A Welcome Grave

by Michael Koryta

  “It was a long time ago,” I told the empty office.

  I pulled the stack of case files on the desk toward me and flipped the first one open. There was work to do, and nobody else would be coming in to do it for me.

  Karen’s call came at ten in the morning on the day after her husband was buried. I was in the office again, alone again, typing up a report on a custody case. The father was my client, and he wanted proof that his ex-wife’s new boyfriend was a drug dealer. Thought it would help him in the court battle for the kids. During the two weeks I spent on the case, I determined that the ex-wife had no boyfriend and that my client was a prick. Although he found time to call me six times a day, complaining that I must not be doing my job because “that bitch” most definitely did have a boyfriend, and a drug-dealing boyfriend at that, he somehow managed to miss his seven-year-old son’s birthday by three days. When he realized that, he blamed the ex-wife, naturally.

  I was sitting in front of the computer, momentarily frozen as I sought words that would allow me to tell my client he was an idiot without sacrificing the rest of my fee, when the phone rang. I hit the speakerphone button, a habit I’d developed only in Joe’s absence, and said hello.

  “Lincoln?” Voices on the speakerphone always seemed to come from a long way off, but this one put a different spin on that quality. It was coming from a long way off and a place I’d been trying to forget.

  “Karen.” For a moment I regretted saying her name, wished I’d pretended not to recognize her voice from just that one word, but then I realized that was a pointless exercise. I would’ve known her even if she’d only sneezed when I answered the phone, and she knew that.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. Certainly better than you must be doing, at least.”

  “Are you free for a little while?”

  I paused. “I’m working. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just . . . I was hoping you could come by. I wanted to apologize, that’s all. I just found out what the police did. That was ridiculous. I can’t believe they talked to you. There was no reason for it.”

  “There was a reason for it,” I said. “It’s called doing a job. I didn’t take any offense.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I just wanted to make sure . . . wanted you to know that I didn’t send them. That I wasn’t the one who gave them the idea they needed to bother you with this.”

  Hearing her voice was surreal. I knew it so well, the pitch, the cadence, and yet in a way it felt like listening to a singer whose face you’ve never seen. That voice couldn’t be any more familiar, yet I didn’t know who she was. Not anymore.

  “I understand,” I said.

  Silence. I leaned back in my chair and waited.

  “Lincoln?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you were still there.”

  “I’m here.”

  Another pause, then, “Anyhow, I was hoping, if you had a few minutes, you could come by.”

  “So you could apologize?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “You just did. And, thank you, but it was unnecessary.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Well . . . goodbye, Lincoln.”

  “Goodbye, Karen. Good luck.”

  She hung up, but only when the phone began to beep at me did I remember to lean over and click off the speakerphone.

  Ten minutes later, it rang again. Karen.

  “Lincoln, I really do need to see you. I’m drained, and emotional, and I hung up before because . . . well, your voice was so defensive. And I understand that. I do. But I need to see you. In person.”

  “Just to apologize?”

  “Lincoln . . .” There were tears in her voice now.

  Shit. I pushed back in my chair, rolled my eyes to the ceiling, and shook my head. What the hell was this about?

  “Twenty minutes,” she said, speaking the words softly and carefully, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice. “It’s important.”

  “Where?”

  “The house.”

  The house. Like it was Monticello, some sort of damn landmark.

  “I don’t know where the house is, Karen.”

  “Pepper Pike. Off Shaker, near the country club.” She gave me the address.

  “The country club,” I said. “Of course.” That had been the location of my last encounter with Jefferson, but Karen didn’t strike me as someone who’d appreciate that particular flash of nostalgia, so I kept it to myself.

  “You’ll come?”

  “Like I’ve got no sense at all.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. I’ll see you in a bit.”

  “Thank you, Lincoln.”

  We hung up again, and, after a few minutes of swearing at myself, I got up and walked out the door.

  2

  The house was a spectacle. A driveway that was probably repaved every year wound through a collection of tall, perfect trees shading a lawn that looked like a fairway at Augusta. Then the home came into view around the bend—southern mansion met colonial met contemporary, but, somehow, the damn thing worked. It was a lot of white and glass and a sprawling front porch beneath second-story balconies. A stone wall bordered a swimming pool and patio. A cover had been spread across the pool, and it looked like there was a stone fireplace built alongside the patio.

  A four-car garage stood to the side, styled to look like a carriage house. I pulled to a stop in front of it and waited for someone to come out and offer to provide my truck with oats and water while I went inside. When nobody did, I shut the engine off and got out. The spacious yard was still and silent, the house more of the same. I walked up a cobblestone path to the porch. At the front door, I lifted the brass handle and dropped it back on the wood a few times. A minute passed, maybe two. Someone had left a bouquet of flowers at the door. I picked them up, looked at the card. From Ted and Nancy, with our deepest sympathies. I kept the flowers in my free hand while I banged the knocker again, the sound loud and hollow. This time the door opened.

  The sight of her shook me. She was gorgeous, sure, but that wasn’t it—she was the way I remembered her, the way I tried not to remember her. A new line or two on the face, maybe, the soft blond hair cut in a more expensive style, five extra pounds on a body that always could stand ten extra pounds, but, damn it, she was still the Karen I’d proposed to in the rain on a warm night in April. I didn’t want her to be.

  She wore loose white pants and a sleeveless shirt, no shoes, no jewelry. Her body was firm and lithe. Looking at her I saw a sudden flash of the scenes I’d missed in the last few years: the dinner parties where Jefferson’s rich, fat friends had looked at his trophy wife and sworn under their breath with envy; the smug smile on Jefferson’s face when he and Karen encountered one of his aging ex-wives.

  “Good to see you, Karen,” I said.

  “So good,” she said and stepped forward to embrace me. I remembered the fit of her body perfectly—the top of her shoulders sliding just beneath the rise of mine, her chin slipping alongside the bottom of my neck. Her hair smelled different, though. Expensive perfume where the hint of apples from some cheap shampoo belonged.

  She pulled away but kept her hands on my biceps. “Thank you for coming. I understand—really, I do—that you don’t want to be here. But I need to talk to you about something. I have to talk to you about something.”

  “Okay.”

  “Come in.” Her eyes dropped to the flowers I was still holding. “Oh, Lincoln, thank you. You didn’t need to—”

  “I didn’t. They were at the door.”

  “Oh.” She let go of my arms, took the flowers, and led me inside. The front door opened into a wide entryway with a clear view of the lower level of the house—blond wood, white trim, more windows than I’d ever seen in a house before. I followed her past a room on my left that was filled with books—none of the spines cracked—and a room on my right with a desk and a fireplace that might have been used as an o
ffice by someone who actually worked at home but instead had the look of a showroom. Hell, the whole house had that look. When we went past the kitchen and into the living room, I noted that there wasn’t so much as a juice glass on the counter or a salt shaker on the table. Everything felt sterile, as if it had been thrown together for a photo shoot. Flowers and cards had been delivered by the dozens, but I saw as we passed that all of them had been placed in another room on our right, tastefully arranged around a piano.

  Karen moved into a living room at the rear of the house and sat on a walnut-colored leather chair with her back to the row of windows looking out on the yard. I settled into a matching couch across from it and sank about a foot into the damn thing.

  “Comfortable,” I said, wondering if anyone had ever actually sat on it before.

  She didn’t say anything, just sat and stared at me. She looked more tired than I’d ever seen her, more tired than I would’ve imagined a woman with her energy and life ever could. Beautiful, yes, but tired in a way that came from deep within. Better than her husband, though.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.

  “No.” I didn’t bother to mention that it wasn’t even eleven. She’d already lifted a glass of wine from the table beside her.

  “My nerves are shot,” she said, following my look. “It keeps me calm.”

  “Sure.”

  She sipped it, and it was so early for wine that I felt like I should look away, as if she were changing clothes across from me instead of taking a drink.

  “Are you alone here?” I asked.

  “My family just left. My mother isn’t well.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “About the police,” she said, but I interrupted.

  “You already apologized, and there was no need for it then. They’re just doing their job as well as they know how to do it, Karen. I would have been more surprised if they hadn’t come to see me when your husband was murdered.”

  The word made her wince. She lifted the glass to her lips, had it in her hand when the phone rang, a long, shrill chirp. She jerked at the sound, not a slight motion but a violent one, and the glass fell from her hand and shattered on the pale wood floor. The wine pooled, then found the cracks between the boards and ran down them, toward the stone ledge in front of the fireplace.

  There was a phone on the table beside me. I picked up the handset and leaned forward, offering it to her. She pushed back into her chair, eyes wide, and held her hand out as if she were warding the phone off.

  “No. Not now, please.”

  I gave her a long look, still with the phone outstretched, before dropping the handset back on its base. One ring later, it went silent, and only then did she pick up the stem of the broken wineglass and set it back on the coffee table. There was a photograph in a silver frame on the table: Jefferson and Karen kissing on a veranda, probably taken in someplace like Paris. I returned my attention to the spilled wine. Some of it was soaking into a rug beneath the coffee table that was probably worth more than my gym.

  “Want me to grab some paper towels?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Okay.”

  We sat and looked at each other. Her chest rose and fell under her shirt. I switched my gaze from her to the broken glass and the wine on the floor and back again.

  “Karen, what the hell’s going on?”

  She drew in a long breath, ran her hands through her hair again, and shook her head. “My husband was murdered, Lincoln. That’s what’s going on. My husband was brutally—”

  “There’s something else.”

  “No.”

  “Karen.”

  She looked away, and when she spoke again it sounded as if she were on the verge of being physically ill.

  “Do you have any idea what they did to him? They tortured him. Cut him with—”

  “I’ve heard. And I’m sorry. What you’re going through right now . . . I can’t say anything of substance to you because words aren’t worth a damn. Particularly words from me, I’d imagine.”

  There was a long silence, and then I said, “So what is it that you want?”

  She stared at me for a few seconds. “You’ll be well paid.”

  I spread my hands. “For what?”

  The big house felt empty in the way only too-large spaces can. From where I sat, I could see the steps leading up to the second floor, where a hallway crossed over the living room and kitchen. There were a few paintings on the walls in the hallway, and I would’ve bet everything I had that neither Karen nor Alex Jefferson had picked them out. Interior designer, all the way.

  “I need help.” She was leaning forward, gripping the edge of the chair so tightly her fingernails were probably cutting into the leather, her eyes fixed on mine.

  “With what?”

  “Alex’s son.”

  “I’ve never been real good with kids.”

  “I need to find Alex’s son.”

  I frowned and cocked my head. “He doesn’t know his father’s dead?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t know how to get in touch? Don’t have a phone number, an address?”

  “No.”

  “Tell the cops to find him.”

  “I don’t want them . . . It’s awkward.”

  “Why?”

  “Alex hadn’t spoken to him for several years. To his son. They were estranged.”

  “The police can find him.”

  “I need someone else to find him.” This through clenched teeth, her eyes hard.

  “There are a hundred private investigators around, Karen. Any of them could do it.”

  “I need someone I can trust.”

  “And you can trust me?”

  “Yes.”

  She said it immediately and with confidence. Instead of being flattered, I was angry. All the things that had happened between us, and she was still sure I’d be there when she needed me. That I’d do what she wanted, as she wanted.

  I shook my head. “I’m not the man for the job, Karen. Sorry.”

  I was thinking about getting to my feet and moving for the door when she said, “He’s inheriting eight million dollars, and he doesn’t know it.”

  “They were estranged, and the kid’s still getting eight million?”

  She nodded. “And he doesn’t even know Alex is dead. I need someone to find him, so I can tell him these things. And so . . .”

  “What?”

  She dropped her eyes. “It doesn’t need to be in the paper and on TV, Lincoln.”

  “What doesn’t?” I waited. “That Alex Jefferson was estranged from his son?”

  She nodded but didn’t look at me.

  “Ah,” I said. “Image. I see.”

  Her head rose, and this time her look was sharp. “It’s not that.”

  I didn’t say anything. She took her hands off the chair to lean forward, and when she did it they were shaking. She pressed them together and squeezed them between her knees. “You know what one percent of eight million dollars is, Lincoln?”

  “Eighty grand.”

  “It’s your fee. That’s what you’ll be paid, even if it’s the easiest job you ever have. I promise you that. An accountant will write you the check the same day you find him.”

  Joe was probably done with physical therapy now. A two-hour session that would cost several hundred dollars. Insurance would pay a chunk, but not all of it. Joe went to therapy three times a week. Had been doing so for many weeks. The session fees stacked up on the rest of his medical bills, many of them extravagant. Last week, the only work our agency had was that one damn custody case, for a client who more than likely wouldn’t pay the full bill.

  “You and I would not have the ideal investigator-client relationship,” I said. “I can recommend someone else. Someone better for this situation.”

  “No.” Her voice was firm. “Lincoln, please . . . just find him. How long can that take you? To find someone?”

 
With every minute I sat there and talked to her, the house felt bigger and emptier, and she looked wearier. I remembered the way she’d looked on a Saturday one June when we’d rented a sailboat out on the Bass Islands, her wet hair plastered against her face and her neck, her smile so damn genuine. For some reason, that was the moment to which my mind returned most often. I’d be in the kitchen or in the car or in the middle of a workout, and suddenly I’d see her there on the boat, see her smile and the sun on her skin and her wet hair, and something inside me would break. Then I’d think of her with Jefferson and push the rest of my memories beneath his smug smile.

  “Finding someone can take half an hour, or it can take weeks,” I said. “I’d have to know the details.”

  “It’s been five years.”

  “That’s how long he’s been missing?”

  She nodded, then said, “Well, no. Not missing. I mean, missing to Alex.”

  “But not the kind of missing where you call police.”

  “Right.”

  I lifted a hand and ran it through my hair, looked at the floor. “Where’s his mother? Is he estranged from her, too?”

  “No. She died about two years after the divorce. Matthew was probably around fourteen at the time. She’d moved to Michigan. He came back to live with Alex until he went to college. They’ve been estranged since Matthew was in law school.”

  “His name’s Matthew Jefferson?”

  “Yes.”

  “A hell of a common name. Probably a couple thousand of them in the country. I’d need identifiers. Date of birth, Social Security number, whatever you’ve got.”

  “I can get everything by this afternoon.”

  I raised my head and looked at her. “The fee you quoted is ridiculous. It’ll probably take me a day or two at most. Regardless, I’ll bill my normal rate.”

  “You’ll get what I promised.”

  Eighty grand for a routine locate. I did skip traces for two hundred bucks. At the end of the day, that’s all this would really be.

  “I remember when you borrowed a hundred dollars from me to cover your car payment,” I said.