The Shadow Box(88)

“He did?” I asked, feeling a chill run through my body.

“Yes,” Jackie said. “He took it home that same night. But it wound up in the garbage outside the gallery. Other things had been discarded up the street. Kids found them, including a knife that Conor connected to your attack. The cops searched the whole neighborhood. Either someone stole the shadow box from Griffin, or he threw it out himself.”

I tried to picture it: Griffin heading into town, stuffing art and weapons into trash bins. “What else did the kids find, besides the knife?” I asked.

“There was a key chain. The Styrofoam kind boaters use and it came from the Sallie B.”

So there was a connection between Sallie and me—it made sense. Spencer’s story was the missing part of the puzzle—the Dan factor.

“This is all about timing,” I said quietly.

“Timing for what?”

“Griffin’s campaign,” I said. “He had too much to lose—I was going to leave him. It’s been hard enough having suspicions about Ellen all these years. I couldn’t let him run for governor knowing he’s a murderer. He always knew I suspected—I just didn’t know why he’d done it until yesterday.”

“Because of what happened in Cancún,” Jackie said. “Ellen knew.”

“And so did Dan, and he must have told Sallie,” I said. “So now, getting closer to the election, they murdered her. And nearly killed me. Because I knew too.”

“Griffin and Dan? But what about the kids,” Jackie asked. “How could they have let them be collateral damage? Charlie is dead, and Gwen is beyond traumatized. She’s with Tom right now. He just told me on the phone.”

“I want to meet her,” I said, feeling numb. “We’re the two survivors. What can I do to help her?”

Jackie took a deep breath. “I don’t know. She’s troubled, and how can she not be? And how can she live with her father—if he really did that to Sallie? She has this elaborate fantasy that Charlie is being held in a castle by the sea. She did these incredibly intricate drawings of a mansion with turrets and towers and scary crow gargoyles.”

“Do you have the drawings?” I asked.

“Not the originals,” Jackie said. “But Tom took photos and sent them to my phone. Hold on.” She began scrolling through texts, and when she found the right one, she showed the shots to me. I saw the castle, the crags and cornices, the turret, the gargoyles with thick black beaks and folded wings, the men standing on the balcony.

“Wait,” I said. “They’re not scary crows. They’re ravens.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s not an imaginary place,” I said. “It’s a real house.”

“How do you know, Claire?”

“Because I’ve been there. A fundraiser for Griffin. Emily’s father—Maxwell Coffin, one of Griffin’s supporters—owns it. It’s an absolutely insane, over-the-top replica of the ‘ancestral estate,’ as they put it, in Scotland. You can’t see it from the road—it’s on acres of land, up a long driveway. On the outskirts of Stonington.”

“That’s bizarre,” Jackie said, looking shocked. “Tom’s taking Gwen to the lighthouse in Stonington now. How do you know the owners?”

“I don’t, really. Max is Neil’s older brother. We’ve met a few times, but that’s it. He and his wife commissioned me to do a shadow box of their house. Of Ravenscrag.”

I was practically shaking, remembering that night—and the letter that followed. I pictured the Gothic Revival mansion, the crenelated towers, the walls lined with English sporting art and austere nineteenth-century family portraits. The curved marble staircase was lined with photos taken in the early part of the twentieth century, people at black-tie affairs and in country-gentleman garb holding guns and posed with white-and-brown spaniels.

It was a very dressy affair, full of pomp. Max’s wife, Evans, had worn a mauve satin gown with a jeweled bodice, and the two of them had walked me down to the seawall, where the waves broke on the rocks below, sending spray upward, so I could look back at the mansion and start imagining the shadow box I would create.

Evans stared at me while Max talked about my great talent, how he had been an admirer ever since Griffin first told him about my work. Extraordinary, he had called it. Mysterious, storytelling, soulful. I kept glancing at Evans, and initially I thought she was upset that her husband was paying so much attention to me.

But the expression in her eyes told me something else—imploring, warning, as if she were telling me to beware. But of what? I certainly knew about dangerous husbands, but what would I possibly have to fear from hers? I wasn’t to find out until weeks later, when the letter came.

Abigail and Neil Coffin were there, of course, as well as some of our other Catamount Bluff neighbors—they often attended Griffin’s fundraisers. Griffin and I had driven over with Wade and Leonora Lockwood.

Alexander and Ford lived in the guest cottage, available to housesit when the family went to stay at any of their other houses, in St. Barts, Vail, and San Francisco. Ford was absent that night, but Alexander and Emily were helping to bartend. Max was the first to sign a big check to the campaign to elect Griffin Chase as governor of Connecticut.