by Luanne Rice
“Or, in the case of Griffin, some family friends,” Spencer said.
“Wade and Leonora Lockwood,” I said.
“Yes, they were the hosts. A friend of Mrs. Lockwood’s was along and her stepson, Dan. Plus, Griffin and his girlfriend, Ellen. The group seemed like typical guests. Superrich, there for the fishing and beaching and lots of cocktails. Marnie and I were chambermaids by day, cocktail waitresses by night—we were working extra shifts to save up money.”
“And you served them?” I asked.
Spencer nodded. “At first we were just the hired help, but Griffin, Ellen, and Dan were our age, and we began to be kind of friendly.”
“You joined them for dinner or something?” Jackie asked.
“No,” Spencer said. “That wouldn’t have gone over with the Lockwoods. You have to picture this place. Five stars, right on the beach, but with a restaurant where people ‘dressed’ for dinner. The guests either knew each other from yacht clubs or business deals or Yale—or they’d read about each other in the Wall Street Journal or Town and Country. Drawing the wagons tight so no riffraff, like hotel employees, could get in.”
“You’re not riffraff,” Jackie said.
Spencer smiled. “Our parents were Washington people—they would have gotten along just fine with the resort crowd—but they weren’t there. To people like the Lockwoods, Marnie and I were just the hired help.”
“But Griffin saw you differently?” I asked.
“I’m not sure how he saw us. It started with Ellen. She caught us after lunch one day, when we were just finishing our shifts, and invited us to hang out with them that night. On a beach a few miles from the hotels, one that we knew pretty well, where we sometimes went to get away from the resort people.”
Spencer and Marnie had said yes, excited to escape the hotel for a few hours. Marnie thought Dan was cute, scruffy, and easygoing compared to perfectly preppy Griffin.
The girls wore sundresses and sandals, glad to leave their Ventanas uniforms behind. Ellen seemed nice, and she said she was relieved to have other girls around. But Spencer had noticed something: the way Ellen kept looking at Griffin, with deference, as if trying to read signals from him.
“I felt weird almost as soon as we got into the car. It was a Jeep—the Lockwoods had rented it to go off-road, exploring the Yucatan. Griffin drove and Ellen sat up front; Dan was in back, between Marnie and me. He was sweating—I could feel it through his clothes, like he was nervous about what was about to happen—and Ellen kept glancing over at Griffin, talking to him in a low voice.”
“What was about to happen?” Jackie asked.
I listened to Spencer describe the ride: the radio was on as they left the bright lights and bustle of the hotel zone. The foliage along the roadside was thick, dark green in the headlights. The sounds of tree frogs and Yucatan night birds came through the open windows. They drank Coronas; when Griffin finished one, he hurled the empty bottle at a street sign. They heard the glass smash.
Griffin turned off the main road, and they bounced along a rutted track, trees growing so close they scraped the sides of the Jeep. Eventually they broke into a clearing at Playa Mariposa, the calm Caribbean a black mirror reflecting the stars, spreading into infinity.
“Ellen said she thought there’d be more people here,” Spencer said. “She sounded nervous. Marnie told her it was safe and we went there all the time—just to get away from the resort crowds. Only locals knew about it. And kids who work at the hotels.”
“You’d gone there before?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “And it started off as a good time, but there was a strange vibe between Griffin and Dan.”
Something about the way Griffin spoke to Dan made Spencer think the two boys weren’t really friends, that Griffin, in fact, looked down on him, was embarrassed by him. After a season at the resort, she couldn’t miss the differences in status—who in the party had the most money, who was in charge, who was the diva, who called the shots.
Ellen spread out a blanket—Spencer knew she’d taken it from the room—and the boys brought a cooler and a canvas bag down to the water’s edge. Dan took a small CD player out of the bag and turned on the music. There was an offshore breeze keeping most of the insects away, and they were lucky it hadn’t rained lately. Dry weather kept the mosquitos away.
Dan handed out more Coronas, and Griffin opened a bottle of tequila with a silver label. He had brought a lime, and he cupped it in the palm of his hand and cut it into slices with a bone-handled knife.
They began trading stories about colleges and hometowns, life in New England and inside the Capital Beltway, and the inevitable do-you-knows. Spencer’s freshman-year roommate had gone to the same boarding school as Ellen’s cousin; Marnie’s stepbrother had been wait-listed at Wesleyan—where both Griffin and Ellen went—but wound up at Trinity. Dan’s family used to go to Washington, DC, every spring vacation to visit his aunt, and it turned out she lived on the same Georgetown block as Marnie.
While Spencer listened to Dan and Marnie talk about Q Street and waiting in line for ice cream at Thomas Sweet, Griffin poured another round of shots and handed them around. The music mix was good. He reached for Spencer’s hand, but she glanced at Ellen and pulled it away. Wasn’t Ellen his girlfriend? Everyone but Ellen began to dance; Ellen sat on the blanket, watching. Griffin put his arm around Marnie and began to slow dance with her.
“Griffin told us he wanted to walk down by the water, take a swim,” Spencer said. “I told him no, there were sharks after dark. He kept saying he wanted to, and Dan joined in. Ellen didn’t say anything. Marnie really liked them, I could tell, and she said we could at least get our feet wet.”
So they all walked to the tide line, teasing the waves. The water hit their bare feet, exploding into a million bright stars—bioluminescent marine organisms that glowed at night. Spencer and Marnie had seen it happen every time they went down there for beach parties; the phenomenon always shocked and delighted kids on vacation from the north. The five of them held hands, dancing in the shallow water, kicking great sprays of water that showered them all in tiny saltwater stars.
“Dan, Marnie, and I were standing in the water, but Griffin and Ellen walked away, having an argument. That’s when I began to feel dizzy from the tequila,” Spencer said.
She went back to the blanket to lie down. She looked up at the sky. She said it was so dark there, without hotel or city lights, that the stars seemed to shower down around her, brushing her shoulders as they fell onto the sand.
The sound of the waves on the sand was rhythmic and beautiful, and she remembered thinking that this was why she and Marnie wanted to travel, to have magical nights like this, where everything came together in one peaceful, exciting, spontaneous, exotic moment. She knew she’d be hungover for her breakfast shift in the morning, but as soon as she could, she would start an article about the perfect beach party on a Yucatan night.
The beach began to spin; it felt like more than the alcohol, as if she’d been drugged. She closed her eyes and passed out for a few minutes. Or longer. She woke to the feeling of sweaty heat and the pressure of someone’s leg across hers. She wriggled to get out, but an arm held her down. Marnie was on her back beside her, thrashing beneath Griffin. Dan was holding Spencer down, his face close to hers. She tossed her head back and forth to keep him from kissing her.
She screamed and yanked her hands free, shoving his shoulders as hard as she could, punching his face. He grunted and hit her back, stunning her. Drunk as he was, he fumbled his way back. He tugged at the waistband of her panties, couldn’t manage to pull them down.
Dan was breathing heavily, telling her to hold still. She vomited into his face, and he jumped away, swearing.
Marnie was lying beneath Griffin, and he was holding her down, arms pinned to her side. Spencer saw Griffin’s naked buttocks, jeans down to his ankles. His chest pressed against Marnie’s face, but Spencer heard her muffled cries.
�
��He was raping her,” Spencer said. “I jumped on his back, smashing him with my fists as hard as I could, screaming for him to leave her alone.”
He roared at her, flinging her away. He reached up to rub his head where she’d yanked his hair. In that second Marnie rolled out from under him and began running down the beach. She disappeared into the darkness, but Spencer heard splashing and tore after her. She couldn’t catch up. By the time she reached the tide line, she saw Marnie diving into the sea.
“I dived in myself,” Spencer said. “But she was swimming so fast. I yelled for Ellen to help me, but she was up at the Jeep, looking the other way.”
“What about Dan?” I asked.
“He sat next to Griffin on the blanket as if nothing had happened. I was twenty yards offshore when Marnie disappeared—there was nothing but black water.”
There was not even a ribbon of blue-green fire to show where she had been.
“I dived for her. Over and over, screaming her name,” Spencer said, closing her eyes and seeming to go very far inward.
No one spoke for a few minutes. I watched Spencer slowly, steadily, gather herself. The window was open, and a warm breeze blew through her Rhode Island cottage in the pines. She wiped her eyes.
“I never saw Marnie again,” she said. “Her body washed up two days later.”
“I’m so sorry, Spencer,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll never get over losing her that way. I kept thinking, What could I have done differently, to help her, to save her? If I hadn’t drunk so much, or if I’d figured out they were drugging us. If I’d caught up with her before she’d jumped into the water . . . if I’d had better instincts about Griffin.”
“You saw what he wanted you to see,” I said, picturing him at that age—at any age. “Charming, fun . . .”
“And he had a girlfriend,” Jackie said. “So you would never have thought he’d be dangerous to you.”
“What happened?” I asked. “After you called Ellen to help you?”
“Nothing,” Spencer said. “I heard Griffin say, ‘Let her go swimming if she wants.’ For some reason, that sobered me up. I realized if I stayed in the water searching for Marnie, I might not come back.”
“What did Ellen do?” I asked.
“She and the boys left me there. They went back to the hotel. As they drove away, I screamed for Ellen to send help. It took forever, but finally some police—so-called police—arrived.”
“They weren’t?”
“They were resort security,” Spencer said. “They had uniforms on, drove a car with a flashing light on top. I was too messed up to realize at first. They came running down the beach, wrapped me up in a blanket, and tried to get me to leave—without even going in to try to find Marnie. No rescue squad—nothing.”
“What about Griffin and Dan?” I asked. “And Ellen? What did they say?”
“They left the resort that night,” Spencer said. “Their whole party. The Lockwoods checked out and returned to Connecticut.”
“Wasn’t there an inquest?” Jackie asked.
Spencer shook her head. “We’d been drinking. Everyone said Marnie’s death was an accidental drowning—and it was, in the sense that nobody held her under. But she’d been terrified—she ran into the water to get away from Griffin. When I told them that he had raped her, that Dan had tried to rape me, they never even investigated.” She took a deep breath. “To them, we were just a bunch of kids partying, having fun.”
“Did anyone even examine you? Or Marnie . . . after she was found?”
“No. We were just chambermaids, and they were paying customers—no one was going to ask questions.”
“The Lockwoods paid them off,” I said.
“Of course they did,” Spencer said.
My skin was crawling as I thought of the vile thing Griffin had done to Marnie. My husband had raped a young woman. And Ellen had watched and done nothing. Dan Benson, now grieving for his wife, had assaulted Spencer. And the Lockwoods—my friends, Leonora and Wade—had whisked the boys away that same night, as if they had never even been there at all.
“Why did Griffin say to let you go swimming if you wanted?” Jackie asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Spencer asked. She stared at Jackie, then at me. I felt the blood rushing through my body.
“It is,” I said.
“I was inconvenient,” she said.
“He hoped you’d drown too,” Jackie said.
“Yes. Because if I had, there would be no one left outside their circle to tell the story,” Spencer said.
“Did you ever tell anyone?” I asked. “After that night?”
“For a long time, no,” she said. “I quit work—went home to my parents. All they knew was that Marnie drowned. That I was traumatized. I wrote her parents saying how sorry I was—they wrote back telling me it wasn’t my fault, that horrible accidents happened. The story, with our friends, became that Marnie was a daredevil, lived on the edge, took one risk too many. And I never contradicted them.”
“You never told about the rape?” I asked.
“What was the point? She was gone, they had to mourn her, and I didn’t see the point of telling them what Griffin did. What she went through. No one down there believed me—there was no proof, and no one was going to make Griffin pay. All I wanted to do was forget.” She paused. “I did a good job of that. Took a long time to go back to college. Found very effective ways to keep from thinking about what happened. But then I knew.”
“Knew what?” Jackie asked.
“That I had to help women who’d faced men like Griffin. I finished college, went to law school. But that wasn’t enough. I was only able to represent one woman at a time, so I established a foundation that can do much more.”
“I know you fund clinics and go after abusers in court,” I said. “But how do you raise the money?”
“I used part of what I inherited from my grandmother,” Spencer said. “She would have liked nothing more than to help this cause. We have a network of journalists that publicize specific stories, and those reports bring in donors.”
I nodded, taking that in. I felt a surge of energy, knowing that I wanted to be involved in this. I was already using my experience to tell my story—and Ellen’s—through shadow boxes like Fingerbone. But I wanted to do more.
“When I read about you,” Spencer said to me, “I knew it was time to focus on Griffin. He has such entitlement—prosecuting criminals when he’s worse than any of them. And now, running for governor. He got away with Marnie’s death for so long. I couldn’t let him get away with yours.”
“And you want to stop him,” I said.
“So do you, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I didn’t know about you and Marnie. But I know about Ellen.”
“He killed her because she knew. She was the only one besides me. Once I started the foundation, I worried he might come after me, but I’m very careful. My house is in the name of my trust; he’d never find it,” Spencer said.
“I’m glad,” I said. Spencer radiated strength and savvy; I knew she didn’t underestimate Griffin. “What about Dan? He was right there and knows everything. Isn’t he in danger?”
“Dan was part of it,” Spencer said. “They had it on each other. Mutually assured destruction if one of them told.” She paused, gazed hard into my eyes. “So he tried to kill you because you know about Ellen,” she said.
“I didn’t see his face. He wore a mask and gloves.”
“If he was going to kill you, why would he care whether you knew it was him or not? He’s so arrogant that I would think he’d want you to know,” Spencer said.
I thought about that, as I had every day since I’d been attacked. “He’s a monster but a very particular type of monster,” I said. “He has to be thought of as the good guy, even as he’s pulling the wings off dragonflies.”
“Claire, if not Griffin, who did this to you?” Jackie asked, holding my hand.
&n
bsp; “It was Griffin,” Spencer said. “It had to be.”
I thought so, too, but I wasn’t completely sure.
And I thought about how Wade Lockwood had helped to bury the story about Marnie and protect Griffin, just as he did later that same year, after Griffin had killed Ellen, and Wade made sure there was no investigation.
I wondered what he was doing right now, spinning what had happened to me, steering all suspicion away from Griffin Chase, the son he never had.
44
CONOR
Conor drove toward the southeastern corner of Connecticut to meet two men with a strange story to tell.
One month before Claire Beaudry Chase went missing, Lance Staver and Jim Dufour, members of the Ravenscrag Sportsmen’s Preserve, hiked the three-hundred-acre club property, training their German short-haired pointer puppies to become superb hunting dogs, when they came upon a disturbed area—a pile of dead leaves.
Upon investigation, they found that the leaves had been heaped on top of a sheet of plywood. They kicked aside the plywood and discovered a hole in the ground. It was six feet long, three feet deep, and two feet wide. Four bags of quicklime were piled on a white plastic tarp at the bottom of the hole.
“Totally a human grave,” Staver said.
“Yeah, wonder which member is killing his wife?” Dufour asked, and the two men laughed. They figured one of the club officers had dug the hole to dispose of animal carcasses. Once a deer was field dressed, the meat removed, there was the problem of the body—left in the meadows, it rotted, attracting predators like coyotes and bobcats, hawks and ravens.
None of that would be a problem, except lately a few members with small children had complained about the smell and about the dangers of being on the club grounds when critters with big teeth were out there ready to pounce, which to Staver and Dufour was bullshit. If you didn’t like wildlife and the food chain, join a country club, not a sporting club.
