The Shadow Box

by Luanne Rice

  “Well, they’re beautiful,” Tom said.

  “She would like them,” Gwen said.

  “I’m sure she would,” Tom said. He listened for police cars, tried to catch Lydia’s eye. She noticed and brushed the dirt off her hands, stood up.

  “How about if I get us some lemonade?” she asked.

  “I’m going to keep planting,” Gwen said. “This garden is going to be for Mom and Charlie. And when he comes home, he will help water it.”

  Tom and Lydia walked around the corner of the house.

  “The police are coming to search,” Tom said. “I’m surprised they’re not here by now. You should get Gwen out of here.”

  “Search for what?” Lydia asked.

  “They have a long list.”

  “Is this about what happened to Sallie?” Lydia asked.

  “Partly,” he said.

  “Good,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Lydia leaned forward to glance at Gwen and make sure she was out of earshot.

  “Something’s going on with Dan,” she said. “He barely pays attention to Gwen; he never mentions Sallie, and when I bring her up, he looks angry. And he’s on his phone all the time—texting or talking. He’s definitely hiding something. I just don’t know if it’s related to what happened to Sallie.”

  “Have you told my brother?” Tom asked. “Or Detective Miano?”

  A frown clouded Lydia’s face. “No,” she said. “Because I’m not sure of anything. And because of Gwen. I don’t want to tell the police anything about Dan unless I’m sure. It would just make things worse for her.”

  “Well, let’s get her out of here now, so she doesn’t have to see a bunch of cops going through her house.”

  “I should stay, shouldn’t I?” she asked. “To be home when they arrive?”

  “You don’t have to,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I feel as if I do, for Sallie. I don’t want a bunch of strangers tromping through her house.”

  “They will anyway,” Tom said. “I think it’s more important that you look after Gwen.”

  “She trusts you,” Lydia said. “Do you have time? Can you take her? She loves the beach, if you could just go for a walk or ice cream or . . .”

  “No problem,” Tom said. Lydia ran to get Maggie’s leash and a sun hat for her niece, and Gwen was so comfortable with Tom that she didn’t even question the plans.

  “Are we going to see Jackie?” Gwen asked when they backed out of the driveway.

  “She was busy this morning,” he said, “but let’s give her a call and see if she wants to meet us.”

  He was just making the call when they passed the first cop car heading in the opposite direction on the Bensons’ street. Then another, six altogether. He looked over at Gwen, but she didn’t seem to notice the vehicles. Jackie answered the phone, her voice coming over the truck’s speakers just as Tom thought he was going to have to hear another message.

  “Hey,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”

  “There’s a lot to tell you,” she said. Her tone of voice told him it was big, that she was bursting to tell him. “You won’t believe this, and you can’t tell Conor yet. I’m with . . .”

  “Jackie, Gwen’s in the car with me,” he said quickly, so she wouldn’t reveal anything the child shouldn’t hear.

  “Oh,” Jackie said. “Hi, Gwen.”

  “Hi, Jackie,” Gwen said.

  “We’re going to take a walk on the beach,” Tom said. “Want to come?”

  “I can’t right now,” Jackie said. “But how about if I meet you later—we can go to Paradise for fried clams. How does that sound, Gwen?”

  Gwen nodded. “Good,” she said.

  Both Tom and Jackie were silent for a moment. He wanted her to tell him what was going on, but he sensed she was holding back because of Gwen.

  “Jackie, just tell me, Are you okay?”

  “Tom,” Jackie said. “You can’t imagine how okay. I can’t wait to see you. Meanwhile, have fun by the water. Gwen, do you like to find sea glass?”

  “Oh yes. I love it.”

  “I know a good place,” Jackie said. “In Stonington, the small beach near the lighthouse museum. Especially when the tide’s out.”

  “It’ll be low tide in an hour,” Tom said. He liked Stonington, a small town with a lot of big old houses, an unfortunately shrinking fishing fleet, and a favorite restaurant in the midst of a boatyard. He passed Stonington by water nearly every time he went out on patrol.

  “That sounds great,” Jackie said. “Have fun!”

  “Thanks,” Tom said. “You too. Whatever it is you’re up to.”

  “We will,” Jackie said.

  Tom heard the smile in her voice, and it made him chuckle. He disconnected, glanced at Gwen to make sure she was okay, and began to drive east.

  46

  CONOR

  The police executed the search warrants at Dan Benson’s office and home, the separate building that served as a garage, and his vehicles. Benson was at neither location. There was also an urgent feeling among the team, excitement building, because it felt as if the case were about to break.

  Conor and Jen had combined their resources in what the press had started calling the “task force,” even though the department had not given it an official name. The goal now was to find Claire if she was alive or locate her body if she was not.

  When Conor Reid arrived at the Benson home, he saw two satellite TV trucks parked up the road. In high-profile cases like this, the media staked out homes of victims and suspects, and obviously the word had spread about the search. Two state police officers, including Hunter, had been stationed at the head of the Bensons’ driveway to keep the public out.

  The reporters called out questions. Conor waved as he walked past. He had a good relationship with most of them, had done interviews with many after Beth Lathrop’s murder and the subsequent trial of her killer, but there would be no statements until today’s search was completed, if then.

  Conor entered the house by the front door. Lydia Clarke was sitting in the living room, a copy of the search warrant in hand. She was thin, with white-blonde hair; a framed photo of Sallie, arms around Gwen and Charlie, was on the bookcase behind her, and Conor felt his heart tug to notice how alike the sisters looked.

  “Detective,” she said, rising and shaking his hand.

  “Sorry for the intrusion, Ms. Clarke,” he said.

  “Don’t be, and call me Lydia. Your brother took Gwen away, so she wouldn’t have to see this. That’s all I care about,” she said.

  Conor nodded. When he had given Tom a heads-up, he’d figured that might happen. “Can you tell me where your brother-in-law is right now?”

  “No idea,” she said. “Dan and I aren’t close. He doesn’t tell me where he’s going or when he’ll be back.”

  “Does he have a place in the house where he goes on his own? An office, maybe?”

  “Down in the basement,” she said.

  “Can you show me?” Conor asked.

  “Sure,” she said. She led him through the first floor, past police officers intent on their search. The basement door was just off the kitchen. Downstairs, Dan had a tool bench, an ornate carved-oak desk, a billiard table, and two vintage pinball machines. There was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with books. A built-in wall unit served as a bar, and there were two closed doors, behind which were a large closet and a bathroom.

  Conor looked in the closet and bathroom. He walked over to the leather desk chair and examined it. He opened the desk drawers and looked inside each one. The shallow top drawer stretched the width of the desk and was haphazardly filled with pens, pencils, paper clips, and other office supplies.

  The next drawer contained piles of envelopes held together with rubber bands. Conor riffled through them; they appeared to be mostly bills. The forensic accountants could go through them.

  In the same drawer, he found several hardbound annual
reports, going back a few years, for the Last Monday Club and for the Ravenscrag Sportsmen’s Preserve. He chose the current year for each and opened to the membership lists. He set the lists side by side, cross-checking one club against the other. Maxwell Coffin was president of both.

  He knew that Max and Neil were brothers. Another Catamount Bluff connection. Conor used his iPhone to shoot pictures of each list of officers.

  Tucked into the Last Monday Club book was a handwritten note. Conor read the lines:

  Exhibit starts at 5—GC accounted for all afternoon, will be at gallery by 5.

  CBC—4–4:30 optimal.

  Site prepared in advance and disposal MUST BE completed by 7. Investigation will have started at CB by then.

  Conor knew he was looking at a timeline of the Friday Claire disappeared. It was a script for killing her, disposing of her, and providing an alibi for Griffin—GC. He wondered whose handwriting it was and bagged the note.

  Finally, he opened the bottom drawer and found it stacked with brown leather-bound photo albums. As he removed them, he wondered why they were here and not on the bookshelves or otherwise out where the family could look through them.

  “That’s where they went,” Lydia said, watching from the doorway.

  “What do you mean?” Conor asked.

  “Oh, Sallie and Dan were very big on keeping photo albums. There must be hundreds of photos in there.” She paused. “The kids love looking through them, especially Gwen. I suppose it’s the same with all children, wanting to know everything about their families.”

  Conor looked through the one on top of the pile and saw that the pictures were from a different decade. The styles were all wrong for current times, and he recognized a much younger Dan Benson on the beach with a ponytail. He was wearing cutoffs as a bathing suit; beside him was Griffin Chase with long hair, Ray-Ban sunglasses, and the same cocky expression he had today. Between them was a girl beaming and giving a peace sign; he recognized her as Ellen Fielding.

  Flipping through the album, Conor saw more photos of the trio as well as other familiar faces—Wade and Leonora Lockwood. On a sportfishing yacht, sipping cocktails under a thatched beach hut, on the beach, at a dinner table. Clearly on vacation, somewhere tropical. One picture of the hotel showed a Mexican flag.

  As Conor glanced through the other albums, he saw that Lydia was right—the family had taken many photos, especially of the kids. The timeline progressed from Sallie and Dan’s wedding, to the births of Gwen and Charlie, and through their childhoods—building sandcastles, playing Little League, in costumes for school plays and concerts, opening Christmas presents, Gwen outside a church in a white dress and veil to receive her First Communion.

  The last album, at the bottom of the drawer, had an insignia embossed on the green leather cover: it was the same one Conor had seen on Griffin’s and Edward’s shirts, an imposing blackbird with outstretched wings and words in Latin beneath: Corvus Corax. When Conor began looking through the pages and saw the pictures inside, he caught his breath.

  They were of the sea castle.

  He thought of the photos his brother had sent him; a shiver ran down his spine. Gwen had drawn this exact scene. Two men in tuxedos stood on the balcony of a big stone mansion at the water’s edge. The mermen. One was Griffin; the other was Dan. Gargoyles hulked behind them.

  Now he put it together. This was the same house depicted in the gallery of photos at the sporting preserve, the one Staver had said shared a name with the hunt club: Ravenscrag. And now the crest on the men’s shirts and the front of this album made sense; it wasn’t just a blackbird—it was a raven.

  The album was devoted to the house and the people within it. From cars in the courtyard, Conor could tell the pictures were from the present day, but there was an old-world flavor to the scenes depicted. Formal portraits of men in black tie, group shots that seemed to have been taken during a ball, men and women dancing to an orchestra.

  He recognized Wade and Leonora Lockwood, Edward and Sloane Hawke, Neil and Abigail Coffin, Maxwell Coffin and a woman he didn’t recognize, Dan and Sallie Benson, and Griffin and Claire Chase. In one, the two couples—the Chases and Bensons—were standing together.

  And Dan had said he’d never met Claire.

  The last photos were of young people. Children of the members, perhaps, Conor thought. The Old Guard would want new blood so their traditions and way of life could continue. Ford and Alexander Chase were in half the shots. Some showed them dressed formally at the same dances as their father and Claire, but in others they were more casual, with kids their own age. On the tennis court, having a picnic, sailing at the dock.

  A series of three pictures caught Griffin’s attention: Ford, Alexander, and Emily Coffin in a small powerboat. The hull was white, and ravens were stenciled on the side.

  The blackbird boat that Gwen had seen following the Sallie B.

  Conor slid the photos out of the album’s clear sleeve to get a better look. In one shot, taken from behind, he saw the name of the boat and the home port emblazoned on the transom:

  RAEN

  STONINGTON, CT

  And in a close-up of Emily, he saw that same word, Raen, printed in black letters on her white T-shirt.

  Lydia had been standing beside him, paging through one of the earlier albums. She stopped to look at the photos Conor was holding.

  “Pretty girl,” she said.

  “Do you know her?” he asked.

  “No, she’s the daughter of friends of Dan and Sallie. I was curious, though. Once Sallie showed me the photos in that book, pointed out the house, and said it was one of the biggest in Connecticut. I asked her about the word on the girl’s T-shirt, and Sallie said it meant raven in Scots.”

  Conor watched as Lydia closed the album and pointed at the insignia. “Corvus Corax is Latin for raven,” she said. “I asked her what the significance was. She said that the raven is one of the smartest birds, entirely black to blend into the night. There’s a legend, dating back to medieval times, that England could never be conquered as long as there were ravens at the Tower of London.”

  “Okay,” Conor said, skeptical but also noting that this crew of men really did live in another world. Their rules were different, and legends counted more than laws.

  “Sallie said that, to this day, there are ravens at the Tower of London. They’re fed by the Ravenmaster of the Yeoman Warders. Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it?” Lydia paused. “It bothered me to see Sallie surrounded by people like Dan’s friends.”

  “Why?” Conor asked.

  “Whatever the literary legends are—in Britain, in mythology—to Dan’s friends, the ravens are here to protect the group’s wealth. They see themselves as important, deserving privilege, getting to do what they want.”

  “Who in particular?” Conor asked.

  “Griffin Chase,” she said without hesitation. “He’s their great hope for the future. He’s going to bring civility and structure back to society.” She snorted. “They might tell themselves that, but what they really want is for him to let them develop every inch of the shoreline and fill their pockets. She said that Dan once told her they’d kill for him.”

  “For Griffin?” Conor asked.

  “Yes,” Lydia said. “She said Dan said it like a joke. I’m not sure she took it that way, though.”

  Conor pictured the grave in the middle of the Ravenscrag Sportsmen’s Preserve and, again, wondered if they had dug it for Claire. She was the wife who knew too much. He thought of those missing bags of quicklime.

  “Lydia, your sister was obviously a great gardener. Was that something she and Dan would do together?”

  “No,” she said. “Sallie was the one with a green thumb. I was in awe of her. It’s all I can do to plant a few annuals. I’m only doing it for Gwen. Dan did have a way with landscaping, though. He was going to plant some rhododendrons and a dogwood tree, but he hasn’t gotten around to it.”

  “Did you ever see bags of lim
e among Sallie’s garden supplies?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Where did Sallie keep her garden things?” he asked, sidestepping the question.

  “In a bin on the terrace,” she said.

  Conor was about to ask her to take him to the bin when something occurred to him. “When did you first find out Dan was going to plant that tree?”

  “Sallie told me a few days before she died. It bugged her because he had the ground all ready for planting, tilled and dug. She said it had been that way for a month, they were past the prime time to get the tree and bushes into the ground, and she was afraid the kids would fall into the hole.”

  “The hole?” he asked. “Where is it?”

  “Right beside the garage, out back,” she said.

  “I didn’t notice it when we came in.”

  “Come to think of it, neither did I,” Lydia said.

  Conor hurried out the door, around the side of the building. He saw it right away: a rectangular plot of freshly disturbed earth, the exact shape as the one he’d seen at the hunting preserve.

  “This is weird,” she said. “It was a big old hole just yesterday. Why did he fill it in instead of planting the rhododendrons?”

  “Let’s go back to the house,” Conor said. After she went inside, he found Jen with a bunch of forensic techs in Tyvek overalls. “Get your shovels,” he said to them and led them back to the recently filled-in grave-shaped hole. He felt sick, wondering if they were about to uncover Claire’s body, dusty with white quicklime.

  “You okay?” Jen asked.

  He shook his head. “I want to find her but not like this . . .”

  “I know, Conor,” she said. Then, “What fucking balls it would take to bury her right behind his house.”

  The police erected portable tents to prevent onlookers and media drones from seeing what they were doing. When the techs began to dig, Conor pulled Jen aside and showed her one of the photos of Ravenscrag.

  “This is the place Gwen drew,” he said.

  “Where she thinks the mermen took Charlie,” Jen said.

  “Let’s start calling departments along the shoreline, ask who knows where this house is. It’s not exactly discreet—it’s got to be a landmark to people who live near it,” Conor said. His stomach flipped; he was standing here with Jen Miano, talking in a calm voice while listening to shovels scooping and throwing dirt. The sound was rhythmic and solemn.