by Amy Stuart
“He brought you here?”
“He gave me the option to come while we figured out a plan. I took it. Got here around Valentine’s Day, about two weeks before Sally and William.”
Raylene lies back on her bed, eyes to the ceiling again. For a long moment they listen to the receding storm, the low and distant rumble of thunder. Clare stands and turns off the overhead light, then lies on her bed too.
“Why should they get to live?” Raylene asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Why should our husbands get to live?”
The weight of this question, Clare thinks. The what-ifs debated too many times. It is too much, her own past swirling into Sally’s. She thinks of the pill bottle at the bottom of her duffel bag. The dullness she would welcome.
“I thought of killing him,” Clare says. “Many times. Sometimes I wondered whether I was inventing it all. He could be so convincing. People loved him. I couldn’t be sure anyone would believe me.”
“Few would have,” Raylene says. “I learned that the hard way.”
Sometimes, at night, in the many motels since leaving, Clare would lie awake and wonder if aspects of her life, of her marriage, were not memories but a series of muddled dreams. She’d told no one her story while it was happening, not the whole truth, anyway. And so after she left, the only account that remained was her own. Clare was never one to trust herself. What proof did she have that any of it was true?
Raylene clears her throat. “I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t see her go in,” she says.
“I didn’t think you were,” Clare says.
“I heard a scream. I looked out the window. I’m not sure, but I think I saw something. Someone in the river. I do remember that. I think I saw her. I think so, but I’m not sure.”
See? Clare thinks. The trick of memory.
“I know for sure that I never saw the boy,” Raylene says. “There was just one person.”
“What did you do?”
“I went downstairs. I couldn’t find Helen. I went outside and there was no one there. I called Jordan. Then he called the police. And I looked myself. I searched along the river until the police arrived.”
“You did what you could,” Clare says.
“The funny thing?” Raylene says. “When Jordan got here, he told me to just tell it that way.”
“What way?” Clare asks.
“He told me to tell the police that I’m sure I saw Sally go into the river. He said it might be helpful even if I’m not totally sure. He said that way we could be sure the police would check the river thoroughly, not give up too soon. You know how police are with missing women. With women like us.”
“I do,” Clare says, thinking of Jordan by the river earlier, the aloofness, the offer of counsel. “I guess that makes sense.”
“I heard her,” Raylene says again, fidgeting, eyes ahead as if trying to conjure a clear picture. “I heard a scream.”
“Okay, but—”
Raylene holds up her hand to stem the questions. It is dizzying, the way their conversation jumps, both with too many secrets, too many stories to tell. Lies and omissions replaced by strange truths as the conversation wears on. Versions. Clare closes her eyes and presses her head into the heat of the pillow. All she wants is sleep.
“They’d be six by now,” Raylene says, a whisper.
Who? Clare thinks to ask, but realizes Raylene means her children. Clare says nothing. There is no answer that will help.
Tomorrow morning Clare will speak to the police. She must sleep now, steel herself for their questions. She must breathe against the unease tomorrow incites. The rain sweeps sideways, the wind picking up again. Clare knows she should be sending a message to Malcolm, setting a meeting time for tomorrow if she can sneak away. It is remarkable how distant he feels from her now, as though it weren’t him who hired her. As if she were working entirely on her own. When she closes her eyes she can barely recall Malcolm’s features, stranger to her now than he’s ever been.
MONDAY
The water slaps around her, dark and foamy and cold. She pops out at the surface and manages a gasp. She can see that it is night, that the stars are clustered in milky swarms above her. There is no shore in any direction. A wave comes at her, a hand around her ankle, then an arm around her waist. Clare can’t crane, can’t kick, can’t turn. Instead, tethered to his weight, she gives in and lets herself sink to the bottom.
When she wakes Clare is thirsty, her shirt soaked through with sweat. Raylene’s bed is empty. She slides her hand under her shirt to the moisture of the wound. Only when she turns does she see the figure in the doorway.
“Jesus!” Clare says. “You scared me.”
“You were calling out,” Helen says.
Helen enters the room and sits on Raylene’s bed. She hands Clare the glass of water she holds. Clare gathers the sheet over her legs, then accepts the glass and drains its contents.
“You were calling a name,” Helen says. “You were calling for Malcolm.”
The room is too dark, Clare knows, for Helen to read any shift in the expression on her face.
“Who’s Malcolm? Is that your husband?”
“No,” Clare says, looking down to evade the questions. Even if it were a story she could tell without blowing her cover, how would she explain Malcolm Boon to anyone when she doesn’t understand him herself? He is not my husband, she might say. He searches for missing women. That is his job. My husband hired him to find me after I left. And when he did find me, he hired me instead of turning me in. Clare’s head shakes slightly at the thought of it, the implausibility of their arrangement, her inability to summon words to define it. She thinks back to her mother in the hospital, flipping through a photo album Clare had made her, her life story laid out in caption-free pictures. The unlikely friendships, the heartbreaks, the losses, the mistakes. The turns she didn’t see coming. You can’t make up a story stranger than the one you live, her mother said after snapping the album closed, not a hint of nostalgia in her voice. Clare sighs and looks up.
“I’m not prying,” Helen says.
“I’m sorry,” Clare answers. “It’s the heat. It makes me so light-headed. Malcolm is . . . He’s from another life. He’s no one to worry about. What time is it?”
“Three.”
“Where’s Raylene?” Clare asks.
“She might be downstairs. She’s often up at night.”
“I don’t usually call out in my dreams. I’m sorry I woke you.”
“You didn’t. These days I’m not sleeping more than an hour at a time.” Helen pauses. “Dreams are funny. They’re the brain’s way of telling us something we need to know. Don’t you think? I’ve had many premonitions in my sleep and I wasn’t always one to trust them. I regret that now.”
“I’ve never really thought about it.”
In truth Clare has thought of it many times, the dreams of running she had for months, even years, before she actually left Jason. And then after she was gone, the dreams of Jason chasing her. Clare hands the glass back to Helen. She imagines Helen opening the bedroom door, watching her as she tossed and turned. It distresses Clare to realize she didn’t wake when Helen came in. When she first married Jason, Clare would sometimes be gardening or chopping wood outside, absorbed so fully in her task that Jason would have to whistle to catch her attention from the porch. I’ve been standing here watching you for five minutes, Jason would say, and you never noticed.
“Can I get you anything else?” Helen asks.
“No. Thank you. I’m fine.”
“Sally’s son used to wander at night.”
“Oh,” Clare says. “I didn’t know that about him.”
“He was already out of a crib even though he’d just turned two. He’d wake up at night and wander. I guess Sally slept like such a log that he’d slip by her.”
“Where was their room?”
“Across the hall. Facing the back field. I keep it locked now. Sometimes
I’d hear him out in the hallway or making his way downstairs one step at a time. I’d intercept him and we’d go downstairs and share a glass of warm milk. He didn’t speak much. A handful of words, but he had this way of telling you exactly what he . . .” Helen quiets and looks down the hall as if expecting to see the boy there.
A tight grip takes hold of Clare’s chest. In the low light Helen looks defeated, sad. She stands.
“I had a clear vision for this place,” she says, repeating her own words like a chorus, as though forgetting their riverside conversation this morning. “My intentions were good. For every woman I’ve had here. My intentions for Sally and little William were good.”
Clare nods. “Of course they were.”
“Maybe I can still help you,” Helen says.
“How?”
“Give you some options. To get away.”
“I want to find Sally,” Clare says.
Helen gazes at nothing, her hand closing tightly around the glass. Without another word she turns down the hall. Clare listens to her footsteps and the open and close of her bedroom door. She digs through her bag for her cell phone, then tucks it in the elastic band of her sleep shorts and tiptoes downstairs, stalking the perimeter of the main floor. Where is Raylene? Clare sits in an armchair, its fabric warm with absorbed heat. This house feels ghostly in the dark, rotting, spots on the ceiling plaster peeling open like gaping wounds. Clare closes her eyes. The dream comes back to her in a flash. Underwater, a pull on her leg, a hug around her chest, the last bubbles of air leaving her lips. What if her instincts haven’t been honed at all these past months? What if Jason is right behind her, ready to pull her under?
Calm down.
Clare sits up, eyes open, fishing for the cell phone fallen loose into the folds of the chair. She listens.
I’ll handle it.
Voices. Clare stands and adjusts herself behind the drapes to ensure she’s in full darkness. Out the window she sees Jordan, the bright white of his shirt. She cannot see who is with him. He’s lowered his voice so he speaks in pantomime, arms in vivid gesture. He reaches out and draws the person he’s addressing into a hug, wrapping her. Raylene. She is crying, her hand in a fist against his chest. Jordan takes Raylene by the wrists to calm her. Then he startles, pausing to look around, as if aware someone is watching.
He doesn’t see Clare in the window. She tiptoes away and climbs the stairs. In her room Clare sits on the bed and tucks her head between her knees, dizzy with exhaustion or anxiety, her palms hot and dry on her face. She peels back the sleeve of her T-shirt and examines her shoulder. The scarring is purple, flared, the skin warm. It hurts more than it has in days. She fumbles through her bag for the bottle of pills, only a few left.
My intentions were good, Helen said. Clare pulls her cell phone out and punches in Malcolm’s number.
Coming to city in AM. Might be able to get away for an hour. Can u meet? Somewhere central.
Wherever he is, Malcolm is likely sleeping. Still, the phone seems to pulse in her hands as she cradles it. When it vibrates only a minute later, Clare jerks.
Sentinel Park. Benches by the pond. Easy to find. I’ll be there 10AM.
Then, after a beat, Will wait. Txt if you can.
Clare can’t be sure why she feels such relief in reading his message. She thumbs a reply.
Ok.
From her vantage point, the porch roof blocks Jordan and Raylene from Clare’s view. Beyond, the river roils madly. Clare can envision Sally Proulx on the dock with her son, whether she went there on her own, whether she’d been led there by someone else. The versions. Sally’s son sleepwalking, a terrible accident, her scream as he wandered off the river’s bank, her terror as she jumped in after him. The version where someone leads Sally there, her son too, where she pleads, promising to keep some secret, to undo some terrible wrong. Clare pictures Sally placing her son in the water, then going in after them, provoked by despair. Or someone chasing her, chasing them both, Sally’s scream loud enough for Raylene to hear it from this room even over the din of the river.
Jordan told me to just tell it that way, Raylene said.
Clare imagines the eroding soil of the riverbank giving way beneath them, tossing Sally and her child in, or the two of them tumbling in a push. Sally Proulx would have clawed at the surface, called for help, reached for her baby boy. The cold of the water. There would be nothing to grasp but each other, and Sally might have held on to her son for dear life. But the current would have been too strong. She could not have kept hold. In no time, it would have ripped them from each other’s arms.
A light comes on in the house across the river, and then another, and Clare can track the shadow of someone moving room to room. She thumbs at the lid of the pill bottle. Three in the morning in this house, yet no one here seems to be asleep.
The sensation is a perfect one. It kicks in all at once, a balm across the skin, her pain numbed, her thoughts clear. Clare stands under the willow tree, watching the river. Her hair drifts up in the gentle wind. It still smells of salt from the ocean. She can almost feel it, the lightness of her body floating in the calm of low tide, the salt water stinging her shoulder. Was Malcolm there? She can see two chairs on the sand, the rocky path to the motel. But Clare cannot see him. She bends and lowers her hand to the river’s current, allowing the water to slap hard at her fingertips. A river colder than the ocean.
After Helen left the room, Clare could not sleep. She’d feigned it when Raylene came back, eyes pressed closed until she was certain Raylene was asleep, her hand gripping the prescription bottle under the pillow. Then she’d tiptoed to the kitchen and swallowed one. Two. Now she stands here, the sky still black with night, her muscles relaxed and happy. She sidesteps to where the cross is nailed to the tree. Globs of dried paint hang from its ends. On closer look Clare can see initials carved into the wood. I hate that cross, Helen said. Markus put it up. A gesture of remembrance, Clare thinks, for a murder committed decades ago.
Clare leans against the tree and listens. For what? Any sounds above the roar of the current. When her mind is open like this, when the pain is gone, every sound is distilled. The first time she’d experienced this sensation was a dozen years ago, the single pill stolen from her mother’s cancer stash. Clare remembers the coolness of the autumn late afternoon as she walked to the far end of her family’s wheat field, the pill pinched between her fingers, the burn as it dissolved on her tongue. And then came the washing over, the calm, her vision so sharp that she could discern the dusk colors overhead as if she’d painted the sky herself. The next day she woke up with a headache, the hours between the pill and bedtime a strange blur. Everything is exactly right at the moment, Clare remembers confessing to a disapproving Grace, but then you come down and you remember almost nothing.
Across the river the light comes on again. This time Clare can see into the kitchen through the sheer curtains, a man at the sink. Markus. He disappears briefly, then emerges on the porch and descends the side stairs to cut across the lawn. Clare watches the flashlight beam bounce ahead of him until the trees swallow him up. Ten minutes must pass before the beam bobs again, this time on her side of the river. It flashes in a strobe. He is moving through the distant trees, away from the river. Clare follows it, cautious in her steps. Now the beam seems to shoot up from the ground, washing the trees above in yellow light. Clare can make out two small trapdoors flipped open from what looks like a hole in the ground.
The river is far enough away that Clare catches the small sounds. A click. A shuffle. She tucks herself behind a tree. It makes you reckless, Clare, her brother used to say once her addiction had fully set in. You do things you’d never do sober. Like, Clare thinks, follow a stranger’s flashlight into the woods at night. She calls a hello and moves even closer.
“Hello?” she says again.
Markus pops up between the trapdoors.
“Oh dear,” he says, lifting himself out of the ground. “Hello?” He squints. “Sor
ry. I can’t see who you are!”
“Oh.” Clare steps into the ambient light. Maybe she should be nervous, but she isn’t. She is calm, her nerves numbed, her arms dangling heavy at her sides. “I’m Clare. I just arrived here yesterday. I’m sorry. I couldn’t sleep. I was getting some air. I saw the light through the trees.”
“Clare. Right. Clare.” He scratches his head. “Helen told me you’d arrived last night. You’re Sally’s friend.”
“Yes,” Clare says. “I don’t mean to bother you.”
Markus bounces on the spot and draws his hands in and out of his pockets. “This probably looks strange to you.”
Well, yes, Clare thinks, but she won’t say it. Instead she leans over the opening to the underground room and takes in the wooden stairs that descend to it.
“What is it?” she asks.
“It’s a bunker. My father built it thirty years ago. He was a paranoid guy.”
In their own yard Clare’s father had dug one too, a hole formed into a room with beams made of used barn boards. The bunker stood a hundred feet from their house. Not paranoid, he would say to Clare’s mother as he lined its shelves with canned goods. Just realistic. Prepared.
“I get it,” Clare says. “My father had one too.”
There is a bed of dead pine needles and leaves built up around the open doors. She thinks of the cellar off the kitchen at the home she ran away from, Jason bolting her in, trapping her under her own house. She thinks of the mine egress in Blackmore, its heavy doors pierced by bullets, all the clues that led her there. These dark places.
“I know it looks strange,” Markus says. “Ha. I’m repeating myself. But it’s funny, you know. Because the only other person to catch me here in the middle of the night was Sally.” He shifts on his feet again. “I’m sorry for your loss, by the way,” he adds.
It strikes Clare, his use of words. She spent a lot of time with Markus, Jordan had said by the river. Both home all day with little kids.
