STILL MINE - Novel Excerpt

STILL MINE: Chapters 1 and 2

"Hello?" Clare's voice barely rises above a whisper.

Nothing. In her exhaustion, Clare cannot decide what to do next. At dawn, she'd pulled in to a lakeside rest area, walking straight past the picnic tables and the outhouse, wading thigh deep into the lake, catatonic, transfixed by the vast, jagged landscape of snow-peaked mountains. A foreign land. She'd hoped to take a warm shower. Malcolm told her about this motel. Clare slams her hand down hard on the bell.

The door at the far end of the office opens. A man in his sixties peers through, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

"We look open to you?" He tosses the napkin over his shoulder.

"The door was unlocked."

"We're closed."

The man is gray haired and rosy cheeked. An old family portrait hangs on the wall to his right, a younger version of him the beaming father to two red-haired boys, his hand resting proudly on his pretty wife's shoulder.

"If the rooms are still standing," Clare says. "Maybe I could just—"

"I'm closed."

Clare nods.

"I've never seen you before," he says.

"I've never been here before."

"You a reporter?"

"No."

"A cop?"

"No. I'm not a cop. I'm just here to see the mountains."

"Huh. Right."

"I take pictures."

"Pictures. Of what?"

"Landscapes, mostly. Anything off the beaten track."

"No one around here likes getting their picture taken," he says, his voice flat.

"Like I said. Landscapes. Not people." Clare pauses. "Is there another place in town I could stay?"

"No."

Clare gropes through her bag for her car keys. Just arrived and already she's failed at her first task. This motel might have been busy once, when Blackmore was still a bustling mining town, when there were jobs for everyone, money to go round, people to visit. Maybe this man's sons had been miners. Maybe they were underground five years ago when the mine blew up and killed three dozen of Blackmore's men. Clare detects a slight softening in the motel owner, his shoulders relaxing. He peels himself off the wall and approaches the desk.

"We had a bad melt in the spring," he says. "All twenty rooms flooded. I've barely had a customer in months. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't help you."

"It's okay," Clare says. "I'll figure something out."

"There are plenty of mountain towns. You could pick another one."

"I could," Clare says.

Already her story feels like too much of a ruse, arriving in Blackmore alone and unannounced. On the drive she'd anticipated the questions the attendant just asked of her. Who are you? Why are you here? She'd rehearsed her answers. She and Malcolm had been hasty in picking photography as her cover, the one skill in her thin repertoire now ringing false on delivery. The attendant walks around and props the door open to usher her out.

"Turn around," he says. "Drive back down the hill. That's my advice."

Clare retraces her steps to the car. The mountains are cloaked in low clouds, Blackmore's main road fogged from view. She hears the bolt of the office door behind her. Clare knew full well the reception here would be cold. She grew up in a small town beset by the same woes as Blackmore. She remembers the way her neighbors closed rank when strangers turned up, all prying eyes unwelcome. Who knows what the motel owner sees when he looks at Clare? Maybe he knew Shayna Fowles, maybe his sons were friends with her. Maybe it rattles him, one woman gone missing and another turning up out of nowhere, a stranger in his midst.