Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

“Drink this,” I say, handing him the cup.

“Go away,” he says, not taking it.

“It’s hot,” I say, “and you don’t want to risk me spilling it all over you.”

He sits up and takes it. “What the hell do you want?”

“To talk to you about Rachel.”

“Let me guess-her mom asked you to come here, right?” he says. “She still thinks I killed her.”

“I’m working for Rachel, not for her mother. Did you kill her?”

He looks ready to throw the coffee at me. “Get the hell out of my room.”

“I found her body.”

He stares at me for a few seconds without moving. Then he sits up straighter and tightens his grip on the coffee mug. “She’s dead?”

It’s such a simple question. There is no emotion there, just a look of complete surprise, his mouth slightly open and his eyes slightly wider. No tears, no anger, no frustration. Just acceptance. Acceptance of a question I think he’s been asking himself over and over-the big What if. What if she’s still alive? What if she isn’t? And finally the answer.

“She was found yesterday,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. I’m sure he doesn’t think I’m making this up, but he shakes it anyway, as if he can ward off the bad news. “Are you sure?”

I hand him the ring. He sits the coffee on the floor so he can look at it. He turns it over and reads the inscription. Then he slips it onto the tip of his finger and slowly spins it around, studying it from every degree.

“I gave her this,” he says. “It wasn’t long before she disappeared. I promised her that when we graduated I’d take her away from here and we’d never come back.” He smiles, then gives a short, half-second laugh that sounds more like a grunt. “It feels like a lifetime ago.”

“She hated it here? Why?”

“I don’t think she really did,” he says. “I guess that’s the thing about this city, right? You can love and hate it at the same time. I think she just felt claustrophobic here, you know? She wanted to see the rest of the world, and I was going to show it to her. Doesn’t every young person want the same thing? Where did you find her?”

“She was buried in a cemetery.”

He frowns, then commits to screwing his face up instead, as if he’s just bitten into something rotten and something dead. “Huh?”

“She had been put into somebody else’s coffin.”

His head is slowly shaking. “I don’t get what you’re saying. She was buried?”

The emotion is coming now. His hands are shaking a little, and his eyes are starting to glisten over, just as I’ve seen it dozens of other times in those who have lost loved ones.

“We were exhuming a body,” I say. “The person we thought we were digging up was missing. Rachel was there instead.”

The still shaking head. He’s hearing what I’m telling him, but it’s a struggle for him to process. Of course it is. He’s hearing that the girl he loved was murdered and stuffed into somebody else’s coffin. “Who were you digging up?”

“A guy called Henry Martins. Ring a bell?”

And still his head is shaking. “Why would it?”

“He was a bank manager. You sure you’ve never heard of him?”

Finally his head becomes still. “Does it look like I’ve ever needed a bank manager? How’d she die? Was she buried alive? Oh, Jesus, don’t tell me that.”

“I’m not sure,” I say, which is not actually telling him anything.

“You’re not sure?” he asks. “Did you see her?”

“Yes.”

“How’d she look?”

“She was still wearing the ring,” I say, which isn’t quite true.

“How’d she look?” he repeats.

“She’s been dead two years, David. That’s how she looked.”

He runs both his hands through his hair. “This isn’t right,” he says. He throws back the blankets and stands up. He’s wearing a pair of boxer shorts, and his body is pasty white. He pulls on a pair of jeans. The ring is still on his finger.

“It never is. Tell me what happened,” I say.

“What?”

“When you last saw her, tell me what happened.”

“Nothing happened. It was just a non-moment. I can’t even remember,” he says.

“Sure you can. Everybody remembers the last moments.”

David’s moment turned out to be like any other. He had dinner with her. They ate fast food while they studied. They went to bed together, though he tells me the house was tidier back then. They woke up together; he headed for class and she went to find some breakfast. It was a slice-of-life moment that has probably been playing over and over in his head for the last two years. He’ll have been thinking about all the factors that had to come together for this to have happened. He could have skipped class. His class could have been at a different time. Or hers could have been. They could have had breakfast together. They could have had dinner separately the night before. Any link in the chain could have been broken and the result would be that they’d still be together.

The reality is, of course, they could have broken up or he could have got her pregnant and left her for a life of less responsibility, or she could have cheated on him. Young love can lead anywhere. But it never should have led to this. He says he didn’t even know she was missing, that he figured she’d gone home that night and hadn’t called.

“Was she having any problems?” I ask.

“No. None that she told me about.”

“Anybody giving her a hard time? Hanging around? Anything at all out of the ordinary?”

“You don’t think I’ve been asked these questions? Man, I’ve been over this with so many other people, and I’ve been over it with myself every single day. I loved her. I still do.”

I nod. “Okay. Where’d she go for breakfast?”

“She ate at a university café. You guys already know that.”

I don’t feel the need to correct his impression that I must be a cop. “Humor me.”

He starts pacing the room. “She was spotted in there. She left around ten thirty. She ate bacon and eggs smothered in tomato sauce. I never figured out how she could eat that combination. Then she left. And that’s all anybody knows.”

“Was she supposed to meet anybody?”

He shakes his head. “She was going to class.”

“Was she seeing anybody?”

He stops pacing the room. He stares at me. It’s similar to the look I gave the cop in the cemetery last night. “What, like having an affair?”

“Was she?” I ask.

“Rachel would never have done that.”

“Would you?”

“Hell no. I loved her!”

“So you can’t think of anywhere else she might’ve gone.”

“I don’t know, man. If I did, I’d tell you. I’d have told you two years ago.”

“Okay, okay. Who else can I ask?”

“What?”

“She has to have had a best friend, right? Who would she talk to when she was complaining about you?”

“She didn’t complain.”

“Then you must’ve been the perfect boyfriend.”

“Alicia North. They’d go shopping all the time and they’d complain about men. Rachel said she did it more for Alicia than for herself. But Alicia didn’t see her that day. I think Rachel did it because she loved shopping. It was kind of annoying. She used to make all these damn impulse buys.”

“Where does Alicia live?”

He starts pacing the room again. “I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t spoken to her since.”

“Ever heard of a woman called Julie Thomas?”

“Julie Thomas? I don’t know. Is she a student here?”

“No.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard of her.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Why?”

“She went missing around the same time as Rachel. What about Jessica Shanks?”