Still Water

by Amy Stuart

  “I need your help,” Rourke says.

  “I thought you were looking for Sally,” Clare says.

  “I am. I asked to be put on the case. I needed a missing persons case. A woman.”

  “Why?”

  “I needed to lure Malcolm here. I wasn’t expecting him to bring you too.”

  Clare buries her face in her hands. Every conversation with Rourke swirls now, not her ruse but his, that he’d known all along why she was here. She thinks of Malcolm yesterday, coming unhinged, this reaction to her mention of Rourke’s name. Had he felt a vise closing around him?

  “He knows you’re after him,” Clare says. “And clearly you are. Maybe you’ll tell me why.”

  “Shall I start at the beginning?”

  Clare crosses her arms warily. Then he begins.

  “Malcolm Hayes used to work as a forensic psychologist,” Rourke says. “His father owned a tech company that made millions, but both his parents and a younger sister died in a plane crash when he was fifteen. He was taken in by an aunt on his mother’s side. He inherited a massive trust the day he turned twenty-five. He spent five years floating. Then he met Zoe Westman and they were married within three months. They lived a nomadic life. New York City, Europe, even Rio for a while. You name it. They had very few friends. They were a strange couple by any measure. They finally settled in some old rambling house in Northern California. One neighbor said she could hear them fighting at all hours. Another said they were quiet as mice. Malcolm was finishing his PhD and was working on a book about—”

  “What happened to his wife?” Clare asks, interrupting him.

  Rourke lifts the photograph himself, scrutinizing it as Clare can guess he’s done a thousand times, then opens the file to set it back in place.

  “Zoe has a sister whom she confided in. She told her sister that Malcolm could be violent, would threaten suicide if she left him, would accuse her of marrying him for his money. But the sister said she suspected Zoe had something else going on too.”

  “You spoke to Zoe’s sister?”

  “I’ve been tracking him, like I said. Working the case. Anyway, there was more than one side. There were many sides. Zoe’s sister said she didn’t know which might be true. Then Zoe disappeared a year ago this past May. Went for a drive along the coast and never came home. They found the car a week later. Never found a body.”

  “And you think Malcolm killed his wife?” Clare asks, working to keep her voice steady. “He must have been questioned.”

  Rourke shrugs. “He didn’t hang around long enough for us to get him. He was gone the day we found the car.”

  We, Clare thinks. We found the car. The door opens and Somers peers in. Clare feels a surge of rage at the look Somers gives her, sad and sorry. She drags over the corner chair and sits with them at the table.

  “Everything okay?” Somers asks.

  “I’m just filling her in.”

  “You knew about this?” Clare asks.

  “Not until I got here today. I swear to God.” Somers yanks the file away from Rourke. “He just told me. And I’m not happy about it.”

  “Listen,” Rourke says. “I’m trying to straighten things out. Put it all on the table.”

  “Please tell me there’s nothing else to put on this table,” Somers says.

  “Our fathers were friends,” Rourke says.

  “What?” Clare says.

  “Malcolm and I. We grew up together, sort of. My dad worked for his dad. We didn’t exactly run in the same circles. After his parents died his aunt sold off the company and it was shuttered. Parceled off. Tech was crashing. Long story, but my dad lost his livelihood. A lot of people did. Malcolm got rich.” Rourke pauses. “This isn’t coming out right.”

  “It most certainly isn’t,” Somers says.

  “We both lost a lot. We kept in touch. We even went to the same college at the same time. I was lucky to get a full ride on a baseball scholarship. We didn’t hang out, but I’d see him now and then. We’d exchange e-mails here and there. Keeping track of each other. I’ve known Zoe since we were kids. I was actually at the college reunion where he met Zoe. After they hooked up he was harder to pin down. Fast-forward to just over a year ago and she goes missing. It made sense for me to work the case because of all the background I had on him.”

  “Let me correct you there,” Somers says, angling herself to Rourke, finger jabbing up. “It makes no sense at all for you to have taken the case. Didn’t you learn about conflict of interest in your training, Rourke? Pretty basic stuff. You don’t know when to stay out of things? Forget discipline committees. That’s a firing offense.”

  “I know.”

  “Clearly you never told anyone at your last precinct that you knew him. Or that you knew her.”

  Rourke exhales. “I didn’t tell anyone. That’s true.”

  “Then you couldn’t find him and the case went cold and you came here for a change of scene, right?” Somers’s voice is low, angry. “Every cop has a case that eats them, and this is yours.”

  “This is mine,” Rourke says.

  “The crazy thing is,” Somers says, her fist tight on the table, “even if you had caught him, even if you do catch him, you don’t think he’s going to tell the world he knows you? That you have a complaint with him? That his family screwed yours? That you grew up with his missing wife? Jesus Christ. You don’t think that even if you could build a case without a body, any sane judge or jury would let him off?”

  Rourke throws his hands up.

  “That is without a doubt the sloppiest cop shit I’ve ever heard in my life,” Somers says.

  “I got to a point with it.” Rourke sighs. “It became hard to turn back.”

  “Malcolm saw you yesterday,” Clare says. “On campus. When you picked me up.”

  “That must have been a shock to him.”

  “How did you find him?” Clare asks.

  “A few weeks ago the mine case in Blackmore was in the news. The missing woman gave a long interview on TV.”

  Yes, Clare remembers now, but it’s all blurry, seen through the haze of the pain meds in that motel room. The missing woman from Blackmore, Shayna Fowles, selling her story to the highest bidder and sitting down for a one-hour exclusive.

  “She talked about you in the interview,” Rourke continues. “About a Clare O’Dey. The mystery woman who appeared in the mine, then vanished from the hospital the next day. She said you’d told her you were working for someone named Malcolm Boon, that you’d been hired to find her. I heard the name and I knew. I just knew. Boon was the name of the street he grew up on. Malcolm, the forensics guy. I saw the photograph of you and you looked like Zoe. It wasn’t actually a stretch to piece it all together.”

  “You knew he’d be looking for missing women, for women beyond his own missing wife?” Somers says dryly.

  “I know Malcolm. The way he fixates on things. They never figured out why the plane carrying his family went down. Whether it was a mechanical issue or something more sinister. He became obsessed with unsolved mysteries. He doesn’t let things go.”

  “Like you,” Clare says.

  “I actually wanted to be a baseball player,” Rourke replies. “I was a good pitcher. But I blew out my elbow in college. Lost my scholarship.”

  “Jesus, Rourke,” Somers says, eyes down on the open file. “Cry me a river.”

  “I took some vacation days a few weeks ago and flew to Blackmore,” Rourke says. “Or flew to the nearest actual town, then drove to Blackmore. Did some police work. Found the doctor who treated you. Who hired Malcolm. He referred me to Malcolm’s website, which is basically a single banner page with an e-mail address. He ID’d Malcolm from the picture, said he’d met him in the hospital after you were shot. I had my confirmation. When Sally Proulx went missing, I had my chance. It was perfect, actually. I got lucky.”

  “Lucky,” Somers scoffs.

  “So you lured him here?” Clare asks. “By hiring us?”
/>   “I hired him. Not you. Set up an anonymous e-mail account. Said I was a citizen concerned about the goings-on at High River. That I didn’t trust the cops to do it right.”

  “Is that ever rich,” Somers says.

  Rourke ignores her. “I had no idea how you fit into all this. I was surprised to see you in High River, needless to say. I recognized you right away. It kind of shook me, to be honest. You threw a wrench in my plan.”

  “Why?”

  “Because who are you, really? I couldn’t be sure how much you know.”

  Rourke drags the folder back over and uses a flag to open it midway. He runs his finger down the page in search of something.

  “O’Callaghan,” he says. “Clare O’Callaghan. One arrest for possession of illegals when you were twenty, a few domestic calls, spouse Jason O’Callaghan never charged. Disappeared December of last year—”

  All sounds around them have ceased. Clare’s ears ring with panic. She eyes the coffee still on the table, still steaming, still hot enough to scald.

  “Don’t say that name again,” she whispers.

  “We’ve had enough here,” Somers says. “This is a lot to process. And I need to decide whether I’m going to get your ass fired.”

  “I’m not here to threaten anyone,” Rourke says. “I think we all want the same thing. The three of us.”

  “You have no idea what I want,” Clare says.

  “Yes I do. You want absolution. Answers. You want this to end.”

  Rourke reaches to rest his hand on Clare’s forearm.

  “Don’t touch me,” Clare says, ripping her arm from him.

  “I want to help you,” Rourke says. “You can help me too.”

  “I don’t work for you. You know nothing about me.”

  “I know a lot, actually. I’ve dug up whatever I can.”

  “Stop it!” Somers’s chair slides back with a squeal. She stands and slams the folder closed. “Out,” she says to Rourke. “Get out of here.”

  And then Clare feels it, watching Rourke as he backs to the door. The instant numbing, the icing over. Rourke is saying something to her, but Clare looks at him with such venom, such fury, that he quiets. Somers tucks the folder under her arm and follows him out, closing the door behind her. Clare stands and moves to the glass of the one-way window, pressing her forehead against it. She sees only black, but somehow she knows Rourke is on the other side. She can sense him there. Of course he is watching her. He has been all along.

  Clare watches the spin of the convention center’s revolving doors. She watches so intently that it dizzies her. She knows Grace’s routine. A walk after each speaking engagement to quiet the nerves. A three o’clock finish, a short mingle with her audience, then her escape. After twenty minutes the doors spit out a familiar figure, Grace in a tailored pantsuit. Clare feels a deep pang as she spies her friend fiddling with her phone, looking north and south to pick a route. Always a planner. At once Clare remembers Grace in the yard of their high school, collecting signatures for a petition while Clare huddled with other girls, sharing a cigarette under the bleachers. At school their friendship went under the radar, their lives on different planes, Grace the star student and Clare the quiet brooder at the back of the room. But as they passed in the hallways they’d reach out to brush hands, some unwavering bond holding them together. A childhood friendship rooted deep.

  The light turns. If Grace heads left after crossing the street, she will walk right by her. Clare emerges from the bus shelter, uncertain how to avoid startling her friend, shuffling her feet as Grace closes in. When Grace’s eyes land on Clare, her expression remains blank. Then her head shakes vigorously.

  “Grace,” Clare calls.

  Her friend takes a step back and shades her eyes with her hand.

  “No,” she says. “No.”

  “Grace. Please.”

  “No,” Grace repeats, her voice cracked but firm. “No!”

  By now there is only a few feet between them and Clare can see the look on her friend’s face perfectly. Fear.

  “Grace, I’m so sorry,” Clare says. “I have so much to explain.”

  “You let me think you were dead.”

  “I know,” Clare says. “Please. Let me explain—”

  “How can you explain why we all thought you were dead?”

  “Can I buy you a coffee? Can we just talk? A few minutes.”

  Clare reaches for Grace’s hand. When she grasps it the tears come, to Grace first and then to Clare, and then they are hugging, and the familiar scent of her friend fills Clare with an anguish she must hold her breath to contain. When they finally break apart, Clare motions to the coffee shop on the corner. Inside, they order and take their hot drinks to a table at the back, silent. In the calm light of the coffeehouse Clare can see it clearly, how thin her friend has become, her hair flat, her face lean.

  “I don’t . . .” Clare begins. “I don’t even know where to start. I’m so sorry.”

  “I thought you were dead,” Grace repeats. “For months that’s what I thought. Months.”

  “I know.”

  “Your father wanted to plan your funeral. Christopher wouldn’t let him. He said we had to be sure.” Grace fiddles with the string of her teabag. “We looked for you everywhere. Search parties for weeks. I left my newborn baby at home to trudge through fields of snow looking for your dead body.”

  “I’m sorry,” Clare says. “I don’t know what to say. After the baby died, this plan formed. You know? I had to leave. There was no other way. He wasn’t going to just let me leave him. I had to disappear. There really was no other way.”

  Grace is unmoving, her lips a tight line. “If that was the case,” she says, “you could have told me. Maybe I could have helped.”

  Clare feels her fists clench. If that was the case.

  “You were done helping me, though. Weren’t you? Both you and Christopher were done with me.”

  “I was done being lied to, Clare. You never told me the truth. You were stealing from me. Money, drugs. You took painkillers from my medicine cabinet. You pointed a gun at your own brother. We were all done with you. Can you blame us?”

  “I was desperate,” Clare says.

  Grace takes a sip of her tea, eyeing Clare over the rim of the white mug. Her friend looks like she’s aged ten years in the months since she last saw her.

  “He tells a very different story,” Grace says.

  “Who does?”

  “Jason.”

  At once the remorse, the love and pain and regret stirred within Clare since first spotting Grace are replaced by a flaring wrath.

  “He was going to kill me,” Clare says, her voice low and steady.

  “You were going to kill yourself. You were one bad fix away from the morgue.”

  “Do you know what my life has been like since I left?” Clare asks.

  “Do you know what our lives have been like since you left?” Grace’s eyes well up again. “That’s the thing about you, Clare. It was always about what your life was like. Ever since we were kids. Everything was always awful for you. You always had it worse than anyone else. Like you laid sole claim to misery. I know you had it bad. I know you lost your mom when you were way too young. But so did your brother, and Christopher’s not a mess. I know Jason isn’t a very nice guy. But none of it even matters. Because I swear you’ve been selfish since the day you were born. You only see your side. You hatched this escape plan because it suited you. It suited you to disappear into thin air. You didn’t think about us.”

  “I thought about you all the time,” Clare says. “You’re all I think about.”

  “Did you know that my marriage ended?”

  “No,” Clare says, hand to her mouth.

  “He left. Three months after Elliot was born. Or three months after you disappeared, however you want to count it. He dropped me for a nurse at the hospital. They moved to a condo in the city. He sees our baby every second weekend, give or take.”

&
nbsp; “God. I’m so sorry . . .”

  “No you’re not,” Grace says, spitting venom. “Your whole issue from the beginning was that you thought my life was perfect. We were good until your mom got sick. After that, you hated that my life was going well. Never mind how hard I’d worked to make it that way. I remember in the weeks right after Brian left me, I missed you so much. I’d drink myself into a stupor in the kitchen and wish so, so badly that you were there with me. But then it occurred to me that maybe you’d have been happy that he left. That you’d have taken pleasure in seeing me knocked down a few rungs.”

  “No,” Clare says.

  But the tears that come tell another story. Even today when Clare saw the poster, that same jealousy mustered in her. The lab coat, the speaking engagements. And perhaps it does bring Clare some terrible satisfaction to know that Grace’s husband has left, to see her friend experiencing the kind of loss and pain Clare could never seem to properly convey to her.

  “I’m sorry,” Clare says, wiping her eyes. “I honestly didn’t mean to make things worse for you.”

  “Sure you didn’t. You just let it be. Let us suffer. So here’s what you don’t know. We found out you were alive when we saw you in the news tangled up in someone else’s mess thousands of miles away. You made this decision to vanish and you didn’t think about what it might do to Christopher, or to your dad, or to me. Even to Jason. You—”

  “Don’t say his name,” Clare says.

  Grace crosses her arms. “He said I might run into you here.”

  “Who said that?”

  The expression on Grace’s face is unrecognizable to Clare. “Jason did. He said you’d left that mountain town. Blackmore, or whatever. That I might run into you here.”

  A fog descends over Clare, too many voices, the espresso machine earsplitting as it bursts forth steam. Clare feels woozy, untethered. She closes her eyes and thinks of the moment when she tumbled down the cellar stairs, her hand clasped to her pregnant belly, thinks of running through the back field, the ground cold and hard, of Malcolm the first time she saw him. Clare thinks all the way back to her mother’s cancer diagnosis a few weeks before her high school graduation, of Jason locking eyes with her across the bonfire circle the night they first met. All these memories closing in on her at once, a flash sequence of her life as though she were dying. You only see your side, Grace said. Clare opens her eyes.