“Or we just avoid each other altogether,” Clare says, arms crossed. “I’ve got other people I can align with.”
“You mean Austin Lantz?” Germain offers a hearty laugh and crosses his arms behind his head. “The self-declared expert on the Westman family. That’s funny.”
Clare’s jaw tightens. “Were you spying on me?”
“No. You called me, remember? He’s just the obvious guy to align with. It’s almost a cliché. The obsessed reporter.”
“He doesn’t have the best things to say about you,” Clare says.
“Because it bothers him that I won’t give him the time of day,” Germain says.
“He claims other women have gone missing too,” Clare says. “From Lune Bay. That it’s not just Zoe.”
“Right.” Germain leans forward. “That’s one of my favorite conspiracy theories. Of course he’s peddling it. Finds the name of a few women who had tenuous connections to each other—which everyone in Lune Bay has, by the way—women who left town for whatever reason. Maybe their overbearing parents filed a report because their daughters stopped taking their calls. And Austin tries to tack them on to the Westman case. Man, he’d love that to be true. He wants this all to be one big monster plot. Did he tell you that he used to be Jack Westman’s personal driver?”
“No,” Clare says. “He didn’t.”
“Yeah. See? So his whole ‘reporter’ thing is a little much. He’d tell you he was only driving to put himself through journalism school. Still, there’s a bit of shitting where he used to eat going on, isn’t there? He quit right before Jack Westman was killed. His brother hit the jackpot in the tech business, and now he funds Austin’s little reporter escapades.”
Clare fiddles with her napkin. She does not want to feel daunted by Germain, outfoxed.
“Well,” she says. “That’s good intel. Thank you.”
“We can be cordial, can’t we?”
When the bill arrives Germain hands the waitress his credit card without looking at it. He smiles, offering a détente between them, a declaration of his own victory. Clare knows her silence does her no favors, that Germain is all but toying with her now. But her exchanges with Austin turn over in her head, the whiskey that may have dulled her. She is angry at herself once again.
“Where are you staying?” Germain asks.
“Downtown.”
“Oh, come on. It’s not hard for me to find out where.”
“The Caledonian. Not easy to find cheap digs around here.”
“No, it isn’t,” he says, sliding out of the booth. “Clare O’Kearney. I hope we can keep talking.”
“I do too.”
Germain saunters to the front to engage the waitress again. Clare watches him. She’d figured on the upper hand in this exchange, but even a relative rookie like Germain is still more experienced than she is. The food has her tired though it is still early morning. She feels flustered, uncertain. But the day is young, and the list of leads to follow grows longer and longer. She must dig deeper on the Westmans. She must keep her focus at all costs, avoid distractions like the whiskey last night. As she follows Germain back through the restaurant and out to his car, Clare reminds herself to remain vigilant. You can still slip, she thinks. You are still you, and you always will be.
A wrought iron fence with a rounded gate marks the entry to St. James Cemetery. The online search for the graves had been a simple task. Take a walk down to St. James Cemetery, Austin said to her last night. Though he was being facetious, Clare needs a chance to regroup, to stand in the morning sun. She follows the narrow road down a winding hill, the older gravestones towering high and tilted, the carved lettering mossy and faded. By the time Clare circles to the bottom of the hill the headstones are no longer stone but dark marble, the dates of death flashing white with their more recent etching. She consults the screenshot of the map on her phone, then takes a final left before spotting it.
HAYES. ALISON, BRIAN, CAMILLE.
It feels almost intimate to be standing here. The dates of death are all the same, Malcolm’s parents and his eleven-year-old sister killed in a plane crash twenty-five years ago, when Malcolm was just a teenager. Clare reaches down and rests her hand on the cool marble of the headstone. She tries to envision Malcolm here, as a young man or as his current self, the grief that might overcome him. Or maybe the tragedy struck at an age where Malcolm went numb instead. Stone cold, Austin said. It tells Clare something about how little she knows Malcolm that she cannot predict what his reaction to such a loss might have been. She takes a photograph of the gravestone, then looks to the map again and circles back to the path in search of her next stop.
It’s quiet here. Clare takes a deep breath. Her mother had not wanted a burial in a place like this. She’d asked for cremation instead, her remains to be sprinkled into the creek that marked the far boundary of their farm. But the urn sat unattended for so long on the mantelpiece that Clare knew her father, wrapped in his own obstinate grief, would not be able to bring himself to honor his dead wife’s wishes. So one day, the October before Clare left, she’d gone to her childhood home in the late daylight hours when she knew her father would be in the fields. She hooked the urn under her arm and walked the path of sheared grass to the trees and then the creek. Clare remembers how badly her head hurt as she worked to unscrew the urn’s lid, those early days of sobriety leaving her shaky. What she remembers most is the way her mother’s ashes dropped from the urn as she overturned it, not in a wispy trail but in chunks that only dissipated
