Читать книгу An Unquiet Grave - P.J. Parrish - Страница 9

CHAPTER 3

Louis hadn’t been back to Plymouth in more than six years. After he graduated from University of Michigan in 1981, he had stayed in Ann Arbor to work on the police force there. He felt comfortable in the college town, comfortable in its rich stew of races, religions, and ways of thinking. Every time he had gone back to visit Phillip and Frances during the past few years, it had been while they were up North on vacation, sort of neutral territory. Never here, in Plymouth.

“So how’s the old hometown look to you?”

Louis glanced over at Phillip, who was driving. “About the same,” he answered.

Louis’s eyes drifted back out the cold-fogged window. The Lawrences lived out on the edge of town, and Phillip had to drive through the small downtown to get to the freeway. Louis’s eyes lingered on the square with its white band shell fully exposed by the bare trees. He could see the old columned bank and the marquee of the Penn Theater: FIELD OF DREAMS. And there, on the corner, the old hotel.

“They’ve remodeled the Mayflower,” Louis said absently.

“Yeah. But they kept that old wallpaper in the dining room.”

Louis had a sudden memory of a sixth grade field trip. It was a slate-gray November day, just like today, and he remembered feeling alone and small as the bus let him and the other kids off in front of the Mayflower Hotel for their lunch.

He knew now that the Mayflower wasn’t a fancy place. But it seemed like it then, with its dark green carpeting and shining wood desk and the sour-looking woman in a black uniform who handed them menus in the restaurant. The menu was huge in his hands and he didn’t know anything. What to order. What to do with the heavy white cloth napkin. Where to go if he had to pee.

The teacher was standing up and talking about the Pilgrims, pointing to the wallpaper with its pictures of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. She was saying that they should all be thankful for the sacrifices of their forefathers who came here in ships to make their lives here possible. He had sat there listening to her, thinking, well, they sure the heck weren’t my forefathers.

“The town is changing,” Phillip said.

Louis heard something in Phillip’s voice and turned.

“All these young folks moving out here, looking for some lost idea of a perfect small town,” Phillip said, his eyes steady on the road.

“Plymouth isn’t perfect,” Louis said carefully.

“They closed Cloverdale’s, you know. Some chain came in on Main Street.”

Phillip was shaking his head in disgust. But Louis was remembering soft Sunday evenings, walking to the old ice cream parlor, he and Phillip getting double-dip cones of lush black cherry ice cream and ignoring the stares of all the white faces.

Louis rubbed a sleeve over the fogged window. They were passing the high school now. The press of memories kept coming. Four years of being the only black kid in an all-white school. No one was mean, no one called him names. He was accepted, but almost like some weird mascot. Shared jokes in the john and always a seat in the cafeteria. But never an invitation to the parties at the white kids’ homes.

Phillip was looking at the high school as they waited for the light to change.

“You still run?” he asked.

“Not as much as I should,” Louis said. He was still back in high school, trying to bring a face into focus, the face of some asshole PE coach who told him he should go out for basketball. The man didn’t care that Louis hated basketball, just kept pushing him until Louis started cutting PE. Finally, Phillip had a talk with the coach and then with Louis. Eventually, Louis went out for track just to please Phillip. But to his surprise, he liked cross-country. He liked the rush of the cool air on his face and the sound of his pulse in his ears. He liked the brain-cleansing feel of running. He liked the aloneness of it.

“Frances found your letter sweater the other day in a box in the basement,” Phillip said. “She sent it to the cleaners so it would be ready when you came home.”

“I don’t want that old thing.”

“Take it anyway,” Phillip said. “Okay?”

The light turned green and they drove on in silence. Phillip reached down and jabbed the lighter, and with a gesture born of decades shook a cigarette from its pack and lit it with one hand, his eyes never leaving the road. He cracked his window and blew the stream out.

“What did you tell Frances about today?” Louis said.

“Just that you wanted to go for a drive.”

“Phillip, I need to know something. How much exactly does she know about this? Does she even know you visited this cemetery?”

Phillip nodded. “She thinks it’s an old army buddy.”

“That’s what you told her?”

Phillip nodded again. “I could never bring myself to tell her the truth.”

Louis let that go. The landscape changed as U.S. 12 stretched into the Michigan countryside. Flat, and tufted with yellow grass, the air swirling with crumbling rust-colored leaves.

“Where are we going?” Louis asked.

“The Irish Hills.”

Louis was trying to remember if Phillip had ever taken him to the Irish Hills. But he didn’t need to think long. Phillip answered for him.

“I never brought you out there,” he said. “I thought about it, but it would have meant taking Frances, too, and I just couldn’t do that.”

Louis formed the question, and then wasn’t sure he wanted to ask it. But he knew he needed to. “The Irish Hills was your place with her?” he asked.

Phillip glanced at him, then turned his gaze back to the road. “Only for one weekend.”

Phillip didn’t say anything else and Louis held the rest of his questions. This wasn’t some passing fling. It was something that had survived Phillip’s thirty-one-year marriage to Frances. Longer than Louis had been alive.

A first love.

It wasn’t something he knew much about. It sure as hell hadn’t happened for him in high school. In the midseventies, many parts of the country were beginning to tolerate interracial relationships, but he never had the sense Plymouth was one of them. He had never gone to a dance or any other school function with a white girl on his arm. His first real girlfriend had been in college, but even she didn’t come with those tender memories that should accompany a first love. Right now he couldn’t even remember her last name.

He settled back in the seat, watching the empty land, feeling the cold swirl of air from Phillip’s cracked window against the back of his neck.

There was no sign for the cemetery. Only a listing black iron gate stuck deep into the mud, as if it had been left open for quite some time. Two towering pines stood guard on each side of the entrance and the land beyond it was a flat expanse of brown grass bordered by thickets and trees. As they walked up to the gate, Louis could see a silent backhoe sitting at the far end next to a heap of black dirt. Near it was a gangly yellow hoist, used to lift the concrete vaults from the graves. Three muddy vaults sat off in the far corner of the cemetery.

Only the cawing of crows broke the still cold air. Louis looked up and spotted two of the birds staring down at them from the two sentry pines.

Phillip walked on ahead and Louis followed, scanning the ground. The grass wasn’t very high, only five or six inches, but Louis didn’t see any headstones or monuments. A yard or two into the cemetery, he spied a plot of freshly disturbed ground where he guessed someone had been dug up and the hole refilled. Then there was another, and a third, before Phillip finally stopped.

At his feet was an open grave, the bottom puddled with dark water. Phillip knelt at the head of the grave and pushed aside the dead grass. Louis stepped closer.

A small stone square was pressed into the ground, no larger than six inches by eight inches. Louis squatted to look at the stone. It was well worn, but someone, probably Phillip, had scraped away the moss and mud, and the engraving was easy to read.

No name. Just a number—1304.

“What kind of cemetery is this?” Louis asked, looking up at Phillip.

Phillip rose slowly, his eyes drifting back to the road they had driven in on, and beyond, to a cluster of taller trees. “There’s a hospital over there. This is where they buried their unclaimed dead.”

Louis looked off in the same direction as Phillip, but he saw nothing. “What kind of hospital?” he asked.

“A sanitarium.”

“An insane asylum?”

“Yes.”

“Your friend died there?”

“Yes. At least that’s what I was told.”

Louis looked back at the stone marker embedded in the grass. “And all these people got were numbers on their graves?”

“I suppose it started out as some kind of privacy thing, maybe to keep the curiosity seekers from coming in and vandalizing the graves,” Phillip said. “There were a couple of well-known criminals who were sent here back in the fifties and sixties.”

Louis looked off at the far trees. Something was coming back to him. He stood up, facing Phillip. “This is Hidden Lake, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Phillip said. “You know about it?”

Louis hesitated. He knew. He had heard about Hidden Lake many times, mostly in hushed conversations with other kids. Talk of crazy people screaming behind iron bars, stories of secret operations, torture, and brain removals. No one he knew had ever seen Hidden Lake, but every kid knew what it was like. Hidden Lake was hell, Halloween, and a chamber of horrors all rolled into one. It was where all the really crazy people were kept, where your mother would threaten to send you if you were bad. It was where all the insane killers were locked away.

A memory came to him suddenly. A serial killer from the late sixties, a man who prowled lovers’ lanes, chopping off heads and eating the eyeballs of teenagers. The killer had been sent here, hadn’t he? Or was that just another story whispered in tents at a summer camp, a story spawned of some boy’s fevered imagination?

He knew now that none of it was true. He knew, too, that mental illness was something to be treated, not feared. Still, as he tried to imagine Phillip’s friend in a place like Hidden Lake, he couldn’t shake the images that were suddenly crawling out of the locked box of his own childhood nightmares.

He walked a few feet away and saw another stone marker almost hidden in the grass. “You mentioned that maybe some numbers got mixed up. Were you able to check that?”

Phillip shook his head. “No one will talk to me. The company in charge of transferring the bodies claims it’s not their problem. And the hospital is being dismantled and there’s only a few people left to clean things up. The records are either lost or just gone.”

“What about the local police? Have you tried them?”

Phillip nodded. “They said if the hospital doesn’t feel the need to report this, then it’s not really their business. I get the feeling that all anyone wants to do is level the hospital and forget it ever existed.”

Louis pulled a small camera from his coat pocket and came back to the open grave. He took a picture of the stone marker, then moved to the nearby marker, brushed aside the grass, and took a photo of that one, too. He did the same with all four surrounding graves, hoping that having the numbers might help verify any errors.

He looked back to Phillip, who had knelt down by the open grave. He was pulling the dead weeds and grass away from the stone marker.

“What was her name?” Louis asked.

Phillip rose slowly and brushed the dirt from his hands. “Claudia. Claudia DeFoe,” he said. He walked slowly away, his hands in his pockets.

There was a sign on the backhoe: SPERA & SONS EXCAVATIONS. Louis wrote it in his notepad. He looked over toward Phillip, who was standing at the cemetery entrance under the huge pine tree, lighting a cigarette. Phillip was wearing a gray overcoat, which seemed to accentuate his height and thinness, and his chopped gray hair was the same color as the sky. For a moment, he seemed to disappear before Louis’s eyes.

Louis went over to him. “I think you need to show me this hospital,” he said.