Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

He hangs up without me telling him Alderman has my daughter. And that’s okay-I want to deal with Alderman myself.

The phone call I’m going to make will take most of their legwork out of play. It’ll mean the contents of the other two coffins are no longer up for grabs. But that call can wait. First I’m going to find Sidney Alderman and do what it takes to get my daughter back, and that’s something I don’t need Landry’s help for.

The church is bathed in sunlight on one side and shade on the other, the two halves separated by a thin line like good and evil. It looks like there’s probably a difference of twenty degrees between the two. The stained-glass windows look dull and fogged up with age. The concrete brick around the edges of the shady side has speckles of mold. The gardens have low-key and low-maintenance shrubs spaced out about a meter apart. There aren’t any weeds, but that’ll probably change now that Bruce is gone.

Mine is the only car out front, and there’s nobody inside the church either. Except, of course, for Father Julian, who appears from a side door to the right of the altar when I’m about halfway up the aisle. Maybe I passed through a motion detector. Maybe he’s been hanging out all day for the chance to trap some soul into a conversation about God. But the way he moves toward me makes me think he’s been waiting for me to show up.

“You’re here,” he says gravely.

“We need to talk.”

“You’re right. We do.” He looks paler than yesterday, as if a chunk of his faith has slipped away during the night. Or been stolen. “We need to talk about Bruce. Though to be honest I don’t know if I can. I don’t think I can talk to you.”

“Father Julian, please, you have to-”

“I don’t know, Theo,” he says, glancing at the large envelope in my hand. Some of the color is coming back to his face, and the look in his eyes suggests it’s coming back on waves of anger. “I remember what it was like for you two years ago.”

“It’s not like that now.”

“Do you remember I used to come around to your house?” he asks.

“Of course I remember. But this isn’t like that other time.”

“Perhaps not for you, but perhaps it’s like that for me. Bruce was. . well, Bruce was like a son to me. What you’ve done-”

“I didn’t kill him.”

His expression doesn’t change. He looks as if he was prepared to hear me say that, and equally prepared to dismiss it. He looks like a man struggling to stay in control. “This is not the time or especially the place for your lies.”

“I didn’t touch him.”

He shakes his head. “You lost your way, Theo. You lost your God. You lost your faith.”

“I lost my family,” I tell him. “You used to think that was part of God’s plan. If you were right, then what happened last night was also part of His plan.”

“You’re trying to be smart,” he says. “After all that you’ve done.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I tell him, putting my hands up in a warding-off gesture, the There’s nothing up my sleeve sign.

“No? I know what you’re capable of. The man that killed your daughter, do you remember what happened after he disappeared?”

“I remember you stopped coming around,” I tell him.

“I tried to help you,” he tells me. “But you didn’t want it. I tried to stop you from heading down a path, but you wouldn’t be stopped. And this is where it has brought you, this path, this path where innocent men die. Innocent men like Bruce.”

“I didn’t touch him,” I say, “and I sure as hell don’t hurt innocent men.”

“Oh, you didn’t touch him, did you?” he says, his voice getting louder now, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve ever heard him yell. First time I’ve heard anybody in a church yell. “Then how in the hell did he end up dead!”

“He shot himself. There was nothing I could do.”

“You sure found yourself able to do something two years ago.”

“That was completely different.” Now I’m the one getting close to yelling. “And you know that. You damn well know that.”

“I told you that Bruce was a good boy,” he says, his arms going out to his sides and his hands flicking forward, as if trying to discard something sticky from his fingertips. “I told you he had nothing to do with those girls dying. I told you! Why couldn’t you have listened? You’ve shown so much trust in me in the past, why couldn’t you have shown it now?”

“Goddamn it, Father Julian,” I yell, and the words don’t make him step back-in fact he takes a small step forward. He looks like he wants to hit me. “I didn’t kill him! Why the hell don’t you pick up the phone and make a call and speak to anybody down at the station or at the morgue and ask them what happened? They’ll tell you.”

“You mean your friends?”

“Come on, you can’t believe that bullshit you saw on TV,” I tell him.

He nods. He concedes the point. “He was a good boy,” he says, much quieter now.

“Maybe he was. Part of me certainly believes he was. So instead of getting angry at me, why don’t you stay angry at whoever did this. How about you give me a hand here and help me clear his name? Bruce told me he was innocent, that he buried the bodies, but that he didn’t kill those girls. How about you help me, or are you too caught up with those assumptions of yours?”

He looks at me for what feels like a long time, as if inside somewhere he’s searching himself for the right thing to do. The time it takes him suggests he’s either searching real hard or he’s slipping on just what the right thing is these days.

“I’ll listen to you, Theo, just one more time. Then you have to promise me you’ll never come back here.”

“Once you hear what I have to say, you won’t ask me to-”

He shakes his head and cuts me off. “Promise me,” he says. “Under the eyes of God, inside His church, promise me you’ll never come back here.”

I make the promise. It’s easy to make when you don’t believe in God or His church.

“My office,” he says. “We’ll talk there.”

I follow him through the side door. The corridor is dimly lit, and we pass other doors and plenty of drafts-churches are full of drafts. He leads me into a small, dusty office that is cluttered with old-looking books and mismatched furniture. He takes a seat behind his desk. The sun has arced around in the sky and is shining directly on him. It makes his face look whiter, almost glowing. Like a halo. The dust particles floating in the air are all a bright white. The light makes the stubble on his face look patchy, and it takes some of the anger out of his eyes and makes them look tired. There’s a crucifix hanging on the wall behind him. Jesus has a downcast look about him, as if he’s bored by it all, as if he’s seen every church office there is to see and after two thousand years of it he’s about had his fill of churches. The entire office looks as though every night somebody sneaks in here and alters everything slightly. It’s the same way my place looks when I can’t figure out where I left my wallet or keys. I sit down opposite him.

“If I’d helped you last night, maybe. .” Father Julian hesitates. “Well, who knows?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

Father Julian sighs. “What do you want from me, Theo? Did you come for somebody to forgive you? Because you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“Did you know that Bruce owned a gun?”

“He didn’t.”

“It sure looked like he did.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“No. But think about it. If I was going to kill him, why would I take him back to my office? You think I’d shoot him in front of my desk so the whole world would know about it?”