Free Cemetery Lake by Paul Cleave Page A

long.’
    “No’
    ‘That’s a real shame,’ I say, ‘because it’s cold out here. I’m going to have to keep myself warm somehow, and the best way
    to do that is to keep pounding on your door.’
    There is a small shudder as the door catches, then frees from
    the frame before swinging open.
    The man confronting me is the man I saw pictured earlier this
    evening in the article about the retired caretaker. I reach out and offer Sidney Alderman my card, but he leaves me hanging.
    ‘I know who you are,’ he says. ‘You’re the cop who had to bury his daughter.’
    He spits the comment at me as though it’s some kind of insult, and I’m unsure how to respond. The fact this man remembers me
    makes me shudder. Two years ago he covered Emily’s coffin with dirt. How the hell did he remember? The way he says it makes
    me want to hit him.
    He grins, his aged face stretching dozens of wrinkles in dozens of directions. He has a few days’ worth of grey stubble; his hair is dishevelled, as are his clothes. He looks like he just spent a week in the desert. If I saw him two years ago I don’t recall it. His eyes are unreadable in this light.
    He smells of cheap beer and even cheaper vodka, and there is
    another smell there too, something I can’t identify, but it makes me think of old men hanging out in hospitals and homes gathering a collection of old diseases.
    “I’m looking for your son,’ I say.
    Only you’re not a cop any more, are you, Tate,’ he says.
    ‘ You don’t have to be a cop in this world to want to look for somebody,’ I point out. ‘That’s why they have phonebooks.’
    ‘Then let your goddamn fingers do the walking,’ he says, and
    starts to close the door.
    I stop it with my foot.
    ‘What happened?’ he asks. ‘You get sick of the donuts?’ He
    starts to laugh, then scratches at his belly as if he has just come up with a real humdinger. ‘No, they fired you, right? Why was that again?’
    He keeps grinning at me. His teeth look like they haven’t seen fluoride in years.
    ‘Sure is a nice place you got here,’ I say — and hell, maybe the day isn’t long enough after all, because here comes that personality clash. ‘You in the middle of renovating?’
    ‘Yeah. It’s a real fucking palace,’ he answers, but his laughter doesn’t have an ounce of humour in it. It’s as though he’s heard other people do it, maybe on TV or on the radio, and he’s trying to imitate it. ‘Somebody died, right? Isn’t that why they fired you?’
    ‘Where’s your son?’
    SNobody knows. The police have been here all afternoon,
    right? They’ve gone through this place and asked me the same
    damn things over and over, and my answer didn’t change for
    them and it ain’t changing for you.’
    ‘Your boy is guilty of something. Things will go easier for him if he starts helping himself here. Tell me where he is and I can start to help him.’
    ‘You’re a fucking joke,’ he says, sneering for a few seconds and then grinning like the madman he’s turning out to be. I feel sick knowing this is the man who covered my little girl’s coffin with dirt. Sick he was anywhere near her.
    ‘You can’t hide him for ever.’
    ‘You finished?’
    I think about Bruce Alderman and how he was behaving while
    we dug up the coffin, and I think about him driving away in
    the stolen truck with the coffin sliding off the back and hitting the ground. I think about how he has perhaps behaved his entire life. This man was his role model. Maybe the world should be
    thankful there were only four corpses found in the lake and not a hundred.
    ‘You know, I am going to find him,’ I say, ‘only now it’s going to be the hard way’
    “I don’t fucking care about making your life easy’
    “I’m not talking about hard for me. You should have given him
    up, Alderman.’
    Instead of getting angry Alderman starts to laugh again. ‘You’re just a fucking cliche,’ he says. ‘And on top of that, you have no