Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

“So where do you want to go?” I ask him.

“Away from here. N-now.”

I manage to shift my eyes from the barrel to his pale face. His features have sunken since the afternoon, as if the bubble of paranoia holding them in place is slowly deflating. His eyes dart nervously back and forth, unable to fix on any one thing for more than a fraction of a second, like he’s hyped up on drugs. There are beads of sweat dangerously close to rolling into his reddened eyes. Behind him, further up the road, dead people are being found in other dead people’s places. I look back at the gun, then at his eyes. Back and forth, back and forth, his eyes are looking for something-whether for help or for the demons that have chased him his entire life, who knows? Could be he’s looking for his caretaker father to take care of this.

“Please,” he repeats, more begging than demanding.

I turn around, and it’s hard to keep looking ahead with the weight of the gun trying to pull my eyes back. I swing the car around, wondering if the old man is watching any of this from his filth-covered windows, or even if he can see through them. In the rearview mirror the house in the glow of my brake lights looks like it’s set on Mars. I head past the cemetery, past the dozen or so people helping the dead and ignoring, for the time being, the living. I pass the large iron gates that look like they were sculpted two thousand years ago to guard some Greek mythological fortress. I pass the church parked back from the road. I’m not sure what Bruce Alderman’s plans are, and I hope at least he knows. I pick a direction and stick to it.

We stop at the first intersection behind a beat-up pickup with a sun-faded bumper sticker on the back saying Oral Me . I look at him in the mirror. He looks scared. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”

The caretaker doesn’t answer.

“I can help you.”

“Help me?”

“You must want something,” I tell him.

“Nobody can give me what I want.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

“I know,” he says. “It’s impossible. Unless you can turn back time. Can you? Can you make the last ten years disappear?”

His stutter has gone and I suspect that’s because we’re away from the cemetery. Or, more accurately, away from his dad. He sounds like he did this afternoon when I spoke to him briefly before the digger came along and unearthed all these questions. He also sounds as if his question is genuine, as if he’s holding out hope that maybe I can make the impossible happen. I hope it’s not part of his plan.

“You’re not the only one who wishes they could turn back time,” I tell him. “All I can do is listen to what you have to say. And then I can give you some options. You want to tell me why you killed Rachel Tyler?”

“You know her name?” he says, instead of denying it like an innocent man would.

“I’m a quick learner.”

“That’s why you’re looking for me,” he says. “You think I killed those girls.”

“You want me to think otherwise?”

He shakes his head. “I never killed anybody,” he says.

“Uh huh. Is that why you were in such a hurry to leave this afternoon that you stole the truck? Is that why you’ve got a gun to my head? Doesn’t seem like the path an innocent man would be taking.”

“You don’t know that,” he says. “Can’t know that. You’d be doing the same thing.”

“I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be.”

The intersection clears and we carry on, getting hooked into the flow of other traffic. We drive along in silence for a few seconds. I need him to stay calm.

“You have an office, right?” he asks.

“Why?”

“You must do. All PIs have offices.”

“I don’t know all the PIs in this world,” I tell him. “Half of them could be working out of their cars for all I know. Or their houses.”

He pushes the barrel into my neck. He seems to be getting more and more confident. Only it’s a sliding-scale type of confidence. He’s more confident, perhaps, than a six-year-old girl walking through a cemetery on a dare. Not as confident as a guy holding up a bank.

“Will we be alone there?” he asks.

“Yes.” I change lanes and start altering my course. “But the coffee isn’t anything to write home about.”

He doesn’t offer any further conversation as we drive, and I decide against asking for any. I let him sit in silence, allowing him time to figure something out.

I turn into the parking lot behind my building, and I take my spot, which in the past I’ve had people towed out of. I look at him again in the mirror. “Now what?”

“Is there a security guard on duty?”

“This isn’t a bank.”

He stays out of reach as we walk to the back entrance, but comes in close when we get there. There’s a swipe pad mounted on the wall-it’s all very low-tech-and I slip a card through the reader. There’s a mechanical sound of metal disengaging from metal, then I push the door open. He follows closely behind me, and my first opportunity of getting rid of him by slamming the door on his face is lost.

“How many floors?” he asks.

“How many floors what?”

“What floor are you on?”

“The eighth,” I tell him.

“Let’s take the stairs.”

I’ve already pushed the button on the elevator and the doors have opened. “This is much quicker.”

“Too confined,” he says.

“You claustrophobic?”

“Where are they?”

“This way.”

I lead him into the stairwell. It’s cold and our footfalls echo as we take the stairs two at a time for the first four floors, then one at a time for the remainder. When we reach the eighth floor, we’re both breathing heavily. We see nobody as we move down the corridor. There are potted plants full of crisp green leaves and no brown ones, oil paintings that don’t represent anything, just colors and shapes thrown together in appealing ways.

We reach my office. I step in. Bruce reaches behind him and shuts the door.

“Sit down and keep your hands on the desk,” he says.

I do as he asks, resting my palms on either side of the watch I took earlier. Bruce sits on the other side of the desk as if he were a client. He stares at the watch.

“You recognize it?” I ask him.

“How much do you know?” he asks.

“About what?”

“Don’t be like this,” he says, slapping one hand on the side of his chair while keeping the other on the gun. Steady now, as if all the nerves are gone. As if being away from the cemetery has cured him. As if over the last fifteen minutes all the confusion, all the fear, all the guilt have somehow lined up, found a way to get along, and formed a brilliant idea about what to do next.

“Okay, here’s what I know,” I say. “From the moment you found out we were digging up Henry Martins, you were nervous. You hung around despite that, but as soon as the bodies started coming up to the surface of the lake you bolted. Things were inevitable then. We were all on the same train ride. In the car a while ago you were surprised I’d identified the girl. Rachel Tyler. You asked if I thought you’d killed the girls. Not people, but girls. That means you already know that when the other bodies are identified, and the matching coffins dug up, there are going to be women in there. The only way you could know that is if you put them there.”

He doesn’t answer. Just stares at me, his hand shaking a little, his options racing behind his jittery eyes. I hope he’s not coming back time and time again to the one where he pulls the trigger. Maybe that was his plan all along, and he’s had it from the moment he climbed into my car. He partners up his free hand with the other one to steady the gun.