by Amy Stuart
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For my parents,
Dick and Marilyn Flynn;
with infinite love and thanks
SUNDAY
Clare jolts upright, her hand at her mouth to stifle a scream.
This room is blue with moonlight. Clare is on a single bed, its rusted joints creaking beneath her as she adjusts to sitting. She blinks. Bare walls, high ceiling, cobwebs wound tight in the corners. There is an open window, a hot wind lifting the corner of her bedsheet. The door is closed. Another single bed is pressed to the far wall, a woman lying facedown, asleep, as still as a corpse.
A voice in Clare’s head. Do you know about this place?
The woman in the bed lets out a long whine. Clare studies her in the low light. She looks to be in her midthirties, her face gently lined but tense even in sleep. She rolls onto her back, one arm flapped over the side of the bed. There is a zigzag of scars on her forearm and palm. Defensive scars, Clare knows. The kind that come from fending someone off. They spoke only briefly after Clare arrived last night, shook hands, maneuvered around each other in the small space. Raylene, she’d said. Her name is Raylene.
The painted hardwood floor is warm under Clare’s feet. She stands and tiptoes to the window. This room is on the second story, a porch roof extending below her. Two hundred feet ahead, a river churns. A willow tree is perched so close to the water that its thick roots curl over the edge of the bank. A wooden cross has been nailed askew to its trunk. Clare twists her hair into a bun, then crouches to catch the breeze on her neck.
Do you know about this place?
Yes, Clare thinks, eyes on the wooden cross. I know about this place.
This morning, there was the ocean. Two days ago, Malcolm Boon in the doorway of Clare’s room, a folder in hand.
I have a new case, he’d said. A woman and her child have disappeared.
How many days since she and Malcolm absconded from the hospital in Blackmore before the police could question them? How many days and nights did Clare spend in that motel room, drifting in and out of fitful sleep as she healed from the gunshot wound? She can muster only flashes. Bandages peeled back, the angry pink of her shoulder. A meal eaten on an unmade bed. A dusty glass of water Malcolm gave her to wash down the pills. The tide in and out on a beach. Malcolm there, Malcolm gone. And then, Malcolm arriving with the folder, offering her a new assignment.
I think you’d be good for this case, he’d said. It’s a place called High River. A place for women like you.
Something had roused Clare then. Her second case. A chance to right the wrongs of her first effort, to prove she might actually be good at this work. For twenty-four hours she’d pored over the folder: Sally Proulx and her two-year-old son, William, swept away days ago by the same river Clare watches out this window now. She’d papered the wall of her motel room with the timeline and backstory, photos and police reports. Photos of Sally in her previous life, before she and William arrived in High River. As Clare worked, a strange energy bolted through her. She couldn’t sleep. She wouldn’t talk to Malcolm. She cut back on the pills, holding her breath against the waves of pain and nausea. This time, she would be prepared. She would invent a version of herself that fit in at High River. Go undercover. Learn from her mistakes. It only occurs to her now that Malcolm probably chose this case because he knew it would hit too close to home for Clare to refuse it.
With a gasp, Raylene sits up in bed, eyes wide. “No!” she says. “No.”
Her eyes search the room until she spots Clare crouched at the open window.
“It’s okay,” Clare says.
Raylene’s eyes are unfocused, afraid.
“You were dreaming,” Clare whispers. “Go back to sleep.”
As if never awake, Raylene slides down the bed until her head lands softly on her pillow.
Rain. Clare extends her hand through the open window to catch the first drops on her palm. She can never remember her own dreams. It used to suit Clare to forget, to abandon the details of her life before this one, those many months on the run before she met Malcolm Boon. Before Malcolm hired her to do this strange work of searching for lost or missing women, before her first case in Blackmore. Before the bullet wound and the blur of days spent recovering at that seaside motel. As they drove to High River yesterday, southward to this thick heat, Malcolm kept such quiet that when he spoke, his voice startled Clare.
Remember, he said. We got lucky on the Blackmore case.
We got lucky, Clare repeated, hand resting on the shotgun wound just inches from her heart. Lucky.
What I mean, Malcolm said, is that missing women don’t always turn up alive.
Forget luck, Clare wanted to say. Instead she looked out her window in silence, any change in the landscape masked by the gas stations and fast-food joints on repeat at every interchange. Mile after mile she mulled the details of the High River case. The little boy and his mother. Fixating on the details of the case distracted Clare from the pain in her shoulder, from the panic, the need for one more pill to take the edge off. She committed everything in that file to memory, every detail of Sally Proulx’s story absorbed, Clare an actor learning her part. This time, she will play Sally’s friend, a more direct route into the story than she took last time. But now that she’s here in High River, Clare feels uncertain she’s made the right choice in agreeing to take on this case. She stares at the white cross, at the swaying tentacles of the willow tree. Her chest hurts. Her shoulder hurts. It feels hard to breathe in this heat. She thinks of the letter from her husband that she carries in her bag.
I can’t forget you, my Clare. You’re still mine.
Eighteen, Clare thinks. Eighteen days since she left Blackmore with Malcolm, driving west to the ocean and that motel, the letter from Jason in her back pocket. Two hundred and twenty-five days since she left Jason, sprinting through the snowy back fields to the car she’d hidden under a sheet. A long-planned escape from a vicious husband. A life left behind months ago. But no matter how much time passes, she can’t seem to stop counting the days.
Do you know about this place?
It was Raylene who’d asked her this question as they lay in the dark last night, hours after Clare first arrived. Clare had feigned sleep instead of answering. Yesterday she’d felt certain she was equipped for this. She’d felt certain she’d learned all she could about High River, that this time her cover would be rock solid. Clare glances over her shoulder to Raylene, curled into fetal position, a pained look on her face as she sleeps. Clare looks back at the river, then presses the window all the way closed, her hands shaking with pain or withdrawal or panic, she can never tell which anymore.
It doesn’t matter if I’m ready, Clare thinks. I’m here.
It is morning and Clare sits at the kitchen table, a breakfast spread in front of her. There is music playing in another room, a song too folksy and quiet for Clare to discern the words. Helen Haines washes her hands at the sink, wooden cabinet doors askew on their hinges behind her. What does Clare know of Helen? That she wears old jeans and a plaid shirt untucked. That she must be a decade older than Clare, forty-something, her dark hair streaked with gray and wrapped in a tight bun. That she owns this grand house and the eighty acres it sits on. That she invites women seeking refuge to stay here with her, women on the r
un. Women like Sally Proulx. Women like Clare.
This time yesterday Clare stood on a patch of grass at a gas station hundreds of miles from here, watching from a distance as Malcolm filled the tank, cell phone warm to her ear, counting the rings on the other end of the line.
My name is Clare O’Brien, she said when Helen Haines finally answered. I am a friend of Sally Proulx’s.
Well-rehearsed lies, only her first name true. There had been a long silence before Helen cleared her throat and asked what Clare wanted.
I need a safe place to stay, Clare said. And I know Sally is missing. I want to help.
Hours later Clare stood at the gate to this strange house with her duffel bag at her feet, swatting at the flies that swooped in the stillness. Across the road from the gate a field of young corn stood ablaze in the pink light. Farmland and trees stretched in every direction. Thick with heat. Too reminiscent of home. When Clare emerged through the bend of trees arching over the long driveway, the first thing she noticed was the river. The willow tree. This house. And standing before it all on her front steps, hands in the pockets of her faded jeans, its matriarch, Helen.
“How did you sleep?” Helen asks, still hunched over the sink.
“Not terribly well,” Clare says. “I had a nightmare.”
“The heat can do that.” Helen wipes her hands on a dish towel and sits across from Clare. “And you traveled pretty far.”
“I did.”
The story Clare told Helen had her traveling from the east and not the north. Helen will know nothing of Clare’s actual trip with Malcolm, the turn inland from the ocean, southward on busy highways, the sun high and blaring through the windshield, a full day of driving until he’d deposited her at a nearby gas station and she’d called the taxi to take her the rest of the way. Helen will know nothing of the curt and fumbling good-bye Malcolm offered as he unloaded her bag from his truck, a strained nod in her direction before driving away, the parking lot gravel too wet from rain to kick up under his wheels.
“I have to say,” Helen says. “I was surprised to get your call yesterday.”
“I debated coming at all,” Clare says.
“Sally never spoke of you.”
“No,” Clare says. “I don’t imagine she would have.”
Clare pauses, mirroring Helen’s frown.
“We don’t advertise this place.”
“I know you don’t.”
“And yet you knew about it.”
“Because Sally told me,” Clare says.
“And now we’ve been in the news.” Helen looks to her feet, anxious. “You didn’t say much last night.”
“I was overwhelmed,” Clare says, a half-truth. “Arriving here. That cross nailed to the willow tree. It threw me.”
“I hate that cross,” Helen says. “Markus put it up.”
“Markus?”
“My brother. He lives across the river. It’s a memorial to our parents. But now . . .” Helen trails off.
“Well,” Clare says. “I appreciate you giving me the chance to rest.”
“Sally didn’t talk about home,” Helen says. “Where she came from. Some women do. Some tell you everything. Some don’t. She mentioned her mom. A sister, once, I think. She and William seemed pretty alone in the world.”
Clare lifts a salt shaker from the table and clutches it hard in her fist. She thinks of the details on Sally’s family from the file, a mother dead and a sister across the country quoted in a story about Sally’s disappearance as saying they’d long been estranged. No father. Few friends. Sally Proulx and her son, alone. It’s hard to pinpoint how it happens, how the isolation sets in for women when a marriage turns bad.
“Did you see Raylene this morning?” Helen asks.
“She wasn’t in the room when I woke up.”
“She often goes for walks before the heat settles in.”
“Is it just you and Raylene in the house?” Clare asks.
“And you,” Helen says. “And Ginny. My daughter. I really only have room for two or three women. Less when Ginny is home for the summer.”
“I haven’t met her.”
“She’s a late riser. And she’ll glare you down like a bear. Just ignore her.”
Ginny, Clare thinks. Virginia. The only photo from the case file had been culled from social media, a hazy profile shot of a young woman in a bikini top and flowing skirt, arms bent loosely overhead, the river swirling fast behind her. Helen stands again and returns to the sink. The room is large and square, a long harvest table at its center. A back door leads to a stretch of untended field and then a distant grove of trees. So much like home, Clare thinks again.
“There are two detectives working Sally’s case,” Helen says. “I know they’ll want to meet you.”
“I’m happy to talk to them,” Clare says, smiling to ward off the surge of dread at the prospect.
Helen stares at Clare, rapping her ringless fingers against the table, her nails cut square. There is a simple beauty to Helen, skin golden from summer sun and eyes a deep brown, but she does nothing to play it up. Clare thinks of her own mother, yanking the brush through her hair and dabbing on lipstick before so much as opening the door to receive the mail. You have standards or you don’t, she’d say to Clare as they roamed the cosmetics aisle of the drugstore. There is no middle ground.
“I don’t know much about what happened to Sally,” Clare says. “Maybe you can fill me in.”
“Other way around,” Helen says. “I need you to fill me in.”
“On what?”
“Sally should not have told you about this place. I’m having trouble getting past the fact that she did.”
“She sent me one e-mail. One e-mail. Telling me where she was. A week later I see on the news—”
“Telling you where she was. You see?” Helen rubs at her forehead. “Who knows who else she told?”
“No one, I’m sure. Sally—”
“She wasn’t supposed to do that. It’s the only rule. The only rule I have. I invite women here. They don’t just decide to come. They don’t invite each other.”
“I understand,” Clare says. “I’m sorry.”
“What if she told her husband? Or someone else?”
“I doubt she would have done that,” Clare says. “She knew who to trust.”
“No she didn’t,” Helen says.
In the file the only pictures of High River were from the initial missing persons report, the details of this refuge laid out in the plain language of police-speak. For years Helen Haines had housed women who needed a safe place to land, sometimes for months or years at a time. It might have been a refuge a week ago, Clare wants to say to Helen, but now it’s a crime scene.
“Eat,” Helen says.
Clare picks a muffin from the basket and rips it in two, grateful for the reprieve. The first bite is so moist it dissolves on her tongue. She wants to cry at its sweetness. With a swoosh the back door swings open and Raylene steps into the kitchen. In the daylight Clare can glean the details, Raylene’s black hair wavy down her back, her skin and eyes a dark brown.
“See anyone?” Helen asks.
“No,” Raylene says. “Not since yesterday. I think they’ve called the search off.” Raylene plops into the chair next to Clare. “Sorry. I don’t remember your name.”
“Clare is a friend of Sally’s,” Helen says.
“What?” Raylene shifts her entire body to face Clare. “Why didn’t you tell me that upstairs? Last night?”
“We only spoke for a minute,” Clare says.
The smell of coffee has overtaken the room. Helen pours a cup for each of them, laying out the cream and sugar at the center of the table. Raylene drops a heaping spoon of sugar into hers and stirs so that her spoon clanks against her mug, eyes never leaving Clare.
“She never mentioned any friend named Clare to me,” Raylene says. “And Sally told me everything.”
A mosquito lands at the center of the table. Clare lowers her
fist to squash it. “I hate when people say that,” she says.
“Excuse me?” Raylene perks up in her chair.
“There’s no way of knowing if someone is telling you everything,” Clare says, sipping her coffee. “We all keep secrets.”
“Do we? Why would you say that?”
Clare shrugs, uncertain herself. She’d figured that playing the part of Sally’s friend would allow her to ask questions, to integrate. That she could fill in the blanks if people dug deeper, work around inconsistencies by claiming a faulty memory, difficult circumstances under which she and Sally met in the first place.
“She wrote Clare a few weeks ago,” Helen says. “E-mailed her. When Clare heard she’d gone missing, she came.”
“Why did you wait?” Raylene asks. “Why didn’t you come as soon as she wrote?”
“It’s complicated,” Clare says. “I can’t—”
“Yeah, well,” Raylene says. “Now you’re too late.”
Raylene squeals her chair along the floor as she stands. She returns the uneaten breakfast to the refrigerator and cupboards, opening and slamming each door with a flourish. Her figure is curvy, and as she reaches for a high cupboard to return the unused teapot her T-shirt lifts. Clare spots the scarring snaked along her belly, the white crisscrosses of faded stretch marks. The marks of a pregnancy with no mention of a child. When the table is cleared Raylene leans on the counter, blowing her hair from her eyes, jaw pulsing. Livid.
“You just show up here, making snide remarks? Some random long-lost friend.”
“I’m not random,” Clare says.
“You are to me. To us.”
“She’s Sally’s friend,” Helen interjects.
“I didn’t mean to anger you,” Clare says. “I’m sorry.”
“Aren’t you angry?” Raylene asks. “Your friend and her kid are gone.”
A sharp ache jolts through Clare’s shoulder. She rests her palm over it. She can’t tell if she’s sweating from the heat or from the feverish spell that comes with the long stretch without anything for the pain. Withdrawal.
