The Shadow Box(71)
“Oh, great,” she said out loud. She’d left the bag containing her black pants, white button-down shirt, and loafers at home—she could picture it on the stone wall just outside the kitchen door, where she had placed it while she’d run back inside to make sure she’d turned off the coffee.
She had—of course. But she’d forgotten the bag.
She turned left out of the high school parking lot and drove back through town—past the gallery, the Congregational Church, and the two narrow rivers and wide salt marshes on her way home.
Jackie had never suffered from depression—she was naturally upbeat, basically hopeful and steady. Even when her first husband had done his acting out and she’d left him, even when the girls had sailed off on an adventure and made her worry, she had hung in there, tough and determined that things would turn out right. The girls were expert sailors, and she had had complete confidence that they would find safe harbor—and they had.
But with Claire missing, and all that blood in her garage, Jackie was in a constant state of anxiety. It was the not knowing that drove her most crazy. She couldn’t stop thinking about where Claire might be, what she could be going through. Was someone holding her hostage? Was it one of those horrific scenarios where a woman was held captive in a basement or an isolated house or a warehouse? She lay awake at night, her racing thoughts as bad as any nightmare she had ever had.
The papers were full of articles and commentary; although the police had not released every detail, there were leaks and rumors, including the possibility—posited by a retired forensics expert—that Claire had lost too much blood to have survived the attack. Had she been murdered, her body taken away by the killer and thrown into a swamp or a forest or a deep ocean canyon, where she might never be found? And Jackie would never know what happened to her.
As she drove under the train trestle that marked the entrance to Hubbard’s Point, Jackie’s heart ached even more. She and Claire had spent their entire childhoods here, and every inch of the place reminded her of her friend. She parked in the road in front of her house and ran up the hill. There was her duffel bag. She grabbed it and heard banging.
The sound was coming from the side of the cottage, and when she went to investigate, she saw the cellar door swinging open and shut in the June breeze. That was odd—the family always closed it tight. When she glanced inside, she saw a glint of light at the edge of the kitchen hatchway—the hatch hadn’t been properly shut either.
No one ever entered this way—the hatch dated back to the thirties, when the house had been built, a way into the cellar in case a hurricane or bad nor’easter made it unsafe to go outside or to stay upstairs with the danger of high winds sending the big trees crashing down.
She climbed the ladder, entered the kitchen, and looked around. The kitchen looked normal, just as she had left it earlier that morning. It flashed through her mind that an intruder might be in the house, but she sensed that she was alone. Had Claire known someone was in the garage waiting to hurt her? The thought terrified her.
Maybe she should call the police, say the hatch was open and someone might have broken in. She could ring Hunter—or Conor. She had left her cell phone in the car, so she hurried into the family room and closed the door behind her.
She lifted the landline’s receiver and was about to dial when she spotted a paper on the desk. It was an exact copy of the note she had made for herself—the phrases about the Benson case and the strange echoes of Clear/Claire and the shadow lady/shadow box. Her heart was beating so fast she had to sit down.
Her elbow bumped the mousepad, and it woke up the computer. She stared at the screen, at an unfamiliar Facebook profile. Someone named Anne Crawford had logged in on her computer. Anne’s profile picture was of Jackie and Claire; Tom had taken it from behind, when they were staring at the sun setting over the golden sea, when they hadn’t known he was there.
Jackie stared at Anne’s last name. She thought back to when she and Claire were children and Claire’s father would take them hiking through the narrow hidden trails in the nature preserve at the end of the beach. She remembered how he would fall silent when they reached the crest of a rocky hill, the site of a burial ground, a tribe of Pequots whose leader was Tantummaheag. And the white settlers had changed his name to “Crawford”—the same name as that of a local sea captain.
Jackie saw that Anne had two friends: Kylie M and Fenwick388. She noticed a messenger notification and read everything that Anne and Fenwick388 had written to each other. The whole exchange had to do with Claire.
It can’t be her, Jackie thought. Can it? Seeing the name Crawford seemed like such a sign. It was a link to Hubbard’s Point, the woods at the end of the beach, and Tantummaheag. It killed Jackie to think that Claire might be out there, communicating with strangers on Facebook, and not letting Jackie know where she was.
Jackie sent herself a friend request from Anne. Then she opened her own Facebook page and accepted. Now Anne had three friends: Kylie M, Fenwick388, and Jackie R. Jackie sat back in the desk chair, closed her eyes, and thought about her new Facebook friend.
Jackie stared at the paper that Anne had left behind. She lifted the note to examine it more closely, and tears filled her eyes. Anne’s handwriting was Claire’s. Claire was alive, still on this earth. Jackie sat very still for a long time.
Then she knew where she had to go.