by Amy Stuart
He is skirting the truth. Malcolm takes off the baseball cap and runs a hand through his hair to shake it out. Despite herself, Clare feels a clench deep in her gut. She shifts to face the ocean. Clouds are moving in overhead.
“You look good,” Malcolm says. “Really good.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I mean it. You look healthy. You didn’t give me the chance to tell you that earlier.”
“Because you ambushed me.”
Malcolm will not take the bait. “Speaking of scars,” he says. “How’s your wound?”
Clare tugs at the neck of her T-shirt and bares the skin of her shoulder. She adjusts her bra strap to give Malcolm a clear view. The circle that marks where the bullet pierced her is still pink and smooth but no longer painful to the touch. Not a wound but a scar. Malcolm frowns.
“This is rather anticlimactic,” Clare says, her whiskey already finished.
“What is?”
“Well, I feel kind of ripped off. Like I was robbed of the gotcha moment. Because I’ve been looking for you, you’re the person I’m supposed to be searching for. Then you just show up? Walk into a bar like some kind of punch line.”
“You gave me no choice,” Malcolm says. “I warned you to stop, Clare. And you didn’t.”
“You could have just warned me and been done with it. Coming here puts you at risk too.”
“Maybe,” Malcolm says. “Maybe it came down to seeing you again, or not seeing you again. Which one could I live with?”
It bothers Clare, the way her heart thuds in her chest, the way the whiskey takes hold. Now that he’s in front of her, Clare is keenly aware of how hard she’s been trying to conjure him in his absence. Trying to remember what a room felt like when Malcolm was in it.
“There’s a video of Jack Westman’s shooting, you know. Charlotte Westman was filming when her father was shot. The video never saw the light of day, or at least the cops never saw it.” Clare snaps her fingers. “But then, boom! It gets emailed to me. Do you know anything about that?”
Clare detects some shift in his expression. A flicker of disbelief.
“Do you know who sent it?” Clare asks again.
Nothing.
Clare unfolds the photograph of Grayson and lays it out for Malcolm. She watches him study it just as Charlotte had done, his expression sad, resigned.
“The shooter was your friend,” Clare says. “That’s quite the plot twist.”
“I knew nothing about it.”
“Then who the hell did?” Clare lifts the empty tumbler and drops it with a clank on the glass tabletop. “Somers and I went to the coroner today and read Jack Westman’s autopsy report. The guy was chock-full of cancer when he died. But I have a feeling you knew that. Did he hire you to plot his own death?”
“Oh my God.” Malcolm throws his head back in exasperation. “Do you actually believe that could be true? Do you think that little of me, Clare? That I would help plot my father-in-law’s murder?”
Malcolm falls silent when the bartender approaches. He sets down their drinks and hovers a moment too long, gauging the tension. After he walks away, Malcolm edges his chair as close to Clare’s as he can. He leans until their foreheads nearly touch and drops his voice to a whisper.
“Listen to me, Clare. I will tell you anything you want to know. I swear to you, I’m here to help you, not to hurt you. I did not kill Jack Westman or plot to have him killed. I never hurt Zoe. Ever. If anything, I let her get away with far too much for too long. I’ve screwed up a lot of things in my life, but these things—they are not on me. I’m not the bad guy. Do you understand that?”
Clare says nothing. I’m not the bad guy. Somers has uttered much the same to Clare, Donovan Hughes too. How easy it is to deny culpability when the truth remains shrouded. And Somers and Malcolm are the two people Clare wants so badly to believe, to trust, the ones she wants desperately to have the right instincts about.
“I deserve the whole truth,” she says.
“I know you do,” Malcolm says.
“So tell me, then. What happened here? What happened to Jack Westman?”
“It should have been open-and-shut,” Malcolm says. “As far as I knew at the time, he was murdered in cold blood while celebrating his wife’s birthday. I wasn’t there because Shelley, Charlotte’s daughter, she was sick and I offered to stay back with her so Charlotte could go to dinner. I got a call around ten from Charlotte, frantic. They were on their way to the police detachment. She told me her father had just been shot in the head in the middle of a crowded restaurant. The shooter made a clean getaway.”
“And you knew nothing about it?”
Malcolm raises a hand. “I swear I didn’t.”
“And Charlotte didn’t say anything about who shot her father?”
“The only version I had for the longest time was the one she and Zoe gave me. And their stories jived. A man walked in while they were eating dessert, fired three bullets at Jack, and ran. There was chaos after that. Both said they couldn’t identify the shooter. Their stories jived with everyone else’s too. Grayson vanished from Lune Bay around the same time, but that was par for the course with him.”
“It never occurred to you that there was a connection?” Clare asks.
“No,” says Malcolm squarely. “I wish it had, but it didn’t. I knew Grayson was good for nothing. But I didn’t peg him as a cold-blooded killer. Then, Charlotte started to… unhinge. She accused me of plotting her father’s death, of trying to get Grayson out of her life. She told me about her dad’s cancer, how he wanted to die on his own terms. I had no idea what she was talking about.” Malcolm gestures to the scar on his arm. “She was out of her mind when she did this to me. That’s when she accused me of hiring Grayson to shoot her father. It was only then that it clicked. That I understood. Grayson was the shooter and Charlotte knew all along.”
“But Zoe hired him.”
“I believe she did. Yes.”
“To kill her father,” Clare says, incredulous.
“You don’t know Zoe, Clare. What she’s capable of.”
“But you should have known, Malcolm. You were married to her.”
Malcolm sips at his whiskey, watching Clare overtop his glass. He’s considering what to say next.
“When Zoe and I moved back to Lune Bay, Jack took me under his wing. You know, the son he never had. And I was susceptible to it. I had no family of my own, and he was gifted at making you feel like you were at the center of the universe. I knew his business dealings were shady. That he was lining pockets down at city hall. My cop friend, Colin Rourke, was wrapped up in it too. Donovan Hughes, Jack’s business partner, was handling the dirty money. More than a few cops were in on it. Zoe loved that I was involved.”
“Involved?” Clare asks.
“Involved, yes. I don’t know what to else to call it. Zoe and I traveled the world when we first got married. I made connections. Once we were back here, I was able to bring in some foreign money, some investors. Lune Bay was this shining real estate star. You can’t lose with oceanfront, Jack would always say. And he was gifted at turning a dime. But lots of the deals seemed to happen behind the scenes. I’d hear promises in restaurant meetings that never showed up on official documents. Roland Song was right in there. Jack paid off some of his business debts, helped the restaurant weather some slow times. And in exchange, Roland offered him a place to do his dirty work right out in the open. I literally watched envelopes of cash get passed around. I asked questions, but honestly? I didn’t push very hard. And that was my mistake—looking the other way because I liked Jack’s attention. He could be fatherly when he needed something from you. But I never knew the extent of his criminal dealings. He kept the worst of it from me. He saved that for Zoe.”
“The worst of it. You mean the women. There were young women involved in these ‘behind the scenes’ deals, Malcolm. Kendall Bentley, Stacey Norton.”
Malcolm nods “See? You’ve put the pi
eces together. Jesus. I knew you would.”
“You knew about them?” Clare’s voice shakes with rage.
“No. Not until long after,” Malcolm says. “I knew bribes were happening. Fraud. But I didn’t know about the women. The trafficking. After Jack died, Zoe really started amping it up. She wanted an empire. That’s the word she’d use. I could see the young women around, some way too young. They worked at Roland’s, or at The Cabin. And I see now that I was turning a blind eye. I regret that. A few years after Jack’s murder, a man showed up on my doorstep clutching a photo of his daughter.”
“Kendall Bentley’s father,” Clare says. “He told me that he went to you.”
“Yeah. And I played dumb with him because I didn’t know how else to handle it. But my ignorance ended then. I knew what Zoe was doing. Who she was hurting in the process. She was finding young, vulnerable women and taking them under her wing, then selling them to the highest bidder, using them to close business deals, rewarding cops or lawyers or coroners who looked the other way. Kendall disappeared. Others had too. I couldn’t believe what was happening. My wife, for God sake. I even brought it up with Colin Rourke, and he said he’d look into it. But turns out, he was in on it. A lot of cops were in on it. By then, Zoe was mostly living at her parents’ house. We barely spoke or saw each other. But after Kendall’s father came to me, that was it. I couldn’t abide by it anymore. I confronted Zoe. I told her I was going to blow her whole sick business wide open.”
“Then what?” Clare asks.
Malcolm scratches at his head and drains the last of his whiskey, waving to the bar for yet another one.
“She told me that she’d never loved me. That I’d been a fallback plan. You know, because of my family money. She could feign love, but I don’t think she ever really felt it. And in that moment, I saw the worst of her. She said she should have handled me a long time ago. That was the word she used. Handled.”
“A threat?” Clare asks.
“Very much so. A final warning. She told me there was a video of the shooting. She said that she knew I’d hired Grayson to kill her father. That she’d take the video to the police. That Charlotte would corroborate. And I understood then exactly how far she’d gone.”
“That she had her father killed.”
“Of course she did.” Malcolm laughs, shrill, eyes to the sky. “I was fucking blind. Numb. Ashamed that I’d married her, to be honest. Jack told her about the cancer. And Zoe, ever the good daughter, gave him what he wanted: a quick death. They were both just insane enough to orchestrate such a thing. It suited Zoe to have him gone. It installed her as the head of the business. She actually instructed Charlotte to film him while his wife was blowing out her candles. She told her own sister, who knew nothing about it, to film their father’s death. Then Grayson came in and shot him. And then Zoe? She took the video and tucked it away. To frame me, if necessary. She knew Charlotte was fragile. She was fueling her own sister’s drug habit.”
“Why?”
Malcolm shrugs. “To keep her pliant. To keep her out of the business. It’s the perfect crime, if you think about it. Zoe’s father was gone. She was the kingpin. She had us all exactly where she wanted us. I’m telling you, Clare. Zoe is a deadly combination. She’s evil, a soulless kind of evil, and she’s brilliant too.”
A misting rain has started to fall, but neither of them make a move to head inside.
“What about Colleen Westman? She must have known something.”
“She was the good wife,” Malcolm answers. “Whatever she knew of the family business, she’d rather die than turn on her own family. I supposed it killed her in the end.”
Clare drains her second drink. She feels overheated, her tongue singed by the sharpness of the whiskey. Malcolm has fallen silent, but he watches Clare. What’s his expression meant to convey? Sadness? Anger? Regret? There is no way to be sure that Malcolm is telling her the truth. It comes down to simply making the choice. To believe him, or not. To trust him, or not. Trust is a gamble.
“Even if everything you say is true,” Clare says, “do you see how messed up this is, Malcolm? You participated in this. You are not absolved.”
“I know I’m not,” he says, rubbing hard at his forehead. “That’s what haunts me, Clare. That’s why I left. Zoe was trying to frame me for her disappearance, but it wasn’t just that. I didn’t just leave because of that. I needed to find out what happened to these women. Once I was gone, once I started digging, I really understood the magnitude of what Zoe had been doing. She was trafficking young women in networks that stretched far beyond Lune Bay. And if these young women wanted out, their only option was to disappear. They knew they couldn’t stay here. They were under threat. If they wanted to live, they had to run—”
Clare has heard enough. She feels anxious, unsteady, chilled from the mist.
“Why did you let Jason hire you?” Clare asks, her voice low.
“I needed a front to be able to ask questions,” he says. “I needed to set myself up as a pseudo investigator. I put up a website. And honestly? I wanted to take on a few legitimate cases. The work was absorbing. Then Jason called me.”
“And he hired you. And you found me.”
“Yes,” Malcolm says, his face sad. “I did.”
“And then you hired me for no reason I can discern except that I looked like your wife. The wife you claim is evil.”
“Clare—”
“You said that Zoe knows about me, that she’ll come after me. How do you know that?”
“She emailed me a photo of you, Clare. Not one from the paper. It was a photograph I’d never seen before. Like she knew exactly who you were. Where you are.”
“When was this?”
Malcolm withdraws his phone from his pocket and unlocks it. He scans his email and hands his phone to Clare. The photograph is a portrait of Clare from the shoulders up taken last summer, her hair down, her face rounded by pregnancy. She is not smiling. The sight of it wraps Clare in a wave of nausea.
“Malcolm. Jason took this photo. How would Zoe have it?”
“I tried to warn you, Clare. You didn’t listen to me. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Zoe knows you’re onto her. That’s what’s driving her. She knows you’re onto her. That, and…”
“And what?” Clare snaps.
“She knows that I fucking fell in love with you, Clare. Jesus Christ!”
Clare freezes. The anger in his tone breaks something inside her.
“Clare,” he says, a whisper. “I’m sorry.”
“No. Stop talking. Just stop.”
Malcolm sets his hand down atop hers. Clare withdraws, as if he’s burned her. She jumps to her feet. The bartender gapes at Clare as she weaves through the patio tables and climbs over the rope to the beach. She walks fifty paces on an angle to the water’s edge, the bar out of sight. She wants room to breathe. She wants Malcolm gone. But what Clare wants too, she knows, is for him to follow her.
This beach is empty, dark, the froth of the waves lit only by the clouded moon. Clare removes her gun from the back of her jeans and grips it squarely. Malcolm’s figure appears and approaches her. Clare stands still. Malcolm closes in, taking shape, stopping only when he is right upon her.
“Clare,” he says. “Please.”
Clare pushes the gun barrel right into the muscle overtop his heart.
“Why should I believe anything you say?” she asks.
“Clare.”
She presses the gun harder into his ribs. He doesn’t back away.
“It always been about you, Clare,” Malcolm says. “That’s all I need you to know. I should never have left your side. I should have told you everything from the start. I should have stayed with you and faced things down. If you want this to end, Clare, you need to trust me. I’m not lying to you. I’m not.”
Clare feels pushed, pulled. Finally, she lowers the gun and backs up. Malcolm moves forward in lockstep.
“I’ll do whate
ver you tell me to do,” he says.
Clare shakes her head. She looks down at his outstretched hand. When she places hers into it, Malcolm tugs her in until he can wrap his arms fully around her. He kisses her forehead. I’m sorry. With her ear to his shoulder, Clare can’t be sure that he’s spoken the words aloud. She untucks his shirt and lifts her hand to touch the bare skin of his back.
When she looks up, Malcolm kisses her. She responds by pressing herself against him, teetering, their feet sinking in the sand. Malcolm edges her legs open with his knee, his hands to her face, and he kisses her so deeply that Clare must turn away briefly to catch a breath. Her body is right up against his now. She feels a heat rise through her.
SATURDAY
The blanket is tangled in their legs. Clare lies on her back, Malcolm propped on one elbow next to her. The lamp next to the bed offers enough light that Clare can see the texture of Malcolm’s face, the lines that cross his forehead, the stubble of his beard.
“I’ve never looked at you this closely,” she says.
“I’m not sure that’s a compliment,” he says.
They haven’t slept. The sliver of light that cuts through the closed curtains tells Clare it’s morning. Malcolm’s motel room was only a block from the fish shack. Clare allowed him to lead her here, to hold her hand and guide her in the rain to the safety of this room.
They said nothing to each other in that short distance. Then Malcolm fumbled to open the motel room door. He closed it behind them, locked it. Aside from a gym bag in the corner, from the briefcase Clare has seen him carry, there were no signs that Malcolm’s been in this room for very long.
Now, this morning, Malcolm places a hand on her back. Clare arches. She takes hold of him and pulls him in against her, kissing him. She cannot make sense of this warmth. Even in the early days with Jason, when they were insatiable, there was always a coldness between them, an air of detachment. This affection from Malcolm feels almost too much to bear. Clare pulls away from the kiss and rests her head on his chest.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
