The Shadow Box(7)

“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?”

“Claire 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.