Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

I glance out at the city. It doesn’t make me feel nostalgic enough to head back to ground level into the rain to see what I’m missing. I start playing with my cell phone. I turn it back on. It starts ringing. I pop the battery out and sit both pieces under the lamp to dry out.

I move into a small bathroom en suite and clean up. I have a spare outfit hanging on the back of the door, there for the day I fall into a lake of corpses or get shot in the chest. I get changed and ball the wet stuff into a bag, taking the watch I found out from my pocket first. Though perhaps found isn’t as accurate as stole . It’s an expensive Tag Heuer, an analog, and it’s still working. Batteries in these things normally last around five years, and they’re waterproof to two hundred meters. I look at the back: there is no inscription. But already a time frame is beginning to take shape.

My computer is a little slow and seems to take a minute longer to boot up for each year older it gets. I begin hunting through old news stories online, using search engines to narrow down my browsing, looking for any mention of coffins being reused to make money; but if it’s happened in this country nobody has ever found out.

I run the caretaker’s name through the same search engines and find other people with the same name doing other things in other parts of the world, covering occupations and religions and culture and crime. I find a link that takes me through to a newspaper story about the caretaker’s father. He retired two years ago after forty years of graveyard service.

I use the online newspaper database of Christchurch City Libraries to go through the obituaries, seeing who died last week and who would fit the description of the woman from the water. I end up with four names, but can’t narrow it down any further because the obituaries don’t give descriptions or locations for the funerals. I wonder if Detective Schroder has already figured out an ID, and decide he probably has. Simple when you have the resources. He’s probably circulating a photo of her body to morticians around the city; or, easier still, he’s got the priest from the Catholic church at the cemetery to take a look. If they’ve identified her, then they’ll be in the process of getting a court order to dig up the grave she was taken from. I look at my watch. It’s after five thirty: everybody will be pushing into overtime, but it will get done today.

I put my phone back together and drop it into my pocket. It’s a ten-minute drive from my office to the hospital, but it takes me thirty in the thick traffic and constant stream of red lights. Christchurch, during peak-hour traffic and bad weather, is always at its worst. I imagine most cities are. Cars are backed up and blocking intersections, and the gutters are starting to flow with rainwater. I have to take a detour when the flow of traffic is blocked by a bus that has driven into a set of traffic lights, squashing them beneath fifteen tons of metal and a few tons of commuters, putting the intersection out of commission. People are tooting at each other, but the rain stops them from winding down windows and yelling.

The hospital is a drab-looking building with no appeasing aesthetics and a design that would equally suit a prison. I park around the back, head to the side Authorized Personnel Only door, use the intercom, and, a moment later, get buzzed inside. I have to sign a log book and make idle conversation with a security guard while doing it. I’m starting to feel pretty cold again, and the idea of seeing the coffin and then having it opened in front of me isn’t warming me back up. The elevator seems to take forever to arrive, making me wonder exactly where it’s rising from. When the doors finally open, I ride it down to the basement.

The morgue is full of white tile and cold hard light. It’s like an alien world down here. There are shapes beneath sheets and tools with sharp edges. The air feels colder than the lake. Cabinets are full of bottles and chemicals and silver instruments. Benches and gurneys and trays hold items designed to strip a body down to the basics.

The coffin looks older beneath the white lights, as if the car ride aged it by a quarter of a century. Plus it’s more busted up than I first thought. There are cracks along the side, and the top is all dented in. The whole thing has been brushed down before being delivered, but it hasn’t been cleaned. There is dirt and mud caked to the edges of it, and there are also signs of rust. It’s resting on a knee-high table, which puts the lid of the coffin a little below chest height.

I tighten my hands in a failing effort to ward off the cold. My headache has become my sidekick; it beats away with varying tempos. I wish it would leave. I wish I could leave too. The smell of chemicals is balancing on a tightrope between being too overpowering and not overpowering enough to hide the smell of the dead. I can never remember the smell-all I can remember is my reaction-yet for those few minutes, whenever I used to come down here, I thought I’d never be able to forget it. The bodies aren’t rotting, they’re not decaying and stinking up the place, but the smell is here-the smell of old clothes and fresh bones and old things that can no longer be.

The lid on the coffin is still closed, and it’s easy to imagine there ought to be a chain wrapped around it with one of those big old-fashioned padlocks attached. I can barely make out my smeared reflection in places, especially on the brass handles, my face broken up by pit marks made of rust. I run a finger across the shovel marks that the digger and truck drivers pointed out to me earlier. They’re right in the middle of a long concave dent.

“She’s been opened before,” the medical examiner says, stepping out of her office and into the morgue behind me, and even though I knew she was there her appearance still startles me. “I wonder what’s inside.”

“Or what isn’t inside,” I say.

I put my hand out, expecting hers to be cold when she shakes it, but it isn’t. “Good to see you, Tracey.”

“What’s it been, Tate? Two years? Three?”

“Two,” I answer.

“Of course,” she says. “I should have known that.”

I smile at her and let go of her hand. I look her over without appearing to look her over. Though Tracey Walter must be my age, she looks ten years younger. Her black hair is pulled back and tied into a tight bun; her pale complexion is bone white in the morgue lights; her green eyes stare at me from behind a set of designer glasses. I think about the last time I saw her and know she’s doing the same thing.

“Sure got busted up falling off that truck,” I say, looking at the long cracks. “Caretaker was in a hell of a hurry.”

“You’ve never seen an exhumed coffin before, have you?”

“Yeah? You can tell that?”

She smiles. “Movies don’t show how much weight coffins are under once they’re in the ground. Often it’s enough to do serious damage. Part of this is from falling off the truck, but most of it will be from the pressure of being in the ground. Six feet deep means six feet of dirt piling up on top-like I said, that’s a lot of pressure.”

I start nodding. A lot of pressure. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. “So, is there anything you need me to do?” I ask.

“Just sign this and you can go,” she says.

“You’re not going to open it while I’m here?”

“It was only your job to be at the cemetery, Tate. It was never meant to extend beyond that.”

“Uh huh, but my job was to make sure Henry Martins made it here, and those shovel marks on the coffin suggest otherwise.”

She sighs, and I realize she knew all along she would never be putting up much of an argument.