Still Water

by Amy Stuart

  “And Markus gets nothing,” Clare says.

  “Not a dime,” Ginny says, mouthing the words again for effect. “And he gets turfed from his squatting grounds. But in the expropriation process he gets a stake because he lives on the land. He gets a settlement if they have to evict him. So it’s way better for Markus if Helen refuses to sell and lets it go to the courts. Makes them take the land from her.”

  “That’s really complicated,” Clare says.

  “You’re telling me. Family. Right?”

  Ginny flips over so she lies on the couch, her feet stretched up along the brick wall. Clare was never so comfortable in her own skin as Ginny seems to be. Even as a teenager she was acutely aware of showing her shape, of clothes that felt too tight. Hard as her mother would try to get Clare to wear skirts or dresses, sleeveless blouses, Clare always preferred loose and boyish. She feels her cheeks redden at the thought of the clothes she was wearing last night, whatever boldness had overtaken her in borrowing them. Braless in an oversized T-shirt, her legs bare against the wall, there is no shyness in how Ginny holds herself.

  “I have these really early memories,” Ginny says. “From when I was little. When we were all there. Helen, Jordan, Markus. Me. The four of us. It felt like we were a family. They’d come back to High River and were trying, you know. To live there. Jordan wasn’t even eight and Helen was about to pop with me. It’s crazy, because Markus and Helen were basically my age. But they had to be the adults. Running the show. Or Helen was, at least. Like I say, Markus was the resident weirdo.”

  “Helen had you,” Clare says. “She had to be an adult.”

  “Markus used to babysit me. After he dropped out of college Helen started taking night classes. I don’t think Markus ever really had a job. I remember us sitting in front of the TV watching these real estate shows, and he’d say he was going to make millions buying and selling property. Move to the big city and get rich. And famous.” Ginny swings her legs back to the floor and edges closer to Clare on the couch. “This one time, he was babysitting me and I got really sick. I’d had an infection and I reacted to the medication. Instead of calling an ambulance he drove me to the hospital. Which makes sense.” Ginny pauses. “It would have been faster to drive me himself. I remember that he let me sit in the front seat without my seat belt on. I remember the feeling of not being able to breathe.”

  “How old were you?” Clare asks.

  “Seven.”

  “How scary.”

  “Yeah,” Ginny says. “We pulled up to the emergency room and he carried me in, yelling for help. Shit, I was more scared by the way he was acting than by the fact that I couldn’t breathe. The way he talked to the doctors. He waited so long to call Helen.”

  “Why would he wait to call her?”

  “That’s just Markus. When something crazy is going on, he wants to be right in the middle of it. I watched him from my stretcher. I had this oxygen mask on my face and he was standing by the nursing station, weeping his stupid face off. Going crazy. He wasn’t trying to comfort me, though. It was all a show. I’m this little kid and I can’t breathe and my fucking uncle is making a spectacle of himself for the doctors. He and Rebecca, you know? They’re both so fake. Two-faced liars.”

  “What do you mean?” Clare asks. “Rebecca wouldn’t have been there. You just said you were only seven.”

  To Clare’s surprise Ginny slaps her hands to her face and begins to sob.

  “I can’t stop thinking about William. I can’t. What the fuck is wrong with people?”

  Clare collects a box of tissues from a side table and pulls out a wad. She pries one hand away from Ginny’s face and dabs at the tears. How difficult would it be at Ginny’s age, Clare thinks, to parse the details of your family’s grievances, to make sense of why the adults around you behave as they do?

  “Ginny,” Clare says. “What does the story you just told me about Markus have to do with William?”

  “Nothing,” Ginny says, snatching her hand from Clare’s grip. “Nothing.”

  “Do you think Markus could have hurt William?”

  “No.” Ginny sits up and sniffs, shaking her head briskly as if to cast off the tears. “Helen says he would never hurt a kid.”

  “Do you think Markus hurt you?”

  “Who knows? Why don’t you ask Helen?”

  “Ask Helen what?” This is a man’s voice.

  Both Clare and Ginny turn to see Jordan standing by the open elevator. Ginny wipes her tears, then shoots Clare a look as if to silence her. She bounds to Jordan and rises to her tiptoes to kiss his cheek.

  “You okay?” Jordan asks.

  “Fine.” Ginny turns her back to him. “Just hungover.”

  “I didn’t hear you come in last night,” he says.

  “It was late. I forgot the key to my dorm room.” Ginny points to Clare. “I didn’t have her number to call and let me in. Thank God for your magic elevator and its secret codes.”

  “Your haven,” he says, setting his satchel on the kitchen counter.

  “I invited our friend over for brunch but all you have is fucking cereal and sour apples.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Jordan says to Clare. “I was hoping to talk to you today.”

  “Okay,” Clare says.

  “Maybe we can head down to the office after we’re done with brunch?”

  Clare nods. In the kitchen Jordan sits at one of the bar stools. Ginny circles behind the counter and fiddles with the coffee maker.

  “Do I want to know where you went last night?” Jordan asks.

  “I ended up at this random warehouse party on the outskirts,” Ginny says. “You had to take these jagged rusty stairs to get in. The guy I was with abandoned me. I only knew one other guy there and he’s got a bit of a serial killer vibe. So I escaped.”

  “Well.” Jordan offers Clare a false smile. “I’m glad you made it here safely.”

  “It was remarkably easy to find a cab.”

  She is leaning into the fridge, so Clare cannot see the expression on Ginny’s face. She cannot read the ease with which she just lied to Jordan. A cab. Of course Ginny wouldn’t expect Clare to know that Rourke picked her up. Ginny sets out bowls and pours cereal for the three of them. Everything about her movements is so casual, so self-assured, no trace of the sadness choking her up only minutes ago, no trace of her deceptions. Ginny throws her head back in laughter at something Jordan is saying. They’re both so fake, Ginny had said about Markus, about Rebecca. Two-faced liars. To bend the truth so boldly without flinching is a skill, Clare thinks. A skill that Ginny clearly has too. A skill that seems to run in the Haines family.

  It feels like déjà vu to be sitting opposite Jordan’s desk again, this time watching him sort through papers. He wears glasses Clare isn’t certain he needs, the rims thick and black. After breakfast they’d left Ginny upstairs and taken the elevator down to the office at his request, leaving Ginny on the couch, absorbed by her phone.

  “Ginny is lucky to have you,” Clare says.

  “I’m lucky to have her.” He looks up over the rim of his glasses. “Give me a sec. I don’t mean to hold you up. I just want to run something by you.”

  “I have nowhere I need to be,” Clare says. “Not right now, anyway. At some point I’d like to go back to High River. At least to see Helen, if she’s there. Until I can figure out next steps. But I’m not in a rush.”

  “I’m headed back there shortly,” Jordan says. “You can come with Ginny and me. But next steps are actually what I want to talk to you about. Helen mentioned you might be considering other options. Ways to move on cleanly.”

  Cleanly, Clare thinks. An odd choice of word.

  “I might be,” Clare says.

  “What if we started by giving you some new ID?” Jordan says. “Nothing too final.”

  “How is new identification not final?”

  “You can choose whether you want to use it. Listen,” Jordan says. “What if you retained me
as your lawyer? No retainer or fees. No cost to you.”

  “Why do I need a lawyer?”

  “That way anything we do, anything you tell me, is bound by privilege.”

  Clare rubs at her forehead. She thinks of the rudimentary identification Malcolm gave her before she left for Blackmore and again before coming to High River, the kit he used so basic that Clare couldn’t believe the ID worked when it came time to flash it. Somehow she thinks Jordan Haines is capable of far more sophisticated work, that maybe she could benefit from having ID different from the one Malcolm provided. That maybe it would make her feel safer. Jordan slides a paper across the desk and sets a pen on top of it.

  “This is a basic retainer,” he says. “Just print and sign at the bottom.”

  What changes between them, Clare wonders, if she signs? Does it hold as a legal document if she isn’t using her real name? Jordan watches her expectantly. She hovers the pen over the paper, thinking that she has yet to write Clare O’Brien on anything, that she never took the time to practice her signature. She holds the paper down and signs it with a flourish, the last name just an O with a squiggled line jutting from it.

  “You hesitated,” Jordan says.

  “I like to read things first,” Clare says. “Before I sign.”

  Next Jordan stands and pulls down a white screen on the wall. He motions for Clare to step in front of it before collecting a camera from his desk drawer. Clare’s own camera was left behind in the trailer in Blackmore, the one keepsake she’d taken with her when she left home, and the sight of this one fills her with an overwhelming dread. She stays in her chair.

  I don’t think I need ID just yet,” Clare says.

  “You might not. But it’s good to have everything in place. A photograph. Authentic-looking ID can take some time to process.”

  “It seems too easy,” Clare says. “To just create a new person.”

  “It’s about knowing the right people,” Jordan says. “About being willing to keep secrets. I’m good at it. Janice, Philip’s wife, she was good at it too. Philip, not so much.”

  “Janice, Philip’s wife. Where is she? I thought he said the other day that they were divorced.”

  “They are. Not by his choice. She got to the end of her rope.”

  “It was good of Janice and Philip to take you in after your parents died.”

  “That was all Janice. I get the impression Philip would have preferred the child-free way of life. He was good to us. But Janice was like a mother. The only one I knew, honestly.”

  “Are they still on good terms? Despite the divorce?”

  “They aren’t on any terms,” Jordan says. “I get it. It doesn’t come naturally to Philip to think about the people in his life. He’s self-centered to a remarkable degree. I’m sure it was very hard being married to him. I think Janice kept her chin up for a lot of years, partly for our sakes. Once they adopted us, she probably felt like she couldn’t leave. And then she stayed with him for decades even after Helen, Markus, and I moved out.”

  “Why did she finally leave?” Clare asks.

  Jordan shrugs. “All I know is when she did, she ghosted him. Moved her things out, changed her cell phone number. Gone.”

  “But you know where she is?”

  If he minds the question, there is no shift in his expression to show it.

  “She’s around. It’s not like she ran away. She just cut him off. She was done. She wanted to live her own truth. But she keeps in touch with me. With Helen.”

  “Not Markus, though.”

  “I don’t know who Markus keeps in touch with. We aren’t close.”

  Clare gestures to the white screen.

  “And Sally? Did you do this for her?”

  “Helen said you might ask me that.”

  “Of course I’m asking you that,” Clare says. “It’s the whole reason I’m here. I want to know what happened to her.”

  Jordan leans back in his chair and smiles. He only seems to smile when he’s displeased.

  “I hope it doesn’t bother you that Helen shared your story with me,” he says. “The whole idea is that any story shared doesn’t go beyond these walls. Whatever you tell me, or Philip, it stays here. I became a lawyer in part because I believe that keeping secrets is a virtue. Confidentiality. You could tell me anything about your life, confess to any crime, and I’m not going to tell the police. I’m your lawyer. My job is to help you, not turn you in.”

  “Isn’t that breaking the law?” Clare asks.

  The office door swings open, startling them both. It is Philip, his face red with anger, the underarms of his shirt tinted yellow.

  “I wasn’t expecting you in today,” Jordan says. “You remember Clare?”

  “You’re something else,” Philip says.

  Jordan stands and circles his desk to shuttle Philip out of the office. But Philip won’t have it. He stops at the threshold and closes the door behind him.

  “You’re not supposed to make any promises to these people,” Philip says sharply.

  “Let’s go to your office,” Jordan says. “We can talk there. I’m headed out soon.”

  “I got a call from those lawyers today!” Philip raises his voice. “Do you know how angry they are? The dead boy could end this all.”

  What boy? Clare thinks. Surely he doesn’t mean William. Jordan squeezes Philip’s arm and yanks the office door open, guiding him down the hall. Clare can catch only a few barbed words of the muffled exchange through the wall. Stop. Can’t. Dead. When her cell phone rings, Clare fumbles for it.

  “Hello?” she answers.

  “Clare. It’s Somers. Where are you?”

  “I’m at Jordan Haines’s office.”

  “Is he there?”

  “He’s here. He’s down the hall arguing with his partner.”

  “Listen,” Somers says, “I was going to take a drive out to High River. I was wondering if you could join me.” She pauses. “Just me. Not Rourke.”

  “Sure. Should I meet you at the precinct?”

  “I’ll come grab you. In twenty or so. Is that okay?”

  “That’s fine,” Clare says. “I’ll wait outside.”

  The conversation has moved to the office next door and dropped in volume now. Clare takes the pen from Jordan’s desk and flips over the retainer to write a note on the back. Somers called. Headed back to High River with her. See you there. She sets the note on his desk and exits Jordan’s office, cutting across the empty reception area and pressing the door open to the blinding heat of the street.

  Clare. A voice.

  Her heart lunges. Who is calling her name?

  “Clare!”

  This time it’s perfectly clear. She follows the sound to the opening of an alleyway. Tucked into the shadow of the building is a figure. Malcolm. He wears the same shorts as yesterday, a golf shirt untucked, his briefcase in one hand. When she backs away he takes her by the arm and pulls her into the darkness.

  “What is wrong with you?” she asks, tearing herself free from his grasp. “What are you doing here?”

  “Listen,” he says. “We need . . . You can’t—”

  “Somers will be here in a few minutes. The cop. You’re going to blow our cover. My cover.”

  There is something desperate in Malcolm’s body language, his eyes darting, weight shifting. He steps close enough that Clare can again feel his breath on her. It smells of mints.

  “The police officer,” Malcolm says, whispering. “The other one. You can’t—”

  “Can’t what? Which police officer?”

  “I went back to the campus this morning.”

  “Why didn’t you text me?”

  “Because I wasn’t sure you’d answer me,” Malcolm says. “After last night. I saw you in the parking lot. Getting into his squad car.”

  Malcolm’s face is twisted in such a way that Clare wonders if he is holding back tears. A van turns down the alley. He presses himself back into the brick, pulling Clare closer
. Her cheeks warm at the thought of Malcolm leaning into the statue last night, their faces inches apart. Now, in the light of day, she can see the thin lines around his eyes, the small dimple that forms in his cheek with the purse of his lips.

  “The officer,” Clare says. “His name is Colin Rourke. He’s working the case. His partner is Somers.”

  The laugh that escapes Malcolm is short and shrill. He paces to the far side of the alley and back again. Clare is up against the brick, facing him.

  “Colin Rourke.” Malcolm shakes his head. “Working the case?”

  “What? Why? Malcolm.”

  He doesn’t answer. There is a puzzle in front of Clare, too many pieces still scattered, out of place. What has it been about Rourke since she first met him? His interest in her? What kind of questions has he been asking her? She presses her fingers to her temple.

  “Do you know him?” she demands. “Detective Rourke? Do you know him, Malcolm?”

  “Clare.”

  “You need to tell me.”

  “I don’t expect you to come with me,” he says.

  “Come with you? Where? Malcolm—”

  “That would be a bad idea.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not abandoning you. I know it’s not over . . .” He trails off.

  “Slow down for a second,” Clare says, her voice rising. “Please tell me what you’re talking about.”

  Malcolm steps even closer and boxes her in, his hands flat against the brick wall on either side of her. Clare can see the jagged path of the scar on his arm, the gnarled white of the tissue winding from elbow to wrist. The desperation in his eyes. She has seen it before, a man coming unhinged. Clare knows she must change her tack.

  “Listen,” Clare says. “You wanted to help me. You could have turned me in. But you didn’t.”

  Malcolm offers a small shrug without looking up.

  “And now you need to leave? But you won’t tell me why.”

  “I can’t tell you. I can’t.”

  How formal he seemed in that first week in Blackmore, how robotic, devoid of emotion. Calm. A rendering of Malcolm so inverse to the man standing before her now, this tired and raw and scared soul who looks like a child in his efforts to stay composed. She tries again.