Still Water

by Amy Stuart

  “I am angry,” Clare says, her voice low. “Really angry, actually. More than you can know.”

  “It’s been devastating,” Helen says. “Just devastating. We’re doing everything we can to find them. To figure this all out. I have hope. I do. I really do.”

  “I’m here to help,” Clare says. “Honestly. That’s all I want. I’ll speak to the police. I’ll search the river myself. I’ll do whatever I can.”

  In a flash Clare’s eyes fill. The tears are strangely authentic. Maybe she need only think of her own regrets to invoke this emotion, to think of her own departure, all that she left behind. She need only imagine Grace, imagine her oldest and only friend coming for her, coming too late just as she has pretended to do here. Clare presses her fingers to her eyes. Helen reaches across the table to squeeze her hand.

  “We appreciate that you’re here,” Helen says, standing. “I know Sally would appreciate it too.”

  Raylene is watching Clare from her perch at the counter, arms crossed.

  “We can go for a walk,” Helen continues. “Have a chat. Get some fresh air. Would that be okay, Clare?”

  Clare nods, sniffling, scooping the crumbs from her muffin over the edge of the table into her cupped hand. These are women among whom trust must be earned. Is it a great stretch for Clare to play this part? No, Clare thinks, swiping away the last of the tears. She could have been friends with Sally. She could have tried to help her friend when everything went awry. So it isn’t a stretch that Clare might be the one to make things right.

  Clare waits for Helen on the porch. Across the river is a smaller house, a cottage with clapboard painted white. A man chases a child on the lawn. A game. The little girl toddles and squeals and loses her balance. Had Clare noticed the house across the river when she’d gazed out last night? It is set back far enough from the river, small enough that the willow tree might block it from view.

  When she closes her eyes, Clare imagines Jason leaning against the willow tree that lined their driveway at home, smiling as he used to when he was waiting for her to return from work. How clearly her mind renders him these days, a depiction more intact than it was in the weeks after she left. He is reappearing, his letter arriving in Blackmore hours before Clare left. I don’t know why everyone here is so willing to forget about you. The words come to her in perfect order, memorized. It’s like that’s what you wanted. To be forgotten.

  A woman emerges on the porch steps across the river. She descends the stairs and says something to the man. He picks up the girl and carries her inside, taking a wide berth around the woman who must be his wife. Even from this distance Clare can see the sighing heave in the woman’s shoulders as she stares blankly ahead before turning back to the house herself. Since her own wedding years ago, Clare has become adept at looking for even the smallest fissures in other people’s marriages. The undercurrents.

  “That’s Markus’s house,” Helen says, sidling up to Clare. “My brother.”

  “Is that his wife?”

  “Rebecca. And that’s their daughter. My niece, Willow.”

  “As in the tree?”

  “As in the tree.” Helen tugs at the bottom of her T-shirt. “Ready?”

  Clare nods and allows Helen to guide her down the porch steps across the lawn. The grass is still moist, the dew cooling Clare’s feet through her sandals. Helen turns downstream and for a few minutes they walk in silence along a riverside path. A hundred yards south, the river narrows and churns a frothy white and they enter a grove of trees. Clare looks back over her shoulder to the two houses on either side of the river, facing each other like soldiers at attention.

  “This path is well worn,” Clare says.

  “I’ve been walking it since I was a kid.”

  The day’s heat is less oppressive under the canopy of trees. Along the riverbank Clare notices a red ribbon tied to a stake. About thirty yards downstream, another one. The path is gone and they now weave around the felled logs and saplings. They come to an eddy, a small pool. Helen circles to the far side so she is facing Clare. She crouches then dips her hands to cup the water.

  “It’s so calm here compared to the river,” Clare says.

  “It’s man-made,” Helen says. “My father dug it out. Dug a huge hole and connected it to the river so it stays full. A swimming pool, but with frigid river water.”

  “Pretty smart.”

  “We used to feel these tiny fish nipping at our legs when we swam. Markus hated it. They never bothered me. They weren’t trying to draw blood. I think they were just curious.”

  Clare slips off her sandals and dips her toes in the water of the eddy.

  “It’s so cold.”

  “It moves too fast to catch the sun,” Helen says.

  “I don’t know much about this place,” Clare says. “About High River. Sally didn’t tell me much. You grew up here?”

  “It was my family home. My parents died when I was young. After they were gone Markus and Jordan and I left for a while to live with friends of the family.”

  Though Clare knows exactly how Helen’s parents died, the file full of news clippings, she will not ask Helen about it yet. She will mete out the questions.

  “Who’s Jordan?”

  “My youngest brother. He was only a baby when our parents died. He’s younger than Markus by ten years. Me by thirteen. When I was old enough to take care of things on my own, we came back here. We had some money. There was a big insurance payout. And I had this idea. To give women a place to stay when they needed it.”

  “Like a shelter?”

  “It’s not a shelter. It’s just a . . . place.”

  A place. Helen picks up a stick and circles it in the dirt, writing her own initials then scratching them out. She seems childlike to Clare, cross-legged at the water’s edge, her dark hair in a mess of a ponytail.

  “How would Sally have found you?”

  “The right people know about us,” Helen says. “I have connections in the city. Jordan does a lot of pro bono work with local shelters. He’s a lawyer.”

  “So it runs in the family, doing this work?”

  “Maybe. But it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s over now.”

  “What’s over?”

  “This place. High River. It functioned on secrecy. And now people know about it. We’ve been in the news. Sally’s name. My name. They might as well have blasted our GPS coordinates. In the few days after she disappeared I had about a dozen people show up at the door. None for the right reasons. Mostly just curious. Even the women I thought might genuinely need a place to stay. What can I do for them now?”

  The question is rhetorical, Clare knows. The safety is in the secrecy. The ground beneath her fingers is soft enough that Clare’s hands sink in when she leans back on them. She looks up. Many of the trees along the riverbank are leafless, their trunks hollow near the bottoms. Dead.

  “I appreciate you letting me come.”

  “What would Sally think if I turned her friend away?”

  With a sigh, Helen gestures onward and they stand and continue along the path. Clare kicks at deadheads with her bare feet, her sandals in hand. Soon they come to a narrow dirt road with a wooden one-lane bridge that arches over the river. They stop halfway across. The railing gives slightly when they lean against it.

  “What has happened to them?” Clare asks.

  “I wish I knew,” Helen says.

  Peering down at the river, Clare guesses that an adult caught in its swirling caps would struggle to keep her head above water, and a small boy would have no chance, the force sucking him under at once.

  “Could she have jumped?” Clare asks.

  “You knew her,” Helen says. “Do you think that’s something she would do?”

  Clare shakes her head. “Well, no. Maybe. You never know what someone is capable of. What they might be driven to do.”

  Watching the current makes Clare light-headed, the water racing around rocks and twirling in funnels. She must
breathe through her mouth to account for the dizziness that comes.

  “It’s hard to believe they haven’t found the bodies,” Clare says.

  “Searchers were here for a few days,” Helen says. “Today’s the first time I don’t see them.”

  “It’s shallow in places,” Clare says. “I feel so certain they would have snagged. They couldn’t have just washed away.”

  The morning sun now lines up with the river, high and hot and untempered by cloud. Clare picks a long sliver of rotted wood from the railing and drops it in the swirling water below. It takes a moment for Clare to notice that Helen’s shoulders are shaking. Her head hangs. Clare reaches out and rests her hand on Helen’s arm, but she feels only annoyance at her tears, the flinch of impatience.

  “It doesn’t matter what my intentions were,” Helen says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter if I was trying to help.”

  “Yes it does,” Clare says.

  “Sally was conflicted. She was angry. There was a life she wanted and a life she had and she struggled to reconcile the distance between them. William was the first child we’ve had here in years. He was angry too, in his little way. Biting, pinching. Wound up the way toddlers sometimes are. But I loved him. We all did. As best we could.”

  Clare frowns. As best we could? An odd choice of words.

  “Sally needed help. She needed somewhere to go. You offered her that.”

  “And what good did it do her? She should never have told you about High River. She broke the sacred rule.”

  “There’s something I should tell you.” This is the hard part, Clare thinks, looking to the water to avoid eye contact. Balancing her truth with this ruse, filling in the story with what she knows to be true about Sally. Authenticating.

  “I’m listening,” Helen says.

  “Sally told me about this place because she thought I might want to come too.” Clare pauses, allowing Helen to register her meaning. “Sally and I knew each other distantly growing up. But we met again around Christmas. I left my husband in December. We landed at the same women’s shelter. I didn’t stay long. I hated it. But Sally and me, we connected. It felt like a real friendship. But she wanted to stay still. To build a new life. I just wanted to move. So I left. About a month ago I stopped in one place for a bit. In this mountain town.”

  “And your husband caught up,” Helen says, not a question.

  “There was this event in the town. Like a gathering party. I went. It felt so far from home, so I thought I’d be safe. My picture ended up in the newspaper. Only my first name, but I guess . . . I don’t know. He found me. He sent me flowers, if you can believe it. A letter.”

  There is an entire side to the story Clare does not tell. The story of her own escape, never a shelter but always motels, months of zigzagging westward from her marital home. And then the story of Malcolm Boon, hired by her husband, Jason, to find her, tracking her in expanding circles until he caught up to her somewhere in the flatlands east of the mountains, pressing his way into her motel room and binding her to a chair when she tried to run. Clare will not mention the strange agreement that emerged between them, how he’d offered her a job in lieu of turning her in to Jason. Her job: to search for missing women. Their first case in Blackmore, a missing woman whom Clare risked her own life to find. And it worked. She found her, alive, rescued her. The gunshot wound in Clare’s shoulder still aches, her photo in the news because the town hailed her as the hero who disappeared from her hospital bed after taking a bullet to save the woman she was meant to find.

  “Now you’re on the run again,” Helen says.

  “I am.” Clare pauses. “Sally felt safe here. That’s what she said in her e-mail. I guess she wanted me to feel that too.”

  “You never knew her husband?”

  Clare thinks of what little information the file gave. Gabriel Proulx, an insurance salesman from the suburbs, a photograph from the company website, the collar of his shirt too loose, cheeks ruddy, goatee. A man aged out of good looks. A few family photos taken from social media. And then a mugshot from a bar fight only days earlier, the goatee gone. The news articles all said he refused to speak to the press about his wife or son.

  “I didn’t know him,” Clare says. “She didn’t talk about him much.”

  “He was in jail the day Sally and William vanished,” Helen says. “Got into some drunken brawl and hit a guy over the head with a beer bottle. Quite the alibi.”

  “Indeed.”

  A swarm of aphids circles in a cloud overhead.

  “The bugs are terrible this year,” Helen says. “It’s the heat. The rain.”

  “The water drowns out all sounds,” Clare says. “You hear nothing else. It’s like there’s nothing else here.”

  Helen aligns Clare so she faces downstream. Through the distant break in the trees, Clare can see the shadows of low buildings, the tall signs of gas stations and fast-food rest stops poking up at the sky.

  “Wow,” Clare says. “I thought we were in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Used to be,” Helen says. “Twenty years ago. Ten, even. But the city’s flooding outward. Last year a developer bought four thousand acres of farmland just north of us. Plans to build fifteen thousand houses. A whole new suburb. A new town. And they need an expressway to connect it to the city. If all goes well for them, the bridge over the river will be right here.” Helen gestures to where they stand. “A six-lane monster destroying everything in its path.”

  “If all goes well for whom?” Clare asks.

  “These men come to the door. Just open up the gate and drive right up to the house like their grandmother lives here. They want to buy the land. They come on behalf of the developer. One came on behalf of the township. Everyone in cahoots. Some of them nice enough, making promises of big money. Others a little more menacing. Reminding me of all the power they have, that it’s a matter of when, not if, they get their hands on my land.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I thought I’d be here forever. But I see now that this place is stained. It always has been, I guess. Now I wonder why I took so long to see it. Jordan handles it all for me now. He knows how to navigate these things. And it’s so much money. It would set Ginny and Jordan up for life.”

  Ginny and Jordan, Clare thinks. No mention of Markus. Three men appear on the shore downstream, two in police uniform and one in a tan suit Clare figures must be a detective. They confer in a tight circle, the man in the suit pointing downstream. Clare feels her heart bang in her chest. Why did she agree earlier to speak to the police? She squints at the detective, his features hard to make out at this distance. He hasn’t spotted them.

  “That’s Detective Rourke,” Helen says. “Here on a Sunday.”

  “Doing his job,” Clare says.

  “He’ll be over to the house later to talk to you.” Helen stares ahead. “We should get back. You must be hungry.”

  Before Clare can speak Helen has moved on, leaving Clare behind on the bridge. The detective’s back is to Clare. He gestures at the water, the officers nodding, as if they all know it: They should have found the bodies by now. They have to be in there somewhere. They must still be in the water.

  Clare leaves the bridge before they see her. Whatever sadness Helen expressed in words does not reveal itself in her gait. There is almost a spring in her step as she follows the path, disappearing into the woods before Clare can catch up.

  The upstairs hallway is wide and dark. Clare stands at its center, not entirely certain which of the four closed doors leads to her room. She runs a hand along the wallpaper ballooned outwards by the crumbling plaster behind it. This house, grand but decaying, creaky with every step Clare takes. A poster-sized photograph of a woman standing in a field hangs in a gilded frame on one wall. There is a wicker basket of corn husks at the woman’s feet. She looks like Helen, that same untapped beauty, her hand shading her eyes from the sun. Clare turns to the sound
of running water. A far door opens and a young woman steps out, toothbrush dangling from her mouth. She is tall and slender in a tank top and pajama shorts, her hair shorn to a dark and boyish pixie. Ginny Haines.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Clare says. “Hi, I mean. I’m Clare.”

  “You’re staring, Clare.”

  “Sorry.”

  Ginny looks bored, hip jutted out as her toothbrush stirs up a froth at her lips. She returns to the bathroom and kicks the door closed behind her. Clare absorbs the heat of the still air, taking note of the beads of sweat that trace a path down her chest. There is a window in the hallway, but Clare cannot pry it open. The frame has been painted shut.

  Clare orients herself at the window. South. To one side is the field, to the other, the river. She cannot see the bridge where she’d stood with Helen, and from this vantage the only sign of the encroaching city is the pixelated cloud of smog that hangs in the distance. Clare rests her hand on her belly. It is flat and taut. This time last summer she’d been round with pregnancy. She can remember standing at the window of her upstairs hall, watching Jason slide in and out from under his truck in the driveway below, dusty and handsome and streaked with motor oil. She can remember the constant symmetry between hope and despair she’d felt then, each sentiment leaving just enough room for the other. She can remember the sensation of her finger swollen around her wedding ring, but for the life of her, Clare cannot summon the sensation of the baby roiling in her belly, the pressure of its little feet against her flesh. That sensation was washed away when the pregnancy ended.

  The window’s glass is hot to the touch. Clare imagines Sally Proulx on the bank of the river with her son. The blue light of clouds backlit by the moon. Clare pulls the cell phone from the pocket of her shorts. She has memorized Malcolm’s number. She keys it in, about to type a message, then deletes it, keys it in again. What would she say but announce her arrival? Here I am, she could type. As if Malcolm might expect her to be anywhere else.

  “So you’re Sally’s friend,” says a voice from behind her.