Still Here

by Amy Stuart

  For a moment, neither of them speaks. Germain sucks on the bone in a way that turns Clare’s stomach.

  “And this stranger,” he continues. “You, I mean. You claim you didn’t know who he was. That you had no idea that this guy you were apparently working with was a suspect in one of the biggest missing persons cases Lune Bay has ever seen.”

  “Lune Bay isn’t exactly cosmopolitan. And he gave me a fake name.”

  “He gave you his real first name.”

  “There are a lot of Malcolms in the world,” Clare says.

  “You think? Johns, maybe. Michaels. But Malcolm?” Germain scratches his head, feigning contemplation. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Yeah.” Clare rips open a wet napkin and uses it to rub her hands clean. “I guess we’ve both had our failings with—”

  “Don’t you read the news?” Germain interrupts. “Most PIs should. Zoe Westman is somewhat of a household name, at least around here. Not to mention her father was shot to death in a restaurant. Jack Westman? Surely you’d heard of him. One of the biggest developers on the coast? Lots of money coming in and out of strange places. A business partner in jail for tax fraud. Your friend Malcolm was in deep with what is essentially a local mafia family. A lot of people would have recognized him from the papers.”

  “Not where I’m from,” Clare says. “And he’s obviously good at going undetected, or you’d have caught him by now.”

  Germain frowns, allowing for a pause in the tempo of back and forth. He is not wrong, Clare knows. After his true identity was revealed to her, it amazed Clare how much information on Malcolm she could find online. A better sleuth probably would have uncovered Malcolm’s backstory, the Westman connection, without his full name at hand. Clare’s leg bounces under the table. At one point in this exchange, she’d felt almost confident. But now the effort to wrest control of the conversation is rankling her. He might be young, but Germain is a natural at cutting her down to size.

  “Look,” Clare says, meeting his eyes with as steady a gaze as she can manage. “I’m the first to say that I’m new at this work. But I’m good at it. I’ve had success. I won’t get in your way. I can fly under your radar, or maybe we can help each other.”

  The waitress returns and removes the platter and their dishes. Clare watches Germain closely as he chats with her, his easy smile, the effusive way he compliments the food, touches the waitress’s arm. He knows his charm is a useful tool, a way to get him what he wants.

  “You were saying,” Germain says once the waitress has left. “About flying under my radar? I appreciate that, I do. But I think I’d prefer to keep you square in my bull’s-eye.”

  “Or we just avoid each other altogether,” Clare says, arms crossed. “I’ve got other people I can align with.”

  “You mean Austin Lantz?” Germain offers a hearty laugh and crosses his arms behind his head. “The self-declared expert on the Westman family. That’s funny.”

  Clare’s jaw tightens. “Were you spying on me?”

  “No. You called me, remember? He’s just the obvious guy to align with. It’s almost a cliché. The obsessed reporter.”

  “He doesn’t have the best things to say about you,” Clare says.

  “Because it bothers him that I won’t give him the time of day,” Germain says.

  “He claims other women have gone missing too,” Clare says. “From Lune Bay. That it’s not just Zoe.”

  “Right.” Germain leans forward. “That’s one of my favorite conspiracy theories. Of course he’s peddling it. Finds the name of a few women who had tenuous connections to each other—which everyone in Lune Bay has, by the way—women who left town for whatever reason. Maybe their overbearing parents filed a report because their daughters stopped taking their calls. And Austin tries to tack them on to the Westman case. Man, he’d love that to be true. He wants this all to be one big monster plot. Did he tell you that he used to be Jack Westman’s personal driver?”

  “No,” Clare says. “He didn’t.”

  “Yeah. See? So his whole ‘reporter’ thing is a little much. He’d tell you he was only driving to put himself through journalism school. Still, there’s a bit of shitting where he used to eat going on, isn’t there? He quit right before Jack Westman was killed. His brother hit the jackpot in the tech business, and now he funds Austin’s little reporter escapades.”

  Clare fiddles with her napkin. She does not want to feel daunted by Germain, outfoxed.

  “Well,” she says. “That’s good intel. Thank you.”

  “We can be cordial, can’t we?”

  When the bill arrives Germain hands the waitress his credit card without looking at it. He smiles, offering a détente between them, a declaration of his own victory. Clare knows her silence does her no favors, that Germain is all but toying with her now. But her exchanges with Austin turn over in her head, the whiskey that may have dulled her. She is angry at herself once again.

  “Where are you staying?” Germain asks.

  “Downtown.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s not hard for me to find out where.”

  “The Caledonian. Not easy to find cheap digs around here.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he says, sliding out of the booth. “Clare O’Kearney. I hope we can keep talking.”

  “I do too.”

  Germain saunters to the front to engage the waitress again. Clare watches him. She’d figured on the upper hand in this exchange, but even a relative rookie like Germain is still more experienced than she is. The food has her tired though it is still early morning. She feels flustered, uncertain. But the day is young, and the list of leads to follow grows longer and longer. She must dig deeper on the Westmans. She must keep her focus at all costs, avoid distractions like the whiskey last night. As she follows Germain back through the restaurant and out to his car, Clare reminds herself to remain vigilant. You can still slip, she thinks. You are still you, and you always will be.

  A wrought iron fence with a rounded gate marks the entry to St. James Cemetery. The online search for the graves had been a simple task. Take a walk down to St. James Cemetery, Austin said to her last night. Though he was being facetious, Clare needs a chance to regroup, to stand in the morning sun. She follows the narrow road down a winding hill, the older gravestones towering high and tilted, the carved lettering mossy and faded. By the time Clare circles to the bottom of the hill the headstones are no longer stone but dark marble, the dates of death flashing white with their more recent etching. She consults the screenshot of the map on her phone, then takes a final left before spotting it.

  HAYES. ALISON, BRIAN, CAMILLE.

  It feels almost intimate to be standing here. The dates of death are all the same, Malcolm’s parents and his eleven-year-old sister killed in a plane crash twenty-five years ago, when Malcolm was just a teenager. Clare reaches down and rests her hand on the cool marble of the headstone. She tries to envision Malcolm here, as a young man or as his current self, the grief that might overcome him. Or maybe the tragedy struck at an age where Malcolm went numb instead. Stone cold, Austin said. It tells Clare something about how little she knows Malcolm that she cannot predict what his reaction to such a loss might have been. She takes a photograph of the gravestone, then looks to the map again and circles back to the path in search of her next stop.

  It’s quiet here. Clare takes a deep breath. Her mother had not wanted a burial in a place like this. She’d asked for cremation instead, her remains to be sprinkled into the creek that marked the far boundary of their farm. But the urn sat unattended for so long on the mantelpiece that Clare knew her father, wrapped in his own obstinate grief, would not be able to bring himself to honor his dead wife’s wishes. So one day, the October before Clare left, she’d gone to her childhood home in the late daylight hours when she knew her father would be in the fields. She hooked the urn under her arm and walked the path of sheared grass to the trees and then the creek. Clare remembers how badly her head hurt as she worked t
o unscrew the urn’s lid, those early days of sobriety leaving her shaky. What she remembers most is the way her mother’s ashes dropped from the urn as she overturned it, not in a wispy trail but in chunks that only dissipated into blackness when they hit the cold water of the creek.

  In the far corner from Malcolm’s family, Clare finds the next plot in her search.

  JACK WESTMAN

  AGED 62 YEARS

  ALL THAT IS LOVED IS NOT LOST

  Jack Westman. Murdered while celebrating his wife’s birthday at a local restaurant. Next to his grave is that of his wife, Colleen, dead of heart failure a year later. Was it an act of marital defiance on the part of Zoe’s mother, Clare wonders, to be buried in a separate plot adjacent to her husband? Clare crouches before Jack Westman’s headstone and traces the words with the tip of her finger. Someone planted perennial flowers at the base of the graves, then left them to be choked by weeds.

  Up the hill a stream of cars follows a hearse down the road. A woman walking alongside them wears a flowery sundress under a cardigan, not an outfit for a funeral. When Clare locks eyes with her, the woman cuts off the path. Clare wants to move on, to walk away, but her feet are bolted in place, sunken into the grass softened by last night’s rain. On approach the woman lifts her hands and smiles to disarm Clare. Clare searches her face for something familiar. The woman is tall, her dark hair tied back in a tight ponytail. She walks straight to Clare.

  “Are you Clare O’Kearney?” she asks.

  A wave of dread overtakes Clare. “Yes. Did you follow me here?”

  “Kind of. Yes, I did. I’m not trying to freak you out. I don’t… I’m not a threat, I swear.”

  “Tell me who you are,” Clare says.

  “Kavita Spence.” She bites at her fingernails. This woman is afraid. Anxious. “I was with Charlotte Westman at the house last night. When she confronted you. Well, I was up the road in the car. We followed you after to the Caledonian. I came back to the hotel early this morning and waited for you to come out. Charlotte doesn’t know—”

  “Why are you following me?”

  “I’m sorry. I should have said something to you at the hotel. But I was too freaked-out. I was afraid you’d make a scene. Please. Can we talk? I just want to talk to you.”

  “After you tell me exactly who you are,” Clare says.

  Kavita points to the gravestone in front of Clare.

  “I was working at the restaurant the night Jack Westman was shot.”

  A silence hangs between them for a moment as Clare absorbs this revelation. Some of the articles had mentioned the bystanders, the bartender and restaurant owner, Roland Song. Waitresses, hostesses, other patrons. But never by name.

  “We can talk here,” Clare says.

  “Okay,” Kavita says. “Okay. Sure.”

  “Where is Charlotte now?”

  “She doesn’t know I’m here,” Kavita says. “I knew Zoe from school. She got me a job at Roland’s restaurant. Charlotte and I, in the past few years, I can’t really explain it. We’ve banded together, I guess. Misery-loves-company kind of thing. But I feel like she’s losing it. And when she got back into the car yesterday she threw this at me.” Kavita pauses and extracts Clare’s crumpled business card from the pocket of her cardigan. “Made it seem like you were a problem we needed to deal with. But I kept thinking last night, What if you’re not? What if you might actually be able to help us?”

  Us? Clare thinks. This woman is so different in demeanor from Charlotte Westman, so unsure of herself. She wraps her cardigan tight and shivers despite the sun. Clare directs them to a nearby stone bench. They sit at the greatest distance from each other that they can muster.

  “I’m here to find the truth about Malcolm Hayes,” Clare says. “Zoe’s husband. Do you know him?”

  “I didn’t know him well. I met him a few times. He was pretty quiet. Always seemed preoccupied. Or sad.”

  “Okay. And you were working the night of the shooting?”

  “Yes,” Kavita says. “Malcolm wasn’t there.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Kavita presses her hands into prayer and pins them between her knees, shoulders hunched.

  “I was back in school doing my master’s degree,” she says. “I needed a few shifts a week somewhere to cover rent. This was maybe my fourth or fifth shift. I’d literally been working there for two weeks. I was standing maybe twenty feet away when he was shot. The shooter walked right past me on his way in and on his way out.”

  “Do you remember any details about him?”

  “The police interviewed me for a few hours the night of the shooting. I’ve probably been interviewed another five times since. Every time they put a new cop on the case, they call me again. I tell them everything I remember.”

  “Which is what?”

  Kavita grimaces, then shakes her head. “It’s all really messed up, right? I had a therapist once who told me I’ll never remember it exactly right. That’s the nature of trauma, she says. You become this unreliable narrator in your own story. So that’s the problem. The last cop? Germain? He accused me of changing my story. But I’m not changing anything. My brain has fucked it all up. It’s changing the story for me.”

  Kavita speaks too quickly, her voice rising, so that the people gathered for the burial up the hill begin to turn in search of the commotion. Clare wants to reach out and touch her elbow, tell her to lower her voice. But she knows better. The witnesses change their story every time you sit them down, Germain said this morning. Maybe, Clare thinks now. But not all shifting stories are by design, Clare thinks as she watches Kavita. Sometimes memory does it for you.

  “You say you think I can help,” Clare says.

  “Charlotte thinks you’re a problem. But I feel like a set of fresh eyes can’t be bad, right? Zoe’s been gone for what, two years?”

  “Eighteen months,” Clare corrects.

  “I just think there are answers out there. No one seems to care much anymore.”

  Austin’s words from last night return to Clare, the exposé, the other women he claims have gone missing from Lune Bay too. Not the kind of women who’d raise serious alarms with the police. Clare’s cursory search this morning brought her no leads. She thinks to ask Kavita about them now, but she appears so tightly wound, trembling, that Clare must parse the questions.

  “Do you think Charlotte is worried about Zoe?” Clare asks.

  “I don’t know. She’s lost in her own problems. If Zoe is dead, if she can prove that Zoe is dead, then I guess she inherits that stupid house. Charlotte is beyond feeling the pain. She’s focused on herself.”

  “Okay,” Clare says, soothing. “But you care. About the shooting going unsolved. About Zoe.”

  Kavita scratches hard at her arms. “Zoe didn’t have much of a soul. She was trying to keep the family business afloat, making some pretty bad choices. Honestly, this isn’t about her for me. The shooting fucked up my life. It took everything from me. I know what I saw. I just want the story to be straight. I want to go speak to Roland.”

  “You mean the restaurant owner? Roland Song?”

  “Yes,” Kavita says, biting again at her fingernails.

  “Why?”

  “I tried to talk to him once, a while ago. To sort out the truth, or the facts or whatever. Compare stories. He was there too. Behind the bar. I’ve tried to talk to Charlotte about it, but she’s a steel trap. She won’t say anything. She just tells me to drop it. I tried to talk to Zoe too before she disappeared. They were all just shut down. Or they’d contradict the way I remembered things. They’d say the shooter came in from the back, but I know that he walked right past me. I guess they just made me feel crazy. And Roland, he just brushes me off. And now it’s been five years. People don’t care anymore. They’ve moved on. But I just need some kind of closure. Even if it just means saying my piece. So I’m hoping you’ll come with me. Maybe Roland will act differently if someone else is there.” Kavita pauses and lo
oks to the sky. “Like an intermediary or something. In case I get all turned around.”

  “Okay,” Clare says, checking the time on her phone. “When?”

  “Now?”

  What a strange morning, Clare thinks, eyes back to the gravestones. This woman following her here, more a crumb dropped in her lap than a threat. Or perhaps, Clare wonders, some kind of decoy.

  Kavita gestures to the graves. “I’ve come here before,” she says. “I look at the stones and let the scene replay. And it does, like a dream. And I never know if I’m adding new details, making things up, or remembering. It’s not like standing on top of this grave is going to clue me in to something I’ve missed along the way. Like the spirits are going to whisper their secrets. But whatever. What else can I do? The truth is impossible.”

  The truth. For a moment, they sit side by side on the bench, absorbed in their own thoughts. A scene comes back to Clare, a restaurant with Malcolm shortly after he’d offered her a second case to work. Clare sat groggy at the table as a waitress filled their coffees and brought them eggs. What she remembers most is feeling surprised by how chatty Malcolm seemed that morning. He was outlining the details of the next case. If I’ve learned anything in this line of work, he said, it’s that memory is the enemy of truth. People will remember the same moment in completely different ways. So you gamble on who to trust.

  “Can I ask you something?” Clare says. “Are you scared?”

  “I am,” Kavita says, a crack in her voice. “I can’t stop being scared.”

  “Of what?”

  For a moment Kavita says nothing, her eyes glassy. Then she inhales deeply, righting herself, wiping a finger under her lashes to gather any tears before they fall.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Everything.”

  “Are you afraid of the Westman family?”

  “No. Not if Charlotte is all that’s left of it.”

  All that’s left of it. What Kavita might mean is that this fear hinges on whether Zoe is still alive.

  “Okay,” Clare says. “Okay. I’d like to help you. I can try to help you. I’ve got some time this morning. We can go to Roland’s.”