“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,” Clare says. “It’s been nearly two years.”
“It’s been a year and a half. And my sister’s not missing. She’s dead.”
Clare works to mask her surprise, to hold her expression steady. “How do you know that?” she asks.
“Because there’s no way she came out of this alive. She pissed off way too many people. Your boyfriend Malcolm included.”
“He’s not my—” Clare stops herself. Charlotte is trying to get the best of her. Clare withdraws the gun from her belt and inspects it, turning it over in her hands, a show of power. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, then, Charlotte? You say your sister’s dead, but you’re keeping some kind of tabs on her abandoned glass house?” Clare waves an arm about. “Do you keep cameras here? Motion detectors? You sure got here pretty fast after I did.”
“We’ve had problems with trespassers.”
“Who’s we?” Clare asks.
The question is met with a stony gaze.
“Locking the door might help,” Clare says, allowing a pause. “I’m guessing you’re playing the vigilante now, the sister dressed in black, looking to avenge? You’ve got a bone to pick with someone. Maybe I can help you. Your sister pissed a lot of people off, you say. I’m sure there’s more you can tell me about that.”
Charlotte keeps her chin up, her back straight against the wall, all signs of her tears gone. She says nothing. We are the same, Clare thinks. At war with ourselves—one part of us in pain and the other ready for revenge. Clare works to call up the details on Charlotte Westman she’d collected in the file. Younger than Zoe by barely a year. Never went to college. Married young, divorced young too. She has a daughter who, if Clare remembers correctly, should now be about ten. A lot in Charlotte’s life has gone wrong, Clare thinks. Hostility is not the right angle to take with her. Clare will try a different tack.
“Charlotte,” she says, calmer. “Listen. This was a terrible way to meet. But I think you and I probably want the same thing.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“I’ve read about you. I know your life hasn’t been easy. You have a daughter. But five years ago your father was murdered and everything went to shit. Then your mother dies, of what? Heart failure? And your sister vanishes three years after that. I believe you lost custody of your daughter. So now you’re alone.”
Clare pauses. Charlotte’s hands open and close into tight fists. She cracks a knuckle, breathing hard through her nose.
“Malcolm isn’t my boyfriend,” Clare continues. “I came here to find him. To figure out what happened. And when you try to tell someone’s story, you should start as close to the beginning as you can get, right? The first sign of trouble is a good place to begin? In this case, the first signs point to your family. My guess is that you were collateral damage in all this. That you paid for other people’s sins. Your dad’s maybe? Even your sister’s.”