Still Water

by Amy Stuart

  “Is Jordan there?”

  “Maybe. What do you care?”

  “I don’t,” Clare says, surprised by the childish bite to her tone. “Give me the address.”

  “He lives above his office. On the fourth floor. Do you remember how to get here?”

  “Yes. What suite?”

  “The entire floor,” Ginny says, drawling. “I get to buzz you up on his private elevator.”

  “Okay,” Clare says. “I’ll be there soon.”

  After hanging up Clare looks out the window at the empty campus green, at the distant statue and bench facing it where she’d met Malcolm last night. A lone figure appears from behind it and cuts across the lawn towards the dorm building. He looks up and waves, though surely he is too far away to see her. No. He wears a hat but curls of blond peek through around his ears. His gait lumbering but confident, as it has always been. The white T-shirt with the V at the neck, jeans despite the heat. Clare collects her duffel bag from the bed and throws in her phone and charger. She snatches the baggie of pills from the desk and drops it in the front pocket of her bag.

  The figure out the window now jogs across the green. Clare watches him, her heart thudding against her chest. It surprises her when she starts to cry, the tears running freely down her cheeks, and soon she cannot catch her breath. She leans her forehead on the window. The man stands on the pathway right below her. He is waiting for someone. Then Clare sees her, a young woman in a sundress clutching her bag as she runs to him. He opens his arms to her and they embrace. The woman removes his hat and tousles his hair, not blond at all, not as curly as she’d thought from afar.

  Of course it is not Jason. Clare wipes her tears and looks down to the couple again. As she watches them kiss, Clare feels a painful shame, a loathing that clenches her fists until her nails pierce her palms. In the months since she left, some tiny part of Clare has imagined their reunion as a relief. The end of a long and lonely and terrifying escape. But, no. That tiny part of Clare is always overridden by the part that hopes she never lays eyes on Jason O’Callaghan again. So how could it be, Clare thinks, that in the fear and the rage she’d felt in mistaking this man for Jason, there had been a twinge of longing too?

  The heavy dorm door swings open and Clare steps outside to get her bearings. Clare turns her face up to the bright sky. Already this day is too hot, the sun too glaring.

  “Clare?”

  A man leans against the building to Clare’s left. She squints. Rourke.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks.

  “I was on my way out to High River. Thought I’d check in.”

  “How’d you know where I was?”

  Rourke smiles. “We keep track of where all High River residents are staying while we execute the search.”

  “Right. Ginny’s not here.”

  “I know she isn’t,” Rourke says. “Where are you headed?”

  “To Jordan’s place. To meet Ginny, actually. I was about to look for a cab.”

  “I could drive you.”

  “It’s out of the way, isn’t it?”

  “Not by much,” he says.

  Rourke is flushed, the veins in his temples popped. He did not shave this morning, but his shirt is pressed. Clare can see the outline of a white tank top underneath its fabric. The half-smile he wears when answering her questions riles Clare in a way she can’t understand.

  “Come on,” he says. “I’m broiling. Let’s go.”

  “Okay,” Clare says. “Thank you.”

  At the squad car Clare can feel the passing students watching her as she lowers into the passenger seat. Though the air conditioner blasts, the leather of the seat boils against her legs. A computer is mounted in the space between them, a CB radio fixed to the dash. They pull out of the parking lot and onto the main campus road. The radio screeches street names and intersections, call numbers Clare knows only from the cop shows. Behind her, scratched plexiglass separates the backseat from the front. When she peers over her shoulder Clare notices that the back doors have no handles. Rourke notes her curiosity with a grin.

  “You ever been in the backseat of a cruiser?” When Clare doesn’t answer, he drops the grin. “Sorry. That wasn’t a very sensitive question.”

  “You know the way to Jordan’s?”

  “I was there last night, actually.”

  “Oh?”

  “Ginny called me around midnight. Asked me to pick her up.”

  “Pick her up where?”

  “She was at some rave in an abandoned warehouse. I guess some guy was following her around, creeping her out.”

  “So she called the police?”

  “Not the police,” Rourke says. “She called me. I gave her my cell phone number when we did the first round of interviews. I felt like she wanted to tell me something but couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Thought I could befriend her a bit to squeeze it out of her. Encourage her, you know. Whatever she knows. She seemed to like the attention. Didn’t figure she’d use me for a cab service.”

  Rourke places his arm on Clare’s headrest and cranes to back out of the parking spot. He has the sort of face that would draw in a young woman like Ginny. Brooding, angular, older. Handsome. It takes a certain kind of man, Clare thinks, to take advantage of such a youthful crush.

  “Why wouldn’t she call Jordan to pick her up?” Clare asks.

  “She said she couldn’t reach him. He wasn’t home when I dropped her off. Or he was sound asleep. I didn’t see him.”

  “She invited you in?”

  “I took her up the elevator. It opened, she stepped out.” Rourke shoots Clare a jesting glance. “Don’t worry. I’m aware that I’m a cop and she’s just a kid.”

  “I don’t know if she’s aware,” Clare says.

  Out the cruiser window Clare watches the scattering of summer students, backpacks and earphones on, faces dipped to their phones. They reach the far side of the campus green. Clare rubs the back of her neck and looks to the statue where she’d stood so close to Malcolm yesterday. She pinches her backpack between her feet. What if Rourke asks her to open it? The file within it. The pills. The cell phone, the undeleted messages from Malcolm.

  “You must be busy right now,” Clare says. “I appreciate the lift.”

  “Autopsy’s today.” Rourke looks at his watch. “Right now, actually. Last night the coroner seemed . . . disturbed.”

  “A dead boy is disturbing.”

  “She’s a coroner. She’s seen it all. Perplexed is a better word. There were some anomalies.”

  If it were Somers driving her right now, Clare thinks, she would tell her what Raylene said about the boy’s body and how he didn’t drown. But she distrusts Rourke, a gut feeling that tells Clare to keep it to herself. They stop at a red light.

  “Where’s Somers?” Clare asks.

  “At the precinct. She’s on paperwork today. I’m on warrant duty.” Rourke frowns and bites at his thumbnail. “When a body suddenly turns up in a place we combed over, the details are important. You never know what clue is going to lead you places. For one, the woman who found him shouldn’t have moved him.”

  “You mean Raylene?”

  “She should have left him there. There was no question about whether or not he was breathing.”

  Clare feels her skin prickle. “Would you have left a little boy underwater?”

  A cyclist veers ahead of them and Rourke hits the brakes, swinging his arm to press Clare back into her seat, his hand landing on her breast. He retracts it at once.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Close call.”

  Clare nods without looking Rourke’s way. He’s too attentive, she thinks. It feels wrong. Forced. They turn out of the campus gates onto a four-lane road choked with morning traffic. Chilled, Clare fiddles with the vents to redirect the cold air away from her. Rourke wears his holster on his right hip, his gun within her reach. In a flash Clare sees Malcolm against the wall in the motel room, one hand raised. He is speaking to her. What is he saying
? Don’t.

  “It must be awful for you,” Rourke says, drawing Clare back to the present.

  “What must be?”

  “A friend gone missing. And then her boy found like that. Knowing that she reached out to you. That you didn’t come soon enough. That’s tough.”

  “It is tough,” Clare says. “What else would it be?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant is that I’m sorry you’re going through this. I’m sorry you had to see that yesterday.”

  “So am I,” Clare says. “Thank you.”

  For several minutes they edge along in traffic. Rourke flicks his sirens briefly to nudge the car in front of him forward so he can cut down an alley. They emerge a block later on a street devoid of traffic.

  “Sometimes I think about packing it all in and taking off,” Rourke says.

  “Excuse me?”

  He gestures to the traffic. “Leaving the city. Moving to some small town where it doesn’t take twenty minutes to drive a block. You ever think about that? Jumping ship? Disappearing?”

  Clare’s ears buzz. She can’t decode his tone. What bothers her about Rourke is not his attentiveness, his smiles or casual questions. The shared details, as though drawing her in. What disconcerts Clare is the prospect that he knows far more about her than he lets on. That he is toying with her. She takes a deep breath and shrugs instead of answering.

  “I guess that was another insensitive question,” Rourke says. “Given, you know. High River.”

  “Sally had every reason to jump ship,” Clare says. “From her old life. Whether she jumped ship at High River, we don’t know yet. Do we?”

  “Her husband doesn’t seem like a stand-up guy. He’s got charges a mile long.”

  “Have you questioned him?”

  “We got a local cop to do it. He was in jail the night Sally disappeared. Didn’t post bail until two days later. There’s a whole night’s worth of footage of him wallowing in the holding cell. That’s a pretty airtight alibi.”

  Clare thinks of Malcolm all those weeks ago in that roadside café, the weeks he’d spent closing in on her, the photos of her that Jason provided in the briefcase that rested at Malcolm’s feet. Clare knew why he was there the moment she laid eyes on him. She’d felt certain in watching him across the café. He was there for her. Jason had sent him. The same could be true with Sally.

  “Sally’s husband could have hired someone else to do his dirty work,” Clare says.

  “Maybe,” Rourke says. “The cop who interviewed him said he wasn’t too bright. I’m not sure he’d be that sophisticated in his revenge. Plus his new fiancée was the one to bail him out of jail. Seems like he’s moved on from Sally. But”—Rourke scratches at his stubble—“if nothing turns up in the next few days I might take a drive down and question him myself. Because you never know.”

  The cruiser slows on a street Clare recognizes. Up ahead she sees the construction site, the building. TWINING & HAINES BARRISTERS AND SOLICITORS. Clare looks up. The entire fourth floor, Ginny told her. They pull over in front of a construction site next door. JJ & SONS CONSTRUCTION LIMITED. Clare thinks of the article in the folder, Jordan and Philip Twining in the alley next to the abandoned lot.

  “The builders,” Clare says. “JJ & Sons? I noticed a sign for them out by High River too.”

  “Yep,” Rourke says. “They’ve got a lock on pretty much every major construction project within twenty miles of the city.”

  “A shelter seems pretty small-time, then. For such a big operation.”

  “Maybe. Maybe it’s a charity thing,” Rourke says, tapping at the steering wheel. “He’s an enigma, that Jordan Haines.”

  “How so?”

  “Rich lawyer. Single guy, good-looking. Owns that whole building. Lives in this huge loft upstairs. And he’s throwing all his coin into a shelter for abused women.”

  “His father shot his mother to death,” Clare says. “That’s a pretty valid driving force.”

  “Yeah,” Rourke says. “My parents both died of cancer. For some reason I’m not donating every paycheck to find a cure.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Maybe it isn’t,” Rourke says.

  The radio squeals again. Rourke flips open the computer and frowns at it. The dash clock reads 10:00 a.m. Clare grips the handle and waits for Rourke to unlock the door.

  “Thank you for the lift,” Clare says. “I know you’ve got a long drive ahead of you.”

  “No trouble. Glad we could talk.”

  Clare collects her backpack and swings her legs to exit the cruiser.

  “Hey,” Rourke says, leaning over to touch her arm. “This case. It’s a weird one. It’s funny you arrived when you did.”

  “I should have come earlier,” Clare says, careful not to shift her expression.

  “Well. Who could have known?”

  In the silence that follows Clare is certain there is more to his words. She searches his face for any glimmer, any notion of why he should fill her with the anxiety now whirring in her muscles. He insisted on taking this case, Somers said yesterday by the river.

  “I should let you go,” Clare says.

  “You can call me,” he says. “You have my card. I’m here to help. Say hi to Ginny for me.”

  “I will,” Clare says.

  Clare steps out and presses the cruiser door closed. The heat lands like a punch. Clare sways, light-headed, then gathers herself and walks to the door that leads to the upper floors of the building.

  The elevator opens directly onto the sort of airy loft space Clare has seen only in magazines—huge windows and wide-plank wood floors. Ceilings two stories high. Ginny stands in front of Clare wearing a white T-shirt that must be Jordan’s and, from what Clare can tell, nothing but underwear beneath.

  “Ta-da!” Ginny says. “Hiya, stalker. Like my place?”

  “It’s beautiful. Is Jordan here?”

  “You keep asking me that.”

  “Well,” Clare says. “It’s his place. And I’m in it.”

  “He’s downstairs at work. Always working,” she says. “I texted him to say you were coming. He’ll be up in a minute.”

  Clare follows Ginny as she bounds to the oversized couch before taking a sharp turn to the kitchen. From the fourth floor the view out the window rises above the buildings across the street to a sweeping cityscape beyond them. South-facing. Clare sits on the couch and examines the space from her new vantage. The kitchen is industrial, metal and wood, a bar with six stools. Along one wall, large sliding doors separate the bedrooms from the main space, along the other is an office with an antique desk, a treadmill in the corner. The first floor of Clare’s old farmhouse would fit in this loft many times over.

  “You hungry?” Ginny asks.

  “I’d take a banana or something. Fruit.”

  “Catch,” Ginny says, throwing an apple to Clare from such a distance that she must brace for it, two-handed.

  “Jordan’s a stud, right?” Ginny sweeps her arm out to the space, crossing the floor back to the couch.

  Stud, Clare thinks. A strange way to reference your uncle.

  “It’s quite the place,” Clare says. “Does he have a girlfriend?”

  Ginny laughs. “Jordan? Um, no. Jordan likes dudes.”

  “Oh,” Clare says, thinking of Jordan and Raylene embracing early the other morning, Raylene’s shoulders shaking as she wept. How intimate it had seemed as Clare watched them through the window. But maybe it was no more than one friend comforting another. Or maybe it was something else, a dynamic Clare cannot untangle in hindsight.

  “I didn’t know that . . . about him,” Clare says.

  “Of course you didn’t. He comes off as straight so you assumed he was. That’s what people do. They assume.”

  “Right,” Clare says. “I guess I did. Does he have a boyfriend?”

  “No. He’s way too obsessed with work to bother with romance. He’s obsessed with that stupid shelter
. With making sure Helen’s okay. Too full of obsessions.”

  “Why wouldn’t Helen be okay? I mean, aside from recent events.”

  “She wants to sell the land to the developers. In her heart, at least. Avoid the whole expropriation process. Jordan knows she does. She needs to sell it and move on. But she’s got so much guilt. Guilt about women she doesn’t even know. Guilt about abandoning the land her mother loved so much and watching it get paved over by suburbia. So it’s Jordan’s job to convince her. And he’s pretty fixated on convincing her.”

  “Why does he want to convince her?”

  “He’s been wining and dining with the developers for years. Calling in all kinds of favors because he’s got this sweet land everyone wants.”

  “So the developers are building his shelter on the promise that they’ll have dibs on the land?”

  Ginny’s eyes narrow. “Sounds kind of mafia when you put it that way.”

  “No,” Clare says. “He could just be leveraging it to do good.”

  “Yeah.” Ginny nods. “Exactly. Do you know how much that land is worth?”

  “A lot, I’m sure.”

  “Forty million dollars. Half a million per acre. It’s the only swath of untouched land left within twenty miles of downtown. It’s basically made of gold.”

  “Forty million dollars,” Clare repeats, picking at the peel of her apple. “Jesus.”

  “Jordan bought this building from Philip and Janice a few years ago when buildings were cheap. After the crash. It was a steal and they still gave it to him for less than it was worth. So it seems like Jordan’s a high roller. But he’s not. Not really. He and Helen bought Markus’s share of the land a long time ago. When it was worth a tenth of what it is now, but it still strapped them to have to buy him out. Markus wanted to cash in his share and they had no choice. Jordan would have just sold the land outright then, but I was just a kid and Helen wanted to stay. I can remember Helen being so stressed about money for a while. Holding on to that land was hard for them. If they sell now, they both get super rich. Helen can find some other farmland somewhere or move to the city and get a real life. Jordan can build a shelter on every corner if his bleeding heart wants to.”