The Shadow Box(80)
“I’m glad,” I said. Spencer radiated strength and savvy; I knew she didn’t underestimate Griffin. “What about Dan? He was right there and knows everything. Isn’t he in danger?”
“Dan was part of it,” Spencer said. “They had it on each other. Mutually assured destruction if one of them told.” She paused, gazed hard into my eyes. “So he tried to kill you because you know about Ellen,” she said.
“I didn’t see his face. He wore a mask and gloves.”
“If he was going to kill you, why would he care whether you knew it was him or not? He’s so arrogant that I would think he’d want you to know,” Spencer said.
I thought about that, as I had every day since I’d been attacked. “He’s a monster but a very particular type of monster,” I said. “He has to be thought of as the good guy, even as he’s pulling the wings off dragonflies.”
“Claire, if not Griffin, who did this to you?” Jackie asked, holding my hand.
“It was Griffin,” Spencer said. “It had to be.”
I thought so, too, but I wasn’t completely sure.
And I thought about how Wade Lockwood had helped to bury the story about Marnie and protect Griffin, just as he did later that same year, after Griffin had killed Ellen, and Wade made sure there was no investigation.
I wondered what he was doing right now, spinning what had happened to me, steering all suspicion away from Griffin Chase, the son he never had.
44
CONOR
Conor drove toward the southeastern corner of Connecticut to meet two men with a strange story to tell.
One month before Claire Beaudry Chase went missing, Lance Staver and Jim Dufour, members of the Ravenscrag Sportsmen’s Preserve, hiked the three-hundred-acre club property, training their German short-haired pointer puppies to become superb hunting dogs, when they came upon a disturbed area—a pile of dead leaves.
Upon investigation, they found that the leaves had been heaped on top of a sheet of plywood. They kicked aside the plywood and discovered a hole in the ground. It was six feet long, three feet deep, and two feet wide. Four bags of quicklime were piled on a white plastic tarp at the bottom of the hole.
“Totally a human grave,” Staver said.
“Yeah, wonder which member is killing his wife?” Dufour asked, and the two men laughed. They figured one of the club officers had dug the hole to dispose of animal carcasses. Once a deer was field dressed, the meat removed, there was the problem of the body—left in the meadows, it rotted, attracting predators like coyotes and bobcats, hawks and ravens.
None of that would be a problem, except lately a few members with small children had complained about the smell and about the dangers of being on the club grounds when critters with big teeth were out there ready to pounce, which to Staver and Dufour was bullshit. If you didn’t like wildlife and the food chain, join a country club, not a sporting club.
They forgot about the hole until Claire Beaudry Chase’s disappearance hit the news, was on TV and in the local papers every day, and they remembered how a group from the Black Hall–New London area, where the missing lady was from, had rented out the property for an outing during the wild turkey hunting season, and they began to wonder.
Conor was following up on their call. The day had dawned foggy, and at ten a.m., the mist had just started burning off. By the time he got to North Stonington, where the club was located, the sky was bright blue and the day was hot.
Jim Dufour was short and round with a fringe of hair that looked like a monk’s tonsure. Lance Staver was stocky but fit; he wore a T-shirt that said NAVY SEAL TEAM 6 and had an American flag tattoo on one forearm and a howling wolf on the other.
“Call me crazy,” Dufour said as the three of them set out on a trail behind the club building—a white farmhouse with a wide porch and two chimneys—“but this thing’s got human grave written all over it.”
“When did you first find it?” Conor asked.
“Round about April, maybe midmonth,” Staver said.
“And you didn’t report it then?” Conor asked.
“Truth is, we didn’t think much of it until we read about the Chase woman,” Staver said.
“And we started thinking, What if she’s here?” Dufour said with an exaggerated shiver. “That’s why we called you.”
“Good that you did,” Conor said.
They crossed a meadow full of tall grass. At the far side was a thick wood, and they skirted the trees until they came to a pond. Staver explained how the pond was stocked with trout every spring and how the club released game birds every fall.
“Something for everyone,” he said.
Conor was sweating and took off his blazer, slinging it over his shoulder. Staver glanced at him, nodded with approval. “Smart move, you got long sleeves under there. This is a nasty year for ticks.” Conor didn’t mention Staver’s T-shirt or the fact he was wearing camo shorts.
“We’re getting close,” Dufour said. “Now, you see those humps of brush and leaves?” He pointed at three piles between the woods and the water. “People think we’re just out here killing animals, and we are, but truth is, we are also into conservation. The eastern cottontail population has been declining in recent years. Too much development, habitat displaced by a bunch more houses and stores. So we build these brush piles to give the rabbits somewhere to live.”