by Amy Stuart
“Charlotte,” she says, calmer. “Listen. This was a terrible way to meet. But I think you and I probably want the same thing.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“I’ve read about you. I know your life hasn’t been easy. You have a daughter. But five years ago your father was murdered and everything went to shit. Then your mother dies, of what? Heart failure? And your sister vanishes three years after that. I believe you lost custody of your daughter. So now you’re alone.”
Clare pauses. Charlotte’s hands open and close into tight fists. She cracks a knuckle, breathing hard through her nose.
“Malcolm isn’t my boyfriend,” Clare continues. “I came here to find him. To figure out what happened. And when you try to tell someone’s story, you should start as close to the beginning as you can get, right? The first sign of trouble is a good place to begin? In this case, the first signs point to your family. My guess is that you were collateral damage in all this. That you paid for other people’s sins. Your dad’s maybe? Even your sister’s.”
“You know nothing about me. Or my family.”
Clare clicks open the gun and allows the bullets to pour onto the floor. She picks them up in a fist and jams them in her pocket, then slides the gun across to Charlotte. It’s a risk, but the way Charlotte had held the gun, the safety still on, Clare can assume she doesn’t have any spare bullets. Charlotte leans forward and snatches the weapon from the floor.
“Collateral damage,” Clare says again.
“That’s what my lawyer said to me,” Charlotte says, her voice low. “Four years ago. Collateral damage. My ex-husband got sole custody of my daughter and moved her across the country. I have zero visitation rights. Nothing. Everything I owned… my house, my car, was repossessed, because my father co-owned it all. This house is technically still a family asset, but it’s frozen. Because where the fuck are the owners? Jesus. You have no idea what’s happened here, Clare. I warn you, run while you can. There hasn’t just been damage to me, to my family. It’s been complete and total obliteration.”
“So what do you want, then?” Clare asks. “Why are you here in this house?”
“Let me tell you something.” Charlotte studies the card again. “Clare? Is that your real name? My brother-in-law Malcolm? He’s not the good guy in this story. If you dig a little, you’ll see what I mean. I’d warn against it, but who am I to stop you? And if you think you’re going to find him, to save him or whatever, you’re in for a big surprise. There will be no happy ending.”
It takes effort to hold Charlotte’s steady gaze.
“What about your sister?” Clare asks. “You say she’s dead. Do you really believe that?”
“You want a place to start?” Charlotte says. “Talk to the cops around here. There’s been about eight of them assigned to the case since my dad died. And nothing’s come up. Nothing. The newest detective? His name is Patrick Germain. I’m pretty sure he made detective barely a year ago. The so-called journalist who works the case knows more than the cops do. It’s all too fishy, you know?”
“I know.”
“Yeah. So you do whatever you want. It’s a fucking quagmire, Clare. Go find Germain if you want. Get yourself caught up in this mess. But leave me alone. I don’t want any part of it.”
When Charlotte hoists herself to standing, Clare does the same. Charlotte gestures for Clare to leave the room first. They descend the stairs together, the hallway lit. When they reach the front door, Clare turns to speak, but Charlotte waves her off, shaking her head no. Outside, once she’s alone again, Clare’s heart begins to race. Don’t risk your life, Somers said. And yet in only her first stop Clare found herself at gunpoint. An omen, she knows, that this place is not safe.
The bathroom mirror is fogged. Clare clears a streak across it with her palm and scrunches her hair to draw the water from her curls. She leans in to examine herself. She looks almost healthy, a peach tone to her cheeks, the circles under her eyes faded from dark purple to something gentler. Clare points her index finger and presses it into the scar at the exact angle the bullet entered her shoulder about six weeks ago. It is still tender, the damaged nerves sending a tingling shot down her arm. With her thumb and finger Clare marks the distance from the wound to the top of her breast, her heart. Two inches, maybe three.
Her first case ended with Clare taking a bullet to the shoulder. The wound is now settling into being only a nuisance, an unsightly scar. The pain still comes and goes, though Clare has stopped taking medication for it. It is better to endure the ache than to risk the urge those pills bring her.
Chance is a funny thing. Fate.
Had Clare turned just slightly to the left as the bullet came at her, it would have hit her heart and not her shoulder. You’re here and then you’re not, Clare’s mother used to say from her hospital bed, inuring herself against her own impending death. It often comes down to chance.
This hotel room is soothing in its blandness. The carpet, the faded comforter, the landscape paintings on the wall. The cheapest place to stay near the center of Lune Bay, a relic from before the Westman money flowed into town. The walls of her room are thin enough that Clare can discern the dialogue from the sitcom playing in the next. In less than an hour, Clare has managed to overtake the entire space, her belongings scattered, the desk covered with papers and photographs, the details of Malcolm’s file. Her cell phone rings at full volume. Clare yelps, startled. She collects it from the dresser and swipes the screen to take the call.
“Somers,” she says, breathless. “Hi.”
“That’s Detective Somers to you.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You all right?” Somers asks.
“I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Somers says, unconvinced.
In the silence Clare tries to evoke an image of Somers, her exact looks. Her braided hair pulled half up, glasses only when she needs to read. Clare lies on the bed.
“I went to Malcolm and Zoe’s house as soon as I got here. Seemed like a logical first stop.”
“Don’t tell me you—”
“The back door was open.”
“Jesus, Clare. I told you, nothing risky. Don’t be stupid.”
“Yeah. Well, Zoe’s sister, Charlotte Westman, showed up with a gun.”
“Oh Christ,” Somers says. “I’m about to pull you off this case.”
“No, no. I was able to talk her down.” Clare will withhold the details, the gun held at point-blank range, the wrestling match it took for Clare to retrieve it. “She’s very angry. You remember her from the file? She lost custody of her daughter. Drug problems, I think. She was with her dad when he was murdered. Seems to me like she’s lost everything since then.”
Through the receiver Clare can hear Somers flipping papers. Writing things down. She feels a surge of something she cannot decipher, a sense of authority. She feels useful, in control.
“She mentioned the cops on the case,” Clare continues. “There’s been a string of them. I mean on her father’s murder case, which seems to have been merged with Zoe’s disappearance, even though they happened almost three years apart. I get the murder happened five years ago, but Zoe’s only been missing eighteen months. Feels weird that they’re lumped together.”
“They’re lumped because they’re connected,” Somers offers.
“Right. But there doesn’t seem to be much focus on either anymore. Apparently, the current detective is a rookie.”
“That’s not good,” Somers says. “There are two reasons cops stop working on a case. One, it’s truly gone cold. No eyewitnesses, no hard evidence, no DNA, no weapon. You nudge those cases to the back of your desk and hope someone walks in one day and confesses.”
“And the other kind?” Clare asks.
“The other cases get nudged to the back of your desk for you. You’re given no choice in the matter. You understand?”
“Right.” Clare sits up and twists a finger through her damp hair. “The detective’s n
ame is Patrick Germain. I looked him up after I checked in to the hotel. From what I can see he was a beat cop this time last year. My plan is to give him a call.”
“I don’t recognize the name,” Somers says. “I’ll do some recon.”
“There’s one reporter who keeps writing about the Westmans. A rogue freelancer. A guy named Austin Lantz. I emailed him—”
“Listen,” Somers interrupts. “I know you’re in the thick of it down there, and I appreciate what you’re doing. But I wanted to give you a heads-up.”
Something in Somers’s tone tightens a vise around Clare’s chest. “A heads-up about what?”
“I’ve been getting calls at my desk.”
“What kind of calls?”
“Hang-ups, mostly. A couple of times a woman said hello and then hung up. I’m pretty sure it’s been the same woman every time.”
“So? What does that have to do with me?” Clare asks. “Can’t you trace it?”
“The calls come from a blocked number, but after the third or fourth time I asked a guy in tech to set up a tracer on my phone. Over the years I’ve had a fair number of threats against me. Some donkey I put behind bars gets out and thinks it’s a good idea to make a few crank calls, scare me. But sometimes the calls feel… different.”
“And?” Clare prompts her. “Why are you telling me this?”
“My tech guy was able to triangulate a general area. These calls were coming from east of here. A long way east of here. Cell towers within a small radius of each other. One was even from a pay phone.”
“Where?” Clare asks, though she suspects the answer.
“Your hometown.”
Clare blinks fast. She tries to picture the stretch of her hometown’s main strip where the pay phone still stood, the very one she’d use to call her mother to come pick her up after spending a Friday night wandering up and down the block with her teenaged friends. She can summon its exact location next to the hardware store, the feel of the heavy receiver in her hands, the winter nights when she’d turn her back to the wind and press a gloved finger to her ear so she could hear her mother on the other end.
“Are you sure it was a woman?” Clare asks.
“Unless it’s a man pitching his voice.” Somers pauses. “No. It was a woman. The hellos were weird, taunting or something. Drawling it out. Sarcastic. But every time I tried to engage, I’d hear the click before I could say anything beyond hello.”
“And she never said anything else?”
“Once,” Somers says. “She said hello and then she paused. I spoke into the silence, asking the obvious questions. Who are you, why are you calling, yada yada. I wanted to keep the line open as long as possible so my guy could calibrate the location. She said hello again, but this time she added my name. ‘Hello, Somers.’ Upbeat, like we were old friends.”
Now Clare’s mind spins. A woman. If it were a man, the answer would be obvious: Jason. There’s Grace, her childhood friend, who might have traced or followed Clare here after running into her, who might have been indoctrinated even more by Jason, since Clare saw her over a week ago. But Grace wouldn’t stoop to such a tactic. Would she?
“Any chance it might be related to you?” Somers asks. “You have any reason to believe it could be?”
Clare doesn’t answer.
“Listen.” Somers releases a long sigh. “Maybe your husband’s got himself another woman. One who’s willing to do his dirty work. They figured out our connection somehow and now they want to toy with you a bit. In my years as a cop I’ve met my fair share of women willing to play their man’s game. I’ve even met a few who take over and win it.”
“It’s possible,” Clare says, her voice a croak. “Maybe.”
“I’ll confess something to you,” Somers says. “I made a call to the detachment over there. One of the guys here has a cousin who’s married to a cop out your way. It’s always six degrees with cops, you know? Anyway, I asked him to do a head count. Make sure your husband was still in town, minding his own business.”
Minding his business. Clare can so easily recall the simplicity of Jason’s life, his truck and his short commute to the factory, the tediousness of his day on the assembly line ramping him up by the time he arrived home to her, sometimes by way of the bar. And then Jason would pace the kitchen as Clare kept a safe distance, another drink in his hand, spewing the same diatribe about life owing him more, about the world’s failure to recognize how capable he was of bigger things. That he’d find bigger things if they didn’t find him.
“And?” Clare asks.
“He’s there. Jason. Your husband.”
“Ex-husband.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Anyway, he’s there. My guy got some pictures of him coming and going. I didn’t ask for much beyond that. Just a visual. Guy sent me a few pictures as proof.”
Clare breathes heavily into the receiver, her cell phone warm on her ear. Her throat aches with the effort not to cry.
“Hey,” Somers says, ever calm. “Let’s not get ourselves twisted into knots. I’ve been going through my old cases. Checking on my lady friends, which ones have been released recently, who might have had ties to that region. That’s the most likely scenario for these stupid crank calls. I’ve put more than one woman behind bars in my day. The more likely answer is that it has nothing to do with you at all. I just thought I’d ask.”
“Yeah,” Clare says.
In the ensuing pause Clare feels a stab of sadness. She wishes Somers was here with her, that they were actually working this case together, in person. She wants to believe she can trust Somers over everyone else, but even that feels like an impossible feat.
“I’ve got to get going,” Somers says. “No catastrophizing, okay? Just keep working the case. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open. No one’s coming for you that we know of. Not yet. Let’s not panic.”
With a quick goodbye Clare hangs up and splays backwards onto the bed. She refreshes her email, a response popping up from the reporter she contacted.
I’ll be at The Cabin Bar tonight until late, 14th and Burns Rd
Austin Lantz. Clare opens her browser and looks up his name. Hundreds of results pop up, long- and short-form articles on the Westmans, on Zoe and Charlotte. Clare recognizes some of the articles from the file she and Somers curated.
The clock on her phone reads 9:43 p.m. Clare forces herself to stand up, get dressed. She will keep working. Push through the fatigue. At the bathroom mirror, she leans in and stares closely at her reflection. It feels like looking at a stranger, her face creased with worry.
No one’s coming for you that we know of. Not yet.
But there’d been a lilt in her voice as Somers said it, as if it were taking some effort to make the words ring true.
This bar is cozy and dimly lit, empty even for a Tuesday night. A neon sign over the bartender’s head reads WELCOME TO THE CABIN. She spots him seated at the bar just as his email said he would be. Austin Lantz looks different in real life from his pictures online: lanky, younger than Clare, a flannel shirt far too warm for the stuffy air of this bar. She studies him from the door until he checks his watch and twists, anticipating her arrival. Austin smiles and lifts the beer he holds in a cheers, gesturing at Clare to join him.
Clare strides his way. This job requires a confidence, an extroversion deeply unnatural to her. She places a card in front of him without a hello. He offers her a card in return—AUSTIN LANTZ, FREELANCE JOURNALIST—and extends his hand. His handshake is flimsy.
“Have a seat, Clare,” he says.
She sets her backpack in the footwell of the stool and sits. The bartender wanders over.
“You here to drink? Or is this Austin’s office for tonight?”
“I’ll have a drink,” Clare says. “And maybe a menu?”
“Sure,” the bartender says. “Let’s start with a drink.”
“I’ll take a whiskey,” she says. “Neat.”
Clare will not overthink this. She never had troub
les with alcohol the way she did with other vices. She never loved the burn down her throat or the loss of inhibition, the time and effort it took to get drunk versus the ease of the pills or tabs that dissolved discreetly on her tongue. Jason was the drinker between them, and watching him descend to the mean, sputtering, slurring version of himself was enough for Clare to keep her distance from their liquor cabinet. But here, miles and months away, as she watches the bartender select a bottle from the row and pour a shot into a tumbler for her, Clare feels oddly elated. It’s just one drink. Once the tumbler is in front of her, she lifts it to clink Austin’s beer bottle.
“Thank you for meeting me,” she says.
“I love that there’s a PI on the case now.”
“You’ve been tracking this story for a long time,” Clare says.
“I wrote my first article on it in journalism school. Covered Jack Westman’s murder. So yeah. I’ve been at it for five years.” He swivels his stool to face outward. “This building was a Westman property. Most of Lune Bay was at some point or another. Zoe Westman ran this bar for a while after she moved back to town. Did you know that? She had her engagement party here.”
“To celebrate her engagement to Malcolm Hayes,” Clare says. “I’ve seen photographs of that party.”
“That was a big social event in Lune Bay. The Westmans were local royalty back then.”
Clare found the photos of the engagement party online, Malcolm so young and handsome, his dress shirt unbuttoned low on his chest, his hair longer and wavy. What surprised her most was the way his chin lifted to the camera, a drink in one hand, daring the picture to be taken. It seemed impossible that the young man in that photograph was the same stiff and inscrutable man she’d meet eight years later. Clare recognized other people too; Zoe of course, Charlotte, the Westman parents. All these characters in Malcolm’s origin story.
“Why don’t we exchange what we know?” Austin suggests, facing Clare again.
“I’ve already read most of what you’ve written,” Clare says. “I think I know what you know.”
