“Do you think Charlotte is worried about Zoe?” Clare asks.
“I don’t know. She’s lost in her own problems. If Zoe is dead, if she can prove that Zoe is dead, then I guess she inherits that stupid house. Charlotte is beyond feeling the pain. She’s focused on herself.”
“Okay,” Clare says, soothing. “But you care. About the shooting going unsolved. About Zoe.”
Kavita scratches hard at her arms. “Zoe didn’t have much of a soul. She was trying to keep the family business afloat, making some pretty bad choices. Honestly, this isn’t about her for me. The shooting fucked up my life. It took everything from me. I know what I saw. I just want the story to be straight. I want to go speak to Roland.”
“You mean the restaurant owner? Roland Song?”
“Yes,” Kavita says, biting again at her fingernails.
“Why?”
“I tried to talk to him once, a while ago. To sort out the truth, or the facts or whatever. Compare stories. He was there too. Behind the bar. I’ve tried to talk to Charlotte about it, but she’s a steel trap. She won’t say anything. She just tells me to drop it. I tried to talk to Zoe too before she disappeared. They were all just shut down. Or they’d contradict the way I remembered things. They’d say the shooter came in from the back, but I know that he walked right past me. I guess they just made me feel crazy. And Roland, he just brushes me off. And now it’s been five years. People don’t care anymore. They’ve moved on. But I just need some kind of closure. Even if it just means saying my piece. So I’m hoping you’ll come with me. Maybe Roland will act differently if someone else is there.” Kavita pauses and looks to the sky. “Like an intermediary or something. In case I get all turned around.”
“Okay,” Clare says, checking the time on her phone. “When?”
“Now?”
What a strange morning, Clare thinks, eyes back to the gravestones. This woman following her here, more a crumb dropped in her lap than a threat. Or perhaps, Clare wonders, some kind of decoy.
Kavita gestures to the graves. “I’ve come here before,” she says. “I look at the stones and let the scene replay. And it does, like a dream. And I never know if I’m adding new details, making things up, or remembering. It’s not like standing on top of this grave is going to clue me in to something I’ve missed along the way. Like the spirits are going to whisper their secrets. But whatever. What else can I do? The truth is impossible.”
The truth. For a moment, they sit side by side on the bench, absorbed in their own thoughts. A scene comes back to Clare, a restaurant with Malcolm shortly after he’d offered her a second case to work. Clare sat groggy at the table as a waitress filled their coffees and brought them eggs. What she remembers most is feeling surprised by how chatty Malcolm seemed that morning. He was outlining the details of the next case. If I’ve learned anything in this line of work, he said, it’s that memory is the enemy of truth. People will remember the same moment in completely different ways. So you gamble on who to trust.
“Can I ask you something?” Clare says. “Are you scared?”
“I am,” Kavita says, a crack in her voice. “I can’t stop being scared.”
“Of what?”
For a moment Kavita says nothing, her eyes glassy. Then she inhales deeply, righting herself, wiping a finger under her lashes to gather any tears before they fall.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Everything.”
“Are you afraid of the Westman family?”
“No. Not if Charlotte is all that’s left of it.”
All that’s left of it. What Kavita might mean is that this fear hinges on whether Zoe is still alive.
“Okay,” Clare says. “Okay. I’d like to help you. I can try to help you. I’ve got some time this morning. We can go to Roland’s.”
“That would be good. Yes. Thank you. That would be good.”
Clare points Kavita up the hill to her rental car. She studies the young woman’s gait from behind as they climb, Kavita’s arms dull at her sides. Defeated. This is a detour. Clare had a plan for today, but every case has taught her that the detours often prove the most fruitful. All these Westman characters might seem secondary in Malcolm’s story, but Clare isn’t so sure. Something tells her that Jack Westman’s death and its aftermath played a direct part in Malcolm’s fate too. Whether he was a key player or collateral damage, Clare can only guess.
The map app on Clare’s phone dings their arrival at Roland’s Restaurant. She parks, Kavita silent beside her in the passenger seat. This is Lune Bay’s oceanfront downtown, a stretch of colorful buildings of different heights and sizes, planters sprouting large trees. A perfectly designed and curated strip meant to feel quaint, the ocean a blast of blue behind it. Roland’s is housed in a single-story brick building that backs directly onto the water. In her file on Malcolm there were several articles about this place. “Businessman Jack Westman Dead in Brazen Restaurant Shooting.” In the years since, the restaurant’s signage has been updated, but nothing else has changed.
“We have two options,” Clare says. “We go in there as friends and strike up a chat. We don’t tell Roland who I am. I try to ask questions. We see how we can steer the conversation.”
“He might not let us in,” Kavita says flatly. “The restaurant isn’t open for lunch. What’s the other option?”
“That we tell him upfront why we’re here. I give him my card and
