Still Water

by Amy Stuart

  Clare startles and spins to face Ginny. “I am. Sorry. You scared me.”

  “What’s with the ancient technology?”

  Clare drops the cell phone in her pocket. “I never liked smartphones.”

  “Old-school,” Ginny says. “That’s cute. The cops are coming to see you later.”

  “Yes, Helen told me that.” Clare pauses. “We haven’t met. Sorry.”

  “Is everything that comes out of your mouth an apology?”

  Clare straightens and drops all hints of a smile. In her hometown she could hold her own easily enough against this brand of prickliness, the sharp edge of her reputation always preceding her. If any nemeses weren’t afraid of Clare, of her recklessness, they knew enough to be afraid of Jason. Clare steps closer to Ginny and offers her hand, her look firm with warning.

  “Like I said, I’m Clare. I believe you’re Ginny.”

  Ginny takes hold of Clare’s hand and shakes. Her complexion is fair and flawless, the only blemish the crescents of leftover mascara under her eyes.

  “You slept late,” Clare says. “It’s midafternoon.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s Sunday. And this place bores me into a coma.”

  “I guess there’s been some excitement lately,” Clare says.

  A nervous laugh escapes Ginny. “That’s a weird way of putting it. She was your friend.”

  “She was,” Clare says. In the silence that follows she feels a shift between them, Ginny fidgeting, nervous. If you want people to believe who you claim to be, Clare has learned in her short time on this job, it is better to be assertive than to demur.

  “Who is that?” Clare gestures to the photograph on the wall.

  “That’s her mother,” Ginny says. “Helen’s mother, I mean.”

  “Your grandmother?”

  “Yeah. Her name was Margaret Haines. She’s dead.”

  “Did you ever meet her?” Clare asks.

  “No,” Ginny says. “I didn’t.”

  Of course Clare knew the answer wouldn’t be yes. She thinks of the newspaper clippings, this story splashed across the headlines, the police file, the grim history of High River Clare studied before arriving. The murder of Margaret Haines was a case so prominent that Clare remembers it even from childhood, her own mother glued to the television watching this farmland horror story unfold thousands of miles away. Clare shivers at the thought of standing, of sleeping, of living in the very same house as that news story that transfixed her mother so many years ago.

  “Your grandmother looks a lot like Helen.”

  “She’d be the age Helen is now. That picture was taken in the field behind the house. Back when they grew corn. She farmed the land all by herself. Or oversaw the workers who farmed it, at least. My grandfather was a lawyer. Had this big practice in the city.”

  “That would’ve been a unique setup at the time,” Clare says, prodding. “The woman farming, the man at work.”

  “This was the eighties. Not the fifties.”

  “Still,” Clare says.

  “Totally feminist setup, right?” Ginny offers Clare a cocked grin. “Except one night my grandfather chased his wife outside and shot her in the back as she tried to run away.”

  “Oh no,” Clare says, hand to her mouth for effect. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”

  “Helen and Markus watched it all through the kitchen window. My uncle Jordan was just a baby. Asleep upstairs.”

  There is something almost giddy to Ginny’s telling, the way she shifts her weight and crosses and uncrosses her arms. The way she calls her own mother by her first name, Helen, no mom to endear her.

  “How old were Markus and your mother?”

  “Fifteen and twelve, I think? Markus went and found his father’s other gun. When his father came in through the kitchen door, Markus shot him in the heart.”

  “Yes. Yes. I know the story. I mean, I remember this story. It was big news at the time.” Clare allows her real memories to seep through. “I was a little kid. My mom was obsessed with the news reports. The hero boy who killed his evil dad. I can remember my mom telling my dad about it in our kitchen.”

  “Yep,” Ginny says. “I’ve Googled it. I’ve seen all the articles. If you dig deep there are even pictures of the crime scene.”

  The crime scene. Clare’s file held the black-and-white photographs, the snow in the field stained black with blood, the mess of the kitchen. Her heart flips at the thought of children within that scene, Helen and her brother cowering in the terrorizing stretch between phoning the police and their arrival, the littlest brother oblivious in his upstairs bed. The thought of this young woman next to her now searching these details online, her family’s history laid out for her not in tidy albums but in gory crime scene photos culled from the bowels of the Internet.

  “Does Helen ever talk about it?”

  “Hell, no!” Ginny says. “Helen’s of the ‘dig the deepest hole you can and stick your head in it’ variety. That’s how she copes.”

  “Who took in your mother and her brothers?”

  “They have one random uncle who wanted nothing to do with them,” Ginny says. “So they moved to the city to live with the Twinings. Philip Twining was my grandfather’s law partner. He and his wife, Janice, took them in. Lived the city life for a while, but I guess Helen hated it. Got knocked up in her first year of college with yours truly. Thanks to me she had to drop out and moved back here. Took her brothers with her.”

  Ginny stands close to Clare, eyes to the photograph, the thaw between them incited by her chance to tell this story. Clare can see Ginny teetering on that verge, an adult in body but still so young, her history still too full of the stories of others. There had been a few details about the Twinings in Malcolm’s file, a news piece about them on the twentieth anniversary of the killing, Jordan Haines starting law school with plans to partner with Philip, to do right where his father had done so wrong. Another story about Philip and Jordan and their plans to open a women’s shelter in the city in memory of a mother Jordan surely can’t remember. MARGARET HAINES HOUSE. Not a refuge like High River. A brick-and-mortar shelter with Margaret Haines’s name on the door.

  A phone beeps. Clare rests her hand on her own phone through her shorts, but Ginny pulls one from her waistband, face to the screen. She thumbs a response.

  “Jordan’s coming,” she says. “He’ll be here in an hour.”

  “He lives in the city?”

  “Yeah,” Ginny says, now scrolling through an app, distracted, double tapping photos at random. “Hot young urban lawyer man.”

  “You mean your uncle.”

  Ginny scrunches her nose without looking up. “Oh, I know he’s my uncle. He reminds me of that daily. Uncle Babysitter.”

  Clare leans against the wall and faces Ginny head-on.

  “How old are you?” Clare asks.

  “Nineteen.” Ginny straightens. “Twenty in November.”

  “Can I ask you something? Why do you call her Helen?”

  “She doesn’t like to be called Mom,” Ginny says. “I don’t especially like calling her Mom either. One thing we agree on.”

  There is hurt in Ginny’s voice. Clare remembers the brief period in her teens when she insisted on calling her parents by their first names, how her mother had railed against it. I deserve that word, her mother would say, I worked hard for it. Eventually Clare had relented. And then years later, after the stillborn birth of her son, as the nurse cooed at Clare that she would always be his mom though he was dead, Clare remembers feeling incensed at her mother for those words years earlier, for claiming that motherhood was a badge to be earned and not a twist of fortune that befell some women and not others.

  “What are you going to say to the cops?” Ginny asks, eyes still to her phone.

  “I’ll just answer whatever questions they have,” Clare says.

  “One of them . . . Rourke?” Ginny tucks her phone back in the waistband of her pajama bottoms. “He’s been around a lot�
�”

  “Hopefully so. They’ve yet to find anything.”

  “I’m trying to help him.” Ginny leans back in a stretch, preening. “The whole family’s clammed up. Helen hates having the cops around. I think Rourke’s happy that I’m actually trying to be helpful.”

  “I’m sure he is. Did you know Sally and William?”

  “A bit. The kid was kind of crazy. He literally never stopped moving. A lot of the women who stay here are head cases. Angry or superstressed.” Ginny shrugs and lets out an anxious laugh. “William was just a chip off the old block.”

  “Right,” Clare says. “What about the other cop?”

  “Oh. Her name’s Somers. I don’t think she likes me very much.”

  “I’m sure she’s just focused on the job.”

  “Whatever. They’ll be here soon. I should get dressed.”

  Still, Ginny doesn’t move. They stand side by side, eyes up to the portrait of Margaret Haines, Ginny taking in breaths as though she wants to speak.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” she says finally. “Honestly? I didn’t really know her. Or William. I try to keep my distance, you know? Too much drama. But when she wasn’t stressed, she seemed nice.”

  “She was nice,” Clare says. “Thank you.”

  Clare watches Ginny tiptoe back until she’s over the threshold of her bedroom, taking her leave in a childish skulk. Ginny Haines is nineteen, still in the purgatory where she might want to act like a child yet be treated like an adult. Clare looks again at Margaret Haines. She wears jeans and high work boots, their soles caked with hard mud. Even a woman as strong as Margaret Haines could not withstand a bullet. Clare walks the length of the hall and picks the correct door, swinging it open to an empty room. Though her shoulder throbs, though the fingers of her left hand still tingle from the nerve damage, Clare feels a swell of purpose, of strength. She will leave the pills at the bottom of her duffel bag for now, change her clothes, speak to the police. Stay alert despite the pain. Work the case. If she clenches her hand and holds it long enough in an angry fist, the tremor will subside.

  The river is so loud that he doesn’t hear her approach. Clare pauses ten or so feet behind him. The clouds are low and round, a late-day rain rolling in, and in the heavy light Clare can see the curl of smoke rising over Jordan Haines. Helen’s youngest brother. Twenty-seven years old, according to Malcolm’s file. The toddler in the crib the night his parents died. He holds a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, his back to her. When he releases the puff, Clare stops and inhales deeply to catch its scent. In the early days Clare loved to watch Jason smoke, the way his shoulders would gently rise with each inhale, the tender pinch of his fingers on the filter as he lit one for her too.

  “Hi,” Clare says.

  Jordan looks over his shoulder, noting Clare’s arrival with only a glimmer of surprise. She aligns beside him so they are both facing the water. She’d spotted him here from her bedroom window. There are characters in Sally’s story and Clare can’t know which ones hold the key. And people are far more likely to let secrets slip when you have them alone, so take every chance you get. Clare learned this on her first case. She sighs, unable to read Jordan’s body language, uncertain how to begin.

  “You’re Sally’s friend,” he says.

  “Yes. I’m Clare. You must be Jordan.”

  He smiles without a hint of good humor. He gestures to his cigarette. “You want one?”

  “No thanks,” Clare says. “I quit a long time ago. I’m just waiting for the police to show up.”

  “Right. Me too.”

  The air is soupy with impending rain. Clare can feel the ooze of her shoulder through her T-shirt. Jordan sips his beer, the bottle glowing amber. His features bear the same basics as Ginny and Helen, the dark hair a shock against paler skin. He is trim and tall and wears a pressed shirt with a thin tie loose at the collar. Young to be a lawyer, Clare thinks. Handsome too.

  “Sorry. Am I bothering you?” Clare asks. “I saw you pull up through the window. I’m in one of the bedrooms upstairs.”

  “No bother.”

  His eyes are upon her, but Clare watches the rolling water instead, too tired to gauge the nuances of eye contact, afraid she will ramble if she speaks. Apologize for nothing. He takes the last sip of his beer. Clare recognizes the label as the brand her brother, Christopher, favored, the Saturday trips he’d make to the next town to procure it from a specialty store.

  “I’m a lawyer,” he says.

  “Yes. Ginny told me that.”

  “I’m happy to sit in on your interview with the officers.”

  “That’s a nice offer,” Clare says, “but wouldn’t that . . . Isn’t that a conflict of some kind? Given that you’re family?”

  “I’m not Sally’s family. I’m not your family. And I wasn’t here when Sally and William disappeared.” He takes a long drag from his cigarette and angles to blow the smoke to the sky. “I can find you another lawyer if you’d rather.”

  “Thank you,” Clare says. “I’ll see how I do on my own.”

  Jordan drops the cigarette butt into the beer bottle and tosses it into the river. Clare watches it bob to the surface, then tracks its speedy trajectory downstream. The clouds swirl more violently now, a wind picking up, warm and strong.

  “It feels like rain is coming,” Clare says.

  “When I was young, we could swim in this river,” Jordan says. “Walk from bank to bank with our hands in the air.” He points to a pile of rotted wood on the shore. “That used to be a dock. We’d fish from it. You could look down to perfectly still water and see fish darting around rocks. But the water has been rising year over year. Last spring the current ripped the dock right off its footings.”

  “What changed?”

  He shrugs. “A lot of things. Storms all the time. They built a dam upstream. Too much water. Some days it feels like the bank isn’t going to hold.”

  By his body language, turned away from her, Clare can’t tell if Jordan is arrogant or shy.

  “Did you ever meet Sally?” Clare asks.

  “I met her. A couple of times. I live in the city. I’m not here much anymore. She was only here a few months.”

  “A few months is a long time,” Clare says.

  “It’s hard to keep track of the comings and goings.”

  The comings and goings. Something in his tone nudges Clare, the indifference. Clare thinks of Ginny’s story, the news clippings, Jordan sleeping in his crib as his father shot his mother, as his brother shot his father. She studies him as he draws the pack from his breast pocket and curls inward to light another cigarette. Clare watches him inhale and blow the smoke upward again. Is there a small tremble in his hand? It feels like a persona, Clare thinks, the aloofness laid on too thick.

  “Sally was quiet,” Jordan says. “Seemed worried whenever I saw her. Sad.”

  Of course she was worried, Clare thinks. Of course she was sad.

  “Her son was a handful,” Jordan continues. “Bouncing off the walls.”

  “Well,” Clare says. “He was a little guy. Is a little guy, I guess I should say.”

  “She spent a lot of time with Markus. You know, both of them home all day with little kids.”

  It isn’t hard to detect the scorn in Jordan’s tone, the pursed frown he wears to offset it. Clare thinks of Markus chasing his daughter in circles along the river’s edge. A stay-at-home father, Clare thinks. In the awkward pause that follows, Clare feels herself edge away from Jordan. She glances to Markus’s house across the river, its windows bright. She points to the willow tree, the cross.

  “That cross is strange,” Clare says. “Isn’t it?”

  “Markus is strange. He put it there to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of my parents’ death. Which happened to be a few weeks ago. Bad timing.”

  “It looks like a grave marker.”

  “Yeah.” Jordan unbuttons his shirt cuffs one by one, rolling up the sleeves. “It does.”


  “It seems implausible,” Clare says. “To just disappear without a trace in a river. No bodies found. The police must wonder.”

  “It’s their job to wonder,” Jordan says, pausing for effect. “In law school you learn pretty quick that anything is plausible. About ten years ago a farmer’s wife up the road got swept away in the river too. She chased after a bedsheet that flew off her clothesline in a wind. It was right after they built the dam. People weren’t used to it. The fast water, I mean. She was never found either.”

  A navy-blue sedan appears in the driveway and pulls into the space between the house and the river. A man emerges from the driver’s side and leans against the open door, surveying, sunglasses despite the clouds. When he closes the door Clare can see a gun holstered to his belt, a badge on a lanyard around his neck. He waits until a woman gets out from the passenger side and comes around before closing his own door. The woman wears a tailored jacket and slacks, dark boots despite the searing heat. She is black, as tall as he is, sunglasses and lanyard too. Next to the car they lean in so that their heads almost touch, a huddle before the play.

  “Between them, she’s the boss,” Jordan says. “Though he’ll work hard to have you think otherwise.”

  Once they are done conferring the female detective smiles and clasps her hands, leading the way towards Clare and Jordan. Clare shifts her weight uncertainly as they approach, swallowing hard when the male detective stops short and removes his sunglasses, squinting at her. Colin Rourke is muscular and good-looking, eyes too bright against his tanned skin, hair buzzed short. He is trying to place her. Clare rubs the back of her neck in nervous reflex.

  “You must be Clare O’Brien.” The female cop extends her hand, dry against the clamminess of Clare’s. “I’m Detective Somers. This is Rourke.”

  Rourke says nothing. His gaze is so unrelenting that Clare must counter it by lifting her chin in defiance, smiling falsely, her jaw clenched with the effort to stay poised.

  “Do you want me to leave?” Jordan asks.

  “Not at all, Mr. Haines,” Detective Somers says. “We’re just here to introduce ourselves.” Her eyes shift to Clare. “You arrived last night?”