Still Mine (21 page)

“You’re making that up,” Clare says.

“Am I?”

“Step back!” Clare says. “You’re too close to the edge.”

Cupping his mouth, Jared hollers into the void. The echo is muffled.

“They call it a lost mine,” he says. “All the tunnels down there. Miles of them, abandoned.”

“Please. You could fall in.”

“People have fallen in,” Jared says. He takes hold of the frame and leans into the darkness.

“Please,” Clare says, a crack in her voice. She sees the top of the cellar stairs, the darkness below. That tipping sensation that comes right before you fall. Jared presses away from the door and walks over so that their faces are inches apart through the fence.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m just playing around.”

“Who’s fallen in?” Clare asks.

“No one, really. That’s just Charlie’s dumb joke. But it would be the perfect place to hide a body. Wouldn’t it?”

“It doesn’t sound good when you say things like that.”

Jared steps back to take a quick run at the fence and climbs it again, landing on the other side right next to Clare. He takes her by the arms so she is facing him squarely.

“Let me spell it out,” he says, drawing out the words for effect. “I didn’t kill my wife. I didn’t throw her down the mine shaft. She never came down here. Not even with Charlie. No one threw her down the mine shaft.”

“You didn’t kill your wife,” Clare repeats, blinking, nauseated again.

“Swear to God. Last time I saw her, she was in the gorge, out cold by the fire.”

“You left her down there?”

“I had my hands full with someone else.”

A flash of awkwardness passes between them at this revelation, Jared going home with another woman. His thumb presses into Clare’s shoulder, prompting a stab of pain. She shakes herself free from his grasp.

“She never would have come home with me anyway,” Jared says. “She was looking for reasons to hate me. She didn’t want me, but she didn’t want me to move on either.”

“So what do you think happened to her? You must have a theory.”

“I think she woke up and walked upstream. She knew the route like the back of her hand. Got home and drove away.”

“Drove away in what?”

“Someone’s car.”

The way he looks at her, Jared is willing Clare to piece it together.

“Derek? You think Derek took her?”

“Why wouldn’t he? Suits him perfectly. He gets to keep her, and everyone else looks to me.”

This is the version Clare presented to Malcolm last night. It strikes her now that she might be grasping at whatever theory absolves Jared.

“What about Wilfred and Louise?” Clare asks. “Derek just steals their daughter right out from under them?”

Jared shrugs. “Maybe they’re in on it.”

“What? No way.”

“They always listen to the doctor.”

“You’re just pointing fingers.”

“So are they.”

Clare frowns, considering.

“If I ask you something,” she says after a minute, “will you tell me the truth?”

“Would I admit to a lie?”

“Sara told me that you once found Shayna overdosed at her parents’ place. She said you left her to die.”

Jared bends to pick up a rock. He tosses it over the fence so that it lands and rolls into the open door of the shaft, clanging its way down.

“That’s the kind of story people invent when they need a bad guy,” he says. “You never knew Shayna.”

“So you didn’t find her?”

“I went to see her up at her parents’ place. She’d moved out a month earlier and we had some decisions to make. I wanted to file the paperwork but she was stalling. She was jonesing, actually. Off-her-head desperate. She begged me to find her something to take the edge off and I refused. Tried to talk her down but she was having none of it. Believe me, she was alive and sober when I left. I guess Wilf found her a few hours later in a coma. She must have hit up Charlie in between. I wasn’t even allowed to visit her at the hospital. I was the evil one by virtue of my wedding ring.”

Clare spots four birds circling, hawks or falcons, she could never tell the difference. She squints up and watches them swoop and glide overhead. It’s been months, years, since Clare has bantered like this with a man, a back-and-forth both calm and fraught. An equal footing. Jared studies her.

“You really do look pale,” Jared says.

“Can you drive me to town?”

“I didn’t kill my wife,” Jared says again.

I believe you, Clare thinks. But she can’t say it out loud. Jared is standing too close to her. Please don’t, she wants to say. She’d almost forgotten the energy that signals a kiss, the ground gathering charge. Clare steps around him and walks back to the truck.

“I told Sara I’d meet her soon,” Clare says. “I need to make a quick stop first.”

“I told you my story,” Jared says, following behind. “Now you owe me yours.”

“I know I do. Just not now.”

In the truck Clare rolls down the window and leans into the breeze to ward off further conversation, to settle her stomach. She thinks of Shayna and Jared’s wedding picture, of the photographs of Malcolm and Jason hanging in the trailer, those framed photos left behind on her kitchen windowsill at home, she and Grace, that last healthy picture of her mother. You owe me your story, Jared said. What if Clare isn’t sure of her story, whether she’s remembering any of it correctly? What if she’s altered it to spare herself some key truth? If all those photographs were here, Clare would pile them into the pit at the trailer and light a fire, watch all their faces swirl together. What she wouldn’t give to be free of it, like Louise, to remember nothing, to have it all melt away.

T
he driveway is marked by a hand-painted sign nailed to a tree:
Meyer
. The walk from the hospital has disoriented Clare so that now she is almost teetering, her mouth dry with thirst. It took some convincing to get Jared to leave her at the hospital, insisting she needed only to pick up something left behind in Louise’s room, that she’d soon head to Sara’s.

Derek’s driveway is narrow and rocky, a trailer up ahead much like the one at Charlie’s, his SUV pulled up beside it. No house. Flies swarm her. Clare feels anxious, shaky. You are not yourself, Clare thinks. Settle down. This is just the infection setting in.

A light is on in the trailer. Before she nears the door, Derek opens it and steps out. He looks disheveled, his shirt untucked, a day’s growth on his face.

“I’m surprised to see you,” Derek says. “No one comes up here.”

“The nurse told me where to find you,” Clare says. “My shoulder is bad. I’m out of sorts.”

“Did you walk here?”

“My car is dead,” Clare says. “I thought the fresh air would help.”

“So you’re stranded?” Derek says, his expression blank. “That’s not good.”

Clare feels the familiar patter in her chest. Fear.

“Is someone here with you?” Clare asks.

“Who would be here with me?”

“Shayna?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Come in.”

“Maybe you should take me back to the hospital.”

“We’ll go if we need to. Let me have a look first. Come in. You need something to drink.”

There is nothing else to be done, nowhere to go but in. Clare hoists herself up the steps and into the trailer. It is laid out just as hers is, the small kitchen and banquette at the center and the bedroom at the far end. Except Derek’s is immaculate, the counter wiped clean, the sink scrubbed and devoid of a single dish, no comforts of home. He places a glass of water on the table.

“Sit down. I’ll get my kit.”

After a minute, he returns from the bedroom with his medical bag.

“You’re the town doctor,” Clare says. “Why do you live in a trailer?”

Derek washes his hands at the sink. “I had plans to build a house on this lot. There’s a great view from higher up. I was about to break ground when the mine blew.”

“Why’d you stay in Blackmore? You must have had better options.”

“They needed me,” he says. “The other doctors left. Most of the nurses too. Everything would have fallen apart if I’d gone.”

“But everything fell apart anyway.”

There is a small clench in Derek’s jaw at this slight. A dizzy spell comes over Clare. She sips the water, then rests her forehead in her hand to quell the surge. Derek sits beside her and removes some supplies from his kit. He pulls on a pair of surgical gloves.

“Let me have a look,” he says.

Clare pushes her bra strap aside and wriggles her arm out of the neck of her shirt so that her left shoulder is bare. Derek presses gently into the skin surrounding the gash.

“It’s warm to the touch,” he says. “A bit swollen.”

“I don’t feel very well,” Clare says.

Up close Derek’s eyes are too deep a brown for Clare to distinguish his irises from his pupils. He squints.

“Do you see how the edges of the surrounding redness are jagged?” Derek traces the perimeter of the wound. “The infection is starting to spread. You need antibiotics.”

“You like to fix people,” Clare says, studying his face.

“I’m just doing my job. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“You tried to fix them. The women. Shayna and Sara.”

“Not anymore,” he says, leaning back. “I know a lost cause when I see one.”

Derek reaches into his kit for a gauze, then douses it in antiseptic. When he touches it to Clare’s shoulder, she jolts.

“That burns,” she says.

“It’s not the infection that’s making you sick,” Derek says. “I’ve seen withdrawal before.”

Clare shakes her head. It’s always obvious, Grace used to say. You think you can hide it but you can’t. We aren’t blind.

“What have you been taking?” Derek says.

“Nothing. Not recently.”

“You know it’ll eventually kill you, right? There’s no surviving it. You either stop, or you die.”

“It’s not that simple,” Clare says.

“My mother was a drunk,” Derek says. “She could have stopped. Willed herself to stop. She just didn’t. It
was
that simple.”

“You don’t give her much credit.”

“She didn’t deserve my credit,” Derek says.

Clare thinks of Grace and Christopher seated together in her living room, pitted against her as she seethed at them, their intervention ill-timed, days before her planned departure, Grace’s tiny baby tucked safely at home with Grace’s husband. She thinks of Christopher following her into the kitchen, insisting she hear him out, Clare’s rage steering her to Jason’s gun in the mudroom. Clare braces herself when Derek presses the antiseptic to her skin again. It bubbles and hisses as it seeps into the cut.

“Was Shayna pregnant?” Clare asks.

“Where did that question come from?”

“Louise said something about a baby.”

“She has early dementia. She says a lot of things.”

“She says things about Shayna. About you.”

“Are you working for someone?” Derek says.

“No.”

“Are you working for someone?” Derek says again.

“No. It’s hard not to be curious.”

Derek presses harder. Clare flinches. “Sorry,” he says. “I’ve got to get it clean.”

“I’m trying to help Louise,” Clare says. “I think she’s searching for Shayna. You know a lot about that family. Maybe you know something that could help her. Or help the authorities track her down.”

Derek unpacks some fresh gauze and tape and sets to fashioning a bandage over her shoulder.

“No one in Blackmore gets pregnant anymore,” he says. “The whole town is poisoned. The water, the air, the soil.”

“Were you her doctor?”

Derek sighs. “I’m everyone’s doctor.”

“Louise seems certain you know where Shayna is.”

“Louise is also certain the mine is still open and that she sees Shayna every day.”

“So you think there’s nothing to it?”

“Why don’t we cut her loose?” Derek says, losing patience. “Let a woman with dementia run the investigation? A wild goose chase. See what she finds.”

The door to the trailer flaps open in a breeze. Derek fixes the bandage to Clare’s shoulder.

“Believe me,” he says. “I wish I knew where Shayna was. She vanished and no one who was there remembers a thing.”

Clare brushes her hair aside to keep it from tangling into the tape, Derek focused on his task. She inhales deeply in an effort to pick up his scent. When the bandage is in place, he removes the gloves and stands again to wash his hands. Clare struggles to readjust her shirt.

“I know the theory floating around,” he says. “That I’ve squirreled her away at rehab somewhere. Stolen her to heal her.”

Clare says nothing.

“Why would I do that?” he asks. “What rehab clinic would take someone against their will? Why would I jeopardize my whole life and livelihood for that?”

“You and Jared hate each other.”

“That’s nothing new. I’m not about to kidnap his wife.”

“Ex-wife,” Clare says.

A cell phone rings. Clare rests her hand against her pocket. Derek lifts his phone from the counter and answers it. Clare watches him frown as he speaks, his words clipped, yes and no. Though he hides it well with his poise, Derek Meyer’s anger is palpable, the same anger all the men she’s ever known have bared in the face of things they cannot control.

“I have to go see a patient,” Derek says, hanging up. He reaches into his kit again and sets a full pill bottle on the table. “Take these. Three times a day until all the pills are gone.”

“You just carry a pharmacy around in your bag?”

“I make a lot of house calls,” Derek says. “They’re standard antibiotics. Just take them. You’ll feel better quickly.”

“Thank you,” Clare says, rolling the bottle around in her hand. She twists off the lid and drops one of the pills into her palm. Derek nudges her water closer.

“They’re bitter,” Derek says.

Clare lifts her head and drops the pill to the back of her throat. It occurs to her that the bitterness might be born of something other than the antibiotics. That the pill could be laced, unable as she is to trust even this doctor.

“Can I catch a lift with you to the hospital?” Clare says. “I’d like to check in on Louise.”

Before she can stand up, Derek takes her by the wrist, closing his grip when Clare tries to pull free.