Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

“You were stoned.”

“Best as I remember, yeah.”

“You get her name?” I ask.

“Nah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Could it have been Deborah?”

“Sure, it easily could have. But it just as easily could have been Susan. Or Nicola.”

“That’s real helpful.”

Studly shrugs. “That’s all I know, man. Hey, you find him you tell him he owes me rent, okay?”

“Look, this is important,” I say, and I hand him one of my business cards. “You remember something, you give me a call.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he says, and he screws the card into his pocket. I figure in five minutes he’ll forget it’s even there.

“Okay, let’s do this your way,” I say. “Got some scissors?”

“Fuck you, man.”

“I’m not going to cut you. If I wanted to do something fun I’d just shoot you. Now, scissors? Come on, dude , hurry up.”

He heads into the kitchen and shows back up a few seconds later. I reach into my pocket and pull out the money my mother gave me. I count out two one-hundred-dollar notes. I cut the scissors across them, separating the notes into halves. I hand him a half from each note, along with the scissors, and I pocket the other two halves.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with these?”

“They’ll help you think. You gotta come up with something useful and I’ll give you the rest.”

I sit in my car, but don’t drive anywhere. I think about Rachel Tyler, and I think about David Harding, and I wonder who felt the most revulsion when they found out the truth. For the years they were dating, there is no way David or Rachel could have known they were brother and sister. As they shared the same bed, as they held each other in the night, as they spoke of dreams and fears, there was no way they could have known.

Rachel amp; David forever .

That’s what was inscribed on the ring.

Then somehow David found out. The truth made him sick. It would make anybody sick, and it would make anybody angry too. I wonder if he ever knew that type of reaction was within him, that depth of anger. Did he blame her? Did he blame himself? Or just Father Julian? David has his own abyss, and maybe he didn’t even know it, not until that day. He killed Rachel because he could not handle the fact his sister was his lover. Most men would have felt the anger, the embarrassment, the pain, but what is the normal reaction? To move on, to try and forget about it? To never talk about it, to bury those memories and emotions as deep as they can be buried, and then never mention them again? Or find a shrink, to admit it wasn’t their fault, to process it, and process it to the point where it becomes just one of those things, like missing the deadline on your tax return or spilling red wine on the carpet.

David’s rage took him beyond Rachel Tyler and to other girls he had never met, then it led him to kill Father Julian and to planting the murder weapon in my house. He chose me because he saw me on the news, but the thing about David was he was caught in the student world-a world where he slept in every day and missed the news report the morning following my car accident. He didn’t know to move the murder weapon back out of my garage.

I start driving away from the house. Other possibilities start to filter their way through my thoughts as I drive to Fiona Chandler’s house.

“I never told him who his father was,” Fiona Chandler tells me while I stand on her doorstep.

“So your maiden name is. .”

“Harding,” she says. “Then it became Martins, and now it’s Chandler. Some good names and bad memories.”

She invites me in out of the rain and we stand in her hallway with the door open. She sucks in a deep lungful of cigarette smoke, then blows it into the air, aiming for outside. It forms a small cloud as it hugs the cold air and slowly moves toward me.

“How did David react when you told him about his father?”

“I never told him, not the complete truth. He thinks Henry Martins is his father. He doesn’t know about Father Julian.”

“I’m pretty sure he does.”

“That’s impossible. David was already angry for a lot of reasons. He didn’t have the easiest of lives. He was abandoned by two men he never knew. I didn’t need to tell him everything, so I only ever told him about Henry. I told him that Henry left me when I was pregnant, but I never told him that Henry wasn’t his father. He asked if Henry made child support payments. Henry didn’t, and even though Father Julian offered to, I didn’t want his money. He had ruined my life, and I never wanted anything to do with him. So all David knew was he had a dad who wanted nothing to do with him and wouldn’t help support him.”

“Why’d you keep going to the church if you wanted nothing to do with Father Julian?”

She shrugs. “I know it doesn’t make sense. It’s just that, well, I kept thinking he’d leave the church behind to be with me. But he didn’t.”

“And you never told Patricia of your affair with Father Julian?”

“It wasn’t the sort of thing you went around telling,” she says. “Perhaps these days, but not back then.”

“Did David find Henry? Talk to him?”

“He wanted to. And that just made him angrier.”

“What do you mean?”

“It happened the same week I told David about him. Just one of those things, I guess. He wanted to visit Henry and talk to him because he thought Henry was his dad. He wanted to confront him, I suppose, but he never got the chance. Henry died that same week. It was an awful coincidence, and I guess David felt abandoned all over again.”

“So when was the last time you saw him?”

“I went to Patricia’s mother’s funeral. David came along, of course. David and Rachel met when they were kids through Patricia and me. It was one of those relationships you could see coming up before it ever started. Anyway, it was a few days after that I think Rachel disappeared. It was around the same time Henry died-I can’t remember exactly the details. I’d call David, but he’d never want to speak to me. After a while he stopped taking the calls. Time just kind of went by after that. To be honest I don’t really know what happened. The shock and the loss, I guess, but that’s when family should become closer, right?”

She stares at me for some kind of confirmation, and I slowly nod.

“Except he was losing people-he lost Rachel, he lost a dad he thought he was about to meet. Yet these things seemed to rip us apart. Believe me, I tried. I really did. But there’s only so much you can do. David, well, he had his own life. He was in control of it and I couldn’t change his decision. Can you believe that? I did the best I could, but in the end it wasn’t good enough and his anger toward being abandoned became anger against me, and, well. . well, I should have told him sooner. If I had told him when he was a small boy, maybe he would still think of me as his mother and not some. . I don’t know, monster or whore or incubator or whatever it is he thinks I am.”

My cell phone starts ringing.

“I should take this,” I say, and pull the phone out of my pocket. “It’s important.”

I take a few steps back from the doorway and flip open the phone. I don’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

“Yeah, man, it’s Oliver.”

“Who?”

“Oliver. You were just at my house?”

“Oliver? Oh, Studly,” I say.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“I got something for you.”

“Yeah, money does the memory wonders, right?”

“How do I know I’ll get it?” he asks.

“Do I look like the kind of guy who would lie to you?”

“Honestly, man, you look like a guy capable of anything.”