Cemetery Lake by Paul Cleave Read Free Book Online

usual chitchat, then she asks me if I’m after the
    usual. I tell her I am.
    ‘Your wife must really love flowers,’ Michelle tells me, and
    I slowly nod.
    Michelle picks out a bunch she thinks Bridget will like, wraps some cellophane around the stems, and hands them over. She
    writes down the amount in a small book behind the counter. At
    the end of the month, like every other month, she will send me a bill.
    ‘Say hi to Bridget for me,’ she says, and her smile is infectious.
    Sometimes I think I could just watch this woman smile for ages.
    I head back to my car and rest the flowers in the passenger
    seat, careful not to crush them. I glance at my watch. Bridget won’t be in any hurry to see me, so I change my mind and decide maybe I can pay a visit to Rachel Tyler’s family after all. I do a U-turn and drive back in the opposite direction, taking with me a bunch of already dying flowers and a whole lot of bad news.

chapter seven
    Averageville. That’s where the Tylers live. All the houses in the street are well kept, but there is nothing special, as if any one resident was too scared to make their house stand out above
    another. No huge homes with giant windows, no expensive cars
    parked outside, no Porsches or Beemers suggesting a world of big money and high debt. Doctors and lawyers and drug dealers live elsewhere. This is typical living in suburbia, where robberies are high but homicides are low. It’s a pleasant place to live. Sure as hell beats some of the alternatives.
    I slow down and glance at the letterboxes, getting an idea early how much further I have to drive. This wasn’t my case when
    the bodies floated up. It wasn’t my case when the caretaker took off. But it became my case the moment the coffin opened and
    Rachel Tyler’s body made a suggestion that there are others out there who could still be alive if not for my mistake. I glance at the geranium cocktail next to me, and for a few seconds I think about my wife. I like to think that I know what she would want me to do, but I can’t be sure. It’s been a long time since she gave me any advice.
    I step out into the light rain in front of a single-storey house that was mass-produced back at the start of the townhouse era.
    Things are tidy, but a little run down. The garden has a few weeds; the lawn is a little long; the entire house looks a little tired.
    The door is opened by a woman in her late forties, early
    fifties. She looks like she has been on edge for the last two years, expecting news at any moment. She is like the house — tidy, neat, but tired.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Mrs Tyler?’
    “Yes …’
    I can tell she isn’t sure whether I’m here to sell her encyclopaedias or God, or whether I’m here to bolster or destroy her hopes for her missing daughter. Slowly I reach into my pocket and take out a business card. Her eyes widen and her mouth drops slightly as I hand it across, and when she reads it her mouth firms back up.
    She doesn’t seem sure what to say. Doesn’t seem to know whether to be happy or scared that I’m on her doorstep.
    ‘My name is Theodore Tate,’ I say, ‘and I’m a private
    investigator.’
    ‘That’s what the card says,’ she offers, without any sarcasm.
    ‘Can I have a few minutes of your time?’
    ‘Do you know where she is?’ she asks, already sure of the
    reason for my visit.
    ‘This is about Rachel,’ I say, ‘but not directly. Please, if we can step inside, I can tell you more.’
    She fights with the beginnings of a sentence; perhaps the
    struggle is with the hundreds of questions trying to come out at once, a hundred different ways in which to ask if her daughter is still alive. I bet she’s rehearsed this moment time and time again, but the reality is crushing her, confusing her. She steps back and I move inside.
    The hallway is warm and homey. There are dozens of
    photographs of Rachel on the walls, ranging over the nineteen
    years she spent in this world. There are pictures of her as a