by Paul Cleave
“Did Michael know?”
“He knew. I had to tell him. Can you imagine if he hadn’t known? Every day he would wonder. He would think maybe I was sleeping with so many people that I didn’t know who Rachel’s dad was. I told him, and he wasn’t angry or disappointed. He was relieved, for some reason. I’m not sure why exactly. I think maybe knowing a priest had got me pregnant was much better than thinking I’d slept with some drug addict or criminal. Purer, or something. If that makes sense.”
It does, in a weird kind of way. “Did you keep in touch with Father Julian?”
“In the beginning, of course, but after I met Michael I didn’t really want to involve Stewart in my life anymore. He seemed to understand. Then the day Rachel turned sixteen he stopped the payments and I didn’t ask him why, because I knew. Sixteen was the cutoff date. I never saw him over those years. If it wasn’t for my mother, well . . .”
“He presided over your mother’s funeral?”
“My mother had continued to go to his church. It’s what she would have wanted.”
“Your mother didn’t know who the father was?”
“I refused to tell her.”
“So Father Julian, he saw Rachel that day?”
She takes another sip of water, and when she pulls the glass back she seems to be studying the edge, looking for some microscopic flaw.
“He saw her. Then a week later she goes missing. That’s the connection, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here. If I had told Rachel he was her father, would things be different now? Is that the reason she’s dead? Because I took her to my mother’s funeral?”
I know what answer she wants to hear, but I can’t offer it to her.
“Do you know if Father Julian ever had any other children?” I ask.
“It’s my fault,” she says, and she starts to cry.
I clutch my glass of water, unsure whether to sit next to her, whether to put a hand on her shoulder and try to comfort her. “None of this is your fault,” I say, and it sounds generic because that’s exactly what it is. “But please, this is important. Did Father Julian have any other children?”
She leans back and stares at me. Tears are streaking her makeup. “Other children? I . . . I never really thought about it. He could have, I suppose. But I doubt it.”
“How did he get the money to send you?”
“I . . . I don’t know. But Father Julian is . . . I mean was a good man. He would have done what it took.”
I pull the rest of the photographs out of my pocket and hand them over to her. “There are names on the back,” I say.
She looks through them, but doesn’t recognize any of them.
“There is no way these can all be his children,” she says, but I think she knows there is a way. I think she can see the resemblances too.
“These payments he made to you, they were credited directly into your account?”
“Of course. It was the only way.”
“Do you still have any of the statements?”
“I . . . I suppose I do,” she says, and I’m sure she does. I’m sure Patricia Tyler is the sort never to have thrown away anything from the last thirty years.
“Would you mind finding me one?”
“Why?”
“Because if I can get his bank account number, then if he did father any other children I can find their names.”
“Do you think . . .” She pauses, unwilling or unsure how to continue. “Do you think all these girls who died . . . Do you really think they’re related?”
I hold her gaze. She stares right at me and I tell her yes. She pulls her hand to her mouth as if to hold it closed from whatever she wants to say next.
“Then you already know who these girls are,” she says. “They’ve been identified.”
“Not all of them.”
“What?”
“There are five girls in these pictures.”
“Five? Oh,” she says, and she gets it immediately. She gets that there is one more girl out there who I need to find. “I know where the bank statements are,” she says, and she disappears for a few minutes before returning with one from five years ago.
“It’s the last payment he made,” she tells me.
I look at the statement. It doesn’t have Julian’s name on it. Just his account number, along with the word Rachel.
“Can I take this?” I ask.
“Of course.”
I finish off my water and she walks me to the door. “The police, are they close to finding who killed him?” she asks.
“They’re getting there.”
“But you’re getting there quicker, aren’t you.”
“Yes.”
“Can you promise me something?” she asks.
“I’ll do my best,” I say, already knowing what she is going to ask.
“Promise me you’ll find him before something happens to that other girl. Promise me that when you find him, you’ll make him pay for what he has done. For Rachel. For the others. For all of us. Make him pay. Promise me you’ll make it so he can never hurt another girl ever again.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
“What the hell do you want?”
“Your help,” I say.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
It’s still early Saturday morning. I should have called Landry or Schroder, but instead I’ve driven to the hospital. I need to work my own way, especially if I’m to get the opportunity to dig Sidney Alderman out of his wife’s grave. There’s no way I can do that if I’m in custody answering questions about how I know what I know.
Visiting hours on a Saturday morning mean the corridors are full of disoriented-looking family members and friends. The air has the sickly smell of disinfectant and vomit, but you get used to it pretty quick. Emma’s father pushes me in the chest with his knuckle and I fall back a few steps. I don’t put up a fight. He advances toward me. A few people look over, but no one does anything. “I should have killed you,” he says.
“There’s still plenty of time for that,” I say, holding my hands up in surrender. “At least listen to me before you get kicked out of the hospital for assault.”
“You’re the Goddamn reason we’re in here,” he says. “They’d kick you out and give me a medal.”
“Maybe you should hear me out,” I say. “I have some interesting things to say. You are my lawyer, remember. You signed me out. That means it’s your job to talk to me. If not, I’ll go to your firm and find another lawyer. I’ll tell them all about you. All about that trip we took.”
“Fuck you.”
“You didn’t think it through, did you? I’m your responsibility until that court date has come and gone. See, you figured I’d be dead by then and it wouldn’t matter. But now it does. Help me out and I change lawyers. Nobody has to know what happened.”
“Go to hell.”
“Think about it. Calm down and think about it.”
He takes a step back and stands in the doorway of the ward. He looks at his daughter. She’s awake and hooked up to a bunch of machines. There is a TV going. She glances from the TV to her father. Then his wife, an attractive blond woman dressed perhaps a little too formally for a hospital, looks at me too. She knows something is going on, but doesn’t know what. There is no recognition. If there was she’d start screaming. She’d claw out my eyes. My lawyer turns back toward me.
“What do you want?”
I explain what I want, and the whole time he shakes his head.
“Impossible,” he finally says.
“I thought lawyers thrived on the impossible.”
“We thrive on sure things.”
“But you make more money on the impossible.”
“No judge will sign off on it,” he says.
“That’s the point, right? You don’t need one to. Just get the template for me and I can do the rest. Then you don’t hear from me again. Look, nothing is going to happen. I’m never going to tell anybody where I got it from.”
&nbs
p; “No,” he says.
“No?”
“That’s right,” he says. “I go to my boss and explain what I did to you, and he understands. He’ll tell me he would have done the same thing.”
“And maybe I go to the papers and tell them about you. Even if they don’t believe me, it still puts your name in disrepute. People might sympathize with you, they might even relate, they’ll probably wish you’d pulled the trigger, but that’ll be on their mind every time they’re passing you over in preference for another lawyer.”
“Won’t happen. People will love me for it,” he says.
“I think you have a great misunderstanding of what people love. You prepared to take that risk?”
He looks back at his wife. She’s looking a little concerned, but I bet she doesn’t know about the field trip her husband took me on. My lawyer planned on killing me. He didn’t succeed, and I’m here to pull him deeper into the world he stepped foot in. Only I’m also giving him an exit. He just needs to see that—and, being a lawyer, I figure he will.
“Just the template,” he says.
“That’s all.”
“And where am I supposed to get this from?”
“See, that’s the thing. You must know people. I’m sure you can make it happen.”
“It’ll take an hour.”
“I’ve got time.”
I head upstairs to the cafeteria and order some coffee and a couple of chicken and egg salad rolls. There are a few newspapers lying around. There is nothing in the front-page photo of Father Julian to suggest that he was living a secret life. There is a stock quote from somebody high up in the police: “We are following up on leads, but can’t release any further details at this time.” They have a murder weapon and no suspect. There is another article a few pages in. It details Father Julian’s history. He was assigned to the church thirty years ago. He was born in Wellington to a middle-class family, he excelled academically at school, he joined the priesthood at twenty-one. His mother died twenty-five years ago, his father is still alive. There are facts and figures that would be thrown out of whack if I were to tell them Father Julian fathered all those children.
I read through the rest of the newspaper, but don’t get to the end before Donovan Green is back. He pulls out the seat opposite me, seems about to sit down, then changes his mind. He doesn’t want to sit with a guy like me. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out an envelope. He sets it on the table and keeps two fingers on it.
“We’re done now, right?” he asks.
“That depends.”
“On?”
“On whether that’s a Christmas card in there or what I asked for.”
He slides it across. I open it up and take a look at the court order. I’ve seen them before and know it’s the real thing.
“I don’t ever want to see you again,” he says.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Lawyers hear it all the time, right? Everybody’s sorry after the event.”
I don’t answer him. He stares at me for a few more seconds, and I can tell he’s thinking about how life would be different for him right now if he’d killed me.
“Worse,” I say.
“What?”
“It’d be worse. Trust me. You did the right thing.”
He nods, seeming to understand, then turns and walks away. I push the newspaper aside, finish my lunch, and head down to the car.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The traffic out near the nursing home increases a little on weekends, but it’s not like visiting hours at the hospital. The hospital is a temporary thing. Relatives and friends don’t mind making the visit because they only have to go a few times. Out here it’s permanent. The visits don’t fit in as often as they ought to in the schedule of day-to-day life. The nursing home is too depressing, even with its brightly colored artwork and flowers. There’s no covering up the pain and misery here.
I sit with my wife and hold her warm hand. She looks out at the rain, but doesn’t see it. It’s hard to imagine that a person doesn’t look forward to certain types of weather. Sun, rain, storms: they don’t even register.
“Things are getting better,” I tell her. “I’ve stopped drinking, but it’s hard, I’ll admit that. It’s hard to describe. Without drinking I feel like a part of me is missing. I feel like I need to have one more just to say good-bye to it,” I say, and I picture the one remaining glass in the back of my fridge. “One more won’t hurt, right? Just to say good-bye. I think of you all the time. I wish things were different, but I want you to know that you’re helping me get through this. You’re the reason I’m getting my life back on track.”
I tell her this, but I don’t tell her that it’s only been a day. Maybe in a week my speech will be different. Maybe I will be able to take that drink to say good-bye and not get pulled into the abyss. Maybe.
Back downstairs, Carol Hamilton is behind the desk.
“It’s good that you’re starting to come back,” she says.
“I miss her.”
“I know you do. It’s an awful situation, and it’s worse for you than it is for her. I just wish there was more I could do.”
“I know. I make the same wish every day.”
She doesn’t answer, and I let the silence fall down around us like a shroud, letting us think our own thoughts on how life could be different.
“I hate to ask,” I say, snapping her out of it, “but have you got a computer I can quickly borrow? And a photocopier?”
“I . . . umm . . .”
“It will only take me a minute or two. I promise.”
“That’s fine, Theo. Follow me.”
She leads me into an office that has more photos of family and drawings from children on the walls than anything else. There are so many personal items that it’s easy to see the people who work here need to stay grounded to a different kind of reality, one where the bad things that happen in life haven’t extended to their own families. I’m about to play around with the computer and photocopier when I spot a manual typewriter. I can’t remember the last time I saw one.
“One of the nurses,” Carol says, “is still very old school.” She doesn’t explain any further and she doesn’t need to.
I wind the court order into the typewriter, and type in the priest’s name and location of the bank in the provided space. Then I sign it with some unidentifiable scribble. Carol Hamilton watches me the entire time, but doesn’t ask what I’m doing. She doesn’t point out that I’ve gone over the two minutes I promised her I’d be. When I’m done, I thank her for her time, and she does something different for once—she puts one hand on my shoulder and, with the other, grabs my hand and tells me not to give up hope. I’m not sure whether she means for Bridget or myself.
I already have the car started and in gear when she comes out the doors and waves me down.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she says, “and you need to understand that. But it’s still something you should see.”
“What is it?”
“Come with me,” she says, and I kill the engine and follow her back inside and upstairs.
My wife is still sitting by the window, staring out at the rain. Carol stays in the doorway as I walk into the room. Bridget is in the exact same position as earlier, and at first I’m not so sure what it is that Carol wants me to see, but then I see it. Bridget is clutching a photograph of our daughter. At some point since I walked out of here she has stood up and made her way over to the bedside drawers and picked up the photo frame. I think about the photographs of the dead girls in my pocket, and it seems like an omen: that of all days for her to have somehow taken this photograph it has to be this day. She is holding it against her, the frame pressing into her breasts, the image of Emily facing the window as though Bridget is trying to share the view. I want to read more into it, I want to believe this is more than just one of her automated responses, and I study her face for something—a tear, a flicker of emotion�
�but there is nothing. Still, it is the first time she has ever picked something up and brought it back to her chair. At least it’s the first time I know of—it could be she does this at night and puts the pictures back in the morning. I don’t know, but I like the idea that in the dead hours of the night she gets out of bed and reaches for Emily. It’s sad, it’s depressing, but it’s the sort of hook that I can come along and hang some hope on.
I sit down next to her and I rest my head on her shoulder, and I hug her and tears slide from my eyes and soak into her gown, and I pray to the God I want to believe in but can’t that Bridget will tell me that things are okay, that she will stroke the back of my head and comfort me.
But she doesn’t. When I look back at her face it’s just as it was moments before. But my hope stays firmly on the hook I placed it on. I stay with her for a while—I’m not sure how long exactly—an hour, maybe two. At some point Carol Hamilton walks away. I see her on my way back out and she smiles, but she doesn’t say anything. I guess she is too frightened to offer me hope that she doesn’t think is there.
When I get back outside it’s raining hard. I drive home and change into some fresh clothes, even ironing a shirt and a pair of pants pulled from the dryer. My look could be the difference between getting the information I need and getting busted.
Back in town I can’t find a parking space and have to settle for one six blocks away from the bank. A few years ago and this place would have been closed on a Saturday afternoon; now hardly anything closes. I look at my watch and check the opening hours on the door. The bank shuts in less than twenty minutes. I’ve timed things perfectly.
The security guard gives me a strange look, and I realize it’s because I’ve taken two steps inside and come to a complete stop. I walk over to him. He seems unsure what to do. I pull out my ID, which I haven’t used in more than two years. I used to have a badge that went along with it, but that got handed back. The ID has the word Void stamped across the side of it, but I cover it with my finger and let the guard look at it for about a second before I put it away.