Still Water

by Amy Stuart

  “Late. Yes.”

  “And you’d heard from Sally, we hear.”

  “A few weeks ago. Maybe a month. It was an e-mail. Before she . . .” Clare hesitates.

  “Do you have a copy of it?”

  “Sally asked me to delete it.”

  “And you did, I presume,” Somers says.

  “I did.”

  No electronic trail. This is Malcolm’s rule. Delete all conversations as soon as they happen. Store no numbers or addresses. By the quizzical look Somers is giving her now, Clare isn’t sure how well her response will hold up under true scrutiny. The four of them turn to watch Ginny as she approaches from the house, limbs loose as she walks, her expression locked in a smile aimed at Rourke. She wears jean shorts and a black tank top, her lips circled in lipstick a deep red.

  “You stole my cigarettes,” Ginny says playfully to Jordan, sidling up to him, her elbow pressing into his ribs.

  “I borrowed them.”

  “I hate it when you go through my stuff!” Her giggle is shrill.

  Clare feels mortified on Ginny’s behalf, certain she detects a look exchanged between Somers and Rourke. Jordan lights a cigarette for Ginny and she inhales without grace. It is difficult to gauge their dynamic. Uncle and niece close enough in age to be siblings.

  “You still haven’t found the bodies?” Ginny says.

  “Are we looking for bodies?” Somers asks. “We don’t know what we’re looking for yet.”

  “Raylene could have stopped them,” Ginny drawls. “She was there. There’s no way he would have survived. Will, I mean. A toddler? That’s basically a baby. There’s no way he’d survive that river.”

  Jordan clears his throat and takes Ginny gently by the arm. Raylene could have stopped them. Clare processes this detail, avoiding eye contact with Rourke, focusing on Somers instead. A drop of rain lands cool on her head. She reaches up to touch the wet spot at her crown. Rourke hasn’t stopped staring at her since walking over from the car and it is making her too anxious to stand still much longer.

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Rourke says.

  Is there something familiar in the low rumble of his voice? His is a face Clare is certain she’d remember.

  “Now?” Clare asks.

  “Sure. Maybe we can find a quiet place to talk?”

  “I’m actually not feeling very well,” Clare says. “I might need to sit down.”

  “You know what?” Somers says. “The sky’s about to open. And you must be exhausted from your long trip. Why don’t we come get you in the morning? Drive you to the station. We can talk there. A little more formally. Privately. Make you some coffee. We’ve got a lot of questions. It suits us that you’re feeling good enough to answer them.”

  “Okay,” Clare says, her voice tight.

  “We’ll come back at eight?”

  “I can drive her in,” Jordan says. “I’m staying the night here. I have a meeting in town at nine thirty. I’ll drop her at the station.”

  “That works out well,” Somers says.

  The cigarette’s filter is rimmed with the red of Ginny’s lipstick. She makes no effort to mask her irritation, weight shifting, eyes bouncing between them as they speak past her. “I’ll come too,” she says. “Not to the interview, obviously. I have stuff to do in the city. To get ready for school.”

  “School?” Somers asks.

  “Ginny’s nearly a college grad,” Jordan says. “For engineering, remarkably. One more year. She heads back to campus this week. She’s smarter than she looks.”

  “Law of averages.” Ginny punches Jordan’s shoulder. “If you can be dumb and ugly, then I can be pretty and smart.”

  “Ha,” Rourke says, smiling. Ginny lets out a sharp laugh, then lifts her hand to bite her nails. Despite the tension, Clare detects the affection between Jordan and Ginny, the way he edges closer when he senses she’s embarrassed. Clare recalls that even as children it always felt fraught with her brother, Christopher, always felt like he was admonishing her. You’ll get hurt. Try harder. Why would you do that? His love presenting only as chiding worry. When Ginny looks up to the sky, a drop of rain hits her square on the nose. Somers raises a hand in a fruitless effort to shield herself.

  “Tomorrow,” she says to Clare. “At nine sharp.”

  “See you then.”

  Rourke reaches into his breast pocket and hands Clare a business card. She takes it without meeting his gaze. As the detectives walk back to the sedan Ginny’s face transforms into a pout. Perhaps she’d been expecting more engagement from Rourke, a detective who must be fifteen years older than she is, who may have planted a seed in Ginny that grows without tending. Clare stands with Jordan and Clare and watches the car reverse to turn around, then disappear down the driveway, Somers at the wheel this time.

  “How far is the city from here?” Clare asks.

  “Thirty minutes if the traffic’s light,” Jordan says. “Triple that on a Monday morning.”

  The city, Clare thinks. A land still foreign to her, vast and concrete. Malcolm. She will text him. See if there is a way to meet.

  “How will I get back?”

  “I’ll drive you,” Jordan says. “And you? Miss Noon Riser. We’ll leave without you if you’re not ready by seven thirty.”

  Ginny groans and flicks her still-lit cigarette into the river. The rain begins in earnest. The three of them break for the house, the earth instantly saturated and muddy under Clare’s feet. A flash, then the rumble of thunder. Clare pauses on the porch and turns out to watch the storm. The branches of the willow trees sway too wildly, the house across the river now dark in every window. Clare looks down at the smudged business card in her hand. DETECTIVE COLIN ROURKE, it reads. There is nothing familiar in that name. There was nothing familiar in his face, either. And she is too many miles from home, from the last place where anyone knew her, knew who she really was. So why, Clare thinks, crumpling the card in her fist, has Rourke stirred within her that familiar dread?

  In their shared room Raylene lies on her bed, staring up at the ceiling, catatonic. The rain clatters on the porch roof. Clare sits on her own bed, her hands worried between her knees, waiting for Raylene to speak.

  “Are you hungry?” Clare asks. “I could get you something to eat.”

  The shake of Raylene’s head is almost imperceptible. Clare knows this pose, the numb immobility that comes from containing grief or rage. Clare reaches for the duffel bag stuffed under her bed. It takes her a moment to call up the combination to the small lock binding its zipper. She collects her cell phone and tucks it under her pillow.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  This time Raylene doesn’t answer at all. When she blinks, a tear runs down her temple and hits the white pillowcase.

  “We can talk about it if you want,” Clare offers. “They come at me sometimes too. Thoughts, memories. I don’t know. Whatever’s troubling you.” Clare pauses. Nurturing is not a natural instinct to her. The coaxing makes her edgy. “I spoke to the cops just now.”

  Raylene blinks again.

  “They’re bringing me in tomorrow for a formal interview,” Clare says.

  With movements so deliberate they seem in slow motion, Raylene sits and swings her legs over the side of the bed. Her hair is matted. The shirt she wears is tailored but stained, her sandals expensive but worn, her shorts the white sort you’d wear to play tennis. Raylene might have had money once, the tattoo of two cherub angels on her ankle the only anomalous feature about her.

  “You stare,” Raylene says. “That’s a bad habit.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Clare says. “Sorry. I’ve been alone a lot the past few months.”

  “And you forgot basic social norms?”

  Clare allows a small smile. “Hopefully not.”

  “I don’t like it when people ask me a lot of questions,” Raylene says.

  “Neither do I.”

  “I knew Sally well,” Raylene says. “Better th
an anyone here did, at least. And she never said anything about some friend she met at a shelter. That’s not a question.”

  It rises in Clare, the option to adapt the truth. To mingle her story with Sally’s, cross their paths just enough so that it rings true. To imagine Grace Fawcett, her only real friend at home, the scorn they’d often reserved for each other where kindness should have lain.

  “We knew each other before the shelter,” Clare says. “Distantly. But I wasn’t very good to her after we reconnected. She really needed a friend. But I had my own troubles. I couldn’t help her.”

  “What kind of troubles?”

  “That’s a question,” Clare says.

  Raylene cocks her head, expectant.

  “Well,” Clare offers. “The same kind as Sally. The same as you, I presume. The kind that led you here. Like you said earlier, I didn’t respond when she first e-mailed me. Now I just want to make amends.”

  “Right.”

  “I met Ginny earlier today,” Clare says. “We talked in the hallway. She told me that you were there when Sally and William went into the river. Is that true?”

  “You think I’d just let them jump?”

  “No,” Clare says. “Of course not.”

  “Ginny and her stories,” Raylene says. “She’s quite the little bitch.”

  Bitch. Clare thinks of her mother standing over them at the kitchen table, her hand raised in a threat to swat Christopher for calling Clare that very word. How easily it fell from Jason’s lips at every turn, even playfully, even in front of friends. You bitch, he would say, taking her by the wrist, squeezing until it ached. Clare kicks off her shoes and slides back on her bed to rest against the wall. A clack of thunder startles them both.

  “I don’t want to talk to the police,” Clare says. “The whole idea makes me want to vomit.”

  “I hear you,” Raylene says.

  What Clare doesn’t say is that her fear is grounded in the way Rourke appraised her earlier, how he and Somers might work together to peel back the layers of her cover. The vigilance it will take to keep ahead of them. There had been no police work to speak of on her first case in Blackmore, no detectives milling about asking questions, a luxury she hadn’t fully appreciated until now.

  “I don’t want to talk to them about my past,” Clare says.

  “Are you married?” Raylene asks.

  “I was. Then I left. Right around the same time Sally left her husband. I’ve been on the move, mostly. But my husband wrote me a letter recently. Sent it to the place I’d been staying. Like a taunt. He knew where I was. I’ve been carrying the letter around.”

  “Isn’t that just great?” Raylene says. “Same thing happened to Sally. Her husband wrote her a while ago too. Told her he missed her. As if.”

  “How did Sally feel about that?”

  “To my face she’d insist the prospect disgusted her. That she’d never go back. But then she found out he was moving on. He wrote to say he wanted a divorce. He’d met someone else. She went kind of ballistic. I’d come in here at night and find her red-faced, staring at the wall. Breathing through her nose like a bull, like she was going to blow. It wasn’t even about wanting him back. It wasn’t about that. It was about . . . family. What she was forfeiting. She loved the idea of one big happy family. Hated the idea of another woman with the man she’d run away from. She knew it meant he was abdicating William. Letting her have him. That made her mad.”

  “I get it,” Clare says.

  “William was sweet,” Raylene says. She drops her head and breathes against the crack in her voice. “He was wild. Full of beans. But lately he was sick. Weird sick. Throwing up. He had these terrible dark circles under his eyes. Then this fever. Helen made Sally take him to the hospital a few weeks ago. But they couldn’t find any cause. Said it was probably just a bad virus.”

  “Did you see them go into the river?”

  “No,” Raylene says. “Honestly? It was one of those nights when I had my own shit to deal with. I ran into her in the hallway. She was crying her eyes out about something. Practically frantic. I didn’t engage. I went into my own room. Heard her go downstairs. She didn’t come back.”

  “Where was William?” Clare asks.

  Raylene shrugs, catching her breath to stem the tears. “I never saw him. I don’t know. Then they were just fucking vapor. Gone. I don’t even know how it’s possible.”

  So often Clare has wondered how her own disappearance has haunted those she left behind. Her brother, her father, Grace. The questions or regrets that might plague them. Worse, she’s wondered if they’ve been afflicted at all, if instead they’ve felt only relief to have her gone.

  “Where’s your husband?” Raylene asks, reading Clare’s expression.

  “Home, I assume. But I don’t know for sure.”

  “Do you ever ask yourself why? Why Sally ended up here? Why your husband is still at home?”

  “It was always his home. It was never mine.”

  “You lived there, didn’t you?”

  Clare nods.

  “It doesn’t anger you that he’s still there and you’re not?”

  “I don’t actually know that he is,” Clare says, calm, her heartbeat steady.

  “But he stayed, right?” Raylene asks. “You’re the one who left?”

  “Right,” Clare says.

  “What is it about the world that makes women have to run away?”

  “I don’t know. It felt like the only way out. For me. For Sally too, I guess.”

  “Do you see the flaw in that?” Raylene asks. “Grown women forced to run away?”

  “I do.”

  “You never had any kids.”

  “No,” Clare says. “I was six months pregnant around this time last year and—”

  “Let me guess. He threw you into a wall. Knocked you down then kicked you and you lost the baby.”

  The accuracy of Raylene’s guess takes Clare aback.

  “He pushed me down the stairs,” Clare says. “The cellar stairs. But I—”

  “Don’t. Don’t you dare say ‘but.’ What ‘but’ could there possibly be?”

  “I had a lot of problems. I’d been drinking. I was using. I was a user. Most of my adult life, I was a bad user. You know what? I’m not even sure he pushed me. I might have just fallen.”

  Something in the confessional breaks Clare open, a sob rising fast in her throat. She drops her head to her hands, body quaking. It takes several minutes for the tears to abate.

  “It amazes me,” Raylene says.

  Clare’s voice is still too cracked for her to speak.

  “You actually blame yourself.”

  “What about you?” Clare asks, wiping at her cheeks. “Do you have kids? I noticed the tattoo on your ankle.”

  “I did,” Raylene says. “I had two kids. Twins. A boy and a girl.”

  Had, Clare thinks. Past tense.

  “I was a doctor. I am a doctor. I used to work in a really busy ER.”

  Clare nods to mask her surprise. She could tell by small details of her clothes that Raylene was probably not completely destitute, but a doctor? The posters on domestic abuse plastered around the hospital where Clare used to work would declare that it knew no boundaries, but Clare hadn’t figured that to be true. She hadn’t figured the doctors working on the floor where she was a cleaner could be living the same vicious cycle that she was. She used to figure she could spot the women. The ones in the same boat. The accidents they’d claim, a tumble, a scald while cooking dinner. How they averted their eyes at the question, smiled in their answers as though apologizing for the lie. But maybe there’d been women among her just better at hiding it.

  “My husband was a banker,” Raylene continues. “Big-time banker. Born into money. His mother was fifth-generation rich. His father was a judge, so he knew the system. I was at work one evening and he found a card in one of my jacket pockets. I had no idea he made a habit of going through my pockets. It was a card for a family
lawyer. A lawyer who specialized in helping women escape shitty situations.”

  “When was this?” Clare asks.

  “Four years ago. Five days before Christmas.”

  “What happened?”

  “He drowned them in the bathtub. Our children. The night he found the card.” Raylene scrunches her eyes closed, clenching her teeth against the wave that comes. “He tried to make it look like an accident. Said he’d heard a noise downstairs and left them alone for just a minute and when he came back, they were . . . He called an ambulance and had the paramedics bring them to my ER.”

  “No,” Clare says.

  “Yes. After they were declared, they left us alone with their bodies. ‘You did this,’ he said to me. ‘You did this to them. You made me do it.’ And then he lied. To everyone. Called it a tragic accident. Took his eyes off them for a minute or two. Some people believed him. Some of my closest friends. Believed it was an accident. Friends. But an orderly from the ER testified that he’d heard him threaten me, that he’d heard him admit what he’d done, and there were bruises on their arms from fighting him, and it threw his story into question just enough to warrant an arrest. But my husband’s parents stood by him. Paid for the very best lawyers. His mother even testified that the orderly had tried to bribe them. The jury was hung in the first trial. He was acquitted in the second.”

  “Jesus,” Clare says. “What did you do?”

  “I left. I just left. Buried them and abandoned everything. My parents, my siblings—I have four siblings I haven’t seen in two years—my job, everyone. Moved here. To the city, I mean. Found an apartment on the outskirts and got a job working in a factory that makes . . .” Raylene pauses, staring at the wall. “Clocks. If you can believe it. Went from an ER doctor to making clocks. Lived like that for two years.”

  “What brought you to High River?”

  “I met Jordan. I never officially got divorced. When I searched online for lawyers who help women in my situation, he and his partner, Philip Twining, they were the first names to come up.”

  Clare thinks of the photograph in the file, the news story. Jordan Haines, the lawyer on the mission to do right by the mother he never met.