Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

“Yeah. It’s a real palace,” he answers, but his laughter doesn’t have an ounce of humor in it. It’s as though he’s heard other people do it, maybe on TV or on the radio, and he’s trying to imitate it. “Somebody died, right? Isn’t that why they fired you?”

“Where’s your son?” I ask him.

“Nobody knows,” he says. “The police have been here all afternoon, right? They’ve gone through this place and asked me the same damn things over and over, and my answer didn’t change for them and it ain’t changing for you.”

“Your boy is guilty of something. Things will go easier for him if he starts helping himself here,” I say. “Tell me where he is and I can start to help him.”

“You’re a joke,” he says, sneering for a few seconds and then grinning like the madman he’s turning out to be. I feel sick knowing this is the man who covered my little girl’s coffin with dirt. Sick he was anywhere near her.

“You can’t hide him forever,” I tell him.

“You finished?”

I think about Bruce Alderman and how he was behaving while we dug up the coffin, and I think about him driving away in the stolen truck with the coffin sliding off the back and hitting the ground. I think about how he has perhaps behaved his entire life. This man was his role model. Maybe the world should be thankful there were only four corpses found in the lake and not a hundred.

“You know, I am going to find him,” I say, “only now it’s going to be the hard way.”

“I don’t care about making your life easy.”

“I’m not talking about hard for me,” I say. “You should have given him up, Alderman.”

Instead of getting angry Alderman starts to laugh again. “You’re a cliché,” he says. “And on top of that, you have no authority here.” He composes himself immediately, as if the laugh was as fake as the concern he’s displayed over the years filling in and digging out holes. “They never found him, did they?”

“What?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

I slip my business card back into my pocket. I’m glad he didn’t take it. I don’t want this guy touching my card; I don’t like the idea that my name could be in print anywhere inside this house of the damned-worse, I don’t like the idea of his fingers brushing against mine.

“I’ll find your son,” I promise.

“Ya think so?”

“I know so.”

He shrugs, as if it doesn’t bother him either way. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe he really doesn’t care, and that’s always been the problem for his son. Already I can see Bruce Alderman being found not guilty on a plea of insanity. With this man as his father, there isn’t a jury in the world who would be unsympathetic.

“It’s been a pleasure,” I say, and I back away from the door, keeping my eyes on him. He stares at me as if he is trying to unlock some great mystery. The only mystery here is how somebody so antisocial can have worked these grounds for so many years. He closes the door.

I’m ashamed at myself, angry with him. I came here to interview the bastard yet the only thing I achieved was to let him crawl under my skin. And I can’t take it out on either of us.

I reach the sidewalk, unlock the car, and swing the door open. And that’s when it happens. I sense it immediately. It’s a sprinkling of goose bumps that covers my arms and the back of my neck, and at first I think it’s just a residual feeling that anybody leaving that house would get, but then something touches my back. I know it’s a gun even though I’ve never felt one pushed there before.

“S-s-slowly,” he says, “just move s-s-low-ly.”

“Where?”

“Driver’s s-seat. Climb in.”

I do as Bruce Alderman says, trying to stay as calm as possible as he climbs into the seat behind me.

Too much training and not enough experience. That’s my problem. Plus the training never detailed anything like this. It was more a general thing, like a commonsense warning. If a gun is pointed at you in close proximity, stay calm. Try to talk your way out of it. It’s advice I would’ve figured out even if I’d never learned it.

“D-d-don’t try anything,” Bruce says, so I don’t. I don’t fight for the gun. I don’t open the door and try to run. Don’t do any of this because it’d be pointless, unless the point was to get shot.

Instead I slowly adjust my body so I can turn my head and face him. The gun looks huge, but only because of the viewing angle and I’m not the one holding it. I wonder where he got it from. There are two hands on the handle. Both are shaking. A finger is wrapped around the trigger.

It strains my eyes to keep the barrel in focus, but I keep them strained. If Bruce Alderman wanted me dead, he’d have done it already, but I feel as though if I take my eyes off the barrel I’m going to die.

“What do you want?”

“I d-d-don’t know,” he says, and his answer is a problem. If he doesn’t know, that means he has no plan, and that makes him far more dangerous, and it means maybe he is planning on shooting me. Maybe that’s where his plan is taking him.

His hands keep shaking, the gun rising and falling with minute motions.

“You must want me for something,” I say. “Probably to tell me something. Right? To tell me you had nothing to do with the dead girl we found?”

“Why were you t-talking to my f-f-father?” he asks.

“I was looking for you.”

“You s-started this,” Bruce says. “If it hadn’t been for you, everything w-w-would be okay. It would be okay.”

No, it wouldn’t be okay. Hasn’t been okay for Rachel Tyler for some time now. “Why is that?” I ask.

“What did my father say?”

“Your dad’s a real affable guy. He had plenty to say.”

He pushes himself back into the seat, but keeps the gun leveled at my head. “You think I k-k-killed those girls?”

I don’t answer. I look at Sidney Alderman’s house and wonder what he’s doing right now. Could be Sidney knew his son was out here waiting for me and was putting on a show, his own little performance of misdirection. Could be he didn’t know. It’s not like they could have anticipated my coming here. Bruce must have been here all along, or he followed me from the church.

“Please, I–I. . I need you to drive away from here.”

I turn back toward him and stare at the gun barrel. “Drive? Where to?”

“I don’t. . I don’t know.”

“I’m not a taxi service. I’m not going to take you somewhere where you can kill me in private. You want to do that, you do it here, and maybe your old man can help you dispose of my body. Or you might luck out and the cops will hear the gunshot. They’re not that far away.”

“Is that w-what you want?” he asks, pushing the gun forward a few more inches. “You think I w-won’t do it? You think I’ve got something to lose by doing it?”

“I don’t think that’s your plan,” I say, trying to sound calm, “and I don’t think you’re going to pull that trigger. You’d have done it already. You want to tell me something. Maybe you want to confess. Maybe you want to tell me all about it before putting a bullet in my chest.” His hands start to shake a little more. I figure I’m only a few shakes away from getting the back of my head splashed on the windshield. “But you don’t want that to happen here.”

“Maybe you’re wrong.”

I think about my wife. If I’m wrong, I won’t be seeing her again. If I’m wrong-and if I’m lucky-maybe I’ll be seeing my daughter. Only problem is I don’t believe in an afterlife. I think of Bridget, already alone and about to become even more so. Except that she’d stare out the window as my death made the newspapers and TV and she’d never feel the loss.