Still Mine (25 page)

“How long have you been here?” Clare thinks of her naked dash from the shower to the trailer.

“I just arrived.”

“I haven’t heard from you.”

“I’ve sent you four messages.”

“I didn’t get them. There’s no clear signal. I told you that.”

“I came here to get your things. It’s time to extract you.”

“Extract me? You said I had three more days.”

“I’ve changed my mind. It’s gotten risky. You look like you haven’t slept.”

“I keep seeing her.”

“Who?”

“Shayna. I need to make sure Louise is . . .” Clare trails off.

“Did you take something? Your eyes don’t look right.”

“Please don’t grill me.”

“You have no restraint, Clare. Jesus.”

“I’d love to see how you do it, Malcolm. How you show restraint.”

“It’s no longer safe for you,” Malcolm says. “Do you understand that?”

A shrill laugh escapes Clare. “Was it ever safe?”

“I couldn’t have predicted certain—”

“You did this,” Clare says, her voice dropping. “You brought me here. You knew about me, didn’t you? He told you about me.”

Though he evades all questions, Clare has learned one small detail about Malcolm, the way he uses simple gestures to end a conversation. He stands and fiddles with the hot plate, then sets the kettle upon it. Next to him on the counter are the balled-up photographs. Clare cannot stop fidgeting. With the tea made, Malcolm squeezes back into the banquette.

“Sit,” he says.

“No.”

Malcolm cups his hands around the warmth of his mug. Calm.

“How long have we known each other?” he asks.

“A week.”

“Eight days. I sent you here. You’re right. I did. But now you’re refusing to leave.”

“My head is full of things,” Clare says. “I’m closing in. I wonder about Derek. Charlie too. He’s trying to take hold of me. This morning I saw Wilfred Cunningham in the gorge. He was asleep against a tree with a shotgun on his lap. I really think Shayna’s mother knows where she is.”

“Did you spend the night at the gorge?”

“Why does that matter?”

“You’re being reckless.”

“I’m being thorough. And I’m not leaving yet.”

“You work for
me
.” There is a stark change to Malcolm’s tone.

“I don’t have to work for you anymore. I’ll do it myself.”

“It’s too dangerous.” Malcolm pulls his cell phone from his pocket and unlocks it. “Pack your things.”

“What are you doing?”

“Checking the time.”

“There’s a clock on the counter.”

“I can’t be sure it’s right,” Malcolm says.

“You’re threatening me. That’s what you’re doing. You’ll call him.”

“This isn’t about him,” Malcolm says. “We agreed on how this would go and now you’re not complying. I made a mistake sending you here.”

Since that snowy night when she drove away from home, Clare has taken to counting. In hours at first, and then in days. Two hundred and six days since she pulled the bedsheet off that car in the field and drove away. Two hundred and six in between. One hundred and forty motel rooms, sixty nights in her car, and six in Blackmore. Two hundred and six days worth of distance, erasable by a single phone call. Malcolm stands and puts on his coat.

“Sometimes the job doesn’t get finished,” he says. “I know that. I’ve been doing this long enough. Sometimes you find nothing. Often, you find nothing. You don’t know that yet.”

Clare’s eyes stay on Malcolm’s hand, its light grip on the phone. Then she lunges and snatches it from him.

“Jesus, Clare!” Malcolm says. “What are you doing?”

Clare shoulders the trailer door open and jumps outside. She drops Malcolm’s cell phone on the rocks of the fire pit and lifts her foot to smash it. But before she can do it Malcolm is behind her, his arms around her in a bear hug. Her feet lift off the ground. She thrashes.

“Put me down!”

“You’re out of control,” Malcolm says, perfectly calm, even now.

Clare throws her head so that it butts him hard in the nose. He releases her and falls backwards. The blood runs from his nose and down the sleeves of his jacket. Clare picks up the cell phone and runs to the edge of the clearing.

“Please don’t,” Malcolm says.

“I’ll kill you before I’ll let you call him!”

“You’ll kill me?”

“You know nothing about me,” Clare says. “You are not my savior.”

There might be thirty feet between them, and the rage escapes Clare as quickly as it surged. A swell of vomit fills her mouth. She retches at the foot of the closest tree. Then she slumps to the ground and jabs at Malcolm’s cell phone. His contact list is empty.

“You don’t have it in here. His number’s not here.”

“I learned my lesson about storing names or numbers in my phone. Yours is memorized.”

“You made it seem like you were going to call him.”

“You aren’t seeing straight,” Malcolm says. “Whatever you’ve taken has made you paranoid.”

Malcolm tilts his head back. The blood abates. It always amazes Clare how fast the human body reacts to blood loss, the clotting, the self-preservation. She jabs at his cell phone again. The lock screen has come on. There is no photo on his wallpaper, just the swirling orange background, the factory settings. His phone the same as everything else about him, revealing nothing. Clare steadies herself and walks over to him.

“Here.” She drops the phone in his lap. “I’ll get you something for your nose.”

In the trailer Clare gags over the sink. A cold sweat wraps her. She gargles to clear her throat, then finds a cloth and some ice from the small fridge. Outside, Malcolm sits in one of the lawn chairs. Clare hands him the cloth. He touches it to his face and winces.

“I owe you some explanation,” Malcolm says. “I’ll tell you. I’ve corresponded with him.”

“Jason?”

He nods, the ice pressed to his nose.

“When?”

“He’s been keeping in regular touch.”

“Did you meet him in person?”

“No. I use e-mail with clients.”

“What did he give you to go on?”

“Photos, mostly. Some basic history. Your features. Copies of your identification. Tendencies.”

Tendencies. Clare can guess what that means.

“Did I leave an easy trail?”

“Not at all. It took me a long while to find you.”

“But you did.”

“I went to seventy-six motels before someone recognized your photo. Eighteen days of driving in a circle, an expanding radius from your house. Finally this motel attendant told me he’d seen you. Maybe four months earlier, he said. Remembered your face, said you were pretty. I paid him a hundred bucks to go back through the records. Find me a name. After that, it got easier. I knew you’d gone west. You changed your last name a few times, but you never changed your first. And always the O. The O names.”

The choices of O names had been plentiful. She had counted on the name Clare to be common enough to go undetected.

“You disappeared mid-December,” Malcolm says.

“I went for a run. A storm was coming.”

“There was no thaw until spring. They thought they’d find a body. Figured on a hit-and-run, worst case a domestic or a kidnapping. There were news stories here and there. Search parties organized by family and friends.”

Clare can hope Christopher would have been the one to trudge through snow, searching for her, maybe even her father alongside, or Grace and her husband. She feels the heat of tears in her eyes.

“But they never did,” Malcolm says.

“Find a body.”

“No.”

“And you never talked to anyone else?” Clare asks.

“You mean your family? No. He instructed me not to.”

Another wave of nausea passes over Clare.

“Why did it have to be so elaborate?” Malcolm asks. “Why not just leave?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think I could. I thought he’d kill me.”

“Did you want them to suspect him?”

She’d imagined it more than once in the months since she left, Jason finally faced with questions he’d eluded for so long.
What did you do to your wife?
Clare angles the other lawn chair and sits facing Malcolm.

“I just wanted to escape,” she says. “He needed to be fooled. Thrown off course.”

“I don’t think he was fooled,” Malcolm says. “I think he understood very plainly what you did.”

“I knew he’d come. One way or another.”

“You have the instincts. They’re there.”

“I’m not so sure. I thought I saw him in the woods. At the gorge.”

“He’s thousands of miles away.”

“I can’t shake it. He’s chasing me.”

“Something bothered me,” Malcolm says. “Your husband. The case. It bothered me from the start. There was something off. I thought I might find you dead. Suicide, maybe. He was clearly . . . ill-intentioned.”

“So? Surely he’s not the first husband who hired you to find his wife. You didn’t know me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“So why’d you hire me instead of turning me in?”

Malcolm breaks eye contact.

“Why did you hire me?”

“It felt familiar. That same feeling you have here. You reminded me of someone.”

Clare straightens up. “Who?”

“She’s long gone now. It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“No.”

“Where’d you get that scar?” Clare asks, pointing to his arm.

Malcolm collects his ruined jacket and unravels the cloth, casting the ice into the fire pit. The lighter fluid from the other night still leans against the rocks. Malcolm lifts the can and shakes it, the contents sloshing. Still no response, always the evasion. He does not look at Clare. She will not press him.

“I need one more day,” Clare says finally.

“Go inside and pack your things,” he says. “I can take them with me now.”

“I don’t want any of my things.”

“Then leave them here,” Malcolm says, lifting the lighter fluid. “Burn them. You can’t leave any traces.”

“Okay,” Clare says.

“One more day,” Malcolm says. “That’s it.”

For the first time Malcolm appears tired, defeated, slumped back in the chair. She does not understand Malcolm Boon. The way he retains his calm no matter what, the way he shows Clare a strange loyalty because an old photograph of her struck something in him. He could have turned her in to Jason. That was his job. And instead he hired her knowing nothing of her ability to do this job, whether she could be trusted. No small thing would compel him to take such a risk on her, to keep her from Jason, even now. It must have been no small thing.

T
he first place Clare will go is the Cunningham house. The birch trees that split the lots look fifty years old, the bark of their trunks silvery and peeling. Clare cuts through from the Merritt driveway, carrying her backpack, only her gun, her phone, and her camera within it. Everything else she’s abandoned at the trailer, the photographs burned at the center of the fire pit. Clare hovers at the tree line. Wilfred’s truck is not in the drive. She must work to steady her breath before approaching the house and climbing the porch.

Cupping her hands against the door pane, Clare can see down the hall and into the kitchen, their tea mugs from how many mornings ago still on the tray on the table. She presses down on the handle. It releases but the door doesn’t budge. There doesn’t seem to be a deadbolt, so Clare puts her shoulder into it and the door gives readily, swinging open and banging against the foyer wall.

Trespassing is against the law, Charlie said. Wilfred could return with his gun. Clare scans the property one more time, closing her eyes to check for far-off sounds, the rumbling of an engine. Nothing. She steps inside and closes the door behind her.

“Louise?” Clare calls. She leans back against the door and listens to the silence.

She’ll be waiting for me at home, Louise said.

Clare’s head swirls with all the puzzle pieces collected in the days since she last stood in this front hall, Louise’s cryptic pleas, Sara and Derek and Charlie. All the fingers pointed at each other. It’s occurred to me to ransack their house, Jared said at the gorge.

Focus, Clare thinks. The final piece of the puzzle is here.

The floor creaks with her steps. She moves to the bottom of the stairs.

“Shayna?” she calls, slowly climbing. “Shayna?”

The second-floor layout matches that of Clare’s childhood home, the standard farmhouse with small dormer bedrooms jutting off a center hall. The first room must be Wilfred and Louise’s, a double wrought-iron bed unmade, clothes strewn across the floor, the vinyl blind lowered so that even in bright daylight the room is dark. An old shoe-box television sits on the dresser. When Clare breathes she feels the particles from this stale air enter her throat and lungs. She must lean against the door for a moment to stop a spin that overtakes her.

The second room is smaller, its single bed neatly made and pressed into the corner, the wooden dresser buckled with age and topped with creams and a hairbrush. The mirror on the wall is warped and gives Clare a warbled look, stretching her eyes to twice their size. Clare examines the half-full bottle of painkillers, then braces to pull the top drawer open. A check out the window. Nothing. The dresser is empty but for a few stray shirts. In the closet is a stack of boxes and a suitcase. It would have been months since Shayna left Jared and moved home, but the room has an air of transience, much as a motel room would.

Clare peers under the mattress and yanks up the corner of the rug. A cloud of dust poofs out as it drops back in place against the floorboards. If she is anything like me, Clare thinks, Shayna would keep things hidden in plain sight. Just as Clare did with the money, the fake ID, all in that tin on a shelf in the pantry. Jason made it a regular practice to go through her drawers and the boxes of mementos in her closet. He probably even tapped at the walls, looking for hidden compartments, searched her coat pockets and the mattress in the spare bedroom. But never would he have figured on the pantry, so out in the open as to be the best hiding place of all.

She squeezes the pillow and hits on something hard. Clare pulls out a large zipper bag. A mishmash of pills is divided into smaller bags within it, some pharmaceutical and others homemade looking like the one Charlie gave her. And then prescription bottles, eight of them, all empty. S
HAYNA
E
LIZABETH
F
OWLES
, the labels read. Methadone hydrochloride. The prescription dated a month ago. In the corner, the prescribing doctor’s name: D
R
. D. P. M
EYER
. Clare opens the bottle and smells it. A drug meant to help wean the addicted. For years Grace fought for the right to prescribe it, then begged Clare to take it. Clare puts one of the prescription bottles in her pocket and tucks the bag back into the pillowcase.