Beyond the Grave

by R. W. Wallace

  Thirty-Two

  Caroline Sanchez lives in a ground floor apartment in an old but well-maintained building at the very end of a cul-de-sac in a calm and sleepy neighborhood in the north part of Toulouse. It takes Emeline and Malik forty minutes to get there from the police station—twenty-five minutes of metro and fifteen minutes on foot.

  It might have taken the same time in a car but at least now Emeline isn’t annoyed and angry at life in general. She’s had the time to ponder the case in peace while they were crammed into the very back of the last car of the metro, and she took the opportunity to chat with her colleague during their walk. They didn’t talk about the case, partly because Emeline has always been a little paranoid about talking about cases out in public, but mainly because she wants to get to know the man who’s working this case with her.

  Malik is the fourth of five kids and grew up in one of the more mixed neighborhoods of the city. During his childhood his family was far from poor—his father worked as a high school teacher and his mother a nanny—but he had classmates who were much better off than him financially. Emeline gets the feeling he probably lived through some injustices because of his social standing though he doesn’t say it outright. It was probably part of his motivation for his chosen career path, though.

  Malik asks some questions but Emeline mostly avoids answering anything too personal. She likes getting to know her colleagues but she’ll only share her own secrets with people she trusts completely.

  Having Malik answer questions helps to move him toward that trust.

  “There’s a gymnasium not far from here,” Malik says, waving a hand to their left, indicating some spot behind a group of small but pretty houses. “We sometimes have games there.”

  Emeline lets her eyes run up and down Malik’s tall body. “Basket?”

  Malik flashes that huge grin of his, making him look like he should be in class in the high school they passed before entering the cul-de-sac. “Basket. It’s the only sport worth playing.”

  They reach the gate at the end of the street and Emeline presses the down arrow on the intercom, searching for Sanchez’s name. “The only sport?” she says with a laugh. “That’s a risky claim so far into rugby-land.”

  Malik scoffs good-naturedly. “Rugby is just brute force. There’s no finesse, no art.”

  “Care to take that up with Diome?” Emeline seems to remember hearing that he played professionally in his youth—not surprising, considering his size.

  “Nah. I don’t want to hurt his feelings or anything.”

  “Good plan.”

  A faint voice comes out of the intercom, probably asking who’s there.

  “Captain Evian and Lieutenant Doubira of the Judicial Police, Madame,” Emeline says loudly into the microphone. “We’d like to come in and talk to you for a moment.”

  No more sounds come out of the intercom but after a few seconds the smaller of the two gates clicks open.

  “Do we know where we’re going?” Emeline asks Malik.

  He shrugs and pushes through the gate, holding it for her to follow. “She’s on the ground floor, apartment number four. Shouldn’t be too complicated.”

  Two minutes later, they find apartment number four at the end of a brightly lit hallway, where a woman is waiting for them with the door cracked open. She looks to be in her sixties, with hair such a beautiful brown color Emeline suspects she dyes it, and quite a few wrinkles marking her face—but more from smiling than frowning. Her eyes are blue and alert as she assesses Emeline and Malik.

  Emeline doesn’t miss the fact that she stays well inside of the door and can easily slam it shut in less than a second.

  “Caroline Sanchez?” Emeline asks. “I’m Captain Evian and this is Lieutenant Doubira.” She holds out her hand and after only a slight hesitation, Madame Sanchez exits her apartment far enough to shake it.

  “What brings you here, Madame?” The woman glances at the IDs Emeline and Doubira show, clearly knowing what to look for and identifying Emeline as the senior officer in the pair.

  “We’d like to talk to you about your brother,” Emeline says. “Robert Villemur, that is,” she adds as she remembers the woman has three, and two of them still alive.

  The surprise on the woman’s face isn’t faked. She seems to forget to breathe for a moment as her mouth falls open, and her hand, which was stretched out in front of her after shaking Malik’s hand, drops to her side.

  “Robert? But…” She looks from Emeline to Malik and back again. Then down the hallway behind them, as if expecting someone to jump out and yell surprise. And not a good surprise. “What— He never— What?”

  “Would you mind if we come in?” Emeline says, keeping her tone gentle.

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” Madame Sanchez steps back and lets the front door slide open. She gestures. “Come in. Why don’t you step into the kitchen and I’ll make some tea or coffee.”

  Emeline appreciates how the woman recovers so quickly. And she’s very happy at not having to drink coffee. “I’d love a cup of tea, Madame,” she says. “But I suspect my colleague will take you up on the offer of coffee.”

  They move into a modern kitchen in white and several shades of gray. The small table can seat four, and Emeline and Malik take seats on the same side to sit opposite Robert Villemur’s sister. While their hostess prepares their drinks, Emeline studies the pictures framed on the wall and attached by magnets to the fridge.

  Madame Sanchez must be a grandmother. There are pictures of at least five different kids below the age of six and several drawings for “Mamie.” Some pictures also contain adults who might be in their mid-thirties, and they definitely share some DNA with the woman preparing coffee.

  She wonders if any of them remember their uncle.

  Madame Sanchez places a steaming cup in front of Emeline, another one for Malik, and a third one for herself. “Tell me about Robert.”

  Emeline takes a deep breath. “We found where they buried his body.”

  Thirty-Three

  Caroline’s apartment is great. It suits her.

  When I was alive, she and her family were squeezed into a three-bedroom apartment in one of the city’s more seedy neighborhoods, worrying about the school they were going to send their kids to and whether or not it was safe for Caroline to go out alone at night.

  I know it’s thirty years later and that she should, by all rights, have manged to get out of that hellhole by now, but I’m still very happy that she did.

  My sister lives in a safe and calm street. She has four bedrooms, and two of them are clearly mostly unused guest rooms. She’s still married, if the ring on her finger is anything to go by.

  She has at least five grandchildren. And…I go so far as to walking through Doubira to get to some of the pictures. That dark-haired man with the beginnings of a pot-belly—that must be Mathieu. He still has the same lop-sided smile, and has passed it on to his sons. Three of them! And the lean man with a shaved head and about five days’ worth of blond beard? Definitely Antoine. I can’t believe I recognize him when I haven’t seen him since he was two. Soulful, blue eyes, impossible to miss.

  But in two of these pictures, I see an entire family of four. And I don’t recognize any of them, except that there’s a definite Villemur family resemblance. From the mother.

  Did Caroline have a third child after my death?

  Somehow this makes me even more sad than having missed out on everybody growing up.

  When Caroline asks Evian for news about me, I sit down on the empty chair next to my sister. Clothilde has found a kitchen counter to perch on and she’s studying my sister closely.

  I touch a hand to Caroline’s—I can’t feel her and she can’t feel me, but I need to do it anyway. My sister. Who’s even older than my mother was when I passed away. Before I can stop them, my fingers lift to trace the wrinkles a
t her eyes and the sagging skin on her jaw.

  A tear starts to form in her eye, so I stop. Looks like she’s at least a little sensitive.

  “I didn’t really believe he was alive,” she says to Evian in a small voice. She lowers her beautiful blue eyes to her cup, where her spotted hands are curled around it for heat. “I think it’s good to finally know,” she adds after a moment’s thought. “I think.”

  Evian nods. “It usually is better to know. Especially after this long.”

  “Do you know if he died when he disappeared?”

  “It seems likely,” Evian replies. “It was too long ago for the coroner to be able to tell when he died to within more than a year or two. But he’s been dead for approximately thirty years, and the location he was found in seems to indicate that he disappeared because he died.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  Doubira speaks up for the first time since we got here. “He was illegally buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in one of the villages outside of Toulouse.”

  Caroline’s eyebrows shoot up and her hands twitch around her cup. “Illegally buried in an unmarked grave? How is that even possible?”

  “That’s part of what we’ll be looking into, Madame,” Doubira says smoothly. “All I can say is that his casket was right next to another one that we exhumed, so we happened upon it while digging.”

  “You happened upon his casket while digging up someone else.” She’s repeating what she’s being told in order to try to make sense of it. She did the same when we were kids and I gave her the world’s worst excuses for whatever idiocy I had been up to that day.

  She’s not angry, like she used to be back then, though. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say she’s legitimately trying to make sense of what the two strangers are telling her.

  “Who were you digging up?”

  “Me!” Clothilde says helpfully from behind us. “I’m supposed to be the star here—everybody has just forgotten, apparently.”

  I turn to send a soft glare at her—we can’t have her distracting Evian—and also to check that she is, indeed, joking.

  “Don’t worry, Robert,” she says with her signature eye roll. “I’m happy to work on your case first. My time will come.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t tell you that,” Evian replies to Caroline. “But I can tell you that the two deaths seem to be linked.”

  “Do you know how he died?”

  Licking her lips, Evian says, “It seems likely he was shot in the chest, probably straight through the heart.”

  Caroline stops breathing for a few seconds, her eyes going distant. Then she draws breath again—not a very deep one, but it’s a breath. “So he probably didn’t suffer for long?”

  That all depends on what happened leading up to the bullet in my chest. And since I’ve forgotten everything that happened that day, even I don’t know.

  “Probably not,” Evian replies, thankfully not taking my sister down the path of horrible possibilities when a police officer ends up dead.

  “Does Maman know?”

  Both officers nod and Doubira is the one to answer. “We talked to her yesterday. I take it from your reaction that she didn’t tell you?”

  “She’s probably keeping it for our call tonight.” Caroline sighs and takes her first sip of tea. It can’t be very hot anymore. “We always talk once a week.” Another sigh. “This is going to kill her.”

  I’m kind of afraid she’s right. And not only in the metaphorical way.

  Our mother was always a character to be reckoned with. She’d go up against ornery teachers and angry fathers during soccer practice alike. Nothing scared her.

  Except losing her kids.

  I don’t think she intended me to hear, but I eavesdropped on her conversation with a close friend once, where she said she was convinced she could weather anything—except losing her kids.

  No matter which one, she loved us all equally. And no matter if there would still be three left. She didn’t think she’d be able to get past the mourning of the one she lost.

  I was maybe fifteen at the time. I had rolled my eyes at my mother’s melodrama and moved on with my life.

  I remember how my mother deflated yesterday when she learned I was dead and suddenly I’m not very optimistic.

  My sister takes another sip of her tea. This time she winces—she never did like her tea cold. “You say he was buried, though? In a casket? In a cemetery? Is that normal?”

  Evian chuckles and pulls her teabag around in her cup by the thread. “Is there really such a thing as ‘normal’ when it comes to homicides? I’ve never worked a case where we found an extra body in the ground, but I have seen a body switch. They switched the bodies before the funeral and we only found out when we identified the body dumped in a river as a guy who was supposedly buried in a cemetery.”

  Caroline’s lips twitch as Evian tells her anecdote and I’m grateful she’s managed to lighten the mood a little. “Still. They got him a casket?”

  “I’ll admit I find that fascinating, too,” Evian says. “However, it wasn’t a pretty and fancy casket like the one in the real grave right next to him. It was more like a wooden box, probably made by the people who buried him.”

  “And you say there’s a link between my brother and this other person?”

  Evian bites her lips as she seems to consider her options. “He was working on the case of this person’s death not too long before he disappeared.”

  “Oh.” Caroline lets go of her cup and folds her hands in her lap. “That might explain it, then.”

  “Explain what?” Evian’s eyes are laser sharp and Doubira doesn’t seem to be missing much, either.

  Caroline breathes a heartfelt sigh. “I don’t think my brother was particularly good at his job,” she says, her voice barely there. “He had a tendency to listen to the advice of the wrong people. I mostly helped him out when he got in trouble in high school, but once he started at the officers’ school…”

  Evian’s voice is soft now. “Are you trying to tell us that your brother wasn’t a very good cop?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you.”

  Thirty-Four

  Well, ouch.

  It’s true—I’ve known it for over thirty years. The fact that I was awful at my job while I was alive is the main reason I’m still here as a ghost—but still. Ouch.

  “Are you basing your judgment on his behavior in high school or do you have proof he was the same fifteen years later?” Evian asks. “People do change and grow up.”

  Yeah, no, I didn’t.

  It took my own death for me to pull my head out of my ass.

  Caroline shakes her head, her eyes sad. “Robert was my brother and I loved him dearly. He was so sweet and sensitive as a boy. But I don’t think he ever really found his place—in the family or in society.”

  She picks up her cup then puts it back down when she remembers the tea has gone cold. “There were four of us, and Robert was number three, one of three boys. Honestly, I think our parents did everything right, they gave us all the same amount of attention, but it was never enough for Robert. He was never the first to do something, he was never the strongest since he wasn’t the biggest, and he wasn’t the last or weakest either. I think he felt like he was just there. He wanted to be singled out. But our parents would never do that because it wouldn’t have been fair to the rest of us.

  “I don’t think Robert ever realized that. That he was loved, that he was special—only not more special than the rest of us. So he sought validation elsewhere.”

  It hurts to sit here and listen to my own sister talking about me like this.

  Even if it’s true.

  I never did feel like I was good enough. I wasn’t sufficiently introspective to have put words to it like Caroline is doing now but I d
idn’t feel seen by my parents or my siblings. There wasn’t a single subject where, if someone needed help, they would think, “Oh, I know, I’ll ask Robert.”

  We all want to feel appreciated and valued, right?

  Caroline isn’t done, of course. “I’m sure Robert could have made lots of friends in school, if he’d just been himself. He was smart, he was fast, he was strong, he was compassionate. But he didn’t believe in himself, so he tried to emulate whoever he saw as role models.

  “When you’re a teenager, the boys that everyone else tend to look up to, because they’re ‘cool,’ are the bullies. The loud guys. And possibly the jocks. In Robert’s school and year, the cool boys were mostly bullies.”

  Caroline runs a hand down her face. She’s visibly tired and seems to have aged a year or two since we first came into her home. “Robert decided to do whatever it took to get into the cool gang, and started doing anything they asked him to do. I managed to stop him from going too far in bullying a boy two years younger than him once, but another time our parents were summoned by the director when he’d ruined some girl’s homework by flushing it down the toilet.”

  I remember both of those occurrences and if I’d had any blood in my ghostly body, I would have flushed with shame. I’m glad Clothilde is sitting behind me so I don’t have to meet her gaze right now.

  Across from me, Doubira and Evian are listening intently, not interrupting, letting my sister tell her story at her own pace. I think Doubira is using his phone to record the conversation.

  Looks like I was special, after all—I was the biggest loser.

  “Our parents yelled at him,” Caroline says. “Our older brother mocked him, our younger brother declared Robert was mean, and I tried to make him see that he should be making different friends. But nothing helped. He just got better at judging when he’d get caught and when he’d get away with it. He learned all the rules so he could know where to step to toe the line.”

  “Not exactly an ideal candidate for a police officer,” Evian remarks.