Clare strides his way. This job requires a confidence, an extroversion deeply unnatural to her. She places a card in front of him without a hello. He offers her a card in return—AUSTIN LANTZ, FREELANCE JOURNALIST—and extends his hand. His handshake is flimsy.
“Have a seat, Clare,” he says.
She sets her backpack in the footwell of the stool and sits. The bartender wanders over.
“You here to drink? Or is this Austin’s office for tonight?”
“I’ll have a drink,” Clare says. “And maybe a menu?”
“Sure,” the bartender says. “Let’s start with a drink.”
“I’ll take a whiskey,” she says. “Neat.”
Clare will not overthink this. She never had troubles with alcohol the way she did with other vices. She never loved the burn down her throat or the loss of inhibition, the time and effort it took to get drunk versus the ease of the pills or tabs that dissolved discreetly on her tongue. Jason was the drinker between them, and watching him descend to the mean, sputtering, slurring version of himself was enough for Clare to keep her distance from their liquor cabinet. But here, miles and months away, as she watches the bartender select a bottle from the row and pour a shot into a tumbler for her, Clare feels oddly elated. It’s just one drink. Once the tumbler is in front of her, she lifts it to clink Austin’s beer bottle.
“Thank you for meeting me,” she says.
“I love that there’s a PI on the case now.”
“You’ve been tracking this story for a long time,” Clare says.
“I wrote my first article on it in journalism school. Covered Jack Westman’s murder. So yeah. I’ve been at it for five years.” He swivels his stool to face outward. “This building was a Westman property. Most of Lune Bay was at some point or another. Zoe Westman ran this bar for a while after she moved back to town. Did you know that? She had her engagement party here.”
“To celebrate her engagement to Malcolm Hayes,” Clare says. “I’ve seen photographs of that party.”
“That was a big social event in Lune Bay. The Westmans were local royalty back then.”
Clare found the photos of the engagement party online, Malcolm so young and handsome, his dress shirt unbuttoned low on his chest, his hair longer and wavy. What surprised her most was the way his chin lifted to the camera, a drink in one hand, daring the picture to be taken. It seemed impossible that the young man in that photograph was the same stiff and inscrutable man she’d meet eight years later. Clare recognized other people too; Zoe of course, Charlotte, the Westman parents. All these characters in Malcolm’s origin story.
“Why don’t we exchange what we know?” Austin suggests, facing Clare again.
“I’ve already read most of what you’ve written,” Clare says. “I think I know what you know.”
“Ha! So you think a reporter writes down all his secrets?”
“Isn’t that exactly what a reporter’s supposed to do?”
“Maybe. I’ll tell you that I couldn’t find anything on Clare O’Kearney, Private Investigator.”
“No,” Clare says, a ringing in her ears. “You won’t find much on me.”
“I’d say that means you’re using an alias.”
“If I were, I’d probably have a good reason to, right? Keep a low profile, that kind of thing.”
Austin smiles. The bartender returns with a menu. Clare scans it quickly and orders a burger. She can’t remember the last proper meal she ate, her stomach hollow with hunger. And she must eat if she’s going to keep drinking.
“You want any food?” she asks Austin.
“He’s too cheap to order food,” the bartender says, taking the menu. “I force him to order at least one drink.”
“Come on,” Austin says. “You know you love my company.”
Clare must remind herself to take small sips of the whiskey. She watches Austin over the edge of her glass, his easy banter with the bartender. His eyes are a sharp blue, his jaw patched with the attempts to grow a beard. Much of his presentation is about making himself appear older than he is. One arm rests on a leather notebook thick with earmarked pages. Clare bends to her own bag and extracts her notebook. In the days in between cases she’d thought of every way she could to formalize this work. She’d sat in a motel room with papers scattered, watching rerun detective shows into the early hours. Anything she could think of to authenticate herself into this role. She writes today’s date at the top of the page, then the name Austin Lantz, underlining it twice.
“Can you tell me everything you know about Malcolm Hayes?” she asks. “Any secrets, as you say, that you didn’t include in your articles?”
“The guy was a creep. I’m pretty sure he offed his wife.”
“There’s no proof of that.”
Her tone is measured. If she is biased, Clare must not reveal that to Austin.
“A woman goes missing, they can’t find a single trace, and as soon as the cops lean on him, the husband vanishes? I’d say that’s as close to a confession as you’ll ever get.”
Not necessarily, Clare thinks. She too disappeared from her life nine months ago, never reaching out to those left behind, instead allowing them to believe whatever they chose to believe. Clare knew they’d think she was dead, that her brother, Christopher, and her best friend, Grace, would assume the worst. No doubt they believed that if Jason hadn’t killed her, then she’d probably overdosed, done herself in. Clare knows better than anyone else that it’s possible to vanish, alive and well.
“Did you ever meet Malcolm?” Clare asks.
“I met him. I know him.”
“What do you mean, you know him?”
“I’ve researched his life. Take a walk down to St. James Cemetery. In one corner you’ll find Malcolm’s whole family, dead. Plane crash. He didn’t grow up here. His father was a bigwig in Newport, which is a few hundred miles up the coast. But his parents were from this area, so they’re buried here. About a hundred yards away, you’ll find the Westman plot. I’ve talked to people who knew Malcolm back in the day. They say he was stone cold after his family died. His family died in a plane crash and he just iced over. Sound like a normal guy to you?”
“But you don’t actually know him,” Clare says.
Austin says nothing. Clare knows she can’t fully trust the version of Malcolm offered to her by those here in Lune Bay. She has often thought of what people in her hometown might have said about her after she left, how they might have described her as bitter, cruel, detached, a drug addict married to an angry drunk. Clare drains her whiskey and orders another one. Fuck it. She needs it.
Austin flicks her empty glass so it edges down the bar.
“A PI with an Irish name drinking whiskey,” he says. “That’s very on brand.”
Clare smiles tightly. “Beer’s not my thing.”
“Was it your husband’s thing?” Austin asks.
“Excuse me?”
Austin lifts Clare’s left hand from where it rests on the bar and gently rubs at the base of her ring finger. “You see right here? The little dent in the skin? It’s almost faded. Almost. Your wedding ring might have gotten a bit tight over the years. Literally, I mean. My mom still had that dent two years after leaving my dad and chucking her wedding ring. It drove her nuts.”