Still Mine (19 page)

Clare did not know what this man knew, why Jason had hired him. This man before her, the clean-cut stranger from the café, she knew nothing of him. He could shoot her between the eyes, let the force of the shot tip her back in her chair, leave her to die on the musty carpet of this motel room. Perhaps Jason had charmed him. He could be very charismatic when he needed to be. He might have told Malcolm that Clare took off on him, took his money and his heart, an addict wife who left him bereft. I only want closure, Jason might have said. I only want to know she’s okay. Or, he might have said, I want her dead. He might have hired this man to kill her.

An hour passed before Malcolm stopped pacing. Then, he sat on the bed across from Clare and made his offer.

There’s a job in the mountains, he said. I might consider hiring you.

What are you talking about?

I look for people, he said. People like you. People who disappear. If I don’t turn you in, you must agree to help me. That’s the deal.

I don’t even know your name.

Malcolm Boon.

He untied her, taking her gun and leaving her to meet him in an hour at the restaurant. Clare sat still in the chair, rubbing at her wrists, unable to process the choice she’d just been given. It seemed a ridiculous proposition to trust this stranger, but what were her options? Go forward, her mother used to say. Take whatever option moves you forward. Never go back. Before noon Clare crossed the parking lot to the restaurant and slid into the booth across from him.

Tell me more, she said.

I look for people. The ones who disappear.

Why should I trust you?

Because if I was going to turn you in, I would have done it already.

Why don’t you just let me go?

You need work, don’t you? This is work. It will keep you moving.

For a long moment Clare stared at him, the echo of her mother’s words in her mind.

How do I know you won’t hurt me?

You were tied up, Malcolm said. I had your gun. If I was going to kill you, you’d already be dead.

And if I say no?

Then I’ll have a choice to make, Malcolm said.

A minute might have passed, Clare searching this stranger’s face for a hint, a sign of what might come, Malcolm breaking the impasse by turning to watch the passing trucks out the window. He’d framed it as an offer, an out, but Clare saw little choice in it.

So what do I do? she asked. What’s the actual job?

You go to this town, Malcolm said, sliding the folder across to her. And in that town, you try to find this woman.

It took half a day. An afternoon for Malcolm to brief her and use the kit he carried with him to make her fake identification. Clare O’Dey. Half a day to brief her on the story. To talk her through the clippings. All Clare could do was listen to the bass of this man’s voice, baffled at why he would trust her to take this on, at how the arrangement benefited him. If she had questions to that end, he did not allow for them.

When do I start? was all she could say.

Now. Drive west into the mountains, he said. Then cut north to Blackmore.

And so Clare set out that afternoon, leaving Malcolm in that parking lot, the bald tires of her car kicking up a cloud of dust so that she could not see him in her rearview mirror. For the first hour of that drive, she fingered the cell phone he’d given her, unable to keep rein on her heartbeat, to focus on the road. At every intersection she debated veering off course, shaking him, running again, never showing up in Blackmore at all. But something compelled her. Anticipation and fear. Her mother’s voice in her head. Trust it. This man, Malcolm Boon. This woman, Shayna Fowles, alike in looks and basic circumstance, vanished with the same swiftness as Clare. Finally a destination, a place to go after months of existing in the empty distance between nowhere and here.

You knew it all along. Admit it. It suited you that I was bad at being married. I have to tell the stories I know will make you mad. I think back to the first time Charlie gave me a pill. The night of his mother’s funeral. What are you going to do now? I kept asking him. You’ve lost everyone. He pulled this pill from his pocket. Prescribed to keep his mother calm. Try it, he said to me. The next day I asked him for another one. You sure, Cunningham? he said.

I don’t blame Sara for hating me. I like the way Charlie always comes to me first. That night I ended up in the hospital, I’d been to see him. We met in the barn. She wants another kid, he’s telling me. Thinks it’ll solve things. He told me I was the easiest on him, the only one who understood. He tucked a baggie of pills into my pocket, free of charge. Told me he’d never liked Jared. Then we were in the storeroom and I was pressed up on the worktable. It was cold enough to see my breath. I wasn’t even thinking of you.

I know you don’t want to hear this story, but I’m writing it down anyway. You look for color when everything is dulled. That’s my only excuse. I don’t know why I’m telling you this now. Maybe because these words are supposed to be the truth, because you seem to love me no matter what I do.

T
wenty-four pictures. Even a sliver of light and it won’t work. The dark of the trailer is so absolute that Clare can’t see her own hand waved in front of her face. Still, it feels familiar, the steps in blindly handling the roll so as not to expose the film, motions as rote as brushing her teeth. She thinks of her brother and his do-it-yourself photography, her teacher from a young age, all the little tricks he showed her, the alchemy in conjuring an image from liquids and the absence of light.

As she works Clare traces how far back the photos on this roll will carry her. It took her the rest of September to heal from the birth, three months to save her money and plot her escape. After burying her son she’d managed to stay clean, to go back to running, her brain too rigid with grief and purpose to take note of any ache the abstinence might have brought upon her.

The trailer fills with the smell of the chemicals. Clare aligns the photo paper in the enlarger. One by one the photographs count her back through time, Malcolm’s hand lifted in the car, then Jared on the road, his head craned to the side, Louise in the gorge, strangers at the parade, the bowl of the mine, Wilfred storming away, Louise in her garden, Charlie receding down the hill from the trailer, and then the blur of towns between here and home. The first picture on the roll, she knows, will be Jason.

In the last days before she left, Clare descended to the cellar to dig an unused roll of film out of the same box of Christopher’s castaways where she’d found the camera. Jason dozed on the couch, his hands folded almost daintily across his chest. Peaceful. Drunk. She could tell by the pink in his cheeks. Clare loaded the film in the kitchen, then snuck up and stood over him, framing his portrait with the camera, emboldened by his long and slow breathing. Click, she said, actually said it out loud as she took the picture. He didn’t flinch, and Clare stood over him, thinking of the gun secured over the doorway in the mudroom. In their entire marriage she’d never pointed a gun at Jason. She’d dreamed of it many times, but the actual logistics of his death remained unfathomable.

Now his form takes shape on the photo paper, fingers interlaced on his chest, his head dipped to one side. Clare can feel a bulb rise to her throat. Despite the hard drinking Jason always kept his good looks, his skin honey brown even in winter. His lips red and full. This black-and-white photo betrays nothing of those colors, the shades of his face, but still Clare is taken aback by the sight of him. Hatred. She is used to the hatred. But there is longing too, a stab of longing so unexpected that Clare must look away to stave it off.

All those conversations with herself in the car, Christopher’s or Grace’s voice in her head: Why did you stay? Why didn’t you fight back more?

Because I was afraid he’d kill me.

But the other answer, the one she never actually uttered, is about love.

The first years with Jason built up so much of it in her, lust and yearning and devotion, that it lingered for too long after he proved himself unlovable. And then the dependence, Jason the only one who never questioned Clare’s use, who enabled it, allowed it, enjoyed it, even celebrated it. Even now she feels it, the thrill, whatever small wave this photograph brings. She draws the picture from the solution before it is fully saturated and hangs it next to the ones of Malcolm and Jared, of Wilfred’s back. These men, each angry in his own way. The stench of the chemicals burns her nose now, this space too enclosed, too claustrophobic. Clare knocks the trailer door open and stumbles out into the fresh air.

Slouched in the lawn chair, facing her, his hands gripped to the armrests, is Jared Fowles. Clare recoils back toward the trailer, swinging the door closed so that Jared can’t see inside.

“Jesus!” Jared says. “Watch yourself.”

“You scared me.”

“You looked scared before you saw me.”

Clare’s eyes ache from the onslaught of light.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“Checking on you. I was driving past. I’d have called, but apparently you don’t have a phone.”

“I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

“What?”

“Developing pictures.”

“Come on. How?”

“I have some portable darkroom equipment.”

“In there?”

“It’s a tight space. The chemicals got to be a bit much.”

“So you really do take pictures,” Jared says.

Where is your grief? Clare would like to say to him. She thinks of her father’s coldness in the aftermath of her mother’s death, his wife’s clothes dropped at a consignment shop the same day as her funeral, as though he’d held her in no higher regard than one of his barn hens.

Everyone has their own version of grief, Clare’s brother said in their father’s defense, and yours is no better than his. Carrying on, Christopher said, doesn’t make him a bad man.

“Where are you headed?” Clare asks. “If you’re just driving past.”

“Uphill.”

“To the mine?”

“To commune with the dead.” Jared smiles. “The miners, I mean. You want to come?”

Whatever that photograph of Jason incited in Clare, the mix of hot and cold, Jared brings out the same. She hesitates, leaning against the trailer.

“I’m not done here,” Clare says. “I should finish up.”

“You
are
scared.”

“I know better than to go to dark places with a stranger.”

“Am I a stranger?”

“Your wife is missing.”

“Ah,” Jared says. “And you think you might be next.”

“Why not?”

“Meyer’s got you on board. I’m the murderer in plain sight.”

“Are you?”

Clare cannot detect her own tone, whether she is being bold or foolish, or worse, coy. The sensation of her heart wild in her chest has the effect of warming her body.

“Come on,” Jared says. “I promise you’ll come out alive. Good enough?”

Reckless, Malcolm called her. Clare’s mother used to call her much the same, the young Clare who jumped into the hay from the height of the barn roof or fired at targets dangerously close to her brother. You don’t think of the consequences, her mother would chide her. You just dive headfirst. Reckless; Clare’s entire life unfolded as it has because of it.

“Give me a minute,” Clare says.

In the trailer Clare scrubs her hands and face in the sink. Last night she made a rudimentary effort to bandage the gash, slathering it in ointment, but she can feel it, the oozing, the heat of it creeping outward from the cut. She puts on a clean shirt long enough to cover the silhouette of her phone in her pocket. Then she rests her hand on the wood paneling. Her gun. Will she bring her gun? No. Clare knows too well what can happen when you bring a gun, how easily it can end up in the wrong hands.

Outside, Jared waits for her some distance away.

“Sara’s expecting me at her place later on,” Clare says. “It’s her birthday.”

“You think she’d notice if you didn’t show?”

“Stop it.”

“Where’s your camera?”

“I’m almost out of film,” she says. “There’s nowhere around here to buy more.”

Clare follows Jared downhill to where his truck is parked next to her dead car. He unlocks the passenger door for her. A sharp bark startles her, the dog running at them from Charlie’s porch until his tether yanks him back.