Finally Charlotte wipes her eyes with her sleeve and looks up, her expression returned to one of hardened rage, her eyes rimmed red. When Clare points to the card again, Charlotte crawls to collect it from the floor between them.
“Why don’t I start at the beginning,” Clare suggests. “Tell you why I’m here.”
“Why don’t you give me back my gun,” Charlotte says, not a question.
“You mean the gun you just pointed at my brain? I’d rather not.”
“Fine,” Charlotte says. “If you’re going to hold me hostage. Fuck. Just start.”
Hostage. The word troubles Clare. She’d pictured this going so differently. She’d pictured entering this home and finding some clue, big or small. Some place to begin. Her head aches. She is tired. She swallows to gather herself.
“Okay,” Clare says. “Like I said, I’m an investigator. I know Malcolm because I used to work for him.” Clare pauses to gauge her reaction, but Charlotte only stares at her, deadpan. “I know that he left Lune Bay, took off or whatever, after he became a suspect in your sister’s disappearance. Well, he’s spent the past few years searching for missing women—”
“Wait. What? Is this some sort of joke?” Charlotte searches the room, as if expecting someone else to appear. “You’re joking, right?”
“No,” Clare says. “I guess it became his vocation. Maybe because of what happened to your sister? I don’t know. Anyway, he hired me about two months ago to work with him. To help him investigate women who’d disappeared.”
A simple enough version, Clare knows. It’s the truth, just not all of it. What Clare won’t tell Charlotte is that she was initially one of the missing women Malcolm signed on to search for, that her husband, Jason, had hired him a few months after Clare ran away from her life. She won’t tell Charlotte about Malcolm’s offer to hire her instead of turning her in to her abusive husband. Clare still can’t yet tell the full story to anyone.
“I knew nothing about Malcolm when I met him,” Clare continues. “He said he’d been married, but otherwise he was very cagey about his past. But when we were working our second case together, I guess something or someone started to catch up with him. I don’t know what, he never told me. I was working that case with a police officer, a detective actually, and she helped me dig up some details about his life. Some things I didn’t know—”
“Oh my God,” Charlotte says, laughing bitterly.
“What?”
“Let me guess. You fell in love with him.”
No,” Clare says, surprised by the bark in her tone. “What? No. Not at all.”
“Yes, you did. Oh God, I can totally see it. He was this man of mystery, this big-hearted, broken guy searching for missing women. And he kind of saved you, right? Or something like that? He pulled you out of the darkness and into his little world.”
At first Clare is too stunned to speak, anger gnawing in her gut. It is not that Charlotte is right, it’s that she is so flippant. You know nothing about me, Clare would like to say. Instead, she shakes her head and forces a small smile.
“That might make for a better story,” Clare says. “But no. I worked for him. I knew nothing about his past, like I said. I think after he left Lune Bay, he needed to do something. Maybe he felt tied to missing women cases somehow, because of your sister, his wife. Maybe that’s why he set up his own… why he started investigation work himself.” Clare can detect the falter in her voice. How improbable a story it seems when she tells it aloud. “Something to keep busy, I guess?”
“To keep busy? Jesus Christ.” Charlotte holds Clare’s card aloft and studies it again. “Investigator. And you believed him? You bought that story? That’s rich. Did he make these cards for you?”
Clare’s chest aches. A lump climbs up her throat, tears forming behind her eyes. She feels strangely exposed. This back and forth is muddling her. She bites hard at the inside of her cheek, the pain refocusing her.
“I know Malcolm didn’t give me the whole truth,” Clare says. “That’s why I’m here. That detective I met on my last case? Her name is Hollis Somers. It turns out Malcolm had a connection to the last case we worked together. So he disappeared again. Told me he needed to go. And after he left, Somers and I learned that there was more to his story than he’d let on. A lot more. This isn’t Somers’s jurisdiction, but her feeling was that the cops here weren’t doing much to solve the case of his missing wife. That as far as they were concerned, it’s gone cold. So we agreed that I’d come and see what I could find out about Malcolm, and even about Zoe. Test the waters a little.”
Charlotte wears the hint of a smile, nodding at Clare as though she were a child weaving a tall tale. Clare thinks of Malcolm at the end of their first case, confessing the basic details of his life. A missing wife. You look like her, he’d said. In her case file Clare had itemized every detail Malcolm provided about his life. It occurs to her now that little of it might actually be true.
“You must be worried about your sister,”
