“Okay, but do you think he’s here? Or headed here?”
“Do you?”
What kind of question is that? Clare wants to scream. She thinks of Malcolm’s email. I believe that Zoe knows about you. It feels too possible that everything is connected. Clare buries her face in her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Somers says, patting Clare’s leg. “Listen. I’ve told you, I’m on this. I’m working on it. I’m not interested in putting you at risk. I’ve got a lot of options here. Lots of tricks up my sleeve. Let’s just stay on course for now. Go inside, speak to this Roland guy, move forward. Okay?”
“Okay.”
They stand and Clare ties her sweater around her waist. Roland’s is empty, but the door is unlocked. He is again perched behind the bar. He waves them over. Clare phoned earlier to tell him she was coming with Somers, and if it bothered him, if he had anything to hide from them, his reaction gave her no indication.
“I hear there’s a new detective in town,” he says, shaking Somers’s outstretched hand. “Seems like our cold cases are warming up again.”
“I hear you’re famous for your seafood.” Somers plucks a menu from the bar and scans it.
“It’s as local as you can get.” He looks to Clare. “My eyes around town tell me you’ve been busy.”
“I have been,” Clare says. “Just trying to do my job.”
His bemused look tells Clare that he has likely seen the video, but she will not bring it up.
“Hey,” Somers says. “Can I get a plate of this shrimp pasta? Maybe Clare will have the same?”
“Sure,” Clare says.
Roland takes their menus and punches their order into the computer behind him. Somers walks to the empty booth, Roland and Clare trailing her.
“Scene of the crime?” she asks.
“It is,” he says. “Honestly, after five years, it’s still a little tough for me to stand here.”
“Do people sit and eat here?” Somers asks. “By choice?”
“You’d be shocked,” Roland says. “When the shooting happened, I was sure the business was toast. I figured we’d never weather the publicity. That I’d end up shuttering and selling to a developer even though I’d promised my father that would only happen over my dead body. But it actually became a bit of a tourist thing. This macabre attraction. For a while the booth was booked six months in advance. People are weird.”
Somers slides into the booth and rests her forearms on the table, looking up at them.
“Tell me something, Roland? Do you think the cops did a good job on this case?”
“If they’d done a good job, they’d have figured out who killed Jack,” Roland says. “Forty eyewitnesses. Only four ways out of Lune Bay. It’s an absolute disgrace that they didn’t catch the guy.”
“Sit,” Somers says, patting the tabletop.
Both Clare and Roland slide in, the three of them fanned in a semicircle just as Jack Westman would have been with his wife and daughters. From her vantage, Clare can see the hostess station, the door, the trajectory the shooter would have taken. Somers removes a file from her bag and opens it to extract photographs of Kendall Bentley and Stacey Norton. She slides them over to Roland.
“Are either of these young women familiar to you?” Somers asks.
“Sure,” he says. “They both worked here. Kendall and Stacey. Both fell on pretty hard times, I think.”
“They both went missing,” Clare says.
“That’s right. I believe they worked here for a few summers. Patio season. The tall one, Kendall, she was in medical school. The other one—”
“Her name is Stacey,” Somers says sharply.
“Yes. She wanted to open a beauty salon, I think. Honestly, we’d have fifteen of these girls every summer. You should see our patio on a busy night.”
Two staff enter the room from the kitchen, a server and a bartender. They stop short and look to Roland, who waves them onward. Clare watches the bartender as he takes his place and begins counting the bottles lined up behind the bar. She feels a dryness in her mouth. Suddenly, Clare is sweating. She wants a drink.
“Can you point me to the bathroom?” Clare asks.
“To the back right and downstairs,” Roland tells her.
Clare weaves through the tables to the stairs that lead to the basement. In the early days of their relationship, Clare can remember signaling Jason at the bar to join her in the nook under the stairs. Those scenes return to her now, Jason pressing her back into the wall, how brazen they’d be when they were drunk. Clare studies her reflection in the mirror as she washes her hands. She cannot tamp down the anger. She is tired. She lets out a long sigh, then presses the bathroom door open.
On her way up, Clare slows to study the photographs that line the stairwell, some autographed by famous patrons, others marking celebrations like the restaurant’s fortieth anniversary. Clare can pick Roland out in one of the earliest photographs, barely a teenager. He sits propped on a stool at the bar between his parents, smiling, raising a can of soda to the camera. Clare takes the last of the steps and has nearly turned the corner back into the restaurant when she stops dead and descends two stairs again.
No, she thinks, staring at the picture. It can’t be.
There are about a dozen people in the photograph. It is taken on the rocks out front of the restaurant. To the far right is a slightly younger Roland, smiling broadly. Some in the photograph wear the white of a cook’s uniform, others are dressed smartly, as servers would be. Three women stand, their arms interlocked, on one large rock: Kavita, Stacey, and Kendall. And next to Roland is Austin Lantz. How is this possible? Clare thinks. She unhooks the photograph from the wall.
“Fuck,” she says aloud. “Get a grip, Clare. Get a fucking grip.”
But her hands are shaking when she plucks her cell phone from her back pocket to take a picture of the photograph. She
