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Authors: David J Bell

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BOOK: Cemetery Girl
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Our food came. Buster salted his fries and started eating. I stared at my plate, my appetite uncertain.

“I stopped by your house on the way to that crazy church,” he said. “I thought I might catch you. I knocked and knocked, but nothing.”

“We were at the church already.”

“I know that. But Frosty didn’t bark.”

I shook my head. “He’s gone.”

“But you were just walking him the other day. He died? What happened?”

I shrugged. “I took him to the shelter. He’s an older dog, set in his ways. They said there’s a chance someone will adopt him, but if not, well, they euthanize the dogs eventually.”

“Did he get sick?”

I shook my head.

Recognition spread across his face. “Abby wanted him gone?”

I didn’t respond. I picked up a french fry and popped it in my mouth.

“And you did it? You took him to the pound?”

“I did it for Abby. And for me. He was Caitlin’s dog. He was a reminder of what we lost. If it helps us to turn the page . . .”

“Jesus. That’s cold.”

“The dog who knew too much. Except how to tell us what he knew.” I emptied my cup and poured more beer for Buster and myself.

“How are things with you and Abby?”

I started eating my lukewarm food. “The same.”

“That good?”

“We’re fine.”

“Let me ask you something, and if I’m crossing a line here, just let me know.”

I laughed. “Would that stop you?”

“No.” He signaled the waitress for another pitcher. “But I’m just wondering . . . do you two still do it? I mean, do you sleep in the same bed? Do you fuck?”

The pitcher came. “Put that on my brother’s tab,” I said.

“You can put it all on my tab. My treat.” He winked at me. “I guess I owe you a few.” He didn’t refill his cup. “Well?”

“I know you’re trying to provoke me now. It always ends up this way with you.”

“You don’t fuck? Ever?” He shook his head. “I don’t know how anyone could live that way. I just have to get something, you know? I can’t live without it.” He kept shaking his head. “See, I’m really just trying to find out why you stay married to someone who you don’t have anything going on with. She’s at that freaky church; you’re a college professor. She wants to do this whole funeral thing. You don’t. She thinks Caitlin’s dead . . .”

“She hasn’t worked for a long time. She gave up teaching when Caitlin was born.”

“ S o? ”

“Our lives are intertwined. It’s not as easy as you make it sound.”

“Isn’t it?” He pushed away his plate and drank more. He let out a hissing burp. “I think it is easy. Easy for me to see anyway. The dog’s gone. The headstone’s been laid. People are moving on. Remember when Dad died? My dad? Remember how you cried at the funeral?”

“I didn’t cry.”

“You did.”

“Not for him, I didn’t.”

Buster sighed. “He raised you.”

“If you want to call it that.”

Buster leaned back. He brought his hand up and scratched his jaw. I could tell he was angry. Whenever we talked about my stepfather, one or both of us ended up full of anger. But Buster managed to swallow his this time. When he spoke again, his voice was even.

“Here’s my point—it wasn’t long after the old man died that you went off to grad school. You started a new life, a new career. You met Abby. You had a baby. It was like his death liberated you in a way. You know, they say we don’t fully become ourselves until our parents die. Maybe that’s why I’m something of a late bloomer.” He spoke the last sentence without a trace of irony. “Maybe you have the chance for a new life here. Now. If you just . . . accept things . . .”

I stared at him across our dirty, cluttered table. I thought about walking out—hell, I thought about punching him. But instead, I just signaled for the waitress, who brought the check.

“Give it to him,” I said. “We’re finished here.”

Chapter Three


D
o you mind making a stop?”

“Where?” Buster asked.

When Buster saw the animal shelter, he sighed. “You’re kidding, right? He’s dead.”

“Just give me a minute.”

In the lobby, I smelled the accumulated odors of hundreds of caged animals. Their fur, their waste, their food. Their fear and desperation. The door at the back, the one that led to the cages, muffled the sounds, but I could still hear a faint chorus of barks and yelps. I asked the woman working at the counter about Frosty, and she seemed immediately confused by my request.

“He’s your dog?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And he was lost?”

“No, I brought him here. He’s a yellow Lab. Frosty’s his name. I wanted to get rid of him, but now I want him back.”

She pursed her lips like the nuns from my grade school.

“Well, I’ll see,” she said. “But this doesn’t happen often.” She stopped at the door to the cages and looked back at me. “You’ll have to pay the adoption donation even if he is your dog.”

I nodded my assent. While she was gone, I looked around the lobby. The faces of dogs and cats in need of homes stared back at me from one bulletin board, and next to that another one held flyers advertising missing pets. We didn’t make a new flyer for Caitlin this year. The police created an age progression image, one showing Caitlin at age fifteen, and it was so warped and distorted—the eyes too large, the hair artificial—I couldn’t bear to look at it. I thought it belonged in a mortician’s textbook, an example of what not to do to preserve the image of a loved one. But the police distributed it anyway, and from time to time I came across a faded, wrinkling copy in the corner of a coffee shop or stuck to a community bulletin board downtown.

The woman reappeared so quickly I knew she bore bad news.

“He’s gone,” she said matter-of-factly, as though talking about a housefly.

“I thought you kept them for a week—”

“He’s been adopted,” she said. “Someone got him yesterday.”

“Okay, can you just tell me who it is? I need him back.”

She shook her head, the lips pursed again. “We can’t do that, sir.”

“But he’s my dog.”

“You brought him in here. You gave him away.”

“It was a mistake. A misunderstanding.” I leaned against the counter, letting it support most of my weight. I felt drained by the day. And guilty. I’d hoped having Frosty back would lift me.

“We can’t give out that information. It’s private.”

“I know, but—”

“We can’t just have people coming in here and getting personal information about our clients.”

“Okay, okay. I get it.”

“We have plenty of other dogs here,” she said. “Good dogs.” She seemed suddenly cheery and upbeat. “Is this for a family? Are you looking for a dog for your children?”

“No, just for me, I guess. And I only wanted that dog.” There was nothing more to say, so I turned and left.

When I climbed back into the car, Buster didn’t say anything. He dropped it into gear and drove me home, the voice of the talk radio host our only companion. Buster stopped at the curb in front of the house, but neither one of us got out.

“Thanks for coming today,” I said. “I’m glad you made it.” I extended my hand, which he shook.

“That’s what brothers do for each other,” he said.

“I didn’t even ask what you’re doing these days.”

He shrugged. “A cell phone company. Sales. It pays the bills. Look, I know why you’re asking about that—”

“No—”

“I plan on paying you back. All of it, all five thousand.”

“I don’t care.”

“Abby?”

I paused. “She cares about it. But she’s also given up on you. She tells me she’s written off that money, like it was a business expense.”

He started tapping his right hand against the rim of the steering wheel. “The price of being related to me.”

“Something like that.”

“How about you? What are you doing with your time off? Writing a book? Who’s it about this time? Melville? Moby Dick? Dicky Moe?”

“Hawthorne. His short fiction. You know, it sounded like there was a woman with you when I talked to you on the phone the other day. Are you dating someone?”

“Why the sudden interest?”

“I just don’t want us to be pissed at each other. I know the stuff with your dad is tough. For both of us maybe, but certainly for me. I still dream about him, about him coming into our room at night, drunk and angry. The way he’d come after us, swinging at us. I see his figure there in the dark. Sort of a hulking presence. I can’t forget it.”

“We’re not going to solve all this sitting here in the car.”

“Do you remember the same things?” I asked. “At least tell me that.”

He didn’t hesitate. “No, Tom. I don’t remember it that way at all. Sorry.”

“We used to huddle together in the dark,” I said. “Hell, you used to try to protect me. You’d lay on top of me and keep me safe. Are you going to tell me you don’t remember? You’re really going to stick to that? Really?”

“I’m not sticking to anything,” he said. “It’s a fact.” He looked at the console clock. “I have to get back home, okay?” I opened the door, and before I was out he added, “But, Young Goodman Tom, if you do decide to change your life—really change your life—give me a call. You have my number.”

Chapter Four

I
n the weeks and months after Caitlin disappeared, rumors had started to spread. New Cambridge, Ohio, is a small college town of about fifty thousand people, mostly middle class, mostly quiet and pleasant. It was primarily populated by professors and their families and students who came and went based on the academic calendar. Bad things didn’t happen in New Cambridge, at least not bad things that people knew or talked about.

But even if friends tried to insulate us from the gossip, we still heard what people said: Caitlin was pregnant, and we’d sent her away. Caitlin met a lover over the Internet and ran off with him. Caitlin fell victim to an online predator who’d kidnapped her. Or Caitlin simply ran away. Tired of the boring life in a small college town, she’d taken matters into her own hands and run off for greener pastures. California or New York. Seattle or Miami.

The police, of course, interviewed all of our friends and family, and they talked to a handful of my students and examined police records, but they found nothing. In those first days and weeks after Caitlin didn’t come home from her walk, the police treated us with the due deference owed to the parents of a missing and possibly murdered child. They spoke to us in soothing tones, they offered us platitudinal encouragement—which actually felt wonderful to hear—and they answered our calls and questions promptly. But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear.

It began with Buster and his indecent exposure rap. He lived an hour away in Columbus and wasn’t in New Cambridge the day Caitlin disappeared—as far as we knew—but he couldn’t provide a rock-solid alibi. He said he was at his house. An ex-girlfriend claimed to have spoken to him on his cell phone an hour before the disappearance, but she didn’t know where he was while they talked. For a while, Buster became something of a suspect, even though the police refused to call him that to either Abby or me. He endured some heated questioning, and some not so subtle threats in the interview room. While he never requested a lawyer or offered anything close to a confession, and while no evidence linked him to the commission of a crime, word leaked to the newspaper that Caitlin’s uncle—unnamed—was a
person of interest
in the case.

I never offered a particularly strong defense of my brother. Not to Abby and not to the police. I did tell them I didn’t believe he would harm Caitlin. In fact, he was a surprisingly doting uncle to Caitlin, one who often sent birthday gifts and, on the rare occasions when he visited us, went out of his way to talk to Caitlin as though she were more adult than child.

“But that’s just it, Tom,” Abby said to me on one of the days Buster was going a few rounds with the cops. “He paid so much attention to Caitlin. Didn’t it seem out of character to you?”

It did. It really did. And I allowed the suspicions of the police and Abby’s doubts to become my own to such an extent that they never fully went away, even when the police finished with him and let him go. I still found myself returning to those questions again and again: Where was he that day? Why did he seem to care about Caitlin so much? Was his indecent exposure charge really just a drunken misunderstanding?

But if my doubts about Buster remained alive, even in the back of my mind, the police—absent any conclusive proof of his involvement—moved on to other things. They examined every scrap of mail, every phone call, every bill and financial statement we possessed, and none of it led anywhere—except for the computer we’d purchased for Caitlin, the one she used in her room. There were no unusual e-mails, no evidence that she made contact with a man who might have lured her away or taken her. But Caitlin had been searching the Web the day she disappeared, and in the hours before she walked out the door with Frosty, she’d visited Web sites for Seattle, horses, Amtrak, the U.S. presidency. I didn’t see anything nefarious or unusual in this list. A curious child surfed the Internet, following her train of thought wherever it might go. I do the same thing every day.

But the police jumped on two items from the list—Seattle and Amtrak—and decided there was a decent chance that Caitlin had run away. They questioned us about it, placing special emphasis on whether or not there were difficulties in the home. They asked her friends, her teachers, our neighbors, and many of them said that, while they didn’t believe anything was wrong, they did think Caitlin was something of a distant child, one who kept to herself, one who really didn’t allow others to know what she was thinking. All true, and all things Abby and I had told the police from the very beginning. We didn’t always know what Caitlin was thinking, but what parents of a twelve-year-old do?

From that point on, a slight rift grew between the police and us. They slowly drew down their resources—the SBI removed their consulting agent from the case, the New Cambridge PD cut back to one detective—and we sensed, both Abby and I, that the authorities were no longer taking us seriously, that we were being moved to the back burner as long as no new information came forward to propel the case along.

BOOK: Cemetery Girl
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