by Luanne Rice
I am an only child, unconditionally loved by my parents; we “went to the beach” when school got out in June. My mother was an art teacher in public school, my father an environmental studies professor at Easterly College. He taught me everything I know about the woods, and she encouraged me to paint what I saw. When I was nine, she died in a car accident; she lost control in an ice storm, crashed into a tree, and was killed instantly.
The shock and sorrow paralyzed my father and me. We turned to nature. After school and work and on weekends, we trudged the woods, climbed the rock face between Hubbard’s Point and Catamount Bluff. Members of the Pequot tribe had lived in these woodlands. A burial ground sat atop one boulder-strewn hill. My father told me to always treat this land as sacred.
He taught me how to blaze a trail—to notice rocks, trees, a broken branch and use these landmarks to orient myself and not get lost. At night he showed me Polaris and taught me to navigate by the stars. Late that summer we built a cabin at the edge of the marsh on the far side of the hilltop, in almost-impenetrable woods. One night we stayed there and heard an eerie, blood-chilling cry.
There was an enduring myth that mountain lions, their woodland habitat displaced by farms in northern Connecticut, had been driven south through the greenways of open space and conservation land to the river valley. The name Catamount Bluff, given to the land in the 1800s, was testament to the legend’s long history. My father and I scanned the ledges and rock shelves. We searched for tracks, remains of white-tailed deer, any sign that mountain lions lived here.
He died of an aneurysm when I was twenty. His brother’s family in Damariscotta, Maine, would have taken me in, but my sorrow was too great to accept help, to try to join another family. I dropped out of college. The cabin reminded me of my dad and became my refuge. I felt his presence there. At night I would look for the North Star and know he was with me. I began to build shadow boxes of things I found nearby: lichens, pebbles, dried seaweed, mussel shells, the bones of mice in owl pellets.
That August night, the summer after Griffin’s graduation, when the Perseid meteor shower was due to peak, he called to ask me to meet him at the cove—a rocky inlet halfway between Hubbard’s Point and Catamount Bluff.
I figured he meant a group of us would be getting together. “Should I invite Jackie?” I asked.
“No, Claire,” he said, his voice filled with magic. “Just you. I want to watch shooting stars with you. Is that okay?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Meet you there,” he said.
I ran through the forest path from the Hubbard’s Point end, almost breathless knowing he was on the way from his house—to meet me. I couldn’t believe it. Halfway there I slowed down and peered up a steep hill, thick with scrub oaks, white pines, bayberry, and winterberry. Deep in those woods were the Pequot graves, and beyond them was my cabin.
He was waiting at the cove. When I saw the blanket he had spread above the tide line, and knew we were going to be together on it, my knees felt weak. We were isolated from any town or houses, with nothing but hundreds of acres of granite ledges and woods and marsh and salt water surrounding us. In the dark of the new moon, the sky blazed with stars.
His dark-brown hair tumbled into his eyes. A white streak slashed across his left temple—shocking, considering he was only twenty-one. His eyes were emerald green in the starlight, with the same questioning look as ever.
“What is it?” I asked, laughing nervously. “I feel as if you’re wondering something.”
“I am,” he said. “I always have been. I’ve felt it forever, that you’re my best friend. And more.”
“We’ve hardly ever talked,” I said.
“Not with words,” he said, and he leaned back on one elbow.
He pulled me down on the blanket. This time when he looked at me, the question was gone from his eyes. I heard waves hitting the rocks, splashing against the sand. He rolled toward me, slid his arms around me. He pressed his body against mine and kissed me. Our first kiss: tender, then rough. I could practically feel the waves beneath us, lifting us, as if the sand had turned into the sea.
I touched his face, ran my fingers down his neck; his pulse was seismic under my fingertips, just like mine. There was a strange abrasive sound coming from the water, but I was too excited to pay attention.
“Do you hear that?” he asked.
The sound was crisp: scritch-scritch, like rough sandpaper on wood.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But then again, who cares?” he asked.
He pulled my body back toward his, hard, kissed me again, his hand running down my side. He hooked his thumb into the waistband of my jeans. I wanted him to keep going, but now I couldn’t stop hearing the noise.
Now it sounded more like clicking and seemed to be coming from the tidal pools. With a new moon, tides were extreme, and this was dead low, with rocks and ledges that would normally be underwater exposed. I pushed myself off the blanket and walked toward the rocks.
“Claire,” Griffin called. “Be careful.”
Starlight caught the white edges of the small waves, the glossy black tendrils of kelp, and illuminated a swarm of rock crabs completely covering a lumpy object in the shallow tidal pool. The crabs moved as if they were one entity instead of thousands of individuals, summoned from rock crevices by whatever was rotting beneath them. Their claws click-click-clicked.
I thought it must be a dead fish, a big one, maybe a striper. Or even a seal—they lived here over the winter, into the spring. Please don’t let it be a seal, I thought. Or any other marine mammal. Not a dolphin, not a baby whale. The smell of decay was overpowering.
I stomped my feet on the wet rocks as I approached, to scare the crabs away, and I saw what was underneath. Bones gleamed white. Long brown hair was matted like seaweed. A glint of gold shone from the half-devoured left wrist. There were still shreds of flesh on the upper arms, but the wrists and hands had been stripped bare. They were skeleton hands; the finger bones were long, skinny, and curved.
I screamed. It was Ellen Fielding.
I lunged toward those crabs, brushing and kicking them away, to get them off Ellen’s body. They scattered, then covered her again.
“Claire,” Griffin said, yanking me away from Ellen’s corpse. I sobbed, staring at the gold bracelet around that horror of a wrist, the ancient gold coin dangling from thick links, given to Ellen by her grandmother.
Griffin wanted us both to go to his house and call the police from there, but I refused to leave. I didn’t want her to be alone. The tide could come in and sweep everything away, take what was left of her body out to sea. I sat in the wet sand guarding her. Starlight glinted on the crabs’ black-green shells, their pincers tearing her apart.
Eventually Griffin arrived with a Black Hall police officer. The cop crouched beside the body, then called for a forensic team and the police boat. Soon the boat came around the point, searchlights sweeping the cove.
“What’s that for?” Griffin asked.
“She might have been on a boat,” the cop said. “It could have sunk, and there could be someone else out there, needing help.”
“This didn’t happen tonight,” I heard myself say. “The crabs have already ripped her apart!”
The policeman was young, not much older than us. I’d seen him around town—directing traffic during the Midsummer’s Festival, after the concerts on the church lawn, writing speeding tickets on Route 156.
“I’m Officer Markham,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Claire Beaudry,” I said.
Griffin stood beside me, put his arm around my shoulders. I’d gotten cold sitting there on the damp beach, and I shivered against his warm body.
“Why are you two here tonight?” Officer Markham asked. “Kind of dark, late for beach time.”
“We wanted to see the meteor shower,” Griffin said.
“How did you come to find the body?”
“Cl
aire did,” Griffin said.
“I heard the crabs,” I said.
“Well,” the officer said. “We’re going to have to identify the victim. Give me your phone numbers in case we need to talk to you some more.”
My heart was racing hard. My lips tingled and my hands felt numb. I waited for Griffin to tell him it was Ellen, but he was silent. Was it possible he hadn’t recognized the bracelet?
“I know who it is,” I said finally, because Griffin didn’t speak.
“Who?” Officer Markham asked.
“Ellen Fielding,” I said.
Griffin drew a sharp breath, as if he were shocked.
“Oh God, oh God,” Griffin said, his head in his hands, pacing in a circle. “She did it.”
“Did what?” the cop asked.
“Suicide,” he said. “She was so depressed.”
“You knew her?” the cop asked.
“We both did,” Griffin said. I waited for him to add that he had dated her, but Officer Markham just asked for our numbers and said we could go, that a detective might get in touch with further questions.
After that, Griffin walked me home through the dark woods. I shivered the whole way. Right by the overgrown trail to my cabin, there was a break in the canopy of branches overhead, and suddenly it filled with shooting stars.
“Look,” Griffin said, pointing up. We stared for a few seconds. “Finally—what we came here for. The Perseids.”
“They’re for . . .” I began to say for Ellen.
“They’re for us, so we’ll never forget this night,” he said, his voice catching.
“Something beautiful,” I whispered. “After something so terrible.”
Over the next few days, the police investigated. As Officer Markham had said, a detective questioned me about finding Ellen’s body, about whether we had noticed any changes in her mood or knew of anyone who might want to harm her. Tucker Morgan, the state police commissioner, was a friend of Wade Lockwood—Griffin’s Catamount Bluff neighbor and surrogate father—and did the questioning himself. With Wade present. Over lunch at the yacht club.
After the coroner made his examination, there was an inquest. The toxicology tests came back negative—so Ellen hadn’t overdosed. She had a fractured skull. Had it happened in a fall? Or had someone attacked her?
Rumors began right away: whatever had happened in Cancún had pushed her to the brink, and she had drowned herself. Or she had gotten involved with something illegal, dangerous enough to get her killed. But Commissioner Morgan chose not to pursue those leads. Wade convinced him that the idea that someone had followed Ellen north, murdered her, and left her body on the beach was too far fetched. She had slipped on the rocks, that was that.
My interlude with Griffin lasted all that August: fire, passion, and wild fascination with each other. The reality of finding Ellen’s body was traumatic; at first it pulled us together, but eventually it drove us apart. We both wanted to stop thinking about that night.
Griffin went to Yale Law School. I considered returning to RISD, but instead, I just kept making art on my own. In the following years, we each married other people. Even though I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking of Griffin. I hated myself, but I would feel his body when Nate, my first husband, was holding me. Later, Griffin told me it had been the same for him with Margot, his first wife. Those years of longing, while we were apart, made our need and desire for each other almost unbearable. I didn’t have children, but he and Margot had twin sons, Ford and Alexander.
Griffin became a prosecutor, eventually rising to his current position as state’s attorney for Easterly County, second only to the chief state’s attorney. After Margot had been to her fifth or sixth rehab, they divorced, and he got custody of their sons. She moved to New Hampshire, where she had grown up. She never saw the boys. Griffin had to keep them going, to somehow make them believe their mother still loved them, even though she never visited or asked them to visit her. At least, that’s what he told me.
By the time he and I ran into each other at a cocktail party in Black Hall, I was separated from Nate, a man I loved and cared about but wasn’t in love with. Nate begged me to come back, but by then I was involved with Griffin and went through with the divorce anyway. Griffin’s sons, forever traumatized by their mother’s abdication, weren’t ready for a stepmother.
There is power in dangerous love. You can be so focused on the forbidden nature of it, justifying your choices to the world—me falling in love with Griffin while still legally married to Nate, Griffin giving me all his attention instead of trying to find a workable custody agreement with Margot, instead of doting on his devastated sons—that you miss the fact you’re completely wrong for each other.
Ellen’s death never left me. It informed my work, led me deeply into nature’s darkness, the terrible beauty of it echoed in every shadow box I created. Griffin said it inspired him to go to law school, to become a prosecutor, plumb the pain and dark side of life—and in doing so, honor Ellen.
That was a lie.
Ellen was buried in Heronwood Cemetery. The rumors that she had been the victim of a violent crime faded away. Perhaps she had slipped and fallen on the rocks, died of a terrible accident. Or, as was more commonly thought, she had killed herself.
I, too, believed it was suicide at first but not any longer. I am positive it was homicide, just as I am sure that Griffin took me to the cove that night so I would find her body.
And I know because he all but confessed that he killed her.
I can picture us, Griffin and me, in our kitchen at Catamount Bluff. Late at night, him coming home after a meeting of the Last Monday Club, black tie loosened, dinner jacket slung over his shoulder. I’d said something “wrong”—it doesn’t matter what; asking about the weather could be “wrong” if he wasn’t in the mood for the question. His face looming into mine, his green eyes turning black—literally black—and him saying, “Do you want what happened to Ellen to happen to you?”
He said things like that to me all the time. He’d say it about other murder victims, whose killers he prosecuted. “The defendant was pushed too far, Claire, just like you push me too far. I have to do my job and send him to prison, but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand why he did it. He takes it and takes it until he can’t anymore. And then she dies.”
“Like Ellen?” I asked. “Did she push you too far?”
That was my fatal question.
Now that I am about to go missing, Griffin will appear on every local TV station, frantic with love and worry for me. The state police will drag rivers and salt ponds and the inshore waters of Long Island Sound, send divers into lakes and reservoirs, scour rock quarries and ledges and hills of glacial moraine. They will question my friends and ex-husband, neighbors, fellow artists and naturalists. Griffin will let them read my notebooks—the ones I left unhidden—look through my computer files, examine the cell phone I left in my SUV when I was struck.
There will be blood evidence, and the forensic team will analyze it. Buckets from my head wound, drops from the halfhearted slashes. Oh, that knife—I keep seeing my attacker wave it. I thought it was going to pierce my heart, so I tried to dodge it. The tip pricked my forearms and the palms of my hand—but he kept pulling it away, never let the full blade slash me.
Griffin would never have killed me with a knife.
Too messy, too much evidence left behind.
The night the jury convicted John Marcus, Griffin and I were in our kitchen, just the two of us, about to have dinner. It was a chilly October evening, cold enough to leave frost on our Halloween pumpkin. The kitchen was cozy. I had made roast chicken. He had brought home a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, so we could toast his victory. People were already talking about a run for higher office.
I lifted my glass. He was carving the chicken.
Right there next to our white marble island, he raised the knife above his head, lunged toward me, and I flinched so hard I dropped my champagne glass and it shatte
red on the floor.
“Jesus, it was a joke!” he said. “You make me feel like a criminal when you get scared like that.”
“Then don’t come at me with a knife.”
“When I come after you with a knife, Claire, you’ll know it.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
“Don’t worry, I would never stab you,” he said, his voice perfectly calm. “Why do you think the jury came back in two hours? Because he was an idiot, he made so many mistakes. He was practically begging to be caught. You have to be smart. You can’t leave DNA. But Claire? I feel like it right now. That glass was Baccarat crystal. It belonged to my grandmother.”
You know? I can’t say he didn’t warn me.
Then I think of the letter and tear up because I didn’t listen.
How far will I be able to walk?
He won’t stop until he finds me. And when he does, he will make sure I never return home.
The entire state of Connecticut will ache for his loss.
Griffin got away with Ellen, but he won’t get away with me.
It’s time for me to leave. I force myself off the floor a second time. My legs barely work; I stumble through the side door. I know to walk on the ledge to avoid leaving footprints, to brush the ground behind me with a pine bough, to head for the deepest part of the woods.
I will hide in the wild, where I feel safest. My feet know their way along this path. I am making my way northeast, but I curve around, and before I circle back to resume my intended route, I cover rocks and tree trunks with the animal mixture. The scent will throw the dogs off my trail.
I will make sure Griffin is caught. I will let everyone know the light is a lie, that darkness is his only truth.
I’ll do it for myself, and I’ll do it for Ellen. I say her name as I walk, and I talk to my father. “Dad, help me. Help us, me and Ellen. Get me to the cabin.” I swear I feel my father lifting me up, carrying me through the woods, and suddenly my refuge is in sight.
4
CONOR
“She still hasn’t shown up,” Jackie said to Conor. “It’s her own opening, and she’s not here.”