“Hey,” he says, opening a hand to her. “Come here.”
Clare chooses the chair next to the bed. She sets her hand in his.
“Look.” He pats his bandaged shoulder. “My gunshot wound matches yours.”
“Funny that,” Clare says.
“I guess that makes us even.”
“I’m not so sure it does.”
“Well, technically you pulled the trigger,” Malcolm says. “That has to count for something.”
“No,” Clare says. “I was trying to save us. I had to get the gun from Zoe. You just got caught in the crossfire.”
“I got lucky,” he says. “I was lucky you were there.”
Clare lowers her eyes. It’s been nearly eight hours since she called the police to Malcolm and Zoe’s house, Jason on the floor in a pool of blood, the life drained out of him. Clare held the gun to Zoe as the sirens drew closer. Malcolm was shot, but alive, breathing, talking to her. Clare has a vague memory of Zoe pleading for her release. Just let me go.
“No,” Clare said. “This is over.”
When the police and paramedics arrived, Clare set the weapon down at their command and allowed herself to be ushered out of the house. She watched from the back of a police cruiser as Malcolm was taken away by ambulance. A while later, Somers arrived and found Clare, and finally the tears came. Clare buried her face into Somers’s shoulder and wept until her chest ached.
On their way to the hospital, Somers received word that Charlotte had been found at the motel, alive but barely, a gunshot wound to her abdomen. And now, in this hospital room, Malcolm searches Clare’s face with such intensity that Clare can’t look at him.
“How’s your head?” he asks.
“Fine. Five staples. A mild concussion. I’ll recover. I’m guessing you spoke to Germain?”
“I did. He was here a while ago. I told him everything I know. About Zoe, the Westmans. It was a start. There’s still a lot of ground to cover.”
“They let me interview with Somers.” Clare gestures to the door. “She took my statement. She’s in the hall, actually. I think she’d like to meet you.”
“I’d like that,” Malcolm says.
Clare goes to the hallway to wave Somers in. Somers drops her bag inside the door and circles the foot of the bed, surveying Malcolm’s injuries with a frowning nod.
“You took a few knocks,” she says.
“Could have been worse,” he says. “If Clare hadn’t been there.”
Somers sits on the edge of the bed. Clare is amazed by her ease, the assured way she sets the tone. Somers and Malcolm exchange a long look, some kind of understanding passing between them that Clare can hardly bear to witness. A bond, she knows, rooted in a mutual concern for her. Everything is different now. They are safe.
“What happens now?” Malcolm asks.
“Well, we unravel it,” Somers says. “All of it. Lots of rot to dig out here in Lune Bay. Lots of criminal tentacles that seem to stretch far and wide. Looks like we’ll have to open up Donovan Hughes’s case again too. So much for his chances of an appeal. That Austin guy, the journalist? He’s already downstairs in the waiting room with his goddamn notepad.” Somers shakes her head. “Kavita Spence is willing to talk. I can see pretty clearly that my efforts on the Stacey Norton case were thwarted by some pretty crafty cover-ups here in Lune Bay. People in high places were only too happy to bury all leads for the right price. The fact that I didn’t smell the rot earlier on is something I’ll have to live with.”
“I can relate to that,” Malcolm says. “A lot of people were in on it.”
“Seems so,” Somers replies. “It looks like you were the only person actually looking for these young women.”
“And Douglas Bentley,” Clare says. “He’s been searching for his daughter for a long time.”
“He deserves the truth,” Malcolm says.
The truth. In the year Malcolm spent looking for missing women, he’d discovered that Stacey Norton vanished without a trace, Malcolm’s only leads pointed to her death. He never found Kendall Bentley either. He only found her boyfriend in a rooming house a thousand miles from Lune Bay, ravaged by addiction and refusing to tell him anything about what happened to Kendall.
“I wish I had a better answer for him,” Malcolm says. “What about Clare? She won’t face any charges, will she?”
“No,” Somers says. “The case for self-defence is pretty clear-cut. Zoe isn’t going to cooperate, but that’s no surprise.”
“And Charlotte?” Clare asks.
Somers grimaces. “She just got out of surgery. They did what they could. Hard to say. She lost a lot of blood. Fingers crossed she’ll pull through.”
Pull through. Again Clare sees it in a flash, Jason’s body on the floor, his fists still clenching open and closed as the color faded from his skin. At some point this morning, a uniformed officer interrupted Clare and Somers’s interview to tell them that Jason had been officially declared dead. His body was transported to the coroner’s office for an autopsy. And when the officer looked at Clare and asked her if she was Jason’s next of kin, Somers had scolded him with a livid calm that had him skulking out the door.
“Hey.” Somers points upward, as if an idea has just come to her. She returns to her bag by the door and withdraws some papers, handing them to Clare. “I printed this up for you when I stopped in at the detachment this afternoon.”
Clare scans the papers. “An application form?”
“To the police academy back home,” Somers says. “Program’s only ten weeks. They need women.”
“You’re giving me an application form to be a cop?”
“I need a partner,” Somers says. “Would you pass a security clearance?”
“Depends,” Clare says.
The three of them laugh.
“Well, then,” Somers says. “Partners? Somers and… O’Kearney?”
“I’m going back to my maiden name. Driscoll.”
“Seriously? Somers and Driscoll? That has TV written all over it.”
Clare’s laughter shifts. She suddenly chokes back tears. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a cop. Like you said, Somers. I work
