In the far corner from Malcolm’s family, Clare finds the next plot in her search.
JACK WESTMAN
AGED 62 YEARS
ALL THAT IS LOVED IS NOT LOST
Jack Westman. Murdered while celebrating his wife’s birthday at a local restaurant. Next to his grave is that of his wife, Colleen, dead of heart failure a year later. Was it an act of marital defiance on the part of Zoe’s mother, Clare wonders, to be buried in a separate plot adjacent to her husband? Clare crouches before Jack Westman’s headstone and traces the words with the tip of her finger. Someone planted perennial flowers at the base of the graves, then left them to be choked by weeds.
Up the hill a stream of cars follows a hearse down the road. A woman walking alongside them wears a flowery sundress under a cardigan, not an outfit for a funeral. When Clare locks eyes with her, the woman cuts off the path. Clare wants to move on, to walk away, but her feet are bolted in place, sunken into the grass softened by last night’s rain. On approach the woman lifts her hands and smiles to disarm Clare. Clare searches her face for something familiar. The woman is tall, her dark hair tied back in a tight ponytail. She walks straight to Clare.
“Are you Clare O’Kearney?” she asks.
A wave of dread overtakes Clare. “Yes. Did you follow me here?”
“Kind of. Yes, I did. I’m not trying to freak you out. I don’t… I’m not a threat, I swear.”
“Tell me who you are,” Clare says.
“Kavita Spence.” She bites at her fingernails. This woman is afraid. Anxious. “I was with Charlotte Westman at the house last night. When she confronted you. Well, I was up the road in the car. We followed you after to the Caledonian. I came back to the hotel early this morning and waited for you to come out. Charlotte doesn’t know—”
“Why are you following me?”
“I’m sorry. I should have said something to you at the hotel. But I was too freaked-out. I was afraid you’d make a scene. Please. Can we talk? I just want to talk to you.”
“After you tell me exactly who you are,” Clare says.
Kavita points to the gravestone in front of Clare.
“I was working at the restaurant the night Jack Westman was shot.”
A silence hangs between them for a moment as Clare absorbs this revelation. Some of the articles had mentioned the bystanders, the bartender and restaurant owner, Roland Song. Waitresses, hostesses, other patrons. But never by name.
“We can talk here,” Clare says.
“Okay,” Kavita says. “Okay. Sure.”
“Where is Charlotte now?”
“She doesn’t know I’m here,” Kavita says. “I knew Zoe from school. She got me a job at Roland’s restaurant. Charlotte and I, in the past few years, I can’t really explain it. We’ve banded together, I guess. Misery-loves-company kind of thing. But I feel like she’s losing it. And when she got back into the car yesterday she threw this at me.” Kavita pauses and extracts Clare’s crumpled business card from the pocket of her cardigan. “Made it seem like you were a problem we needed to deal with. But I kept thinking last night, What if you’re not? What if you might actually be able to help us?”
Us? Clare thinks. This woman is so different in demeanor from Charlotte Westman, so unsure of herself. She wraps her cardigan tight and shivers despite the sun. Clare directs them to a nearby stone bench. They sit at the greatest distance from each other that they can muster.
“I’m here to find the truth about Malcolm Hayes,” Clare says. “Zoe’s husband. Do you know him?”
“I didn’t know him well. I met him a few times. He was pretty quiet. Always seemed preoccupied. Or sad.”
“Okay. And you were working the night of the shooting?”
“Yes,” Kavita says. “Malcolm wasn’t there.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
Kavita presses her hands into prayer and pins them between her knees, shoulders hunched.
“I was back in school doing my master’s degree,” she says. “I needed a few shifts a week somewhere to cover rent. This was maybe my fourth or fifth shift. I’d literally been working there for two weeks. I was standing maybe twenty feet away when he was shot. The shooter walked right past me on his way in and on his way out.”
“Do you remember any details about him?”
“The police interviewed me for a few hours the night of the shooting. I’ve probably been interviewed another five times since. Every time they put a new cop on the case, they call me again. I tell them everything I remember.”
“Which is what?”
Kavita grimaces, then shakes her head. “It’s all really messed up, right? I had a therapist once who told me I’ll never remember it exactly right. That’s the nature of trauma, she says. You become this unreliable narrator in your own story. So that’s the problem. The last cop? Germain? He accused me of changing my story. But I’m not changing anything. My brain has fucked it all up. It’s changing the story for me.”
Kavita speaks too quickly, her voice rising, so that the people gathered for the burial up the hill begin to turn in search of the commotion. Clare wants to reach out and touch her elbow, tell her to lower her voice. But she knows better. The witnesses change their story every time you sit them down, Germain said this morning. Maybe, Clare thinks now. But not all shifting stories are by design, Clare thinks as she watches Kavita. Sometimes memory does it for you.
“You say you think I can help,” Clare says.
“Charlotte thinks you’re a problem. But I feel like a set of fresh eyes can’t be bad, right? Zoe’s been gone for what, two years?”
“Eighteen months,” Clare corrects.
“I just think there are answers out there. No one seems to care much anymore.”
Austin’s words from last night return to Clare, the exposé, the other women he claims have gone missing from Lune Bay too.
