The Shadow Box(6)

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.