flatbed truck starts up and backs a little closer. With the two machines violently shuddering, more dirt spills from the bank and slides into the water.
About five metres out into the lake, I see some bubbles rising to the surface, then a patch of mud. But there is something else there too. Something dark that looks like an oil patch.
There is a thud as the coffin is lowered onto the back of the
truck. The springs grind downwards from the weight. I can hear the three men talking quickly among themselves, having to nearly shout to be heard over the engines. The cemetery caretaker has disappeared.
The rain is getting heavier. The dark patch rising beneath the water breaks the surface. It looks like a giant black balloon. I’ve seen these giant black balloons before. You hope they’re one thing but they’re always another.
‘Hey, buddy, you might want to take a look at this,’ one of the men calls out.
But I’m too busy looking at something else.
‘Hey? You listening?’ The voice is closer now. ‘We’ve got
something here you need to look at.’
I glance up at the digger operator as he walks over to me. The caretaker is starting to walk over too. Both men look into the water and say nothing.
The black bubble isn’t really a bubble but the back of a jacket.
It hangs in the water, and connected to it is a soccer ball-sized object. It has hair. And before I can answer, another shape bubbles to the surface, and then another, as the lake releases its hold on the past.
chapter two
The case never made the news because it was never a case. It was a slice of life that happens every day, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. It made the back pages where the obituaries are listed, along with the John Smiths of this world who are beloved parents and grandparents and who will be sorely missed. It was a simple story of man-gets-old-and-dies. Read all about it.
It happened two years ago. Some people wake up every morning and read the obits while downing scrambled eggs and orange juice, looking for a name that jumps out from their past.
It’s a crazy way to kill a few minutes. It’s like a morbid lottery, seeing whose number has come up, and I don’t know whether these people find relief when they get to the end and don’t find anybody they know or relief when they do. They’re looking for a reason; they’re looking for somebody, wanting to make a connection and to feel their own mortality.
Henry Martins. I pulled those stories from the library newspaper database this morning just like I did two years ago, and read what people had to say about him when he died, which wasn’t much. Then again, it’s hard to sum up a person’s life in five lines of six-point text. It’s hard to say how much you’re going to miss them. There were eleven entries for Henry over three days from family and friends. Nobody made my job easier by throwing a ‘glad you’re dead’ in with their woeful sorrows, but each obituary read like the others: boring, emotionless. At least that’s the way they come across when you don’t know the guy.
Henry Martins’ daughter came into the station a week after the old man was buried. She sat down in my office and told me her dad was murdered. I told her he wasn’t. If he had been, the medical examiner would have stumbled across it. MEs are like that. It was easy to see she already had both feet firmly on the road of suspicion, and I told her I’d look into it. I did some checking. Henry Martins was a bank manager who left behind a lot of family and a lot of clients, but his occupation wasn’t an opportunity for him to line his pockets with other people’s money.
I looked into his life as much as I could in the small amount of time I could allot for his daughter’s ‘hunch’, but nothing stood out as odd.
Two years later, and Henry Martins’ coffin is behind me on chains as the wind increases in strength. And Henry Martins’ wife is trying to avoid anybody with a badge now that her second husband has died, his blue fingernails the first indication that he was poisoned. Henry’s daughter hasn’t spoken to me because I’m no longer in the same position I was two years ago. It’s easy to let my mind wander and think of things that might have been. I could have done more back then. I could have solved a murder, if that’s what happened. Could have stopped another man from dying. The jury is still out on whether Mrs Martins had bad luck or bad judgement when it came to men.
The rain gets heavier, creating a thousand tiny ripples on the surface of the water. The caretaker is backing away, keeping his eyes on the water. Slowly the elements seem to disappear; so do the voices, and the vibrations. All that is left are the three corpses floating ahead of me, each one a victim of something — a victim of age, foul play, bad luck or maybe a victim of a cemetery’s lack of real estate.