The Shadow Box

by Luanne Rice

  He and Jen stood still and silent. His thoughts were for Claire. It took another few minutes before the sound of digging stopped.

  “Detectives,” one of the techs said, beckoning them over.

  Conor’s heart skipped as he approached the hole and steeled himself to look into the face of Claire Beaudry Chase.

  “Holy shit,” Jen said.

  And Conor agreed but didn’t speak as he stared down at the body of Dan Benson, a bullet hole in his head.

  47

  CLAIRE

  Spencer drove us back to Hubbard’s Point and dropped us off at Jackie’s house. Telling us about Marnie had taken everything she had, and she wanted to spend the rest of the day alone.

  When we got to Jackie’s, Tom was out. I actually wished he were there; I was ready to come out of the shadows, and I wanted to tell both Tom and Conor what had happened, what I knew. Jackie handed me a clean towel, and I went upstairs to take a shower. I stripped off my old clothes—so rancid Jackie just threw them away—and stood under the stream of hot water for the longest time, loving the feeling of being clean, not wanting the shower to end. When I got out, I put on a pair of Jackie’s khaki shorts and a blue Vineyard Vines T-shirt and went into her kitchen.

  Jackie had made us tuna fish sandwiches, and we ate them with potato chips and iced tea, just as we had when we were kids, and no meal had ever tasted so good. While we ate, Jackie filled me in on the news—articles about me that had been in the newspapers and stories that had appeared on channels 3 and 8.

  “I don’t know how you stayed hidden so long,” she said. “Your face is everywhere. There was a story about you in People.”

  “Oh, great. All these years of making art, and now I’m known for being missing.”

  Jackie laughed. “Well, it’s working. The gallery has been getting calls from all over, lots of people stopping by.”

  I thought about the gallery, how I had been attacked the day my show opened. How nervous and excited I had felt—not just because of the anticipation of my exhibition opening, the trepidation of hearing the opinions of critics and collectors about my latest work—but because of Griffin. Because I had just shown him my shadow box—the shadow box, the one that mattered.

  “What happened the night of the opening?” I asked.

  “It was successful,” Jackie said. “It nearly sold out.”

  “Remember the piece I delivered late that afternoon?” I asked.

  “Of course. Fingerbone.”

  “Did you know what it was about?” I asked.

  “I knew it had to do with Ellen,” she said. “With you finding her body in the tide pool.”

  “I don’t have proof,” I said. “But I know Griffin killed her.”

  She sat silently, looking into my eyes. “He bought it, you know. Fingerbone.”

  “He did?” I asked, feeling a chill run through my body.

  “Yes,” Jackie said. “He took it home that same night. But it wound up in the garbage outside the gallery. Other things had been discarded up the street. Kids found them, including a knife that Conor connected to your attack. The cops searched the whole neighborhood. Either someone stole the shadow box from Griffin, or he threw it out himself.”

  I tried to picture it: Griffin heading into town, stuffing art and weapons into trash bins. “What else did the kids find, besides the knife?” I asked.

  “There was a key chain. The Styrofoam kind boaters use and it came from the Sallie B.”

  So there was a connection between Sallie and me—it made sense. Spencer’s story was the missing part of the puzzle—the Dan factor.

  “This is all about timing,” I said quietly.

  “Timing for what?”

  “Griffin’s campaign,” I said. “He had too much to lose—I was going to leave him. It’s been hard enough having suspicions about Ellen all these years. I couldn’t let him run for governor knowing he’s a murderer. He always knew I suspected—I just didn’t know why he’d done it until yesterday.”

  “Because of what happened in Cancún,” Jackie said. “Ellen knew.”

  “And so did Dan, and he must have told Sallie,” I said. “So now, getting closer to the election, they murdered her. And nearly killed me. Because I knew too.”

  “Griffin and Dan? But what about the kids,” Jackie asked. “How could they have let them be collateral damage? Charlie is dead, and Gwen is beyond traumatized. She’s with Tom right now. He just told me on the phone.”

  “I want to meet her,” I said, feeling numb. “We’re the two survivors. What can I do to help her?”

  Jackie took a deep breath. “I don’t know. She’s troubled, and how can she not be? And how can she live with her father—if he really did that to Sallie? She has this elaborate fantasy that Charlie is being held in a castle by the sea. She did these incredibly intricate drawings of a mansion with turrets and towers and scary crow gargoyles.”

  “Do you have the drawings?” I asked.

  “Not the originals,” Jackie said. “But Tom took photos and sent them to my phone. Hold on.” She began scrolling through texts, and when she found the right one, she showed the shots to me. I saw the castle, the crags and cornices, the turret, the gargoyles with thick black beaks and folded wings, the men standing on the balcony.

  “Wait,” I said. “They’re not scary crows. They’re ravens.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not an imaginary place,” I said. “It’s a real house.”

  “How do you know, Claire?”

  “Because I’ve been there. A fundraiser for Griffin. Emily’s father—Maxwell Coffin, one of Griffin’s supporters—owns it. It’s an absolutely insane, over-the-top replica of the ‘ancestral estate,’ as they put it, in Scotland. You can’t see it from the road—it’s on acres of land, up a long driveway. On the outskirts of Stonington.”

  “That’s bizarre,” Jackie said, looking shocked. “Tom’s taking Gwen to the lighthouse in Stonington now. How do you know the owners?”

  “I don’t, really. Max is Neil’s older brother. We’ve met a few times, but that’s it. He and his wife commissioned me to do a shadow box of their house. Of Ravenscrag.”

  I was practically shaking, remembering that night—and the letter that followed. I pictured the Gothic Revival mansion, the crenelated towers, the walls lined with English sporting art and austere nineteenth-century family portraits. The curved marble staircase was lined with photos taken in the early part of the twentieth century, people at black-tie affairs and in country-gentleman garb holding guns and posed with white-and-brown spaniels.

  It was a very dressy affair, full of pomp. Max’s wife, Evans, had worn a mauve satin gown with a jeweled bodice, and the two of them had walked me down to the seawall, where the waves broke on the rocks below, sending spray upward, so I could look back at the mansion and start imagining the shadow box I would create.

  Evans stared at me while Max talked about my great talent, how he had been an admirer ever since Griffin first told him about my work. Extraordinary, he had called it. Mysterious, storytelling, soulful. I kept glancing at Evans, and initially I thought she was upset that her husband was paying so much attention to me.

  But the expression in her eyes told me something else—imploring, warning, as if she were telling me to beware. But of what? I certainly knew about dangerous husbands, but what would I possibly have to fear from hers? I wasn’t to find out until weeks later, when the letter came.

  Abigail and Neil Coffin were there, of course, as well as some of our other Catamount Bluff neighbors—they often attended Griffin’s fundraisers. Griffin and I had driven over with Wade and Leonora Lockwood.

  Alexander and Ford lived in the guest cottage, available to housesit when the family went to stay at any of their other houses, in St. Barts, Vail, and San Francisco. Ford was absent that night, but Alexander and Emily were helping to bartend. Max was the first to sign a big check to the campaign to elect Griffin Chase as governo
r of Connecticut.

  Abigail, Sloane, and I had stuck together. I had been grateful to Abigail for giving us a tour of the house; I couldn’t stand the sound of Griffin’s voice cajoling the crowd, while I knew who he was, what he had done. It had been eating me up for so long, and I knew I was coming to the end of my time with him.

  I remembered joking with Sloane Hawke that she had finally met her match in terms of the preppiest girl’s name ever, that Abigail’s sister-in-law, Evans Coffin, had her beat. I had thought Evans might join us, even show us the rooms, but she stayed in the salon, listening to my husband. As I walked past her, she gave me that same look: be careful. At least that’s how I read it.

  And it turned out that I had read her right.

  Abigail identified most of the staid characters in the family portraits, and she said the men with guns had been photographed at the family’s hunting preserve just a few miles north.

  “The one where the guys still go to hunt?” Sloane had asked as we entered the book-lined study.

  “Yep,” Abigail said. “That’s the place. Named after this house. Or the other way around. I always forget. Neil and Max’s grandfather liked consistency and reminding everyone of the, ahem, ancestral pile in the western highlands.” We all chuckled.

  I looked around at the taxidermy—dead animals and birds, especially ravens, hawks, and owls, gathering dust on shelves around the room. But that wasn’t the memory that took my breath away: next to a raven with wings outstretched was a row of Nate’s books. Ten volumes by my ex-husband, Nate Browning. I glanced inside one and saw an inscription in Nate’s hand: To Max, who knows what matters. NB.

  “Worlds collide,” Abigail said, leaning closer. “These people read books by your first husband and are trying to elect your second husband. And trust me, Max won’t let you alone until you make that shadow box for him.”

  I chuckled, but inside I was shaken; Nate was academic and nonpolitical, a scholar who spent his time in the field or at his desk—when he took a stand politically, he was single issue, voting for the candidate who vowed to fight climate change. To Nate, that was what mattered. Did Max agree with him?

  Griffin was a political animal who pretended to care about conservation. He certainly did fight to protect the land around his home, but across the state was another story. He would never put the environment first, certainly not at the expense of business, of attracting large corporations into the state. That’s what the gathering was about—to drum up support for him and his agenda. I assumed Max would be in line with Griffin’s way of thinking, not Nate’s.

  “Why would Gwen be drawing a picture of that house?” Jackie asked now.

  “I don’t know,” I said, still stuck on the memory of seeing Nate’s books there. I remember thinking that I would tell him, that we’d have a laugh about it—political high rollers interested in his poetic research. And I would tell him about the raven gargoyles, the absurd grandeur of a fifteen-thousand-square-foot Scottish castle in a New England town of sea captains’ houses and candy-colored fishermen’s cottages, how the Coffins had wanted me to replicate it in a shadow box.

  And how I had started to do just that, because it was so over-the-top Gothic, surrounded by hedges and English gardens, straight out of one of those dreams that verges on nightmare. My husband was the only reason I had gone to Ravenscrag: a den of vipers gathered together to raise a fortune to elect Griffin Chase.

  “Claire, I know you’ve felt safer staying hidden, but we have to call Conor. And I want to call Tom. They both need to know you’re okay and to hear about this place. We’ve all thought Gwen has been fantasizing but maybe . . .”

  “It’s real,” I said. My mind was racing, recalling the piece I had started, the notes I had made based on that talk with Max Coffin, and the secret I had hidden beneath the frame.

  “I believe you,” she said. “We have to call Tom and Conor right away.”

  “Can I use your computer first? I have to send an email.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Someone’s going to be very surprised to hear from you.” We walked to the desk, to the same laptop I’d used to contact Spencer, and I logged in to my Gmail account. I ignored the hundreds of emails and wrote one to Nate: I’m alive. I never would have guessed you were one of them. Never. Were you in on the plan? Did you know they were going to kill me? Not you, Nate. Why did you have to be part of it?

  My eyes were wet when I hit send. Of all the people in my life, I would have expected that Nate would be true-blue forever. It felt brave to use my voice, but this was just the beginning. I had a lot more to say to many more people. I felt my strength full force—it was back, and I was going to use it. First thing, I needed to get that letter.

  “Jackie, you call Tom and Conor, okay?” I asked. “I have to go to my studio. There’s evidence there. Now that I know Ravenscrag is involved, I need to get it. It’s the link.”

  “That’s crazy, Claire,” she said. “You can’t go back there on your own, not after what happened to you.”

  “No one will see me,” I said. “I’ll go through the path along the beach. Besides, you’ll know where I am. That makes me feel safe.”

  “Conor will want to interview you . . .”

  “You can tell him where I am too. He can find me at the Bluff—I’ll tell him everything right there. I’m doing the right thing, Jackie. I’m taking care of my own life, and I promise you, I’m going to bring these guys down. Especially Griffin.”

  Jackie didn’t want to let me go, but she knew I was determined. She wanted to drive me, but I said no. I needed to walk down the path through the trees, past the spot where Ellen had died. I would need all my strength for this—and it came from the woods, the tide pools, the marsh, and the burial ground. It came from the big cat and the spirit of my father and the knowledge I had, finally, about what Griffin had done.

  And so I kissed my friend and left to go to Catamount Bluff for what I hoped would be the last time.

  48

  TOM

  By the time they got off the highway in Mystic, the fog that had been hovering just offshore began billowing in. The foghorns were low and mournful, and when Tom glanced across the front seat at Gwen, he saw her sinking down, as if the weather and accompanying mood were taking the air out of her.

  It had gotten damp and chilly, so Tom decided a walk on the beach might not be the best for Gwen; she was still fragile and recovering. Besides, the idea was nagging him that he had seen something important, connected to Gwen’s drawings, while passing by these points of land on patrol. They drove east toward Stonington along Route 1. The water was on the right, behind the shops and houses. Low hills were interspersed with salt marshes and rocky coves.

  “Are we going to the lighthouse?” Gwen asked.

  “Yes, we are,” he said. “But I thought it might be too soggy for the beach.”

  “I love beach walks in the fog,” she said. “And the rain. Mom did too. Any weather at all.”

  Tom smiled over at her. “People after my own heart,” he said. “I’m the same. The sea and the beach, no matter what.”

  She nodded, then resumed looking out the window. Tom scanned both sides of the road as he drove. It was habit for him; on patrol he kept a loose gaze, taking everything in. He never knew when he might spot someone in distress or a fisherman pulling lobster pots that belonged to someone else or debris in the water. Jackie and her daughters teased him about it, said he was only halfway present when he was in the car or on the sailboat with them, that the other half was saving lives that didn’t even need saving yet.

  This stretch of road was full of big estates, most of them behind hedges or down long driveways. The rich paid extra for privacy—large pieces of property protected them from prying eyes. He was cruising slowly, craning to see a glimpse of the houses among the trees, when he spotted the stone columns.

  Tall and imposing, on either side of a paved driveway that wound through oak trees up a boulder-strewn hill, the columns
were topped by ravens with their wings spread wide. On the left post, a slab of granite was carved with the house name: Ravenscrag.

  He had slowed almost to a stop, to get a better look, when Gwen noticed the birds on the columns.

  “Tom, that’s them!” she said. “The exact same! They’re in Daddy’s pictures! This is where the mermen took Charlie. Drive in there, we have to get him.”

  “Let’s call my brother first,” Tom said. “You know he’s a policeman, and—”

  “No, we have to go there right now!”

  He hesitated. What if they were wrong, and this was just another Stonington estate? They could drive up, take a look at the house, and leave. If someone stopped him, there was always the “wrong turn” defense. On the other hand, what if Charlie really was there? What would he do then?

  Tom dialed his brother as he drove up the hill. At the top of the rise, the house came into view. It stopped him dead: previously, he had only seen this structure—it could only be called a castle—from the seaward side. Massive, built of fieldstone, it had two square towers and a turret. Gargoyles—birds of prey—hunched all along the roofline.

  “The sea castle!” Gwen cried—and it was. Tom recognized it from her drawings. Conor answered the call.

  “What’s up?” Conor asked.

  “Look, I can’t talk right now,” Tom said, stopping behind a Mercedes SUV parked under an ancient maple. “I just pulled into this wicked-crazy place, and I’ve got to turn around and get out—I’ll call you as soon as I’m back on the road. You’re going to want to get over here.”

  Gwen opened the truck door. Tom tried to grab for her, but she was moving fast and called back to him, “Charlie’s in there! I’m going to go get him.”

  “Hang on,” Tom said to Conor, jumping out of the car to chase Gwen. He caught up to her and grabbed her. “We’re going to get help, Gwen. Come with me now.”