Cemetery Girl (31 page)

The boards creaked as always. The staircase felt narrower, more constricting than in my childhood. I was bigger, of course, and their world was shrinking. But where my hand made contact with the banister, I still felt that greasy slickness, a film my body seemed to be secreting as a defense against the past.

At the top of the stairs, I paused.

It still smelled the same. Faintly musty, a space in need of a good airing out.

To the right was the bathroom, a cramped little space with flaking wallpaper and rust-stained fixtures. And to the left, the familiar room I’d shared with Buster. I went to the doorway, my legs feeling stiff and awkward. I didn’t enter right away. I stood at the door, my hand resting against the jamb. It didn’t look the same. A queen stood in the place of our two twin beds, and the American flag wallpaper was gone in favor of white paint. But without a doubt I recognized the curvature of the ceiling, the shape of the window, the familiar view of the very top of the neighbors’ red brick house.

And it wasn’t lost on me that, when I stood in the doorway, I was standing in the exact same space and nearly the exact same manner as Paul on those nights when he came up to the room. I felt cold, a deep chill the likes of which comes only on the worst of winter days. It was spring and pleasant outside, but being in that room frosted me and almost made my body quake with a shiver. I was about to turn and go when—

“You look like you miss this place.”

I spun at the sound of the voice, almost falling down. I came face-to-face with my mother, who’d somehow managed—squeaky stairs and all—to sneak up behind me.

She looked strangely pleased to see me standing in that doorway, as though I were any child reminiscing about the joys and happiness of the past. “I guess we all miss our childhoods, don’t we?” she said.

I shook my head. “Not me.”

“Oh, Tom.” She reached out for my arm. My posture remained rigid. “You should come back more. You should have come back more when Paul was alive.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because we’re your family,” she said. “Don’t you have any happy memories of being here?”

“I have to get back, Mom. There’s school and everything . . .”

She didn’t let go of me. “Really, Tom. I know it was tough when your dad died and I got remarried. But we did okay by you, didn’t we? Didn’t Paul?”

I took a step back and studied her face to make sure she wasn’t joking. But there was no smile there, no laughter in her eyes. Just a sadness I’d noticed ever since I was a child, its starkness emphasized by the age that was increasingly making its mark upon her—the graying hair, the deep lines around her mouth and eyes, the spots on the backs of her hands. “Paul beat us, Mom. He beat me. He terrorized all of us, including you.”

For a moment, she looked confused, as though I were speaking of events from a long-ago time she knew nothing about.

She started shaking her head back and forth, slowly, the puzzled look on her face not fading but instead only deepening. “Tom, Paul never beat you. He never laid a hand on any of my children.”

“You’re crazy, Mom. You knew about it.”

“You say these things to me. I just can’t understand why you children hate me so much. Was I such an awful mother that you have to make these things up just to hurt me?”

“No one’s making anything up, Mom.” I pulled loose from her grip, my anger swelling unreasonably. “No one’s making this up. Just admit what you know to be true.”

Her eyes filled with tears. She brought her hand up to her mouth. She looked like she wanted to keep the sobs from escaping from her throat. It worked, because none came. But she did manage to speak. “Not today, Tom. Please, not on a day like this.”

“Why won’t you say what I want to hear you say?”

Buster appeared on the stairs.

He reached the top, apparently having heard at least some of our conversation. The raised voices. My mother’s pleas. He looked angry, but rather than taking my side—which I’d thought he would’ve agreed with—he took Mom’s side against me.

“Tom,” he said, “this isn’t all about you and your hurt feelings. We’re all hurting here today. We don’t need you making this stuff up about Dad again.”

“I’m not making anything up. I just want her to admit it.”

Buster gritted his teeth. “Tom, you asshole.”

Mom looked at the floor, wiping at her tears.

I stared, waiting. The two of them formed a Maginot Line of denial. I couldn’t squeeze through. There wasn’t a place for me there. There never was. Never once were they on my side. Not against Paul, not against anything.

I brushed past them and left the house.

And I never saw my mother alive again.

Chapter Forty-three

I
wasn’t sleeping. I knew that.

In the days since Liann’s visit, my nights were spent staring at the ceiling of the guest room, the noise of an occasional passing car my only company. Caitlin was in our house, and John Colter was in someone’s house too. Free on bail. Charged with arson, second degree, just as Liann had predicted.

Something tapped against my window.

I sat up quickly.

John Colter? Could he be there, trying to get into our house?

I crossed the room to the window and looked down. My palms were flat against the glass, feeling the cold from the outside.

Nothing.

The street, the yard were empty.

My imagination, nothing more.

But I couldn’t go back to sleep.

Instead, I went downstairs and made a circuit of the house, checking every door, every window, making sure they were locked and secure. They were. The heat was down for the night, and my feet were cold against the kitchen tile. I looked in the refrigerator. Finding nothing much, I picked up an apple but didn’t bite into it. I thought about the girl from the cemetery and the noise against the window upstairs.

Was she out there again?

It didn’t take me long to go back upstairs and dress. I paused on the landing and stuck my ear against the door to Abby and Caitlin’s room. I heard faint, steady breathing. They were still there, as safe as they could be, so I slipped out of the house like a burglar.

The streets were quiet and empty. It was nearly one-thirty, and when I reached the main road a few cars passed. But even out there it was quiet. The streetlight flashed yellow, and in its strange glow, I scanned the sidewalk in both directions. I didn’t see anybody, and certainly no sign of the girl. My hands were stuffed into the pockets of my jacket, but I still felt a chill that made me hunch my shoulders.

Even in the dark, the headstones were visible. Faint, stony outlines, solid and eternal. I crossed the main road, jogging slightly, cutting at an angle across the front of the park and toward the driveway that wound through the middle of the cemetery. A sign said the cemetery closed at dark, and on rare occasions a security car made a sweep through as the daylight faded. But mostly the security was lax.

Trees lined both sides of the main cemetery drive. The trunks and branches were thick and gnarled, and in many cases grew close to the graves and knocked long-planted headstones out of kilter, tilting them to the side like falling towers.

I slowed my pace the farther I moved away from the street. I felt a little exposed. If the girl was in the cemetery, she could be anywhere, hiding behind any of the monuments or mausoleums, watching me.

And if she didn’t come alone . . .

Even late in the season, with cool weather settling in, crickets still chirped in the grass. Above, through the breaks in the trees, the sky was clear, the stars bright. It was beautiful and peaceful. A wonderful place to spend eternity, if indeed we were granted an eternity to spend.

I reached the back where Caitlin’s headstone—
cenotaph
—stood. I looked around, still not seeing or hearing anything.

But then something rustled to my left.

It was a quick sound, a crunching of fallen leaves. It could have been a branch falling or the skittering of a raccoon. But as I stood there, listening and looking for more, the sense grew within me that I wasn’t alone, that more than just the legions of the sleeping dead were there in the night.

I waited, and the sound came again. It continued longer, a shuffling like footsteps through the carpet of leaves. And then I saw the girl.

She emerged from between two headstones, very close to Caitlin’s monument. My heart jumped when I saw the girl. I took a step toward her. She backed up a half step, as though she wanted to run.

“No,” I said. I held my hand out in what I hoped was a calming gesture. “Don’t go.”

In the darkness, she looked as vague as the shadows between the headstones. I saw her blond hair, and the loose, baggy Windbreaker she wore hung to her knees. Her big eyes glistened like pools of water in the darkness. She raised a finger to her mouth and chewed on the nail.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She kept chewing.

“What do you want from me? Do you know me?”

She studied me.

“He sent me,” she said.

“Who?”

She didn’t answer, but the realization dawned.

“John Colter sent you?”

She nodded, the finger still in her mouth. “He wants to see her,” she said. “He wants to see the girl in your house.”

“He’s going to jail.”

“No,” she said. “He says he wants to see her.”

“Is he here? Is he in the cemetery?”

The girl craned her neck around, looking behind her.

“Who’s back there?” I asked.

I stepped forward, squinting past the girl, but saw nothing. After a long moment, I heard the sound of footsteps, heavier this time and again stirring up the leaves.

I waited, and a figure resolved out of the darkness.

I expected to see that face from the sketch, the one from the photo Ryan had placed in front of me. That hulking, ugly, scarred face.

So it took me a moment to process the more familiar face I saw before me. The one that looked so much like my stepfather, Paul.

I must have blinked my eyes a few times until he said my name.

“Tom, take it easy.”

It was Buster.

Chapter Forty-four

H
e moved slowly toward me, his eyes wide, his lips slightly parted.

I felt the earth turning, the sky moving above me, the stars streaking through the night like fireballs. Everything welled within me, a burning taste at the back of my throat. Anger, frustration, confusion. My hands went out and took Buster by the lapels of his jacket. I gathered fistfuls of the material until I felt my fingernails bend back with the pressure.

“What are you doing here? What the fuck are you doing to me?”

“Calm down, Tom. Calm down—”

He grimaced as I shook him, his lips peeling back in a crazed-looking grin. But it was fear. He saw something in me. My own lack of control. My rage. I shook until he managed to get his own hands up. He gripped my biceps, slowing me down.

“Tom. Stop. It’s me. It’s Buster.”

“Paul—”

“It’s Buster.”

“You took Caitlin. You took her—”

“No, no. Listen. Listen to me.”

I don’t think I would have stopped, except the girl, the child who’d appeared outside my window, came up and grabbed ahold of me. She tugged on my belt loop and strained to be heard above our grunts and scuffling.

“Stop it!” she said. “Stop doing that to him. Stop it! Stop it!”

Her voice reached me through the fog of my anger. I turned to look down at her, and when I did, I loosened my grip on Buster.

She was about twelve. This close, I finally saw her features. The greasy hair, the pale, almost translucent skin. Her clothes hung loose on her body, like she possessed next to no body fat. There were dark circles around her eyes. Malnutrition. The child hadn’t been eating enough.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She looked scared of me, but held her ground. “He wants her back,” she said again. “The girl.
Your
girl.”

“John Colter sent you?”

She didn’t answer.

“Tell me!” I shouted.

My voice echoed through the night. The girl swallowed, her throat bobbing. But still she didn’t answer.

“Tom?”

I spun around. Buster stood about ten feet away, his right hand rubbing his throat.

“He did send her,” Buster said. “Colter.”

“And you? What are you—?”

He held his hands out again, asking for calm and patience. “Let me explain, Tom. Just listen.”

I stayed rooted in place. My brain spun as fast as the planet.

Buster went on. “I found the girl, Tom. This girl. She was outside your house tonight. You mentioned her in the papers that time, so when I saw her there, standing underneath your window, I knew who it was.”

“What were
you
doing outside the house in the middle of the night?” I asked Buster. “Were you there to take Caitlin?”

“No, Tom. I came here to see you. To help you. I saw in the paper that Colter was being let out, that they were only going to charge him with arson or some bullshit like that.” He brought his hands together and rubbed them against each other, steadily increasing the pressure. “I tell you, Tom, I was angry when I saw that. I can’t imagine how you felt. But I wanted to do something. I needed to do something about it.”

“What were you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” He punched one fist into the palm of his other hand. “I found something. I looked in the phone book. Do you know Colter’s number was in there the whole time? All this time he held Caitlin, his phone number was right there in the book. There he was, getting calls from telemarketers, people asking him to give money to charity, to switch his long-distance service, and he was keeping Caitlin locked away in some room in the basement.” He dug into his pants pocket and brought out a small, wrinkled piece of paper. “His mom bailed him out of jail, you know? She put up her house. Did you see that?”

“Yes.”

“Her number’s in the book, too.” He waved the paper in the air. “I called it. The old bitch answered, and I asked for John. She said, ‘Why can’t you reporters leave him alone? He doesn’t know nothing about that girl.’ I told the old bitch to fuck off. But you know what? That means we know where he’s staying. He’s staying there, at this address.” He waved the paper again.