by Amy Stuart
Remember the quiet? It went so quiet. We stood in a circle looking at each other, looking down at Charlie as he bled and barked at us. Like we knew what was coming. The ground was already collapsing beneath us, all of us trapped, even then.
My mother once said that tragedy alters a person’s constitution. She meant it in defense of my father and how he’s changed. But I look at that photograph and I see that the spite was always there. The mine changed the town, it changed our circumstances, but it didn’t change any of us. The good people left. We were never the good. This was in us all along.
SATURDAY
Clare drives with every window open, wind whipping through the car so that her hair dances. Blackmore is behind her and she is heading south, following the directions she traced with pencil onto her road map, her GPS long ago broken. Moines River Picnic Area, Hwy 117 south. After three days alone grabbing blindly at clues, searching for this stranger, Clare’s brain swirls with angry questions for Malcolm.
Malcolm will be there before her, Clare knows. Even if she’s early, he’ll be earlier. At the sign for the picnic area she slows and follows the gravel turnoff along its steep descent. There is one car in the lot, a blue sedan she can’t be certain belongs to Malcolm. She might have remembered Malcolm’s car to be silver, but then she recognizes the dream catcher dangling from the rearview mirror, the one detail she took in before she left him in the motel parking lot days ago. Clare cuts the engine and smooths the creases in her jeans with her hands. Her head aches, her stomach rolling with the queasiness of a hangover. Last night she and Sara drank the twelve beers between them and talked well past midnight.
This picnic area is shaded with a gurgling stream at one end. Moss grows in clusters on the outhouse and the tables, the sun an infrequent visitor down here, trees as thick as houses and stretching high in search of light. Clare sees Malcolm standing at a distance. He wears a gray golf shirt tucked into dark pants, a leather case in his right hand and his jacket in his left. In the days since she last saw him, Clare has already forgotten the specifics of his features, the tall and slim of him, his brown hair clipped clean and short, blue eyes, a deep scar running the length of his right forearm. A politician’s look, crisp and reserved, entirely unlike any man in Clare’s life so far. Under the canopy of trees the coolness of the shade strikes her skin.
“You found me,” Malcolm says.
“It took two hours. Like you said it would.”
“Are you okay?”
“Depends on what you consider okay.”
They choose the least mossy picnic table and sit across from each other. Malcolm sets down his jacket and opens his case, pulling out a folder to match the one he gave Clare days ago. There will be no small talk.
“You’re tense.”
“I’m not tense. I’m confused.”
Malcolm flips the folder open. “What’s confusing?”
“I don’t know what you want me to do.”
“I want you to look for Shayna Fowles. That was clear, wasn’t it?”
“I need to know why. Someone goes missing somewhere and you show up unannounced and look for them? Or contract a stranger to do it for you? That’s actually your job?”
“This is what I do, yes.”
“Who hired you?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“You mean you won’t tell me.”
“It’s not helpful information. You need an objective outlook.”
“Okay,” Clare says. “My objective outlook is that Shayna’s dead.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because she was a junkie who liked to party next to a cliff.”
“If she’d fallen, they would have found her body.”
“I went down there. That gorge is a black hole. The drop is a thousand feet. She could be anywhere along that ledge. And besides, who’s looking for her?”
Another breeze passes through. Clare digs a sweater from her bag and turns away from Malcolm to wrestle it on.
“You look tired,” Malcolm says.
“There’s no motel in Blackmore. You said there would be.”
“It still has a website.”
“Right. Well, it’s shuttered. The place is a ghost town. Half the houses are boarded up. The groceries are next to the mufflers in the hardware store.”
“The mine was the only industry,” Malcolm says. “That’s what happens. A town loses its—”
“Don’t lecture me on small towns, okay?” Clare extracts herself from the picnic table and paces back and forth. “The camera is so obviously a ruse. You think these people are dumb? They’re circling me like hawks. Fresh meat.”
Despite the shrillness of her voice, Malcolm remains dead calm, running a finger along the jagged path of his scar.
“Where did you sleep?”
“In a trailer in the middle of the woods. Right next door to the Cunninghams.”
“Whose trailer?”
“A guy named Charlie Merritt. The local villain.”
“You can sleep in your car. It’s better to keep some distance.”
“It’s hard to keep distance in a town with fifteen people.”
“The current population is four hundred.”
Clare approaches the table and sits again.
“Is Malcolm Boon your real name?”
“It’s a family name.”
“Is it the name your mother gave you when you were born?”
“Clare. Please. You accepted this job. It was your choice to go to Blackmore.”
“You said it was a job. It’s not a job. You’re feeding me to these people. I don’t understand why.”
“It is a job,” Malcolm says. “You need to be methodical. Eliminate the obvious possibilities first.”
“By finding a body at the bottom of the gorge?”
“You’re not looking for a body. Maybe she’s alive. We don’t know.”
“I need to know why! Why did you send me there?”
Malcolm sighs.
“It doesn’t help to keep asking me the same question.”
“I keep asking because you’re not answering me. You sent me there based on nothing.”
“I don’t know much about Shayna,” Malcolm says. “I know more about you than you might think.”
Clare feels chilled, unable to conjure what sort of details Malcolm might have about her, a version of her story that does not match her own. From a distance comes the groan of a truck shifting gears, picking up steam in the face of a steep climb. Malcolm presses a finger into each of his temples without closing his eyes, holding them there in silence. His inscrutability bothers her, his hollowness. What life of his came before this one?
The first time Clare saw Malcolm Boon, he was sipping coffee, his fingers to his forehead just as they are now. It was one of Clare’s first shifts at a café in a lakeside logging town two thousand miles from home, a job she’d taken to test her mettle, to try staying still for a bit. She noticed him as soon as he walked in, the stiff way he slid into a booth with a newspaper tucked under his arm.
Who is this man? she thought.
He came in the next day too, choosing the same booth. Beyond the newspaper, Clare took note of the way he touched his fingers to his mouth as he read, the way he frowned without a hint of sadness. The scar on his arm. That his hair was light brown but tinged with red when it caught the light. And then there was the way he seemed to be watching her. Something about him nudged her.
After her shift she went back to the housekeeping cottage she’d rented and lay on her bed thinking of him, this man with whom she exchanged only brief formalities about eggs and toast. Here was this man so entirely unlike the rest of the café’s clientele, the truckers and the locals, carrying the same leather briefcase he now lifts onto the picnic table.
“Are you hungry?” Malcolm produces two sandwiches and two apples. “I brought some food.”
The sandwich sags in Clare’s hand but she is rabid with hunger. She must
stop herself from tearing away the wrapping and inhaling it. As she eats Clare can feel the sugar seep into her bloodstream, her anger waning. She rifles through her bag for her folder and hands it to him.
“I’ve listed people in some semblance of order.”
Malcolm reads over her notes. He must be a decade older than her, forty or so, and up close he is not as clean shaven as he appeared on first approach.
“Can you talk me through these names?” Malcolm asks.
Her fingers pick away at the damp wood of the picnic table as she recounts the cast of Blackmore characters so far. Charlie, who hates Wilfred; Wilfred, who hates him back; Louise, suffering from dementia or out of her mind with grief or something else. Then Derek, the doctor, too clean-cut and proper; Jared, the ex-husband; and Sara, a new friend who might be of use. Clare tells him about the drugs and the squabbles over land, about her visit to the Cunningham house, every single person or crisis connecting back one way or another to Shayna. She chooses her details carefully, glossing over the particulars of last night’s gunfight, about her shoulder that still aches, that doesn’t seem to be healing, about the unwanted stabs of warmth that both Jared and Charlie seem to stir in her. Malcolm listens and nods. When she stops speaking, he takes out his notebook and begins writing, transcribing everything she’s told him onto his page.
“Have you been taking pictures?”
“Some. Not that it’s convincing anyone.”
“Have your camera with you all the time. Try to authenticate your cover.”
“That’s hard to do. They’re not stupid.”
“If you tell the same story over and over, they’ll buy it eventually.”
“She looks like me,” Clare says. “Shayna.”
“I noticed that.”
“Does that mean something to you?”
“No,” Malcolm says. “Every case is different.”
“She wanted to be a writer.”
“A lot of people want to be writers.”
“Her mother says she wrote poetry. I don’t know if details like that are relevant.”
“All details are relevant.”
From the back of Clare’s folder Malcolm pulls the newspaper she swiped from Wilfred and Louise’s house yesterday, the article about the lawsuit between neighbors.
“Where’d you get this?”
“I stole it from the Cunninghams’ coffee table.”
“Was that a good idea?”
“It wasn’t a bad idea,” Clare says. “That house is stuffed to the gills. I could have stolen the coffee table and no one would have noticed.”
“Avoid taking risks like that.”
“Risks? That’s funny. Why did I risk leaving to drive all the way here to meet you?”
“I can’t exactly show up in Blackmore and meet you for lunch.”
“That’s why e-mail was invented.”
“No electronic trail. We discussed that.”
“Except for the antique phone you gave me.”
“The cell phone I gave you is encrypted. You can’t trust other means. I like to meet in person so I know where you are.”
“Where else would I be?”
“I can’t anticipate what you’ll do,” Malcolm says.
“But you feel you know me well enough to send me in the first place.”
Malcolm says nothing.
“Well, I’m there,” Clare says. “And I can’t be there doing this so-called job if I’m here with you.”
“No,” Malcolm says. “You can’t.”
“I’m going to a party in town tonight with Sara and Charlie Merritt.”
Malcolm clears his throat, focusing again on the folder. Most of her life Clare has felt swept along by a current, someone else steering her fate, be it her father, her brother, her husband. Always a man. Now, here at this damp picnic table with Malcolm, she feels that way again, Malcolm the architect of all this, the unlikeliest of employers directing her from the sidelines. In that lumpy trailer bed Clare has lain awake for two nights, the obvious question haunting her. Why did she agree to this job? It might have been the money, the compensation Malcolm offered more than she could make in three months at the café. It might have been her mother’s voice in her head, reciting the old adage about taking the out you’re given, about trusting someone who appears willing to give you a chance. It might have been that she had no other option.
Clare takes Malcolm’s apple core and tosses it toward the creek. She removes her shoes, then walks across the springy earth to the stream, finding her footing on the wet rocks.
“That water will be cold,” Malcolm says.
“When I was a kid,” Clare says, “a boy from my town disappeared during a picnic at a conservation area. There was some kind of scene with the other kids, and this scrawny little outcast boy blew up in front of everyone. His parents took him away and locked him in the car. When they came back for him later, the car was empty. He was gone.”
“Every kid runs away once or twice,” Malcolm says.
“This kid was only ten, and the picnic was in the middle of nowhere. By a lake surrounded by thousands of acres of dense bush. My mom would take me and my brother up to join the search lines. Could’ve been one of you, she said to us. I remember staring so hard at the ground, looking for some color, a shoelace or whatever, wanting so badly to be the one to find something. After a week some hikers claimed to have spotted the boy from a distance, but he ran away from them. Sooner or later the search-and-rescue team gave up, and after two weeks everyone but his family stopped looking.”
Clare pauses.
“And?” Malcolm says.
“I begged my mom to take me back but she said it was over, the story was over, the boy was dead. No one could survive that long in those woods. Then September came and one morning the kid’s baby sister woke up and said she knew where he was. The parents drove her into the woods and she walked right to him. He was right there, right under her feet. The poor kid was naked and curled up barely two hundred feet from the picnic area.”
“Dead?” Malcolm asks.
“Alive. Emaciated, but alive.”
“Sometimes you’re certain they’ll turn up dead,” Malcolm says. “And then they don’t.”
Malcolm’s shoulders are bent forward, his arms folded. What an unfamiliar dynamic this is, Clare and Malcolm. She is at once electrified and troubled by it, angered even, wavering between purpose and dread, a pawn in a game she doesn’t yet know how to play. Clare fumbles back into her shoes and moves to swipe her folder off the table.
“I’d like you to give me back my gun,” she says.
“Why?”
“The trailer’s in the middle of the woods. The cell reception isn’t reliable. I have to walk around waving my phone to get your messages.”
“You feel unsafe?”
“Everyone in Blackmore owns a gun. It’s that kind of town.”
“Do you think it makes you safer?”
“Do you know anything about guns? Because I do. And it makes me feel safer.”
“I’d rather hang on to it for now,” Malcolm says. “As we agreed.”
“We didn’t agree, actually.”
Clare jams the folder under her arm.
“If you don’t hear from me, assume I’m curled up in the woods. Assume I’m dead.”
“Clare.” Malcolm watches as she searches through her bag for her car keys.
“I don’t have to go back there, you know.”
“I’m not forcing you. It’s your choice.”
Clare’s jaw clenches. He is not physically forcing her, but Clare can’t be certain what he would do, whom he would call, if she backed out now. The illusion of choice, lest she forget she is under Malcolm Boon’s thumb.
“Shayna’s story,” Clare says. “It’s not the same as mine.”
“You don’t know her story yet.”
A crow descends from the trees and plucks at one of the apple cores. Clare feels antsy, wired up. Malcolm meets her ga
ze with a steadiness that rankles her. What choice does she have but to trust him?
“Where will you be?”
“Not far,” Malcolm says.
“What will you be doing?”
“Whatever I can. Whatever might be useful.”
“Here’s something,” Clare says. “Charlie Merritt is the town drug dealer. He must have outside channels. Dig on that.”
Malcolm jots something down, then stands, putting his folder back in his briefcase, the brown leather of it gouged and scratched. Until six months ago, Clare had never ventured more than a few hours beyond her hometown. Until this week, she’d never seen a mountain, and now she’s cloistered among them, at work for Malcolm Boon. Clare closes her eyes to steady herself. The image of Shayna’s body strikes her, dead and coiled over a rock, or facedown on the ground, unmoving. Even when she opens her eyes she cannot shake it. Clare expects Malcolm to budge, to walk her to her car, but he doesn’t. He simply stands there, hands in his pockets. Without another word, Clare turns to leave.
By the time the dash lights flicker out Clare is almost on the far side of Blackmore, almost at the foot of Charlie’s driveway. The clock fades in and out. It must be the alternator. The car dies just as she rolls past the house. When she cranks the keys, the engine will not turn over. Clare sets the gear to neutral and gets out to push it in a crooked line toward her parking spot. The effort renders her breathless and sweaty. Once she reaches the trees she gathers her bag and locks the doors. She cannot be angry at this car for finally dying, this car that has carried her so far without complaint.
No one else is here. When she left this morning both Sara’s and Charlie’s cars were still parked side by side, but now they are gone. The dog is gone too, its leash limp across the dirt of the driveway. Sara will be here in an hour to pick her up, their plan to visit the mine solidified as they said their late good-byes last night.
Toward the Cunningham house some movement catches Clare’s eye. Only a few hundred feet and a thin and trembling line of birch trees buffers the lots between these warring neighbors. Through them Clare can see Louise with her hands on her hips. The jeans she wears are smudged with mud at the knees, gray hair loose around her face. Clare approaches and fishes her camera from her bag. Before Louise sees her Clare clicks the shutter, a picture of Louise, then another of the Cunningham house. This time, she will ask her about Shayna.