by Amy Stuart
“Okay,” Danny says, his focus still on Clare. “There’s no one out on the range right now. I’m going say that only you should be handling the guns, Mr. Bentley. But I can give you an extra set of glasses and earmuffs. Just in case you need them. And I’ll be busy in here for the next fifteen minutes or so. I won’t be checking up on you. Got it?”
“Got it, Dan. We appreciate it.”
As Douglas signs the paperwork, Clare keeps her eyes squarely on Danny. She will counter the patter in her chest, the anxiety, by working to put him in his place. It used to be a game for her, this stare, the count to see just how long it would take before her target would start to squirm. Douglas passes the waiver form back and they follow Danny through the rear door. Outside, Clare and Douglas lift their hands in unison to form visors against the sharp sun. It is warmer here than by the ocean. The gun range consists of messy plywood booths and targets at a distance, pocked with bullet holes. Danny sets the guns and safety equipment down in the nearest booth.
“We can handle it from here,” Douglas says.
“I’m supposed to give my safety spiel,” Danny says.
“I appreciate that, Danny, but unless it’s changed from the last thirty times I’ve heard it, I think you can count on me being safe.”
Danny looks slighted. Once he’s gone back inside, Douglas hands Clare the smaller of the ear protection muffs and the safety glasses. The muffs give Clare the sensation that she is underwater, the tasks her hands now perform in front of her silenced. The glasses cast a yellow hue over everything. Douglas has set Clare up at one of the stations, the handgun resting on a block. He is saying something. Read. Clare retracts the muff from her ear.
“You ready?” Douglas asks.
“Yes,” Clare says.
“You need a hand?”
Clare shakes her head and steps into the booth. She holds the handgun on her open palm like an artifact before lifting it into the proper grip. She fits the muff back in place on her ear. The target is about fifty feet away, Clare estimates. Count, her father used to say. Never guess. In the vast field behind their house he’d measure out specific distances and set up targets for her.
Count.
Clare points the gun and squeezes her left eye closed. She can feel Douglas behind her. There it is, Clare thinks. The trance she remembers so well, the veil that used to descend when she took aim. The focus. She lifts the safety and points to the target’s heart. She pulls the trigger and the target jolts. She aims again, this time for the forehead, triangulated from the two dotted eyes. She fires again and holds her position for a moment, breathing through her nose. Finally Clare sets the gun down and removes her muffs.
“Well, he’s definitely dead,” Douglas says. “You aren’t going to shoot the rest of the bullets?”
“My dad used to give me two shots,” Clare says. “He didn’t like to waste bullets. Especially when the target’s already dead.”
A small smile creeps over Douglas’s face. “I like the sound of your dad. He was a good teacher.”
“When it comes to guns, yes.”
Next to her, Douglas steps into his booth and gears up. Clare studies his form: elbows too loose, grip on the gun too tight. He fires six shots in quick succession, his grip bouncing with each one. The target buckles and shakes. When it settles, Clare notes the exact pattern she’d have predicted, a scattering of holes around the target’s middle. You’ve only wounded him, Clare wants to say. Made him mad. Now what?
Douglas sets the gun down and examines his handiwork.
“Not exactly accurate,” he says. “But consistent?”
“Yes,” Clare says. “Definitely consistent.”
“How does that one feel?” Douglas points to the gun in her hand.
“Good. Light. Easy to handle.”
“You want to empty the rest of your chamber before we head back in? No need to scrimp on bullets. Your dad’s not here.”
Clare puts her safety equipment back in place and lines up again. As a young girl, she aimed her gun at inanimate objects, tin cans or overripe pumpkins, and thought nothing. But this time, as she squints to the target, she imagines a human in its place. Jason. Clare fires until the chamber is empty, then removes her muffs and glasses.
“You okay?” Douglas asks.
“Fine.”
“I’ll buy it,” Douglas says. “You can pay me back.”
Clare nods, grateful. They busy themselves collecting their gear and return to the store, where Danny waits at the counter. As Douglas completes the paperwork, Clare wanders through the racks of hunting vests until she is out of sight. She checks her messages to find one from Austin.
Can we meet?
Clare writes in response,
Where?
He writes with a smiling emoji,
Obviously not The Cabin Bar! My house?
Clare responds,
No.
Oh, come on. Charlotte and Kavita will be here. I’ll send u the address. We can clear the air.
Another smiling emoji. Clare doesn’t respond. Her cell phone clock reads 4:03 p.m. This day bleeds into yesterday, so little sleep in between. And yet, she cannot stop moving. She will ask Somers to meet her at her next stop. Clare wanders back to the counter just as Douglas has finished the transaction.
“Ready?” he asks her.
“Ready.”
With a nod Douglas takes Clare by the arm and leads her out of the store.
The retaining wall that separates Roland’s parking lot from the rocky beach is coated with mist from the ocean. Clare lays out her sweater and sits on it to wait for Somers. She tugs the elastic from her ponytail loose until her hair releases around her face. The wind catches it and whips it upward. Clare so rarely wears her hair down, unruly as it can be. But right now she’ll take any small change that might render her slightly less recognizable.
On the drive back from the sporting goods store, Clare sat in Douglas’s passenger seat and loaded the gun, using the box of ammunition he’d bought too. If he minded her performing such a precarious task in the confined space of his car, Douglas said nothing. He only pointed to the weapon as he pulled into the parking lot at Roland’s.
“That thing’s registered in my name,” he said.
“I know,” Clare responded.
He needn’t elaborate. Clare understands that whatever risks she takes with this gun will implicate him too. As she rose from his car to face the empty parking lot, the ocean beyond it, Clare couldn’t bring herself to say anything more. Now the gun is in her bag, and Clare watches the ocean from her perch, gnawing at her fingernails. The froth of the waves disconcerts her. In the farmland where Clare grew up, everything was demarcated, every swath of land and water marked by clear boundaries. The endlessness of this ocean horizon feels inconceivable to Clare.
Roland’s won’t open for another twenty minutes. Somers pulls up and parks. She emerges from the driver’s seat looking down at her phone, her thumbs typing a message. She looks up and waves. Clare stretches her sweater out to provide dry seating for Somers too. Somers sits and squints to look out to the waves.
“What a beautiful spot,” she says. “I haven’t seen the ocean since my honeymoon. How pathetic is that?”
“I’d never seen the ocean,” Clare says. “Until about six weeks ago.”
Somers smiles. “You win. Shall we?”
“Wait,” Clare says. “Before we go in. Do you need to tell me something?”
“Nothing that can’t wait.”
“What was the issue you had to deal with?” Clare asks. “Back at Bentley’s house?”
“Nothing, Clare. Really. We should get inside before the restaurant opens. We can talk about this later.”
“I thought I heard you say Jason’s name,” Clare says. “When you took that call at Douglas’s house. I thought I heard you say Jason.”
Somers is silent. She tracks a flock of gulls that flies over the crashing waves, diving and rising in chaotic unison.
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“Is it about the calls?” Clare asks. “The ones you were getting?”
“Well,” Somers says. “I got a call from that contact of mine in a detachment not far from your hometown. I’d asked him to keep track of this Jason of yours. Once a day, twice. I did some real grunt work on a case for this guy a few years ago, before he relocated east. So he owed me.”
“And?” Clare says.
“He claims Jason hasn’t shown up to work in a few days.”
“Sometimes that happens.” Clare’s voice wavers. “He goes on a bender that outlasts the weekend by a few days. A week if it’s a bad one.”
“Right,” Somers says. “Sure. Yeah. But he doesn’t seem to be at home either.”
“So what?” Clare says. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because they can’t find him.”
“But it was a woman calling you, right?” Clare’s words are sharp, desperate.
“Yeah. Hey, I haven’t totally pieced this together. That’s why I wanted to set it aside for now.”
“Okay, but do you think he’s here? Or headed here?”
“Do you?”
What kind of question is that? Clare wants to scream. She thinks of Malcolm’s email. I believe that Zoe knows about you. It feels too possible that everything is connected. Clare buries her face in her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Somers says, patting Clare’s leg. “Listen. I’ve told you, I’m on this. I’m working on it. I’m not interested in putting you at risk. I’ve got a lot of options here. Lots of tricks up my sleeve. Let’s just stay on course for now. Go inside, speak to this Roland guy, move forward. Okay?”
“Okay.”
They stand and Clare ties her sweater around her waist. Roland’s is empty, but the door is unlocked. He is again perched behind the bar. He waves them over. Clare phoned earlier to tell him she was coming with Somers, and if it bothered him, if he had anything to hide from them, his reaction gave her no indication.
“I hear there’s a new detective in town,” he says, shaking Somers’s outstretched hand. “Seems like our cold cases are warming up again.”
“I hear you’re famous for your seafood.” Somers plucks a menu from the bar and scans it.
“It’s as local as you can get.” He looks to Clare. “My eyes around town tell me you’ve been busy.”
“I have been,” Clare says. “Just trying to do my job.”
His bemused look tells Clare that he has likely seen the video, but she will not bring it up.
“Hey,” Somers says. “Can I get a plate of this shrimp pasta? Maybe Clare will have the same?”
“Sure,” Clare says.
Roland takes their menus and punches their order into the computer behind him. Somers walks to the empty booth, Roland and Clare trailing her.
“Scene of the crime?” she asks.
“It is,” he says. “Honestly, after five years, it’s still a little tough for me to stand here.”
“Do people sit and eat here?” Somers asks. “By choice?”
“You’d be shocked,” Roland says. “When the shooting happened, I was sure the business was toast. I figured we’d never weather the publicity. That I’d end up shuttering and selling to a developer even though I’d promised my father that would only happen over my dead body. But it actually became a bit of a tourist thing. This macabre attraction. For a while the booth was booked six months in advance. People are weird.”
Somers slides into the booth and rests her forearms on the table, looking up at them.
“Tell me something, Roland? Do you think the cops did a good job on this case?”
“If they’d done a good job, they’d have figured out who killed Jack,” Roland says. “Forty eyewitnesses. Only four ways out of Lune Bay. It’s an absolute disgrace that they didn’t catch the guy.”
“Sit,” Somers says, patting the tabletop.
Both Clare and Roland slide in, the three of them fanned in a semicircle just as Jack Westman would have been with his wife and daughters. From her vantage, Clare can see the hostess station, the door, the trajectory the shooter would have taken. Somers removes a file from her bag and opens it to extract photographs of Kendall Bentley and Stacey Norton. She slides them over to Roland.
“Are either of these young women familiar to you?” Somers asks.
“Sure,” he says. “They both worked here. Kendall and Stacey. Both fell on pretty hard times, I think.”
“They both went missing,” Clare says.
“That’s right. I believe they worked here for a few summers. Patio season. The tall one, Kendall, she was in medical school. The other one—”
“Her name is Stacey,” Somers says sharply.
“Yes. She wanted to open a beauty salon, I think. Honestly, we’d have fifteen of these girls every summer. You should see our patio on a busy night.”
Two staff enter the room from the kitchen, a server and a bartender. They stop short and look to Roland, who waves them onward. Clare watches the bartender as he takes his place and begins counting the bottles lined up behind the bar. She feels a dryness in her mouth. Suddenly, Clare is sweating. She wants a drink.
“Can you point me to the bathroom?” Clare asks.
“To the back right and downstairs,” Roland tells her.
Clare weaves through the tables to the stairs that lead to the basement. In the early days of their relationship, Clare can remember signaling Jason at the bar to join her in the nook under the stairs. Those scenes return to her now, Jason pressing her back into the wall, how brazen they’d be when they were drunk. Clare studies her reflection in the mirror as she washes her hands. She cannot tamp down the anger. She is tired. She lets out a long sigh, then presses the bathroom door open.
On her way up, Clare slows to study the photographs that line the stairwell, some autographed by famous patrons, others marking celebrations like the restaurant’s fortieth anniversary. Clare can pick Roland out in one of the earliest photographs, barely a teenager. He sits propped on a stool at the bar between his parents, smiling, raising a can of soda to the camera. Clare takes the last of the steps and has nearly turned the corner back into the restaurant when she stops dead and descends two stairs again.
No, she thinks, staring at the picture. It can’t be.
There are about a dozen people in the photograph. It is taken on the rocks out front of the restaurant. To the far right is a slightly younger Roland, smiling broadly. Some in the photograph wear the white of a cook’s uniform, others are dressed smartly, as servers would be. Three women stand, their arms interlocked, on one large rock: Kavita, Stacey, and Kendall. And next to Roland is Austin Lantz. How is this possible? Clare thinks. She unhooks the photograph from the wall.
“Fuck,” she says aloud. “Get a grip, Clare. Get a fucking grip.”
But her hands are shaking when she plucks her cell phone from her back pocket to take a picture of the photograph. She breathes deeply to collect herself before rounding the corner to return to Roland and Somers in the booth.
“What’s that?” Roland gestures to the frame Clare holds to her chest.
“It was on the wall.” Clare sets it down on the table and rests a fingertip on the glass overtop Austin’s image. Somers watches her, wide-eyed. Clare withdraws her hand before Roland can see it shaking. “Who’s that?”
“The kid next to me?” Roland leans over and squints. “Can’t remember his name. He was a busboy for while. That’s the worst job, next to maybe dishwasher. They never last long.”
“How old is this picture?” Clare asks.
Roland lifts the frame to study it closely. “Let’s see. Marco’s in it. He was head chef for a few years. Best we ever had. Quit after the shooting. He claimed it gave him the shakes to walk through the dining room to the kitchen. ‘Then use the frigging back door!’ I’d tell him. But he couldn’t hack it.”
“So this was taken before the shooting?”
“Yeah. Must have been.” Ronald narrows his eye
s at Clare. “Why? You know that kid?”
“You don’t know him?” Clare asks.
If he is acting, if he is pretending not to know Austin, erasing any connection that might exist between them, Clare can’t tell. Her skin prickles with sweat. It is not just the back and forth of this exchange that unnerves Clare; it is the idea that Austin has omitted this fact too. The fact that he worked at Roland’s. His house is supposed to be her next stop. Clare rubs at her temples.
“Wait,” Roland says. “The cooks used to call him Texas, I think. No way that’s his actual name.”
“Austin?”
“Yes!” Roland snaps his fingers. “Austin, Texas. Right.”
“Austin has been covering this case for years,” Clare says. “As a journalist. And he was Jack Westman’s driver for a while. Surely you’ve come across him since he left his job here?”
Roland raises his hands in defeat. “I’m not playing dumb, I promise you. Do you know how many reporters I’ve had in here since the shooting? Cops? Weirdos? Daughters of old friends who write crime blogs and want the inside scoop? Actors? Novelists?” He jabs a finger at Clare. “I told you that. I had a novelist in here the other day. You can draw whatever lines you want, but I’m not going to say I remember some kid I barely remember.”
“But look.” Somers taps at the photograph. “Three women in this picture, two of whom we’ve just discussed. Two of whom are missing. That’s a lot of coincidence for one picture, I’d say.”
Roland shrugs. “You two are the detectives.”
“You’re right,” Somers says. “And right now, I’m getting the urge to start really digging. Like, getting my shovel out.”
The bartender has paused, frozen in place, listening.
“Hey now,” Roland says. “My father used to say that half this town worked on our patio at some point over the years. We’d hire rich kids, his friends’ kids, summer jobs when the patio is hot, winter jobs so they could pretend they’re paying for their own jaunts to Europe. You know how much turnover I have? Hundreds of girls have worked here in my tenure. So did they meet here? Probably. Who knows? You knew they worked here. There’s no revelation.”
