Cemetery Girl Read online

  “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

  In 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.

  Did I really believe that Caitlin had run away? I like to tell myself I never did. But I have to admit there were nights—lying in bed, staring at the ceiling—when the results of those Internet searches cycled through my brain like trains themselves. And I had to ask myself, there in the dark: What was Caitlin really thinking or doing? Did anybody—even me—really know?

  Chapter Five

  The Fantasy Club was removed from all the respectable businesses, a small, sturdily built structure with a gravel parking lot and a blinking sign that promised ADULT ENTERTAINMENT—COUPLES WELCOME.

  The lot was almost empty when I parked, my tires crunching over the gravel and kicking up a puff of white dust. The lack of windows made the place look a little like a fortress, a distant entertainment outpost. When I walked in, my eyes struggled to adjust to the gloom; no one tended the door or asked me to pay a cover charge. The stage was empty, the music off. The lone bartender and his only customer stood watch over a newspaper and a TV playing a daytime talk show. The bartender managed to pry his eyes away from the paper.

  “Help you?”

  My head was still buzzing a little from the beer I’d drunk with Buster, so I ordered a club soda. The corner of the bartender’s mouth curled a little.

  “You want a lime with that? I’m all out of limes.”

  “No lime.”

  He sprayed the soda into a plastic cup and placed it on the bar. “We’re between shows,” he said, “so I won’t charge you for the drink.”

  “That’s fine.” I dug around in my pocket and found a dollar bill, which I placed on the counter as a tip and a peace offering.

  The bartender raised his eyebrows but didn’t pick it up. “Thanks,” he said.

  I took a seat at the end of the bar. I drummed my fingers on the bar top and swallowed the club soda in less than a minute. I jabbed at the ice with my little red cocktail straw, tried to focus on the argument raging on the TV, then asked for a refill. The bartender provided it without looking up from his paper.

  “Tonight we’re having a lingerie show,” he said. “You ought to stick around.”

  “I have to face my wife at some point today.”

  The bartender looked up and winked at me. “Hell, bring her. Didn’t you see the sign? Couples welcome.”

  “You haven’t met my wife.”

  The bartender and his customer both laughed at my joke, and for a moment I entered their masculine circle.

  “Can I ask you guys a question?” I asked.

  Their laughter broke off. The sound of the TV filled the space, the tinny voice of an acne-faced kid who stood accused of fathering two children by two different high school girls. He was protesting to the host, his voice rising like a siren.

  I reached into my wallet and brought out the picture of Caitlin I always carried with me. Her last school portrait, the one the police circulated to the media in the wake of her disappearance. I held it up in the space between me and the two men. I tried to make my voice casual.

  “Have you ever seen this girl in here?” I asked.

  The customer, an older man with a deeply lined, sagging face, looked away, deferring responsibility for dealing with me to the bartender.

  “You a cop?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Private investigator?”

  “I’m her father.”

  A hint of sympathy flickered across the bartender’s eyes. He leaned in a couple of inches and looked at the photo, his brow furrowing.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen her,” he said. He flipped the newspaper closed and tapped his index finger against the front page. It was the New Cambridge Herald. “Right here.” It wasn’t above-the-fold news, but it had made the front near the bottom, tucked next to the weather forecast. A picture of Caitlin along with the story—the same photo I held in my hand. “But I haven’t seen her in here. We don’t allow underage kids in. No, sir.”

  “Did you really take a look at the picture?” I asked.

  He sighed a little, then looked again. He studied the picture longer than before, even going so far as to tilt his head back and to the side to get a better angle.

  “No,” he said. “She’s just a little girl. I’ve never seen her.”

  “She’d be sixteen now.”

  “Sixteen? How old is she in the picture?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Do you know how much a kid changes between twelve and sixteen?”

  I put the photo back in my wallet.

  “I wish I did,” I said. “I really wish I did.”

  Chapter Six

  The woman with Liann looked young, college-age young, and she wore a T-shirt, short cutoff denim shorts, and flip-flops. She carried a blue and red gym bag, and when they came abreast of the bar, the bartender, the same one who’d served me, grunted.

  “You’re late, Tracy.”

  “Did someone die and put you in charge, Pete?” she asked.

  Liann looked as out of place in the Fantasy Club as I felt. She wore a no-nonsense brown business suit, and her brown hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. Liann was older than me—she was approaching fifty—but she maintained a rail-thin figure through a combination of jogging and biking. She looked strong and determined as she brought the young woman toward me, a motherly hand resting on the girl’s arm. Her presence comforted me as it had ever since she’d shown at our house the day after Caitlin disappeared.

  I stood up as they approached my table—one in the corner and out of the way—and I shook the woman’s hand as Liann introduced us.

  Up close, in the glow from the stage lights and neon beer signs on the wall, I saw that while my initial assessment was correct—the girl named Tracy was only about twenty years old—the years didn’t look like easy ones. Her hair looked thin and brittle from repeated bleachings, and lines were already forming at the corners of her mouth and eyes. She was thin but not in a healthy, youthful way. Instead she appeared tired and worn, like someone who didn’t sleep or eat right.

  I offered to get everyone a drink, but Liann shook her head. They both sat down.

>   “We should get started,” Liann said. “Tracy has to work.”

  I took my seat, my hands folded on the table.

  “Okay, Tracy,” Liann said. “Go ahead.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “How do you two know each other?”

  Tracy looked down at the tabletop. Liann turned to me and said, “We’re short on time here, Tom.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “But I want to know where this information is coming from. Liann, you work with women and families who have been affected by violent crime. And you’re a lawyer. I want to know which role you met Tracy in.”

  “Tom, Tracy has had some issues—”

  “I got busted, okay?” Tracy said, raising her head to look at me. “I got busted for drugs, and Liann was my lawyer. She kept me out of jail.”

  I nodded. “Okay, I get it.”

  “It’s not really relevant,” Liann said. “Tell him what you saw, Tracy.”

  Tracy took her time getting started. She reached into the gym bag and brought out a pack of cigarettes—Marlboro Lights—and a lighter. Once the cigarette was burning, she let a stream of smoke go up toward the ceiling, then waved her hand around out of consideration for Liann and me. The ceremony completed, Tracy fixed on me with a level gaze.

  “I’ve seen you before,” she said. “I used to dance at the Love Shack, and you would come in there showing that picture of your little girl around. You showed it to me one night.” She took another drag, exhaled. “I have a little girl, too. She’s almost five. Cassie. She stays with my aunt while I work, but I see her sometimes.”

  She wanted a response, so I provided one. “That must be tough,” I said.

  Tracy nodded as though my words carried some eternal truth. “It is. It sure as hell is.”

  Most of the twenty-year-olds I interacted with at the university came from privileged backgrounds and were often more worldly and widely traveled than I was. Tracy didn’t have that life. She didn’t spend her winters in Vail or her summers in Can-cún. More likely, she spent her whole life in the counties surrounding New Cambridge, and she’d carry the rough features and country accent common among locals with her the rest of her life, markers of who she was.