by Amy Stuart
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you told me yesterday morning. Zoe Westman’s rogue husband hiring you to work as a PI. That’s some story, especially in light of last night’s events.”
Clare says nothing.
“You know,” Germain continues, “I feel like I’ve gained a decent sense of this Malcolm guy since I took over the case. Orphaned when he was fifteen with tons of money left behind, boarding school, college, a PhD, world travel. Must be nice, right? Then he bought himself some rambling oceanfront house in a rich suburb. Ripped it down and had this masterpiece glass box built. Do you know how much the houses up there cost?”
The angled sunlight through Germain’s office window is blinding. Clare’s eyes ache. Germain opens the folder and spins a large photograph so Clare can see it. It depicts Malcolm and Zoe’s wedding, the two of them flanked by the Westmans, the ocean behind them. Clare swallows. Why does this photograph stir anything in her?
“The guy never smiles,” Germain says, tapping at the photograph. “This is his wedding day. I mean, come on. You can’t smile for your bride?”
Donovan said the exact same thing of Malcolm yesterday. He never smiled.
“Some people don’t smile in pictures.”
Germain eyes her. “Yeah? Anyone I interviewed, every old interview from the case that I’ve read, has Malcolm Hayes pinned as this quiet guy with a dark side. The kind of guy who can’t break a smile at his own wedding. Like, a don’t-fuck-with-me kind of dark side. A perfect fit for the Westman family business.”
“Yeah,” Clare says. “Feels like a lot of bad shit went down with the Westmans. The cold-blooded murder of the patriarch, a couple of women vanishing, including one of the Westman daughters. And yet only one guy’s in jail. Donovan Hughes. And for what? Tax fraud? That feels a little thin. Like maybe some people haven’t been doing their jobs.”
Germain doesn’t flinch. “I’m doing my job, Clare. Trust me.”
The back of Clare’s neck is coated in a cool sweat. She looks down to her phone again.
“Are you hungry?” Germain asks. “We could have breakfast once Detective Somers arrives.”
“I’d rather not,” Clare says. “I’d rather wait for Somers in the lobby. If I’m free to go.”
Germain masks any disappointment in her response with a smile. He stands when Clare does. Clare’s phone is warm in her hands. Without another word she ducks out of his office and winds her way back to the elevator.
In the atrium, Clare finds a row of chairs close to the entrance. She sits and sends Somers a text:
I’m out. Waiting for you by the main door.
Clare grips her phone in both hands and looks down to the screen. There’s a metallic taste in her mouth, her teeth coated with film. She unscrews the cap to the bottled water Germain gave her in his office and drains it in a few long gulps.
Open the email, she tells herself. Open Malcolm’s email. But she doesn’t.
The atrium is busy with the comings and goings of a shift change, fresh-faced officers arriving just as the haggard overnight crew leaves. A group of uniformed cops stands in a close huddle adjacent to where Clare sits, laughing at a video playing on one of their phones. What if it is the video of her in the bar? The thought fills Clare with dread. This is a regular Thursday morning to them, the air cooler than it was yesterday as September tends to bring, the weekend arriving soon. Clare feels a stab of loneliness. But for whom? For what? Friendship? Camaraderie? She’s known so little of that in her life beyond her childhood friend Grace and, perhaps more recently, Somers. Is she lonely for a life she never had? For all the things she believed she’d experience in her life—a happy marriage, a decent job, a family—and then hasn’t? Clare’s phone pings again. Somers writes:
Twenty mins
Clare’s legs tingle. She is still wearing the black shirt she put on last night. Her jeans feel pasted to her legs. A young boy sits with his mother on a nearby bench. He makes eye contact with Clare as he runs a toy car along the seat. When she smiles at him, he stares back for an unnatural stretch, the toy unmoving in his hand. His mother’s face is streaked with dry tears, her gaze trained on the double doors at the far end of the atrium. She is waiting for someone to be released. Clare closes her eyes.
From the beginning this case has felt fundamentally different from the first two Clare worked on; she is more assured in her choices, less anxious. But the anger isn’t subsiding. In fact, it comes in taller waves now, mixed with sadness and frustration. In the jail cell, Clare had moments of feeling bowled over by it. She thinks of Kavita and Charlotte in the bathroom last night, how mad she’d been at them for snorting lines, for caving to an urge Clare has herself worked so hard to resist. It unsettled her how badly she’d wanted to join them, how little, when faced with it, her own urges have dulled with time.
A laugh from the group of officers startles Clare. She swipes her phone to life. The subject of Malcolm’s email is strangely plain: Pls read. She clicks it open, then closes it again. Why can’t she bring herself to read it? Why does she feel like she wants to cry? You’re just tired, she tells herself. Clare can recall a conversation with Malcolm in their time in between their first two cases, as Clare was healing from the gunshot wound. They’d stood on the beach with their feet in the ocean on the first day Clare had felt able to rise from her bed and leave her motel room.
How do you feel? Malcolm asked her.
Okay, she’d replied. Good. Different. Better.
It struck her at the time, that combination of words, that to feel okay, to feel good, was to feel different to her. That the facts of Clare’s life up until then meant that her baseline was unhappiness, fearfulness, dependence. She’d glanced at Malcolm, expecting him to concur, but found him frowning.
Don’t rest on your laurels, he said.
And though his words had bothered Clare, angered her even, she knew exactly what he meant. It was a warning to heed. Because no matter how confident and well-equipped Clare has felt on this case, she knows she must stay vigilant. That her reckless and angry side will always float just below the surface.
Clare checks the time on her phone. Ten minutes until Somers said she’d be here.
Finally she opens the email.
Clare,
I can’t stop you. I understand that much now. All I can do is tell you the truth and hope that it encourages you to stand off. Zoe Westman is a dangerous person. She is not missing, or dead. She left on her own volition but allowed it to appear like she’d vanished so that the police would zero in on me. She wants revenge for reasons I will not get into here.
I wish I’d given you more reason to trust me in the time we worked together. I can understand why you don’t. But I hope you will at least hear me out. I believe that Zoe knows about you. I believe she knows about our working relationship and that it has set her off. I cannot express to you enough the risk this brings to both of us. I only care about the risk it brings to you.
Clare, I have the means to help you move on. I can wire you money and connect you to people who will help you build a false identity. You can start over entirely. It is what I should have offered you the first time we met. I will regret it always that I didn’t. While it pains me to think of never seeing you again, it pains me even more to think of harm coming your way.
This email address is encrypted. It is safe to reach me here. I hope you will. Please do the sensible thing, Clare. For both of us.
M
Clare reads the message three times, then drops her phone into her lap and works to control her breathing. Hot tears spring to her eyes. She looks upward to the atrium’s glass ceiling, the vivid early morning sky. The boy with his mother watches her intently now, his brow worried, as if he can anticipate Clare’s breakdown. Is Clare tempted to take Malcolm up on his offer? No. The thought of it crushes her with loneliness. What, Clare wonders, a finger to her eye to wipe at the tears, is this yearning she feels? The concern Malcolm shows, however misguided, leaves
her bereft. She could not foresee this sorrow, her own pain at the thought of never seeing Malcolm again. There is a hard ache in her chest. Clare opens the email browser and types quickly:
No, Malcolm. You don’t get to do this. I’m really mad at you. Where are you?
The moment she hits send, Clare regrets it. An emotional response, a childish one. Too intimate. She could have taken the time to think logically, to weigh Malcolm’s words against the information she’s gathered in her time here. Instead, she wrote from her gut. In under a minute, her phone pings with his response.
I know you are. I’m not far.
That’s all. Seven words, no sign-off. And yet this response speaks volumes, at once as an apology and a comfort. Clare goes to clear her throat but coughs instead. She wants to weep, from confusion and exhaustion, but when she looks up and sees Somers pressing through the revolving door, she holds her breath to contain it. Somers looks different to her. Sharper somehow, less soft. Clare does not stand. You see a person’s true soul when they don’t know you’re watching them, Clare’s mother used to say. Somers scans the room, her face pursed in a way Clare has never seen before. She will not wave at Somers. She will sit here and wait until she is noticed.
Malcolm sits on the edge of her bed.
Does it hurt? He’s pointing to her shoulder. Clare looks down to it. The bullet wound is bleeding, soaking through her shirt. That must hurt, Malcolm is saying.
Does it? Clare feels numb. She gathers the sheet from the bed to form a ball and presses it against her shoulder. The wound screams with pain. The bleeding won’t stop. The sheet has soaked red. Clare feels dizzy, but she must ask. She has to ask him before he leaves again.
What did you do to your wife?
I killed her, Malcolm says. She’s dead.
Clare wakes with a jolt. She has kicked the sheets from her hotel bed. She sits up, sweaty, thirsty. The alarm clock reads 11:39. It was a dream. Malcolm is not here.
Four hours ago, Somers drove Clare back to the hotel from the detachment. Clare sat in stony silence in the passenger seat of Somers’s rental car, unable to parse what was making her uneasy. Clare left Somers at reception, where they’d agreed to go their separate ways until noon. Clare returned to her room, stripped to her underwear, and passed out at once.
The dreams, Clare thinks. They come to her like omens.
In the bathroom, Clare undresses and steps into the shower before the water is even warm. She uses a facecloth to scrub at her skin. She washes her hair, then steps out to towel off and move naked into the hotel room, rummaging through her duffel bag for something clean to wear. Clare has thought so little of her appearance these past months, her figure thinning and expanding according to the rhythm of her days. She dresses, finds her cell phone on the bed and sits to reread the chain of emails with Malcolm. Everything about her dream felt real, Malcolm sitting on the edge of her bed, the motel room dark. I killed her, he’d said with such calm in his voice, a twinge of a smile on his face. Clare hits reply and types,
If you’re close by, like you said you were, then I want to meet. I want the whole truth.
Clare throws her cell phone on the bed again and moves to the window. She looks for signs of the ocean through the buildings. Lune Bay feels less like a suburb and more like a village, as Donovan had called it. Clare’s phone pings. It’s a text message from Austin.
I have it on good word that you’ve been released. Can we talk today?
Clare rolls her eyes. Before she can type a response, someone knocks. Clare peeks through the spy hole and sees Somers. She unlatches and opens the door, stepping aside to allow Somers to enter. Somers carries two coffees and a paper bag, a satchel over her shoulder. She spins on a heel at the far side of the room to shoot Clare a deadly look.
“You get some sleep, gunslinger?”
“I slept a few hours,” Clare says. “I feel better.”
“Are you ready to explain yourself? Because I don’t like waking up to voice mails from jail. I don’t like having to catch the earliest flight out.”
“Well,” Clare says, “I don’t like getting arrested.”
Somers hands Clare one of the coffees and a paper bag with a pastry inside. She flops into the corner armchair. Clare sits on the bed and rips a bite off the croissant.
“I had a friend up here send me a copy of your arrest report this morning,” Somers says.
“You have friends everywhere,” Clare says.
“I do,” Somers says. “You’d be smart to remember that. I most certainly do.”
Somers is smiling; she means it in jest, but her tone nonetheless irks Clare, the veiled threat of it.
“The woman’s name is Kavita Spence,” Clare says. “I was at the bar last night with her and Charlotte Westman. Jack’s daughter. They were mixing drugs and alcohol. Kavita was completely out of it. There was this meathead with his friends trying to take advantage of her. Apparently he was an off-duty cop.”
“He is a cop,” Somers says. “He was named in the report.”
“Whatever. He was going to hurt her. And he wouldn’t back off.”
“So you waved your gun around.”
“I overreacted.”
Somers sips her coffee. “That’s one way of putting it.”
Clare sighs. “I found them in the back alley behind the bar. And you know what? The guy called Kavita Kendall. Kendall Bentley is one of the women who disappeared from Lune Bay. Just like your girl Stacey Norton. Kendall’s father’s been searching for her for nearly two years. That’s quite the name slip for that cop to make, don’t you think?” Clare shakes her head. “I don’t know. It triggered me. And now my face is everywhere because of that video.”
“We can work on that,” Somers says. “Do a bit of scrubbing. Germain is already on it. Your name hasn’t been published.”
“You can’t scrub the internet. It’s only a matter of time until my name comes out too.”
“Will you please let me try to deal with it?” Somers asks. “Do you trust me?”
Clare is silent. She looks out the window, avoiding Somers’s stare.
“You really think I might be in on it?” Somers asks. “That I’m some kind of dirty cop?”
“You lied to me,” Clare says.
“I withheld,” Somers says. “There’s a big difference.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Clare says, her voice rising. “You had information that you didn’t give me. You didn’t tell me that you’d worked on a case related to Malcolm, to the Westmans. That’s not an omission, that’s a flat-out lie.”
“Listen,” Somers says, sitting up and setting her coffee on the hotel room desk. “I get that your instinct is to mistrust. To not believe anything anyone tells you. But in police work there’s this thing we call confirmation bias. If you believe someone is guilty or something is true, then you’ll look for clues that support your theory. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have met you, Clare. Because you truly are a set of fresh eyes.” Somers opens her satchel and lifts herself off the chair to hand Clare a file. “I didn’t want to tell you about Stacey because I felt it would bias you. You wouldn’t be objective. You couldn’t be.”
“Maybe you underestimate me,” Clare says.
“Quite the opposite. I believe in you so much that I didn’t want to spoil it with elements of my own failures.” Somers sighs. Her expression softens. She too appears tired. She would have risen in the dark of night to catch her flight. “It burns me to think that I’ve lost your trust. Because this connection between us? This link between an old case of mine and your guy Malcolm? It was a coincidence. I’ve worked over a thousand cases in my career. I could find links from Gandhi to Brad Pitt if I want to. I swear. I wanted your fresh eyes. And if I’m going to be honest, it appealed to me that you’re not bound by the same rules that I am.”
“What do you mean?” Clare asks.
“Cops have a very thick rule book we have to live by. I try to do things by that book. Some
times that puts me at a real disadvantage. A disadvantage that you don’t have.” She points to the file handed to Clare. “It’s all in there. Everything I’ve got on Stacey Norton.”
Clare opens the file. Clipped to the inside face is a large black-and-white photograph of a young woman. Stacey Norton. She smiles, carefree. She is young, pretty. A twenty-three-year-old aesthetician who moved to Lune Bay to take work in the spa at its most exclusive hotel.
“Kendall Bentley’s dad is worth a visit,” Clare says, closing the file. “His name is Douglas. Army vet. Like I said, he’s been looking for his daughter. He’s been pretty diligent. We could go see him.”
“I’d like that,” Somers says.
For a few minutes they say nothing, Clare making a show of flipping back and forth through the Norton file, sipping her coffee. The knot still sits in her stomach, threatening to rise through her and emerge as tears. She works to keep her face set to neutral, but she can sense from Somers’s gaze that she isn’t doing a very good job of it.
“You’ve got to be tired,” Somers says. “A crazy few days, barely any sleep.”
“Yeah,” Clare says quietly. “I’ll push through.”
“Hey,” Somers says. “You’ve got to learn to show yourself some compassion, you know that? You’ve been through the wringer.”
Clare drops her head. “Can we not do this right now—”
“My guess is you’ve only told me half the story,” Somers interjects. “If that. My guess is some part of you is still hoping for a happy ending with this Malcolm character, even when all signs point to that being wishful thinking. And I think some part of you is even protecting that ex-husband of yours. Glossing over the worst of it. Because you married him, right? So he had to have some redeeming qualities, right? You don’t want to make him out to be that bad, because what does that say about you?”
