Still Water

by Amy Stuart

  “Friendship is complicated,” Clare says. “If I’d known this was going to happen, I would have answered her.”

  “How old are you?” he asks.

  “Twenty-seven,” Clare says. She offers him the date of birth on her fake ID, three years younger than her actual age of thirty to line her age up with Sally’s. Clare wonders whether the fine lines around her eyes make that gap implausible to Rourke. No. Men don’t think of women in terms of age, her mother used to say, only in terms of era. Girl, woman, old lady.

  There is a depth to Rourke’s frown that disconcerts Clare. He is no longer writing down her responses. When the door swings open, Clare jumps. Detective Somers enters and grabs the extra chair from the corner. She sits not across from Clare but sidelong to her, the three of them in a triangle.

  “Were you on the other side of the glass?” Clare asks.

  Somers laughs. “You watch too many cop shows. We use that room for storage.”

  “We’re just covering basics,” Rourke says. “Clare already told us that she heard from Sally by e-mail about a month ago. Telling her where she was.”

  “Reaching out to an old friend.” Somers nods. “You mentioned that yesterday.”

  “Why are you two on this case? It can’t be within the city’s jurisdiction.”

  “They called us in for help,” Rourke says. “Don’t exactly have trained homicide detectives out there in the sticks.”

  “Not that this is a homicide,” Somers says, eyeing Rourke.

  “Right,” Rourke says. “You said Sally was always in trouble. What do you mean by that?”

  “She courted it,” Clare says, thinking of the profile article from Malcolm’s file. “That’s what I knew about her. That was her reputation, I guess. She loved excitement, drama. She was always looking for action. For exciting things. We had a lot of mutual friends. They’d tell me stories about her climbing the highest in the trees or playing chicken with the cars on the road. As you get older, those stakes get higher, you know? She was the first to start smoking. The first to steal liquor from her parents and bring it to someone’s party. She married right out of high school just to be the first to do that too. And she married the best-looking guy in town, the most exciting. But he was also the most reckless. And the meanest.”

  Clare watches as Somers slides the pad away from Rourke and resumes the note-taking with her own pen. Her handwriting is smaller, neater.

  “Why did you and Sally lose touch?” Somers asks. “Or stop speaking, as the case may be.”

  “We weren’t really friends back home.” The tears that spring to Clare’s eyes feel too real. “We ran in different circles.”

  “We’re talking about a small town,” Somers says. “It would have been tough to avoid each other.”

  “When you know every corner of a place, it’s easy enough.”

  “Tell me about her husband. Gabriel Proulx.”

  There was a family photograph in Clare’s case file that struck her, Sally’s husband leaning into a tree, newborn William weightless in the crook of his arm, Sally next to him at a strange distance, a portrait of marital strife. Though Gabriel Proulx looked nothing like Jason, Clare had seen a resemblance between them anyway. Something in the callous eyes, the smirk. The file had also held a single police report from years ago, a domestic incident where the neighbors called the police. No charge filed, it read at the bottom.

  “I didn’t know him,” Clare says.

  “You didn’t like him, you mean?” Somers says.

  “No. I didn’t know him. I’d heard stories.”

  “Did you ever see any evidence of—”

  “Bruises? Abuse? Not directly.”

  Clare thinks of Grace stopping in the cafeteria line at the hospital where they both worked, yanking up the sleeve of Clare’s uniform to reveal a cluster of purple thumbprints on her forearm. I banged it on the door, Clare said without making eye contact. And though Grace clearly didn’t believe her, though she shook her head in sad disapproval, it seems to Clare now that her friend could have pushed harder, could have done more.

  “I think she hid it well from the people around her,” Clare continues. “She clearly made a point of hiding it.”

  The detectives nod in unison. Clare knows she must retain these answers, commit this persona and these new details to memory.

  “Was Sally a drug user?” Rourke asks.

  “What does that matter?” Clare says, too loudly.

  “It doesn’t,” Somers says. “We’re just trying to build a full picture.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. She functioned well enough. She would have stopped when she got pregnant.”

  It feels easy to superimpose, to make sense of this story by imagining it to be her own. Clare was never good at playacting. In childhood Grace would compel her to pretend they were sisters despite the divergence in all their features, lying even to the teachers at school. How confident Grace could be in the lie.

  “I never really realized things were so bad for her,” Clare says, thinking of the interviews with Sally’s former teachers in the articles about her disappearance. “She was smart. Things came easily to her.”

  “Easily. Huh,” Somers says. “Do you have a family?”

  “I did,” Clare says. “I do, I mean. My mother died of cancer a few years ago. I have a father and a brother.”

  “No husband, no kids?” Somers asks.

  “Do you have a husband and kids?” Clare asks, her cheeks hot.

  “I do,” Somers says. “One husband. Three kids.”

  “I tried it once.” Rourke smiles. “Didn’t last long. No kids, thankfully. Cops and marriage don’t mix very well. At least that’s what the statistics say. Somers here is the exception.”

  “Anyway,” Somers says. “As far as we know Sally bounced in and out of foster care and was cut loose on her eighteenth birthday. One sister she doesn’t speak to anymore.”

  The most striking feature of Sally’s life, revealed by all the articles and news pieces and bits from social media, was how everyone she knew saw her in their own way. Clare remembers sifting through the file in the motel room after taking the case, trying to paint a picture of this missing woman. But everyone interviewed gave a unique account of Sally Proulx. To the teachers, she was the gifted straight-A student, to her friends, the careless risk-taker. A foster child who’d grown up with no stability, and then a doting wife and mother to William until her marriage became untenable. It struck Clare in poring over the articles that Sally was a chameleon of sorts, each person in her life describing her differently.

  “Hard to imagine she had it easier than anyone,” Somers continues.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Clare says.

  The detectives say nothing, allowing space for Clare to continue. But she only sighs.

  “She left her husband in late winter,” Rourke says. “Have you seen her since then?”

  “No,” Clare says.

  With the way Rourke watches her, Clare can’t bring herself to give them the same story she’d given Helen, to tell them that she’d reconnected with Sally at a shelter. Clare knows too well the line of questioning that might incite.

  “Did she have any other troubles you can think of?” Somers asks. “Enemies? Debts? Family troubles?”

  “Probably. She was very good at keeping secrets.” Clare frowns for effect. “Listen. Sally went into a river. You know that much, don’t you? There was an eyewitness, wasn’t there?”

  “Eyewitnesses are unreliable,” Somers says. “Especially in the dark.”

  “Still,” Clare says. “Shouldn’t the focus be on finding the bodies? Maybe it was just an accident. William was a sleepwalker. Maybe he went into the river and she jumped in after him.”

  Rourke chews the end of his pencil. “Maybe.”

  “We’re looking for the bodies, believe me,” Somers says. “And it’s pretty damn weird that we haven’t found them. Makes you wonder if—”

  The sharp r
ing of a cell phone cuts through the room. Rourke reaches into his pocket and swipes the screen with his thumb. After a few curt words, he stands and collects the writing pad from the desk.

  “I’ll finish up here,” Somers says before Rourke can speak. He nods grimly at Clare before leaving.

  “I don’t think he trusts me,” Clare says once the door closes behind him. “The way he’s watching me is making me nervous.”

  “He’s new to the precinct,” Somers says. “He’s got something to prove. You know. Alpha males.”

  Clare smiles. “I do.”

  “Pretty sure he’s never had a female partner before either. Not sure he can handle it.”

  They laugh. Clare feels a kinship forming with Somers, the calm lilt in her voice reassuring. They both want the same thing. They are both looking for answers.

  “What can I do to help you?” Clare asks. “That’s honestly what I want to do. Help.”

  Somers leans back in her chair and crosses her hands over her stomach, watching Clare.

  “We’ve been trying to get a search warrant for High River since the morning Sally disappeared,” she says. “For the house. The houses, actually. Both of them. Helen’s and the one across the river. Her brother’s.”

  “They won’t let you in without a warrant?”

  “No,” Somers says, her face set tight. “They won’t. And the rule of law is pretty strict. For good reason. You can’t just ransack someone’s home without excellent cause. Most judges won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. A woman’s gone, her kid too, but there’s no evidence to show it’s suspicious. But I think I’ve found a sympathetic judge. She’s got a thing for missing kids and maybe a thing or two against certain citizens of High River.”

  It makes sense to Clare that Helen Haines hasn’t thrown the doors wide open. Who knows what secrets she keeps in that old house, or on behalf of the women she’s taken in. Clare knows she could tell Somers about Markus’s hole in the ground, the bunker, about Markus skulking there at night on his bizarre mission. In the dark hours of this morning it had seemed plausible that Markus was just using it to hide his formula, a getaway amidst the chaos of High River. But now Clare’s head hurts and she wonders if she’d just been pliable, if the pills had made her prone to belief. Clare knows she could buy herself some goodwill by telling Somers all she knows, giving her the best coordinates she can remember. She opens her mouth to speak, then bites her lip. No. Markus would know it was she who gave it up. She will keep it to herself for now.

  Somers reaches into her back pocket and fishes out a card to match the one Rourke gave Clare yesterday. The embossed letters bumpy under her thumb.

  HOLLIS SOMERS. SENIOR DETECTIVE.

  “No one at High River is too keen to talk to us. We could use someone with her ear to the ground. Listening.”

  Clare gestures to the lanyard around Somers’s neck. “It’s the badge,” she says.

  “What about it?”

  “These women have no good reason to trust it. That’s why they won’t talk to you.”

  Somers sighs. “I guess you’re right.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Clare says.

  “I’d appreciate that,” Somers says. “We just want to find them, your friend and her son. You don’t know what the clues are until you solve the puzzle, you know? Is there a number where I can reach you?”

  Despite herself, despite her pact to use her phone only with Malcolm, Clare gives her the number. Somers jots it down, then stands and walks her chair back to the corner where she found it. Clare is aware of her gun, the scratched leather of its holster, the tools Somers would have at her disposal to dig into Clare’s true past should her cover be called into question. When Somers opens the door Clare stands too, smoothing her jeans with her hands before bending to grab her backpack.

  “Do you need a ride somewhere?” Somers asks her in the hallway.

  “I’m headed to Sentinel Park. Meeting a friend. I think I’ll walk.”

  “That’s about ten blocks due north up Young Avenue. Twenty minutes if you’re a slow walker like me.”

  “Thank you,” Clare says. “Good luck getting that warrant.”

  This time as Clare passes through the maze of precinct desks all heads pop up, the room quieting. Clare spots Rourke across the room leaning over to read from a colleague’s laptop. He smiles at Clare. His eyes remain upon her until she is through the foyer and out the front door.

  Outside the police station the pedestrian current absorbs Clare and carries her northbound. Men in suits, women in sunglasses, tourist families in tight packs. Already Clare’s lungs burn from the smog. Her shirt clings wet under her backpack.

  After she left home, Clare saw him everywhere. Jason. He was every man peering out to the road from a chair on the porch, every man crouched over a laptop in the corner of a coffee shop. He was every man on the street corner waiting for the light to change. As she walks up Young Avenue to Sentinel Park, Clare’s eyes flit from face to face, searching for his features, the lumber of his gait. In a crowd like this he could be upon her before she noticed it was him.

  The blocks are short and Clare reaches the south end of the park in only minutes. Though it is a weekday, the paths are crowded, the grass patched with blankets and bodies angled to the sun. Clare follows the signs to the pond, then comes over a rise that overlooks it. She scans its perimeter until she spots Malcolm on a shaded bench, eyes to the phone in his lap. From a distance he looks almost fragile, lost. She circles along the path behind the trees and stops just out of view.

  Barely six weeks ago she’d known nothing of Malcolm Boon. This crisp, detached stranger and the unexpected offer he made. Come work for me. Help me find a missing woman. Now she studies the rise and fall of his shoulders as he sighs and thinks how inscrutable he remains, in part because this Malcolm before her now seems nothing like the one she first met. This Malcolm is fraying at the seams. Clare crosses the last stretch of lawn to the bench.

  “Hey,” she says.

  He looks up and offers a wary smile. She is still unaccustomed to his smile.

  “I have an hour,” Clare says, leaving a small void between them on the bench when she sits. “I have to meet my ride.”

  “You were able to get away.”

  “I had an interview at the police station this morning. One of the Haines brothers gave me a ride in. The lawyer.”

  “Jordan,” Malcolm says. “How did the interview go?”

  “I handled it.”

  A duck lands in the center of the pond, its wing tips rippling the water. They both watch it, unwilling to face each other.

  “Why would someone hire us for this job when the police are working the case?”

  “Because a lot of people don’t trust the police,” Malcolm says.

  “And you’re not going to tell me who it is?”

  “I actually don’t know,” Malcolm says. “Sometimes the call is anonymous. They wire money, hide their identity. I have no name.”

  “That doesn’t worry you?”

  “No,” Malcolm says. “It doesn’t. It makes sense to me. The anonymity. The police mistrust. These things make sense to me.”

  Clare clears her throat.

  “You seem calm,” Malcolm says.

  “I’m detached. I learned my lesson last time.”

  “They believe you’re Sally’s friend?”

  “For now they do. I’m playing the part.”

  “You were supposed to touch base with me yesterday morning.”

  “It’s not easy to just pull out my phone, Malcolm. What am I supposed to say? ‘Excuse me while I text the man I’m working for’?”

  His laugh is small, as though he tried to catch it before it escaped him. He pinches a clover leaf and rolls it between his thumb and forefinger. What’s changed in Malcolm? Clare can’t exactly pinpoint it. He looks too casual, almost disheveled. Unshaven, his hair long enough to curl behind his ears. The circles under his eyes are a shade darker. He blin
ks more. It could be that these changes have been too gradual for Clare to notice. It could be that she doesn’t remember, that the past few weeks are less clear than she realizes. The fog of the pain and the pills.

  “What do you need?” Malcolm asks.

  Clare reaches into her pocket and passes Malcolm a scribbled list. “There’s a developer trying to buy up High River to build a new expressway.”

  “Yes. That’s all in the file.”

  “There were some basic details in the file, but I need more. Anything you can find. Any companies linked to the applications. Names. People who work in the township who might have a vested interest in seeing Helen Haines ousted.”

  “Okay,” Malcolm says, again the hint of a smile. “You think that’s related to Sally?”

  “Everything is related to Sally.” Clare taps at the list Malcolm holds. “There’s a woman there named Raylene. She arrived at High River a few months ago. I don’t have her last name. She says she used to work in a downtown ER as a doctor. I don’t have any specifics on the city. She says her husband drowned their kids in a bathtub but got off after several trials. She’s friends with Sally, they seemed close. I don’t know if any of this is connected, but . . . Raylene is not a common first name, so—”

  “If she knew Sally well, it’s worth a look.”

  “There’s a bunker,” Clare says. “Markus Haines, the middle brother. He has a hole in the ground about a quarter mile from the house.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “It is odd.” Clare will not give Malcolm the details she knows will exasperate him, that she’d found it late last night after taking a few pills, that she’d accepted Markus’s invitation to descend its rickety stairs. “One more thing,” Clare continues. “The Twinings. The couple Helen and her brothers moved in with after their parents died.”

  A man and woman stroll by arm in arm. The woman wears a summer dress and throws her head back in laughter at something the man is whispering to her. They take no notice of Malcolm and Clare. When the man leans to kiss the woman, Clare feels herself shift farther away from Malcolm on the bench.

  “We left Blackmore nineteen days ago,” she says.