He hangs up.
I hand the phone back to the nurse, extending my arm without really seeing her. The desk, the paintings, the window into the office behind her — they all seem to lose detail and disappear.
‘Theo?’
I know Carol is speaking to me, but I don’t look at her. The phone has gone from my hand but I’m still holding out my arm ramrod straight.
‘Theo?’
She touches my shoulder, and the contact seems to work.
I look at her and she starts to say something, but I don’t wait to hear what it is. I cover the foyer with large strides and the heavy door weighs nothing as I pull it open.
When I reach the cemetery I have this hollow feeling in my stomach, similar to the one that was there the day my daughter died. It’s a feeling that grows worse when I bring the car to a stop. I run towards Emily’s grave, though the pile of dirt next to it already tells me what I’m going to find. All these cops out here and nobody stopped Alderman from desecrating her grave.
But why would they? They were never there to protect her from dying. Just as I wasn’t there. And in this case it simply would have looked from a distance as if Alderman was doing his job.
Just digging a hole. Just moving on with life after losing his son — if they even saw him at all. And looking towards the lake, I can already tell they couldn’t. There was no way.
I stand at the edge of the grave. I know now there were two reasons Alderman threatened my wife. The first was to scare me.
The second was to send me away from the cemetery. That means he was watching me all along. He was waiting.
My little girl’s coffin is down there. The lid is open and Emily is gone.
chapter eighteen
All the oxygen is sucked out of me. I stare down at the coffin with the silk linings and soft pillow, and the world outside of the grave fades away and goes black. There are crumbs of dirt where my
daughter should have been. The brass handles have pitted, the
glossy sheen of the wood long since gone. There are cracks and dents in the wood. My first reaction is to climb down and make sure with my hands as well as my eyes that Emily isn’t in there.
My second reaction is to scream. Instead I fall back to the third reaction, the one I had two years ago when I got the call about the accident. I drop to my knees and start to weep and try to
convince myself this isn’t really happening.
It should be simple to know which is worse — my wife
missing or my daughter — but suddenly I don’t know. Suddenly
they both seem as bad as each other. I guess the worse of the two is the one that is happening. I’ve dealt with a lot over the years, but never somebody’s dead child being stolen from a graveyard.
Kidnapped. I don’t even know if that’s the term for it.
I have no real idea what to do. No real direction to take. A
dead child is every parent’s worst nightmare. What is it when all the nightmares come true?
I have lost Emily. Again.
Two years ago it had been on a Tuesday. Tuesdays are a nothing day. People don’t make great plans for a Tuesday. They don’t get married. Don’t leave for holiday. They don’t organise house
warmings. But the fact is one in seven people dies on a Tuesday.
One in seven is born. What better day to lose your family? Is
there a worse day? That Tuesday should have been like the others.
I kissed my daughter and my wife on the way out the door, and
the next time I saw them Emily was lying on a metal slab with a sheet tucked up to her neck so I could see her face. Bridget was in a world between life and death, hooked up to machinery and
surrounded by doctors.
Hours earlier they had gone out to see a movie. It was two
o’clock in the afternoon, and Disney was entertaining my daughter on the big screen with animals that could talk and evade capture and do taxes and everything else clever animals can do. It was school holidays. My wife was a teacher, so it was holidays for her too. At quarter to four the movie ended and my wife walked my
daughter outside along with dozens of other parents and children.
They walked around the shopping complex footpath towards her
car. It was ten to four, and already Quentin James was drunk. It was ten to four in the middle of the afternoon, and Quentin James was behind the wheel of his dark blue SUV that he had paid a
four-hundred-dollar fine to get back that morning. He had no
driver’s licence but that didn’t stop him paying the fine; it didn’t stop the courts from handing over the keys. I can only imagine how it happened — bits of imagery I added together with details from eye witnesses. The SUV swerving through the car park. The SUV jumping the curb onto the footpath. My wife and daughter