The Shadow Box

by Luanne Rice

  “Well, through Dad,” Alexander said. “The cases he works on.”

  “If you’re wondering, Claire’s not an abused woman,” Ford said. “And neither was my mother. Or that other one. Ellen.”

  “Okay,” Conor said. He paused, watching Ford’s face for his reaction to the next question. “Who is Ellen?”

  “Someone my dad dated in college and Claire’s obsessed with. She doesn’t like thinking he was with anyone before her. She’d like to forget my dad was married before. To our mom,” Ford said.

  “Did she talk about Ellen?” Conor asked.

  “No,” Alexander said. “And I think my brother’s wrong about Claire being obsessed with her or anyone. She’s an artist, she’s curious.”

  “Let me ask you this, though: Why are you guys here today? In Claire’s studio?”

  “Because I’m hungover like a motherfucker,” Ford said. “I didn’t want to drive home drunk last night. And I don’t feel like being up at the main house where my Dad might come in.”

  “Why would that be a problem?” Conor asked.

  Ford just stared at the ceiling.

  “Our mother left because she’d rather drink than be with him. With us,” Alexander said, staring at Ford. “And our dad worries about Ford.”

  “I’m not an alcoholic,” Ford said.

  “How do you feel about Claire?” Conor asked.

  Ford made a scoffing sound. “I told you, we didn’t get along. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her, but it’s not making me drink.”

  “What is, then?” Conor asked, taking note of the fact he had said didn’t twice—past tense, as if she weren’t coming back.

  Ford clamped his lips together and his eyes tightly shut. Conor watched waves of pain pass through him. Alexander stared at his brother, brow-furrowed worry on his face. He looked at Conor.

  “Someone Ford loved died,” Alexander said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Conor said.

  Ford didn’t react.

  “Can you tell me who?” Conor asked.

  “Sallie,” Ford mumbled, and he turned toward the wall, perhaps so his brother and Conor wouldn’t see his emotion.

  Conor’s pulse jumped. The mention of Ford in Sallie Benson’s letter now had context. He was facing the big window, and he spotted a tall young brown-haired woman running across the grass—not from the house but from the direction of the beach path that led to Hubbard’s Point. Alexander saw her too and met her at the door. She threw herself into his arms.

  “Is Ford okay?” she asked.

  “He is,” Alexander said, and when he looked at Conor, the young woman’s gaze followed.

  “Oh,” she said, startled. “I didn’t know anyone else was here.”

  “I’m Detective Reid. And you?”

  “Emily Coffin,” she said. “Alexander’s girlfriend. I’m sorry, is this a bad time?”

  “Not at all,” Conor said.

  “He’s investigating what happened to our stepmom,” Alexander said. He held Emily’s hand, and she leaned into his body.

  “You’re Neil and Abigail’s daughter?” Conor asked, trying to keep the neighbors straight.

  “I’m their niece—I live in Stonington.”

  “That’s how Alexander and she got together,” Ford shot over his shoulder. “He and I live in her family’s guesthouse. Proximity makes the heart grow fonder.”

  “We caretake the property when Emily’s parents are away,” Alexander explained.

  “Emily, do you know Claire?” Conor asked.

  “Not very well, unfortunately,” Emily said. “I’m not here that often. But I really like her—she’s always so nice to me. It’s horrible. The reporters keep talking about the blood.” She gazed expectantly at Conor, as if waiting for him to comment, but he didn’t.

  “Dad says he’ll never go into the garage again,” Alexander said.

  “I can imagine!” Emily said. “Is the blood still there? I mean not the actual blood but the stains? The stuff you can see with that chemical in the blue light?”

  “It’ll never go away,” Alexander said, putting his arm around her.

  Conor noticed Alexander glance over at Ford, but Ford hadn’t moved—he was still lying down.

  “Ford,” Conor said. “When you said ‘Sallie,’ did you mean Sallie Benson?”

  “Yes,” Alexander answered for his brother.

  “You loved her?”

  “Yeah,” Ford mumbled. “She was married, older than my mother; I’ve heard all about it. But none of that mattered.”

  “When did you last see her?” Conor asked.

  “Two days before the explosion,” Ford said, sitting up, looking unsteady even though he was on the daybed. “We had a fight. I was a fucking asshole. And she fucking killed herself because . . .” He choked on a sob.

  “Because what?” Conor asked, taking note of the fact Ford thought Sallie committed suicide. Or he wanted Conor to think he did.

  Ford shook his head and couldn’t speak.

  “Ford told her husband,” Alexander said. “He told Dan, but he didn’t do it to be mean—he really loved Sallie. He wanted to be with her, that’s the whole thing. He thought if Dan knew, it would be easier for her to leave him. She’d have no choice.”

  “Were you angry with her?” Conor asked. “When she didn’t leave him, when you had the fight?”

  “Yes,” Ford said. “Because . . . I never even fucking slept with her. She wanted someone else. I mean, not her husband.”

  “You going to tell me who?” Conor asked.

  “Edward,” Alexander said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Edward Hawke,” Ford said. “Our neighbor, right next door. I used to swim in their pool. I told Sloane too. His wife, Claire’s best friend. I told her right here,” Ford said, gesturing around the studio. “Told her Edward was having an affair with Sallie. We had some nice rosé. I drank with the ladies while I told Sloane her husband was cheating on her. Knowing Claire, that shit was probably straight from France. Straight from Provence. She loved stuff like that.”

  “Stop now,” Alexander said. He dropped Emily’s hand and went closer to his brother on the sofa bed.

  “Claire loved spending Dad’s money,” Ford said. “It didn’t make me want to hurt her—it’s just a fact. Sitting here drinking expensive pink wine with Sloane. She was a so-called artist, but how much could she earn from that crap she made? Sallie was the opposite. She never took anything from Dan—she was a successful businesswoman. How could you not admire her?”

  “It’s been traumatic for Ford,” Alexander said. “The whole family is going crazy about Claire—no matter what he says, he’s worried too. And then Sallie. You have to understand him, Detective. Our mother left when we were young, and it’s never really been right since.”

  “The sad boys, the lost twins,” Emily said, embracing Alexander.

  “Sad, not lost,” Alexander said, looking over her shoulder at Ford.

  “Fucked up, not sad,” Ford said. “I’m out of here.”

  “Better not drive,” Conor said.

  “Don’t worry. I’m going to my old room. Now that Claire’s not here, I won’t get shit for sleeping in it. Why do you think we live half an hour away on Emily’s property? Because Claire didn’t want us here.” He stumbled out of the studio.

  Didn’t. Past tense again, Conor thought. As if Ford knew Claire wasn’t coming back.

  Alexander took a step toward the door, starting to follow his brother, then turned and faced Conor. “He didn’t mean it that way.”

  “What way?” Conor asked.

  “Like he’s glad Claire’s not here,” Alexander said.

  “He didn’t say that!” Emily said.

  “I know, but the whole family’s being investigated. Right, Detective?” Alexander asked. “Mostly Ford?”

  “We have to follow every lead,” Conor said.

  “Look,” Alexander said. “We’ll do anything to he
lp you find Claire—even Ford. He’s just had too much to drink, and he’s wrecked about Sallie, and he’s not making sense.”

  “I understand,” Conor said. “Thanks for talking to me, both of you.” He nodded at Emily. “If either of you think of anything, just give me a call. Please tell Ford too.” He started to hand Alexander his card, but Alexander stepped back, hands at his sides.

  “Thanks anyway, but if we think of anything, we’ll tell our father,” Alexander said, not smiling. “No one wants to find Claire more than he does, and he’s the state’s attorney.”

  “That he is,” Conor said.

  “You know, he is pro police all the way. Investigating my brother could really hurt his chances.”

  “You mean his chances to become governor?” Conor asked.

  “Yes,” Alexander said. “My father’s a good man. The best there is. And my brother has some issues, but he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Got it,” Conor said.

  That was weird, he thought as he walked toward his car. Alexander had floated a little threat his way. Investigate Ford and maybe Griffin won’t be so pro police. It rolled off Conor’s back but showed how loyal Alexander was to his brother.

  Conor stared into the woods that ran east from Catamount Bluff. The trails were overgrown and numerous, but if Claire wasn’t taken away by car or boat, they were the only other possible means of escape. With hundreds of acres of forest and marsh to dispose of her body. The extensive search had turned up nothing, but Conor wanted to walk the path himself.

  He stopped at the edge of the coastal forest. To the south, there was Long Island Sound and a long strand of sandy beach and rocky pools. North of the woodland, a salt marsh, full of reeds and creeks and poles supporting osprey nests, spread into the distance. He glanced down Catamount Road—an old white-haired man, wearing khakis and a long-sleeved green shirt, spotted Conor and lifted his hand in a feeble wave. Conor had only questioned Wade Lockwood once, right after Claire went missing. But he recognized the eldest resident of Catamount Bluff, and he waved back.

  Staring at the thicket and woods, Conor saw no visible paths, only small gaps between trees. Were those deer tracks or paw prints on the sandy ground? Either way, he was going to follow them.

  He wasn’t a nature guy. He liked the shore but mostly from the porch of a seaside bar. Sometimes he and Kate flew out to Block Island to hike through Rodman’s Hollow. His brother, Tom, made his life and living on the ocean—and Kate in the sky—but from the time Conor had become a police officer, he’d gotten used to the highway, shoreline towns, urban and suburban crime scenes. He shouldered his way between two pines, smelled sap, and headed into the dark unknown.

  25

  CLAIRE

  Daylight. I tried to sleep during the day and be up at night when it was safe, but a sound awakened me. Something crashing through the brush. Was that a swear word, a human voice? I lay still in my sleeping bag, clawing myself out of wild dreams, and listened.

  Yes, it was a person. No big animal would stalk the woods at this hour, when bright sun was streaming through branches and new leaves. It couldn’t be my mountain lion, and I felt a million times more danger than if it were.

  I thought: Griffin.

  The cabin was hidden so deeply—and it was so camouflaged by its weathered boards, with vines growing up the walls—that I wanted to believe he would never see it, no matter how close he passed by.

  I started to sit up, but my bones ached. I hadn’t eaten much since I had seen the mountain lion—not because I was scared of him, or at least I don’t think that was the reason—but because I was so tired. I’d gathered green seaweed—“sea lettuce”—both to eat and to press into my wounds. It contained alginate, known to aid healing. My father had taught me that. Yarrow worked as well, and I had picked some and mixed it with water to make a poultice and pack the worst cuts. I thought I was getting better, but this extreme exhaustion made me wonder if an infection had seeped in.

  The weakness spread from the cuts in my skin into my blood, my bones, my brain. I would tell myself to move a muscle, but nothing would happen. I began to see the mountain lion sitting in the corner of my cabin. At night, where the North Star used to appear in the cracks of the cabin roof, I would see the cougar’s eyes. What did it mean that I was no less comforted? My father was the mountain lion, and the mountain lion was my father.

  The sound of someone coming through the woods got closer. No animal would be so clumsy, breaking branches and tossing leaves. I imagined Griffin approaching. He was so deft in his legal work—never a wrong word in a brief, never a mistake in court. But in the woods? He loved the water, going out on his boat, but he’d never enjoyed hiking or exploring the woodland with me.

  It was true, however, that on that night when he and I had met at the cove twenty-five years ago, not half a mile south of here, he had moved like a jungle cat along the path—but that had been the main trail, not the narrow, meandering, and hard-to-spot deer tracks that crisscrossed the woods and marsh around the cabin.

  I had a vision of Griffin on the beach, the night of shooting stars. I tasted his lips. In my dream, I felt the heat of his mouth. His body pressed against mine. Time slipped away and came back.

  I thought of the love I had had as a child—the strength it gave me now. And I thought of the day I learned how cruelty in a childhood could create a demon.

  It was just one year into our marriage. By then, I had seen the black-eyes phenomenon several times. It always terrified me, and immediately after each bout of rage, I would think of leaving him. Sometimes I would come to this cabin to think. And once I calmed down, once the reverberations of fear passing through my body had subsided, I would decide to stay.

  I had already been divorced once—I didn’t want to fail in another marriage. I’d tell myself he would never physically hurt me—everyone got angry, and in fact, it was a healthy emotion. With his high-pressure job and the tragedies he encountered at work, he had to let off steam. I’d just have to find a way to tell him venting was fine but he couldn’t take his stress out on me.

  And almost every time I returned, shaken and full of doubt, he would hold me and tell me he loved me.

  “You’re my life,” he said, walking into our house, finding me curled up on the living room sofa after one especially bad episode. “We’re made in heaven.”

  “But it doesn’t feel like heaven when you act that way toward me,” I said, unable to meet his eyes. I looked out the window at sunlight glittering on the Sound.

  “I don’t mean to,” he said. “I’m thinking about the scumbag I’m prosecuting, who stabbed a woman to death and left her body in a pile of garbage. Or last month—the mother who let her boyfriend beat and burn her son, refused to speak out against him until one day the beating went too far and the boy died.”

  I just kept staring outside.

  “Can’t you try to understand?” he asked, an unusually plaintive tone in his voice—conciliatory, asking for forgiveness. It got my attention.

  “I know you see the worst in life,” I said. “When you come home, I’ve wanted you to feel the best in life. Our love. I try to give that to you, but . . . then something happens inside you. I’m never even sure what causes it, and you act like you hate me.”

  “I could never hate you.”

  “Just like you could never hit me, or at least that’s what you say. But you know what, Griffin? Your anger and the things you say to me hurt worse than fists. My heart aches so much right now . . .”

  “No, Claire, please don’t tell me that. I can’t stand to know I’ve made you feel this way. Will you let me try, give me another chance?” he asked, taking my hands, pulling me gently off the couch. He put his arms around me. My body was stiff, defensive.

  “I want to, but it keeps happening,” I said, my voice cracking.

  “Oh God, I can’t bear to know I make you cry,” he said. “Claire, I promise, I will try so hard.”

  “That’s not sayin
g you won’t do it again.”

  “You have to give me another chance. You’re the best woman I’ve ever known, nothing like the others.”

  “What others?”

  When he didn’t reply at first, I took my chance: “Griffin, I think we should go to counseling.”

  Dead silence for a minute. He dropped his arms, stepped back. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m in a position where I can’t show weakness. Claire, I have to be tough, so the police and detectives respect me, so the defense lawyers are afraid of me. You know, other state’s attorneys have cops who laugh at them, don’t respect them. But not me. My cops go to the mat for me. They want to make me happy and bring me everything they’ve got—they’re loyal. That could change if they saw me as weak.”

  “But therapy is private. Doctor-patient confidentiality,” I said.

  “I know you believe that, but people talk. Word gets around. If there’s one thing I know from my work, no secret can be kept forever. People, doctors included, gossip. When they have a high-profile client, they love to talk. I can’t do it.”

  He made some sense, but his words made me feel helpless. Twelve months into the marriage, I was losing hope. And as I said before, every time I relented, went back, I chipped away a little more of myself—but it would take more time for me to realize it.

  That day, I said, “When you said I’m the best woman you know, not like the others . . .”

  “You are,” he said.

  “Who are the others?”

  He sighed. “Margot, of course. You know what a nightmare it became with her.”

  He had told me, but as his second wife, I knew there was another side to the story. Even if the choice to start drinking was hers, I could understand how despair over Griffin’s rages might have fueled her alcoholism. I’d found a photo of her one time, tucked between books in the children’s library. They loved and missed her so much. Sometimes I wanted to track her down, ask what had happened to make her leave.

  “And my mother,” he said.

  “Your mother?” I asked. I was eager to hear more; he hardly spoke about her or of his family at all.

  “She was the great lady of Catamount Bluff,” he said. “She wore pearls every day, even while swimming in the Sound. She gave parties that people still talk about, volunteered at the Art Academy and our church food bank, was on bank and nonprofit boards. Everyone loved her.”