,” I said. “And as for the rest. . I guess she didn’t have much of a response to it.”

  Abby looked like she wanted to say something to Caitlin, but she didn’t. She turned to me and said, “Liann’s here. She said she wants to talk to you.”

  I was halfway through the door when Caitlin’s voice stopped me.

  “Thanks, Dad,” she said.

  I looked back. “For what?”

  “For telling me what you told me.”

  “No problem,” I said and headed downstairs to see Liann.

  Abby followed me to the stairs. Halfway down, she placed her hand on my arm. “Did you hear that back there, Tom? She called you Dad. That’s something, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  “Did you ask her about Buster?”

  “I did.” I paused. Something caught in my throat. My eyes burned. “She thought she heard him one day. His voice.” I felt the tears coming. I choked back on them, held them in. “She said she used to think she heard our voices.”

  Abby reached out to me. “It’s okay, Tom.”

  “I used to imagine her screaming. Calling my name in the park. I should have been there. I should have stopped it.”

  “It’s not your fault, Tom.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and index finger. “I thought you thought it was.”

  “It’s not anybody’s fault.” She took my hand and squeezed it in hers. “She’s home, Tom. She’s here. And they know who did this, and they’re going to arrest him. We can move on. What matters is where we are now.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” My hand slipped out of hers. “I’m going to see what Liann wants.”

  “And we need to get her back into normal life soon. School, church, friends. It’s time.”

  “Once Colter’s taken care of,” I said and continued on down the steps.

  Liann sat at the dining room table, a cell phone to her ear. When I came in the room, she folded the phone shut and slid it into her purse.

  “You look like shit,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  I wanted coffee, so I went to the kitchen and poured a cup. When I sat down, Liann cleared her throat.

  “The atmosphere seems a little charged in this household.”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been distracted by other things.”

  I told her about Buster and his connection to Colter. Liann listened, her face cool and dispassionate. When I was finished, I asked her what she thought of it all.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said.

  “He’s my brother. .” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “They’ve been looking at him hard from the very beginning,” she said. “I can assure you of that. They always look hard at the family. And as you and I both know. .”

  “Family members are likely to be involved.”

  “Amen,” she said. “It’s the gospel truth ninety-eight percent of the time.”

  “But this time? Buster? He loves Caitlin. He’s crazy about her. Always has been. I’ve had my doubts about it, their closeness. But I think he just loves her.”

  “Love’s got nothing to do with it. If he’s mixed up with the wrong crowd, it’s his butt that’s on the line. If he tells the wrong guy the wrong thing.”

  The coffee tasted burnt and bitter. It needed cream and sugar. I almost pushed the mug away.

  “Have you talked to him?” Liann asked.

  I looked toward the stairs. No sign nor sound of Abby. “You’re my lawyer, right?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  I spoke in a low voice. “I saw him last night. In the cemetery across the street.”

  Liann’s body stiffened. Her shoulders went up, then settled back down. “What was he doing there?”

  “He was coming to talk to me, I guess. At the house. It was the middle of the night. .” I couldn’t tell her about the girl, Jasmine. Not yet.

  “And you’re not telling the police about this?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t turn him in.”

  “After what he did?”

  “Allegedly. You always say not to trust the police. And you don’t understand, Liann-my relationship with him is complicated. This goes all the way back to our childhoods.”

  “They could nail you for obstruction,” she said. “You know something, and you’re not sharing it with the police.”

  “It’s my fault. He wanted to borrow money from us. I didn’t give him the full amount, so he owed these guys something. This could have been stopped. .”

  She leaned in close to me and placed her hand on top of my forearm. “What are you planning on doing, Tom? What’s going on?”

  I worked my arm loose and choked down more coffee. “Nothing. I just want to see the guilty party behind bars.”

  She placed her hand on my arm again, forcefully enough that the coffee mug shook and liquid sloshed over onto the table.

  “Hey.”

  “I can’t protect you from everything, Tom,” she said, her teeth gritted. “I know what your motivations are.”

  “You do?”

  “You want to know what happened out there, during those four years she was gone. You’re less concerned with justice.”

  “I’m not as noble as you, I guess.”

  “You think you want to know these things. But do you? Really? Do you want to stick your nose in all that darkness? Will it make you feel better to know that whatever you imagined isn’t as bad as what really happened? Because I don’t think you can-even on your worst day-imagine what really went on in that house.”

  I didn’t look at her. I traced my finger through the spilled coffee, smearing it around on the tabletop. She stood up.

  “Are you even going to ask me why I came here today?” she asked.

  Once we’d started talking, I’d forgotten. “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “They found a body floating in a pond over in Mayfair County. No ID on it yet, but they think it might be Tracy Fairlawn.”

  She didn’t say anything else. She let the news sink in. I felt sick. Hollowed out. A bitter taste filled my mouth, but not from the coffee.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I don’t need to wait for the official ID. I know it’s her. Girls like her often end up floating in ponds like that. Or hidden in the woods. Or thrown in a ditch. It’s the lucky few who don’t.”

  Like Caitlin, she meant. The lucky one.

  “I’m going to go sit with her mother,” she said. “Call me if anything else changes. Like your mind.”

  She left me there, still smearing the coffee around like a troubled, distracted child.

  Chapter Fifty

  I was still at the table when Abby came down. I refilled my mug, stared at the dark liquid, and thought of Tracy’s body facedown in the cold water of some country pond.

  “What did Liann want?” Abby asked.

  As I told her, Abby
slid into a chair, her body seeming to lose weight and almost crumple. She raised her hand to her chest, her eyes unfocused.

  “He killed her,” she said. “They’ll arrest him for that, too.”

  “Maybe. How do we know they can prove it? A girl like Tracy, someone with those kinds of problems.”

  I could hear Liann’s voice in my head: Criminalization of the victim. I used to judge and blame parents with wild, uncontrollable children. Now I lived with a child I couldn’t control. Who was to blame?

  Colter.

  “I was going to go to church,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t. .”

  “You can go. I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.” She waited for more of a response. I didn’t offer one. Our marital standoffs could be like this. Abby probing, pushing; me resisting. Caitlin came by it honestly, the ability to wall out even those who could most do well by her. “Tom, I’m scared. He’s out there. He’s free. And he killed another girl. What are we doing here?”

  “Waiting, I guess.”

  “What if he wants to hurt Caitlin? What if he comes here. .?”

  I shook my head. “He won’t hurt her,” I said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He thinks he loves her. And she thinks she loves him.”

  I felt her gaze. She studied me. “How do you know that, Tom? Do you know something I don’t know?”

  I waited. I shook my head again. “I think you should go to church today, if you want. I’ll stay here with her.”

  “I can take her with me-”

  “No. I want Caitlin to stay here. With me.”

  She studied me more; then she nodded. “Okay. If you change your mind, let me know. I can come right home.” She squeezed my hand when she stood up.

  When she’d said her good-byes and left the house, I went to the foot of the stairs and called Caitlin.

  We sat across from each other at the dining room table. My chest felt buoyant, like the ballast tank on a submarine.

  Caitlin didn’t look at me. She held her right hand near her mouth, her teeth working on a piece of loose skin around her thumb. I didn’t bother to tell her to stop. She’d never stop the chewing, the cursing, the poor hygiene habits. All the things we could have helped, the disciplinary battles we could have fought, were lost. What was left?

  “What do you want to know?” Caitlin asked. A large glass of water sat in front of her, and she took a drink.

  “I want to know what happened in the park that day. I want to know how he got you to go with him.”

  Her brow wrinkled as though she were thinking hard. Four years. I’d assumed the facts would be right at her command.

  “I was walking Frosty,” she said. “He wasn’t very good on a leash, you know. He used to tug and strain and make that weird hacking noise because the collar choked him. You know what I’m talking about?”

  I did.

  “Really, I was too small to be walking him. He wasn’t trained well enough. So he was pulling me along and pulling me along, and I was holding on as best I could, but the leash started digging into my hands, deep into my hands. My fingers were all smashed together, the knuckles rubbed against one another. It hurt, really hurt. I tried to shift the leash from one hand to the other so it wouldn’t hurt so much, but when I tried, Frosty took off. He just bolted through the park, toward the cemetery. He was gone, just gone.” She gave a pained, almost wistful smile at the memory. “Anyway,” she said, “I freaked out. I was scared. If something happened to him, I knew I’d be in trouble, and I knew you’d never let me walk him in the park again.”

  “That would have been your mom’s reaction,” I said.

  “Whatever. I ran after him as fast as I could, but by the time I got to the cemetery, he was gone. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I looked around. I called his name. Nothing. He was gone. I started to cry. I didn’t like to cry-I thought I was too old for that, but I couldn’t help it. I felt the tears burning my eyes, and I knew I was losing it.”

  She stopped. I wished I could get a tape recorder, something to preserve her voice.

  “I guess I was about to run home, to run back to you and Mom and tell you what happened, when a van pulled up beside me. A white van. The man rolled down his window and asked me what was wrong. I told him. He said if I wanted to hop in he’d drive me around a little and help me look for Frosty.” She took a drink of water, her throat bobbing as she swallowed. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to get in a car with someone I didn’t know. I knew all that. You and Mom taught me all of that.”

  She didn’t go on, so I filled the gap. “Why did you get in with him?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then how. .?”

  “I walked away. I turned around and started back for the house. And the guy in the van called after me-he kept saying he would help me. So I started to walk faster, and that’s when John came up beside me. He was walking his own dog, and he’d heard what the guy in the van said to me. He came up beside me and told me I should just ignore that guy, and if I wanted help finding my dog, he’d walk around with me, with his dog on the leash, and he said he bet we’d find him. ‘He couldn’t have gone far,’ he said. ‘Not with that leash around his neck.’ He seemed nice and safe, at least compared to the other guy. He seemed like a nerd, really.” She smiled. “So we started walking around the park with his dog, looking for Frosty. I don’t know what happened to the guy in the van. He drove off, I guess. Who knows what he wanted. I guess we’ll never find out. The world’s probably full of guys like that.”

  She took another drink of water.

  “So how did you end up going off with him?” I asked.

  “We looked and looked for Frosty. We went around the walking track in the park and up and down the rows in the cemetery. I was still crying a little, and John tried to talk to me and make me feel better.”

  John. She called him John.

  “I started to realize it was getting late, that you and Mom were going to worry about me if I didn’t come home. I knew I’d have to go back and probably get in trouble over Frosty being gone. I told John I needed to go back to my parents. He offered me a ride in his car. He said he could drive me, and while we drove back we could look for Frosty some more. He said maybe Frosty just turned and headed for home, that dogs do that sometimes. They just follow their instincts.” She paused. “I didn’t know what to do. I was upset and scared, and John really did seem nice. He did.”

  “We wouldn’t have been mad at you.”

  “Mom would have. And you would have too. You always act like you don’t get angry about those things, but you do. Maybe you don’t even know you do it, but you get this look on your face. This disapproval. It’s there. I know it.” She looked at me, waiting for me to defend myself, I suppose. When I didn’t, she went on. “So I walked with him back to his car and got in. The car wasn’t anything special, just an old Toyota. And it didn’t feel that strange getting in and driving off.” She paused and held up her index finger. “Wait. It did feel strange. It felt different, I guess, and that’s really why I wanted to do it.”

  “Different how?”

  “Different like I wasn’t supposed to do it, but it still felt safe doing it. I felt a little excited, even though I was scared and worried about Frosty. It just seemed like the most unexpected thing I could do-get in a car with a strange man, even though he was just promising to help me look for my dog and take me home to my parents.”

  “But you didn’t come home.”

  “No.”

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “We went to his house.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “We looked for Frosty and drove back this way. We drove right past the house in fact.”

  If only I’d been outside. If only I’d been watching for her.

  If only.

  “After we’d driven around looking for a while, he said I should go back to his house with him and clean my face off. He told me I didn’t
want to see my parents that way, that if I cleaned up and looked grown up, it wouldn’t seem as bad as I thought it would be. I really think if I asked him, he would have just pulled into the driveway here and dropped me off. I don’t think he was intending to force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I was in control of which way things went, and I liked that feeling. So I said to myself, ‘What the hell. Let’s see what else happens.’ And I told him I’d go back to his house with him.”

  “You know you weren’t in control, right? You never were.”

  But she had stopped. There was a finality to the way she broke off. She stood up and went to the sink for more water. She drank it down, then refilled and drank some more. She kept her back to me, acting as though I weren’t in the room.

  “But you had seen him before? Colter? Right?”

  She turned around. “Why do you say that?”

  “In your coat, the coat you wore the day before you disappeared, there was a flower in the pocket. A red flower. It was right before Valentine’s Day, and you kept that flower in your pocket like someone gave it to you.”

  She swallowed but didn’t answer.

  “You know, it’s not going to matter now,” I said. “It’s not going to change anything. I just want to know-did he give you the flower?”

  “Yeah, he did.” She drank from the glass. I didn’t say anything because I could tell there was more to say. “I saw him at the park. I talked to him a few times.”

  “How many times?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How many?” I said, tapping the table with my index finger.

  She gave an exaggerated, exasperated shrug. “Five or six?”

  “A strange man, a grown man, spoke to you in the park five or six times and you didn’t tell us?”

  “Why should I have?”

  “Because we are your parents. We are supposed to protect you from those things.”

  “Well, you didn’t, did you? You didn’t.”

  “Did he give you that necklace then? Before he took you?”

  “No,” she said. She fingered the necklace. “He gave this to me one year later. It’s a token of what we mean to each other. As long as I wear it-”