Still Here

by Amy Stuart

  Clare pauses to absorb the look of wonder Somers gives her. She has taken control. No longer the pawn.

  “What I need from you,” Clare continues, “is the groundwork. The stuff I don’t have access to. The records, the facial matching. Any more digging you can do on Grayson Morris. I need you to call that officer you sent and tell him to leave Charlotte to me. I’ll talk to her.”

  “I can’t do that,” Germain says. “You’re not on this case in any official capacity.”

  “So what? What good have your official officers done here, Germain? Just give me a few hours. Charlotte trusts me. I think she does, at least. There’s a chance I’ll get somewhere with her. Can you honestly say the same?”

  Somers wears only the slightest smile, and when Clare looks her way, she lifts her eyebrows at her as if to say, keep going.

  “Can we agree?” Clare says. “You use whatever resources this beautiful building affords you to track things down, and I’ll deal with Charlotte? You have my word that I’ll report back whatever I find.”

  At this Clare stands. She makes her way to the door and exits the office before Somers can even rise from her own chair.

  The front door is unlocked, Charlotte’s message said. I’m outside on the back deck.

  In the late afternoon light, Austin’s house is even more striking, the ocean like a painting out the long run of windows. Clare steps inside. She can see Charlotte on the deck, curled under a blanket on the same lounger that Kavita had been on last night.

  Even from inside the house, Clare can hear the ocean. She knocks on the glass door to alert Charlotte of her presence before sliding it open. The ocean is kicked up today, angry waves bending and crashing into tall rocks. Clare drags the other lounger to within arm’s length of Charlotte. The circles under Charlotte’s eyes are a deep purple. She is otherwise pale, dressed in track pants and a sweater, pilled and moth-eaten.

  “You’re making your way around,” Charlotte says. “So I hear, anyway.”

  “Where are Kavita and Austin?”

  “Asleep. They’re night owls.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “You’re not here to check up on my well-being, Clare. Can we cut to the chase?”

  “Okay,” Clare says. “If I ask you something directly, will you tell me the truth?”

  Charlotte shrugs. “That depends.”

  “You filmed it,” Clare says. “When your father was shot at Roland’s, you were filming.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  “I have the video. It arrived in my in-box when I was here last night, actually. From an encrypted email address. Did you send it to me?”

  On the lounge chair Charlotte pulls her knees to her chest, her stare fixed on the ocean, silent. Her eyes are glassy with tears.

  “Charlotte,” Clare says. “I don’t know what you’ve done. I think you probably got caught up in something, and I’d like to help you figure this out. You filmed your father’s death, but the video never saw the light of day, and there must be a good reason for that, right?” Clare reaches into her pocket and hands Charlotte the photograph of Grayson Morris. “I think he might have something to do with it.”

  For a long time Charlotte holds the photo aloft and studies it. She pulls it in up close and then extends it away, squinting at it from different vantages. Finally she sets the photograph down on her lap and returns her gaze to the sea. Clare snatches the picture when it flutters in a breeze and nearly lifts away.

  “Grayson Morris,” Clare says. “He shot your father. My theory is that he was hired to do so. You were in a relationship with him.”

  Charlotte will not look at Clare.

  “Like I said,” Clare continues. “My guess is that you didn’t hire him to kill your father. But somehow, you got caught up in it all, right? The cops just want to arrest the guy who pulled the trigger, Charlotte. As long as they can throw the killer behind bars. But now they know you were filming. Germain has the video. You’re going to face an inquisition. Maybe it’s time to tell the truth.”

  Finally Charlotte shifts so she is facing Clare. “Do you know why I sit out here?” She laughs and runs a fingertip under her lashes to wipe away the forming tears. “It’s not for the view. I swear Austin has this place bugged. Pinhole cameras, recorders. He just seems like that kind of guy. Kavita thinks I’m paranoid, but I’m convinced he’s spying on me.”

  “You don’t need to be here,” Clare says. “You could find somewhere else to stay.”

  “Where else can I go?” Charlotte asks. “I was evicted at the end of last month. I had the shittiest apartment in all of Lune Bay but they still managed to evict me. Fucking Charlotte Westman, daughter of the King of Lune Bay, and I can’t cobble together cheap rent.”

  “You could leave Lune Bay altogether,” Clare offers. “Start over.”

  “Right. You’re all about that, aren’t you? Get up and run away as soon as things in your life go awry?”

  The sting of her words takes Clare aback. What has Austin told her? Indeed Clare can no longer assume her past is her own secret. She feels rage at that prospect. Clare thinks of Somers hours ago at the coroner’s office, the tricks she’d used to steer the conversation, to right the course when the coroner tried to veer them offtrack.

  Don’t let them take the wheel, Somers said. Always retain control.

  “You have a choice,” Clare says. “I’m sure every media forensics team within five hundred miles is dissecting the video as we speak. I’ve seen your father’s autopsy report. Germain was going to have you picked up for questioning, but I was able to call him off. I bought us a few hours. So here’s what I’m going to suggest to you, Charlotte. You tell me everything. And we sort it out together, and figure out what version you’re going to give to the police. At this point you owe them the truth, but even the truth is subjective, right? I can protect you.”

  Charlotte scoffs. “Protect me? You’re not a cop.”

  “No,” Clare says. “Lucky you too. Because if I were a cop, I’d have no choice but to arrest you for obstruction of justice. That’s what they’ll do, Charlotte. You filmed that video, then buried it.”

  From under the blanket Charlotte withdraws a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She curls into herself to shield the cigarette from the wind as she lights it. The first waft of smoke hits Clare. That smell, so sharp and particular, forever a reminder of Jason, the way he too would lift his chin to blow the smoke upward even when a breeze promised to carry it Clare’s way. Clare feels an anxious flutter in her chest. Just like that, Jason appears in her mind’s eye. Like he’s here, like he’s in the air.

  Breathe, Clare tells herself. Breathe.

  “Your dad was dying,” Clare says. “According to the autopsy record, he had advanced cancer. Weeks to live, maybe. And when I watched the video, I noticed one thing. Well, I noticed a lot of things, but one in particular. There’s this moment right before the shooter comes in. The camera pans to your father. He’s looking at the door. Waiting for someone to come in. Like he knew. Like he was expecting your boyfriend Grayson to show up.”

  “You don’t know what you saw,” Charlotte says. “Because it wasn’t that.”

  “Did you know what was coming?”

  “No,” Charlotte says.

  “But you knew it was Grayson when you saw him.”

  “No.”

  “What bullshit,” Clare says. “Come on, Charlotte.”

  It’s always a dead giveaway, the way a person’s shoulders drop the moment they are caught in a lie. Clare remembers that feeling too well from her own life, lying to Grace or her brother, Christopher, about whether she’d been using, lying to Jason about why she was a little late arriving home from work. Lying to avoid conflict or accusations, to keep herself safe. She sees that same tension in Charlotte now, the way she exhales the last of her cigarette with a protracted sigh, debating what to say next.

  “I’m not repeating this story to Germain,” Charlotte says. “Do
you understand? It’ll be your word against mine.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’d better not be recording me.”

  Clare stands and lifts her shirt to confirm the absence of a wire. Then she collects her phone from her pocket and powers it off, setting it on the table between them.

  “My dad did have cancer,” Charlotte begins. “He figured he did, so he had me drive him to a clinic fifty miles away. Paid for all the tests and reports in cash to keep it off his medical records.”

  “How long was this before he died?” Clare asks.

  “Two weeks? I don’t know. It’s all jumbled up.”

  “Okay,” Clare says. “How did he react to the diagnosis?”

  “He was stone cold.” Charlotte chokes on a cry. “On the drive back to Lune Bay, he told me he’d known for months that something was wrong. He couldn’t piss properly, he was losing weight, his stomach hurt, you name it. ‘I’m not dying of cancer,’ he told me in the car. He turned on me. ‘I can’t die,’ he said. ‘You and your sister will drive everything I’ve ever built into the ground.’ I didn’t understand why he was lumping me in. Zoe? Sure. She was working with him by then and it was obvious that she was pretty reckless. Taking risky ventures. Branching out in unsavory ways. I was just trying to keep my shit together. I had a custody battle to fight. I was trying to play the good mother and stop myself from popping pills. And then one day my dad is in the passenger seat of my car, riddled with cancer and accusing me of wanting to prey on his death.”

  The sob finally escapes Charlotte. Clare touches her arm and waits for her to gather herself and continue.

  “There was an insurance policy,” she says. “Right after he was diagnosed, he put it in my name. He wanted me to use it for Shelley. My daughter. That was the deal. Zoe would get the company, or what was left of it, and I’d get the insurance policy. He made me promise to keep the cancer thing to myself. I wasn’t allowed to tell my mother. Zoe didn’t know. At least, I think she didn’t.”

  “But you never did get an insurance payout?”

  “That’s the crazy part.” Charlotte’s laugh is shrill. “If he’d just died of cancer, I would have gotten the money. Over three million dollars. But when the cause of death is a bullet to the head, claim investigators don’t let go of the cash so easily. Especially when the beneficiary has been changed only a few weeks earlier. And then the murder goes unsolved. So I get nothing. All his assets are frozen and eventually seized. His business partner goes to prison. Zoe takes whatever’s left and runs it right into the ground, just like he predicted she would. Some part of me wonders if my dad did it all on purpose. To screw with us. He always said we didn’t know how to fend for ourselves.”

  “That’s a hard thing to hear from your father,” Clare says.

  “He was a bad man,” Charlotte says. “He said to me, ‘There’s not a fucking chance I’m dying of cancer.’ You know what he meant by that? That he wasn’t going to wither away in some hospital bed. He wanted his death on the front page of the newspaper. Can you imagine?”

  Clare thinks of the video, of Jack Westman’s anticipatory gaze turned to the door. Charlotte leans to pick her phone from the deck floor next to her lounger. She unlocks it and scans the photographs for a long stretch, back through months and years, until finally she slows the scroll and zeroes in on one portrait. She hands the phone to Clare. The picture depicts three people with the ocean behind them, Charlotte at the center, her daughter, Shelley, next to her, pressed into her hip, the little girl’s hair whipped up by the breeze. A man stands on the other side with his arm around Charlotte. It is easy enough to identify him even though he doesn’t wear glasses: Grayson Morris.

  “He grew up with Malcolm,” Charlotte says.

  “In Newport,” Clare adds.

  “Yeah. I don’t think they were best friends, but they knew each other. Grayson knew who Malcolm was.”

  A pit of dread forms in Clare’s stomach. She can feel herself wanting to lead Charlotte, to suggest other possibilities that point away from Malcolm. Charlotte takes the last drag of her cigarette, then mashes out the butt on the wooden arm of the lounger. She can tell by Charlotte’s expression that the dam is cracking, that she can no longer keep these secrets to herself.

  “Grayson came to Lune Bay looking for a fresh start,” Charlotte says. “Maybe to take advantage of his connection to Malcolm. We’re all guilty of that, right? Mining our connections. Grayson and I met at The Cabin. What can I say? We hit it off. He was attentive. We agreed to keep things under wraps. Just between the two of us until I could settle my custody case. Shelley knew him as my friend. She loved him. But Malcolm wasn’t stupid. He caught on. He hated that I was dating him. He said that I couldn’t possibly know the true Grayson. That he was bad news. Malcolm would come over and pace around my house, opening cupboards and drawers, looking for shit, drugs or whatever. He’d say that there was no way Grayson actually loved me, that he was only using me, that he just wanted a piece of the family name. That I was a fool to believe there was anything good or real in the relationship. Jesus, Malcolm. He could be so fucking cruel.”

  “I don’t know that he’s cruel,” Clare says. She sees the look Charlotte gives her. Clare must redirect. “The other day you called Malcolm a murderer, Charlotte. Do you remember that?”

  Charlotte nods.

  “But you don’t think he killed Zoe. So—”

  “I think he killed my father.”

  “I don’t understand,” Clare says.

  “My father told Malcolm. About the cancer. The one guy he thought he could trust. And a week later, Grayson walked into a restaurant and shot my father in the head.” Charlotte releases a sob. “It’s almost like Malcolm killed two birds with one stone, right? My father gets his blaze of glory ending, and Grayson is out of the picture.”

  No, Clare thinks. What kind of person would plan their own murder in lieu of a natural death? Clare must bite her tongue to stop herself from challenging Charlotte’s account, an account where Malcolm is the killer.

  “Did you send me the video?” Clare asks again.

  “No,” Charlotte says. “I don’t have the video. I never did.”

  “What do you mean you never did?” Clare asks. “You were the one who filmed it.”

  “Remember the other night at The Cabin? When I asked you if you ever felt like someone else was telling your story for you?”

  “I do. You told me that Zoe was the one to tell yours.”

  “Yeah.” Charlotte lifts a hand to her mouth, her shoulders heaving. “On our way to the police detachment, right after we’d watched our father take a bullet to his skull, Zoe took my phone. ‘We’re deleting the video,’ she said to me. ‘It never existed.’ It was Grayson, for fuck sake. He walked into a bar and shot my father right in front of my eyes. So yeah, I let her delete it. I thought she was protecting Malcolm. Maybe she knew his plan.”

  Clare feels sickened by her own skepticism, how hard her brain is working to keep Malcolm in the clear.

  “Did you ever ask Malcolm outright?”

  Charlotte laughs. “Once, I did. After the fact. He played dumb. Of course he did.”

  “But you think Zoe knew?”

  “I let Zoe do all the talking in the police interview. I just sat there like a little coward, because I didn’t know what else to do. But fuck, of course she sent a copy of the video to herself before she deleted it. Of course she did. That’s Zoe for you. Always thinking ahead. She has to control everything. She needed it to use against me, or maybe against Malcolm. She gets whatever she wants.” Charlotte looks directly at Clare, her eyes wild. “And she’ll kill anyone who stands in her way.”

  This open-air fish shack is on the water at the outskirts of Lune Bay. The only patrons are two men nursing beers at opposite ends of the tiki bar. Malcolm sits alone on the patio, the dark ocean behind him, the moon propped high in the sky. When he sees Clare, he stands and tips back the baseball cap he wears, as if she wouldn’
t have recognized him if he hadn’t.

  Clare knows that her fatal flaw is her recklessness. To not feel trepidation where others might. Maybe you’re exactly where he wants you, Somers warned her. Perhaps she should not have come, but Clare knows that was never an option. All she wants now are answers, resolutions. Endings. In the hours since Malcolm summoned her to the beach, Clare has stumbled her way through a bewildering mix of anger, longing, conviction. She stops short at the patio’s edge.

  “Sit,” Malcolm says, nudging the chair across from him away from the table with his foot.

  “You’re not exactly incognito,” Clare says.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” he says. “Like you said earlier, Clare. This needs to end.”

  “Is that whiskey?” she asks.

  “It is.”

  “I’ll have one too, then.”

  Malcolm gives her a look.

  “I can handle it,” she says.

  Malcolm gestures a peace sign to the bartender—make it two more. They watch in silence as the bartender pours. Malcolm stands to collect the tumblers from the end of the bar and sets one in front of Clare. Her lips tingle as she tips the glass. She focuses on the scar that runs the length of his arm. The scar she’s studied so many times but has never touched. She points to it.

  “You never told me how you got that scar.”

  “Charlotte,” he says. “We were in her kitchen. It was a while after Jack Westman died. She was angry with me. She reacted in a heated moment. Life was hard for Charlotte after her father died. It was an accident. She didn’t mean to nick me.”

  “That doesn’t look like an accident,” Clare says. “Or a nick. What happened?”

  “It’s hard to remember. She was angry about everything back then.”