Still Mine

by Amy Stuart

  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.

  The 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. SHAYNA ELIZABETH FOWLES, the labels read. Methadone hydrochloride. The prescription dated a month ago. In the corner, the prescribing doctor’s name: DR. D. P. MEYER. 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.

  At the bottom of the stairs she returns to the kitchen, its floor tracked with dry mud. By the cold room Clare kicks at a garbage bag, then pats it down and wedges her finger into the knot to loosen it. She lifts it onto one of the kitchen chairs and opens it. Clean clothing, a large bottle of water. A freezer bag with an apple and a banana, a granola bar, powdered milk. A pill bottle, unlabeled and half full, its contents mixed. Some of the pills look like vitamins, others like basic pain medication.

  From this new vantage Clare can see the door to the cellar. A small padlock is hooked over the latch but not fastened. She reties the garbage bag and returns it to its place. She thinks of the cellar at her house, the captivity, the darkness that stretched from hours to days. A cellar off the kitchen, just like this one.

  He can’t just lock you in, Louise said.

  Clare sets down her backpack and slides the padlock off the latch, setting it on the counter. Behind the door is a bare lightbulb. She tugs its chain. The stairs match those in her home, crooked and wooden, uneven in rise and tread. She yanks the door hard so it stays closed behind her, and then she descends to the dampness of the cellar.

  A square window gives enough light for Clare to find the bulb at the center of the room. The ceiling is low enough that she can reach up and touch it with a bent arm. When she pulls the cord, the bulb makes a popping sound before the light flashes on. The cellar is tidy, boxes lined along one wall, a neatly sorted worktable under the window. Clare takes a flashlight from the worktable and twists it on. She grips the hammer too. On the wall is a pattern of Post-it notes, each one bearing a name.

  Jared F, Andy P, Roger W, Wilfred C.

  Eighteen names. The men in the mine chamber, their month-long seating arrangement re-created. The far end of the cellar is in shadow. Clare shines the flashlight into it. A black hole, a crawl space.

  “Shayna,” she whispers into the dead space. “Shayna?”

  The space is no more than three feet high, reaching from chest height to the cellar ceiling. It stretches ten feet under what must be the cold room. The flashlight lands on something bright. Clare moves and reaches for it.

  A map. Laminated. She struggles to unroll it with the flashlight tucked under her arm. She can see it’s a plan of the mine. T
wo exits are circled madly in red, the shaft and then the egress, a tunnel aiming down the mountain so that its end point lies beyond the boundaries of the map.

  Above her, the floorboards creak. Clare clicks off the flashlight and presses herself against the nearest wall. Someone is walking overhead. Clare listens, arranging the footsteps against the layout of the main floor. In the hallway. Up the stairs. Nothing. Down the stairs. Into the kitchen, right overhead. Clare tightens her hold on the hammer. She cannot confront him now, startle him. A trespasser. She clutches the map and holds her breath.

  Then the footsteps are gone. Clare races to the tiny window facing the front of the house. She can make out Wilfred’s form as he walks to his truck. He carries the garbage bag. She drops the flashlight and the hammer in place, then creeps up the stairs and presses the cellar door open. The light is on in the kitchen. Out the window Wilfred’s truck reverses in a semicircle, then starts up the driveway. Clare fumbles with the padlock until it hooks back into place, then picks up her backpack. She darts through the dining room to the picture window. At the end of the driveway the brake lights come on. He turns left. North.

  Clare pulls her phone from her backpack and types a message to Malcolm.

  I know where she is.

  Bursting out the door, Clare is running.

  There is the crunch of wheels on gravel, a truck on the Cunningham driveway. Clare turns and sprints for the barn. The truck door slams behind her. How many times has she dreamed of him chasing her? Did Wilfred turn around? Does he see her?

  “Hey!” a voice calls. “Clare! Where are you going?”

  Clare stops and bends forward to catch the sob in her throat. Steve.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Steve asks, approaching.

  “You scared the life out of me. I thought you were Wilfred.”

  “You broke in?”

  “No. I was . . . I came here to . . . What are you doing here?”

  “Louise Cunningham went missing from the hospital last night.”

  Clare feels her blood funnel downward. She is certain she will faint.

  “You took off her restraints, didn’t you?” Steve says.

  All Clare manages is a slow shake of her head.

  “You’ve made a real mess, you know. Sara came home this morning looking like she fell down a well.”

  “Where’s Sara now?”

  “Passed out at home. With Merritt. I came up here to find Wilfred and tell him about Louise. No one at the hospital can find him.”

  “He was here. I think he went to the mine.”

  “The mine?” Steve says, puzzled.

  “I think Louise might be there too.” Because she’s searching for Shayna, Clare thinks, though she says nothing. The weight of her words sets onto Steve’s face.

  “Let’s go.” He directs Clare to the passenger seat of his truck.

  “I could go back in the house,” Clare says. “Call someone.”

  “Who? Who will you call?”

  He’s right, Clare knows. There’s no one to call. No one will come.

  “I’ll drive,” he says. “We’ll call if we catch a signal along the way. I’ve got my gun.”

  I have mine too, Clare thinks, feeling for its shape at the bottom of the backpack on her lap. Steve slams his truck into gear and roars down the driveway and up the road. Even through the fabric of her pack, the gun’s form is easily deciphered, its chamber full should she need to use it.

  There is a heaviness in the air as they approach the mine, its gate swinging open. At the bottom of the switchbacks Wilfred’s truck is parked askew in relation to the buildings. Clare holds her cell phone out the open window. No signal. They pull up next to Wilfred’s truck and jump out. Steve fetches his shotgun from under the backseat, then digs a flashlight from his glove compartment and tucks it into his jeans. Clare revolves in a full circle.

  “I don’t see him,” Clare says.

  Steve slams the door to his truck and walks out to the open space next to the building. “Wilfred?” he hollers, his shotgun perched on his shoulder. “Wilfred? We’re here to help you!”

  Aside from the caw of a crow taking flight, there is no response.

  They round the corner of the building. Up close Clare can see the cinder blocks are crumbling, every window in the building broken, a double steel door at its center. She pulls on the handles. Locked.

  “Give me your gun,” Clare says. “Stand back.”

  They both take long strides back before Clare lifts the gun and aims it. When she fires, a splinter forms between the two doors. She fires again.

  “You’re quite the shot,” Steve says.

  “My father taught me.”

  Clare approaches and kicks the doors open. The smell strikes her first, chemicals and dust so strong she has to cough. The mess hall is dark, lockers on the walls and tables in the middle, some chairs standing, others overturned. No one is here. Steve follows, his flashlight on. To the left she can see another door, just ajar. Clare hands the shotgun back to Steve and presses the door open.

  The room is set up like a makeshift laboratory, a stench of burnt rubber in the air. The light comes from the high windows facing east. Steve lifts a bag of misshapen pills off the table, an imperfect and homemade effort. Anyone can make a pill, Grace told her once. All you need is the Internet and a chemistry set. Around the room they find more stashes, some pills crude and others pharmaceutical, and then powders divvied up into small baggies.

  “This is Charlie’s lab,” Steve says, the rage darkening his face. “This is the crap he’s giving them.”

  There is a desk in the corner with an old coffeemaker on top and a bar fridge next to it. On the fridge sits a large battery with power cords snaking up to the window. Clare sees a solar panel angled to catch the light. With a growl Steve swipes the contents from the table, the glass smashing so that the liquids swirl along the uneven floorboards.

  “He’s a dead man,” Steve says.

  Clare’s eyes sting. Something is burning. She tugs at his sleeve. “We need to leave,” she says. “We need to find Wilfred. And Louise. Now.”

  “I need to find Charlie,” he says, gripping his gun.

  “Please. I can’t explain. They’re in trouble.”

  “What?” Steve says, his eyes darting around the room. “Who?”

  Clare takes Steve by the shoulders and faces him so he can’t look away. “Listen to me. We need to find Wilfred. This is about him too. There’s no time.”

  Steve’s focus settles for a long moment on Clare. Then he nods and lifts his gun, aiming it ahead of them. Back outside they round the building to the truck. About two hundred feet away, Clare spots a faded sign pointed into the woods that mark the end of the mine clearing.

  “Where does that go?” she says.

  “It’s the old utility road,” Steve says. “Ends up down at the egress.”

  Louise’s jumbled words come back to Clare. Down the hill.

  Clare hoists her backpack over her shoulders and starts toward the road, Steve behind her, huffing in an effort to keep pace. The gravel road descends into the trees. To one side is a hill of rock, its angle so steep that she must scramble to climb it. At the top is a plateau, a panorama down to the mine and then out to the mountains in the other direction. When Steve reaches her, he doubles over, setting his gun on the rock, winded.

  Clare forms a visor with her hand and scans below. “Where’s the egress?” she says.

  “Half a mile down, maybe. The lowest point of the mine.”

  Clare nearly loses her footing climbing back down the rise, batting away the brush that scratches her legs. They come to a sludge pipe running downhill, a foot wide and broken open, whatever bled from it dried in place.

  “Look,” Steve says, pointing into the trees.

  Up ahead Clare sees two arms wrapped low around a tree trunk. Louise.

  “How did you know?” Steve asks.

  “She’s looking for Shayna. I tried to list
en.”

  Clare steps closer to the tree.

  “Louise?” she says. “It’s me. Clare.”

  When Steve circles closer, Clare lifts her finger to her mouth to quiet him. Clare takes a wide berth around until she can see the bare feet crisscrossed with bloody gashes. Louise kneels into the tree, the skin of her legs so blue that it occurs to Clare that she might be dead, frozen in this collapsed embrace.

  “Louise?” There is a flutter, a small kick of the toes.

  As Clare closes in Louise clenches and tightens her grip on the tree. Clare motions to Steve. Be ready. He steps closer, then positions himself like a wrestler waiting for the bell. Clare crawls until she is right next to her.

  “Louise. It’s okay. You’re lost. We’ve found you. We’ll bring you home.”

  “I’m not lost,” Louise says.

  Clare leans in. “This is my fault. I shouldn’t have untied you. I’m so sorry.”

  “He shouldn’t have done that either,” Louise says.

  “Who?”

  “Wilf. We shouldn’t have sent you away like that.”

  “Where?”

  “To that place. With the white walls.”

  “Rehab?”

  “It was the doctor’s idea.”

  “Derek.”

  “He said he would take care of it. It only made it worse. Now Wilf is taking care of it. He needs my help.”

  Louise whimpers. Clare touches her, the cold of her skin. Louise falls away from the tree and allows Clare to catch her. She is wet, badly scratched up, her clothing torn and dirty, her lips cracked and bleeding. Clare feels a gush of shame.

  “I’m so sorry,” Clare says again. Louise rests against her chest like a small child. “I never should have done that.”

  “He told you not to worry,” Louise says. “That you two would find me.”

  “He told who?” Clare says. “Louise. Look at me. Please focus. Where is Shayna?”

  Louise searches Clare’s face in bewilderment, Clare and Shayna a switch that keeps flipping in her mind.

  “He told her I was lost,” Louise says. “But I wasn’t lost. I was upstairs in the bedroom. The window was open. I could hear them talking. I wanted to go with them.”