“You don’t know what you saw,” Charlotte says. “Because it wasn’t that.”
“Did you know what was coming?”
“No,” Charlotte says.
“But you knew it was Grayson when you saw him.”
“No.”
“What bullshit,” Clare says. “Come on, Charlotte.”
It’s always a dead giveaway, the way a person’s shoulders drop the moment they are caught in a lie. Clare remembers that feeling too well from her own life, lying to Grace or her brother, Christopher, about whether she’d been using, lying to Jason about why she was a little late arriving home from work. Lying to avoid conflict or accusations, to keep herself safe. She sees that same tension in Charlotte now, the way she exhales the last of her cigarette with a protracted sigh, debating what to say next.
“I’m not repeating this story to Germain,” Charlotte says. “Do you understand? It’ll be your word against mine.”
“Okay.”
“You’d better not be recording me.”
Clare stands and lifts her shirt to confirm the absence of a wire. Then she collects her phone from her pocket and powers it off, setting it on the table between them.
“My dad did have cancer,” Charlotte begins. “He figured he did, so he had me drive him to a clinic fifty miles away. Paid for all the tests and reports in cash to keep it off his medical records.”
“How long was this before he died?” Clare asks.
“Two weeks? I don’t know. It’s all jumbled up.”
“Okay,” Clare says. “How did he react to the diagnosis?”
“He was stone cold.” Charlotte chokes on a cry. “On the drive back to Lune Bay, he told me he’d known for months that something was wrong. He couldn’t piss properly, he was losing weight, his stomach hurt, you name it. ‘I’m not dying of cancer,’ he told me in the car. He turned on me. ‘I can’t die,’ he said. ‘You and your sister will drive everything I’ve ever built into the ground.’ I didn’t understand why he was lumping me in. Zoe? Sure. She was working with him by then and it was obvious that she was pretty reckless. Taking risky ventures. Branching out in unsavory ways. I was just trying to keep my shit together. I had a custody battle to fight. I was trying to play the good mother and stop myself from popping pills. And then one day my dad is in the passenger seat of my car, riddled with cancer and accusing me of wanting to prey on his death.”
The sob finally escapes Charlotte. Clare touches her arm and waits for her to gather herself and continue.
“There was an insurance policy,” she says. “Right after he was diagnosed, he put it in my name. He wanted me to use it for Shelley. My daughter. That was the deal. Zoe would get the company, or what was left of it, and I’d get the insurance policy. He made me promise to keep the cancer thing to myself. I wasn’t allowed to tell my mother. Zoe didn’t know. At least, I think she didn’t.”
“But you never did get an insurance payout?”
“That’s the crazy part.” Charlotte’s laugh is shrill. “If he’d just died of cancer, I would have gotten the money. Over three million dollars. But when the cause of death is a bullet to the head, claim investigators don’t let go of the cash so easily. Especially when the beneficiary has been changed only a few weeks earlier. And then the murder goes unsolved. So I get nothing. All his assets are frozen and eventually seized. His business partner goes to prison. Zoe takes whatever’s left and runs it right into the ground, just like he predicted she would. Some part of me wonders if my dad did it all on purpose. To screw with us. He always said we didn’t know how to fend for ourselves.”
“That’s a hard thing to hear from your father,” Clare says.
“He was a bad man,” Charlotte says. “He said to me, ‘There’s not a fucking chance I’m dying of cancer.’ You know what he meant by that? That he wasn’t going to wither away in some hospital bed. He wanted his death on the front page of the newspaper. Can you imagine?”
Clare thinks of the video, of Jack Westman’s anticipatory gaze turned to the door. Charlotte leans to pick her phone from the deck floor next to her lounger. She unlocks it and scans the photographs for a long stretch, back through months and years, until finally she slows the scroll and zeroes in on one portrait. She hands the phone to Clare. The picture depicts three people with the ocean behind them, Charlotte at the center, her daughter, Shelley, next to her, pressed into her hip, the little girl’s hair whipped up by the breeze. A man stands on the other side with his arm around Charlotte. It is easy enough to identify him even though he doesn’t wear glasses: Grayson Morris.
“He grew up with Malcolm,” Charlotte says.
“In Newport,” Clare adds.
“Yeah. I don’t think they were best friends, but they knew each other. Grayson knew who Malcolm was.”
A pit of dread forms in Clare’s stomach. She can feel herself wanting to lead Charlotte, to suggest other possibilities that point away from Malcolm. Charlotte takes the last drag of her cigarette, then mashes out the butt on the wooden arm of the lounger. She can tell by Charlotte’s expression that the dam is cracking, that she can no longer keep these secrets to herself.
“Grayson came to Lune Bay looking for a fresh start,” Charlotte says. “Maybe to take advantage of his connection to Malcolm. We’re all guilty of that, right? Mining our connections. Grayson and I met at The Cabin. What
