Cemetery Girl

As I told her, Abby slid into a chair, her body seeming to lose weight and almost crumple. She raised her hand to her chest, her eyes unfocused.

  “He killed her,” she said. “They’ll arrest him for that, too.”

  “Maybe. How do we know they can prove it? A girl like Tracy, someone with those kinds of problems.”

  I could hear Liann’s voice in my head: Criminalization of the victim . I used to judge and blame parents with wild, uncontrollable children. Now I lived with a child I couldn’t control. Who was to blame?

  Colter.

  “I was going to go to church,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t . . .”

  “You can go. I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.” She waited for more of a response. I didn’t offer one. Our marital standoffs could be like this. Abby probing, pushing; me resisting. Caitlin came by it honestly, the ability to wall out even those who could most do well by her. “Tom, I’m scared. He’s out there. He’s free. And he killed another girl. What are we doing here?”

  “Waiting, I guess.”

  “What if he wants to hurt Caitlin? What if he comes here . . . ?”

  I shook my head. “He won’t hurt her,” I said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He thinks he loves her. And she thinks she loves him.”

  I felt her gaze. She studied me. “How do you know that, Tom? Do you know something I don’t know?”

  I waited. I shook my head again. “I think you should go to church today, if you want. I’ll stay here with her.”

  “I can take her with me—”

  “No. I want Caitlin to stay here. With me.”

  She studied me more; then she nodded. “Okay. If you change your mind, let me know. I can come right home.” She squeezed my hand when she stood up.

  When she’d said her good-byes and left the house, I went to the foot of the stairs and called Caitlin.

  We sat across from each other at the dining room table. My chest felt buoyant, like the ballast tank on a submarine.

  Caitlin didn’t look at me. She held her right hand near her mouth, her teeth working on a piece of loose skin around her thumb. I didn’t bother to tell her to stop. She’d never stop the chewing, the cursing, the poor hygiene habits. All the things we could have helped, the disciplinary battles we could have fought, were lost. What was left?

  “What do you want to know?” Caitlin asked. A large glass of water sat in front of her, and she took a drink.

  “I want to know what happened in the park that day. I want to know how he got you to go with him.”

  Her brow wrinkled as though she were thinking hard. Four years. I’d assumed the facts would be right at her command.

  “I was walking Frosty,” she said. “He wasn’t very good on a leash, you know. He used to tug and strain and make that weird hacking noise because the collar choked him. You know what I’m talking about?”

  I did.

  “Really, I was too small to be walking him. He wasn’t trained well enough. So he was pulling me along and pulling me along, and I was holding on as best I could, but the leash started digging into my hands, deep into my hands. My fingers were all smashed together, the knuckles rubbed against one another. It hurt, really hurt. I tried to shift the leash from one hand to the other so it wouldn’t hurt so much, but when I tried, Frosty took off. He just bolted through the park, toward the cemetery. He was gone, just gone.” She gave a pained, almost wistful smile at the memory. “Anyway,” she said, “I freaked out. I was scared. If something happened to him, I knew I’d be in trouble, and I knew you’d never let me walk him in the park again.”

  “That would have been your mom’s reaction,” I said.

  “Whatever. I ran after him as fast as I could, but by the time I got to the cemetery, he was gone. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I looked around. I called his name. Nothing. He was gone. I started to cry. I didn’t like to cry—I thought I was too old for that, but I couldn’t help it. I felt the tears burning my eyes, and I knew I was losing it.”

  She stopped. I wished I could get a tape recorder, something to preserve her voice.

  “I guess I was about to run home, to run back to you and Mom and tell you what happened, when a van pulled up beside me. A white van. The man rolled down his window and asked me what was wrong. I told him. He said if I wanted to hop in he’d drive me around a little and help me look for Frosty.” She took a drink of water, her throat bobbing as she swallowed. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to get in a car with someone I didn’t know. I knew all that. You and Mom taught me all of that.”

  She didn’t go on, so I filled the gap. “Why did you get in with him?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then how . . . ?”

  “I walked away. I turned around and started back for the house. And the guy in the van called after me—he kept saying he would help me. So I started to walk faster, and that’s when John came up beside me. He was walking his own dog, and he’d heard what the guy in the van said to me. He came up beside me and told me I should just ignore that guy, and if I wanted help finding my dog, he’d walk around with me, with his dog on the leash, and he said he bet we’d find him. ‘He couldn’t have gone far,’ he said. ‘Not with that leash around his neck.’ He seemed nice and safe, at least compared to the other guy. He seemed like a nerd, really.” She smiled. “So we started walking around the park with his dog, looking for Frosty. I don’t know what happened to the guy in the van. He drove off, I guess. Who knows what he wanted. I guess we’ll never find out. The world’s probably full of guys like that.”

  She took another drink of water.

  “So how did you end up going off with him?” I asked.

  “We looked and looked for Frosty. We went around the walking track in the park and up and down the rows in the cemetery. I was still crying a little, and John tried to talk to me and make me feel better.”

  John. She called him John.

  “I started to realize it was getting late, that you and Mom were going to worry about me if I didn’t come home. I knew I’d have to go back and probably get in trouble over Frosty being gone. I told John I needed to go back to my parents. He offered me a ride in his car. He said he could drive me, and while we drove back we could look for Frosty some more. He said maybe Frosty just turned and headed for home, that dogs do that sometimes. They just follow their instincts.” She paused. “I didn’t know what to do. I was upset and scared, and John really did seem nice. He did.”

  “We wouldn’t have been mad at you.”

  “Mom would have. And you would have too. You always act like you don’t get angry about those things, but you do. Maybe you don’t even know you do it, but you get this look on your face. This disapproval. It’s there. I know it.” She looked at me, waiting for me to defend myself, I suppose. When I didn’t, she went on. “So I walked with him back to his car and got in. The car wasn’t anything special, just an old Toyota. And it didn’t feel that strange getting in and driving off.” She paused and held up her index finger. “Wait. It did feel strange. It felt different, I guess, and that’s really why I wanted to do it.”

  “Different how?”

  “Different like I wasn’t supposed to do it, but it still felt safe doing it. I felt a little excited, even though I was scared and worried about Frosty. It just seemed like the most unexpected thing I could do—get in a car with a strange man, even though he was just promising to help me look for my dog and take me home to my parents.”

  “But you didn’t come home.”

  “No.”

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “We went to his house.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “We looked for Frosty and drove back this way. We drove right past the house in fact.”

  If only I’d been outside. If only I’d been watching for her.

  If only.

  “After we’d driven around looking for a while, he said I should go back to his house with him and c
lean my face off. He told me I didn’t want to see my parents that way, that if I cleaned up and looked grown up, it wouldn’t seem as bad as I thought it would be. I really think if I asked him, he would have just pulled into the driveway here and dropped me off. I don’t think he was intending to force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I was in control of which way things went, and I liked that feeling. So I said to myself, ‘What the hell. Let’s see what else happens.’ And I told him I’d go back to his house with him.”

  “You know you weren’t in control, right? You never were.”

  But she had stopped. There was a finality to the way she broke off. She stood up and went to the sink for more water. She drank it down, then refilled and drank some more. She kept her back to me, acting as though I weren’t in the room.

  “But you had seen him before? Colter? Right?”

  She turned around. “Why do you say that?”

  “In your coat, the coat you wore the day before you disappeared, there was a flower in the pocket. A red flower. It was right before Valentine’s Day, and you kept that flower in your pocket like someone gave it to you.”

  She swallowed but didn’t answer.

  “You know, it’s not going to matter now,” I said. “It’s not going to change anything. I just want to know—did he give you the flower?”

  “Yeah, he did.” She drank from the glass. I didn’t say anything because I could tell there was more to say. “I saw him at the park. I talked to him a few times.”

  “How many times?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How many?” I said, tapping the table with my index finger.

  She gave an exaggerated, exasperated shrug. “Five or six?”

  “A strange man, a grown man, spoke to you in the park five or six times and you didn’t tell us?”

  “Why should I have?”

  “Because we are your parents. We are supposed to protect you from those things.”

  “Well, you didn’t, did you? You didn’t.”

  “Did he give you that necklace then? Before he took you?”

  “No,” she said. She fingered the necklace. “He gave this to me one year later. It’s a token of what we mean to each other. As long as I wear it—”

  “No, no,” I said. “If you’d told us when you saw him in the park—” I stopped. My anger and my voice rose. If, if, if . . . If I’d seen them drive by the house. If I hadn’t let her walk the dog. If I hadn’t allowed us to live with such an undisciplined pet. If, if, if . . . “What made you stay?” I asked. “Why, after all that, did you stay? People saw you with him in public places. You could have screamed and cried. You could have run away. Why did you stay with him? Why did you do that . . . ?” I resisted for a long moment. I tried to swallow it back, but finally I couldn’t hold it in. “Why did you do that to me, Caitlin? Why?”

  She shook her head. “To you?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  She looked at the glass and set it aside. “No,” she said.

  “No? What do you mean?”

  “No, I’m not telling you anything else until you take me to see John.” She pursed her lips and set her jaw. “I just gave you a down payment. I gave you something.”

  “You just started. That’s only the beginning.”

  “What else do you want to know?” she asked. “Do you want to know everything? Every detail?”

  “Tell me that he made you stay,” I said.

  “Take me to him. Or just stand aside and I’ll go there myself.”

  “But he did make you stay, right?” I asked. “He held you there. He forced you.”

  “I can’t tell you something that isn’t true.”

  I pounded my fist against the table, rattling my mug.

  “He made you stay. I know it. You wouldn’t have imagined our voices if you didn’t want to leave. Right, Caitlin? You wouldn’t have imagined you heard us, would you?”

  “What makes you think I imagined them?”

  “Because I didn’t know where you were. None of us did.”

  “I don’t know that. I don’t.”

  I stood up, almost knocking the chair over. I shoved it out of the way and moved toward her. “No, honey, that would never happen. Never, ever. Never.”

  She cringed. Her body locked when I approached, and she took two steps back. She held her hands out in front of me as though she wanted to shove me away. “Just take me to him,” she said. “We made a deal. Take me to John if you want to know anything else from me.”

  She left the room before I could say anything.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  I pulled the phone book out and looked up the number. It took two tries for me to find the right one. An older woman answered, and I asked for John. A long pause followed, a staticky stretch of dead air. “Why can’t you all leave him alone?” his mother asked.

  “I’m not a reporter,” I said. Another long pause. “I’m the man who was at your house last night talking to John.”

  “Oh, I see.” She sniffed. “Are you really that girl’s father?”

  “I am.”

  “Well . . . Johnny . . . he’s always loved children. I mean . . . he wouldn’t really hurt anybody. He wouldn’t. Not intentionally. Now did you ever think these girls—they ask for it, don’t they? They wear certain clothes. Even the young ones . . .”

  “Just put him on.”

  She breathed a deep sigh into the phone, then the receiver clunked against either the counter or the floor. “Johnny?”

  Someone picked up the phone; then I heard voices arguing. I couldn’t make it all out, but Colter’s mother said, “I can’t have you in trouble again. My house, Johnny.”

  “Get out of here,” he said. He must have waited while she left the room, because it took a few more moments for him to come on the line and speak to me. “Mr. Stuart?”

  His voice caused a shiver of revulsion to pass through my body.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “I’m glad you called. I knew you would, though.”

  The phone felt warm against my ear. “You’re awfully confident.”

  “Don’t we both have things the other wants? Don’t we have a . . . what you might call a symbiotic relationship?”

  “Symbiotic?”

  “It means that we mutually benefit.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Hell, we’re practically family. So what’s your answer?”

  “I spoke to Caitlin today.” I swallowed hard. “She’s game, and I am too. So . . .”

  “You’re agreeing to bring her to me?”

  I hesitated. I wanted to know. I simply wanted to know. “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” What he meant was: Now we’re in business. I heard a door close on his end of the line, and he must have moved into another room or outside the house for privacy’s sake. When the movement stopped, he said, “Okay, how are we going to do this?”

  “Start talking.”

  “I got a call from my lawyer this morning. Apparently, they have a new witness and new information about the case. He told me to expect an arrest and a new indictment any day now. For all I know, they’ll be showing up today to put me in chains. What I’m saying is, if we’re going to do this, we don’t have much time to make it happen.”

  “Maybe I should just let it all go then. You can go on to jail, and Caitlin would never have to face you in court.”

  “I told you—I’m leaving no matter what. And if you don’t ante up, you’ll never know what you want to know.”

  “I know some things. Caitlin told me a few of them just today. Hell, maybe I know enough already.”

  I walked through the house to the living room and stopped, staring out at the front yard. The trees were almost bare, the leaves carpeting the ground or else piled at the curb by my industrious neighbors. The clouds hung low, seemingly just above the treetops. They were as gray as cold ashes.

  Colter hesitated. “What could she have told y
ou?” he asked.

  “She told me plenty. How you got her in the car, looking for the dog. She told me how you got her back to the house. Your dumpy little house.” As I talked and looked into the yard, I pictured that day. The car circling the park, then leaving with Caitlin inside. I pictured it driving right past our house, Caitlin in the front seat perhaps, staring out the window as she went by here for the last time. “I can go to the police with that, tell them what Caitlin told me. I can add to what they already have.”

  “Hearsay.”

  “How did you get her to stay in your house?” I asked. “How did you keep her there?”

  He ignored my questions. “No one will believe you. After you told the cops about seeing ghosts and all that bullshit, you have no credibility.”

  “The parent of a crime victim always has credibility. Now tell me—how did you keep her there in your house?”

  “I want to see her before I tell you anything. That was the deal I offered.”

  I turned away from the window. “If you want to see her, you have to give me something. You have to tell me some facts.”

  “Why should I deal with you?” He lowered his voice, added a hint of menace to it. “You want this more than I do. You’re obsessed with knowing. I can hear it. You know, Caitlin told me some things about you. She told me about your stepdaddy. How he didn’t love you. How he used to come in your room and scare you, like you were a little baby.”

  “Caitlin didn’t know that.”

  “Somebody told her about it. Somebody in your family.”

  “Do you know my brother?” I asked. “You saw him at your house. Do you know him?”

  “That’s the angle the cops are working, right? That your brother put me onto Caitlin’s trail?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve crossed paths with a lot of people in my time. It’s possible your brother was one of them.”

  “Caitlin says she heard his voice there, in your house.”

  “He might have been there. Like I said, I can’t keep track of everything that happened in four years. And someone in Caitlin’s situation—living in a strange house, away from everything that used to be familiar—she might imagine some things. It might even be that a guy like me might help her along in that direction.”