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I h8 to wake up and u not here!
Well Im bringin breakfast home so stop your complainin, Poon!!!!
We need to get there early. We at least 1 day late on batch. Driver gonna kill us!!!! Get ur ass home!!!!
Driver. Was that “D”? Shauna went back to the list of messages but found none under “D,” only brief or unanswered calls in the recents list. She put the phone down and lifted the small plastic tub she had retrieved from the safe in the floor of her garden shed. (She was right about the combination code.)
She set the tub on her lap. This was it. This was what they had come for. What these people were prepared to beat, degrade, and humiliate her for. Possibly what they had planned to kill her for. It was also something her husband of almost five decades had wanted to keep from her so badly, he’d constructed an elaborate plan to ensure she never found out about it. The safe. The secret commissioning of it. The weekend away in Florida. It was all for whatever lay in the box on her lap.
There were five unsealed manila envelopes standing upright in the plastic tub. Shauna lifted the first one and peered inside. A small gray device lay blank and silent, its screen dark green, lifeless, and marked with scratches. A single piece of paper was wedged between the device and the side of the envelope. Shauna slipped it out and recognized Mark’s handwriting.
Michelle Dunbar, 1991. Richard Hannoy.
Shauna turned the envelope this way and that but found nothing else inside. She picked up the device, examined it. It was not a phone, but she didn’t recognize what it was. She picked up her own phone and googled the names and date from the slip of paper, clicked on the first story to pop up.
The family of missing teenager Michelle Dunbar have expressed their dismay at police mishandling of thecase, claiming a Palm Pilot belonging to the teenager has gone missing from police custody. The personal electronic organizer, they claim, was recovered from Dunbar’s body and may hold the key to finding the girl after two years of investigative dead ends. Lead detective Mark Bulger refused to comment on how the crucial piece of evidence in the case was misplaced. Dunbar’s boyfriend, Richard Hannoy, was released from police custody without charge yesterday following exhaustive interviews in which…
Shauna sighed. Oh Mark. While she was tempted to scroll further through the story, to look at the images of the missing girl and the strained, grief-stricken parents, Shauna decided not to torture herself with further evidence of how twisted and manipulative her husband had been. Shauna had known, deep down in her soul, that there were probably cases out there that went unsolved because bringing them resolution would in some way disadvantage Mark. He had been that kind of man. That kind of cop. She flipped to the next envelope, which contained a pair of black lace panties and another set of names. In the third envelope was a flick knife. In the fourth, a leatherbound diary. Shauna lifted the final envelope and reached inside. She found a dusty builder’s glove, made of white cotton with protective plastic molding on the inside of the palm and fingers. On the back of the wrist was a reddish-brown stain that could have been old, dried blood. Shauna took the slip of paper from the envelope and read the names.
Georgette Winter-Lee, 1989. Norman Driver.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WHEN I SAW how frail Shauna Bulger looked as she exited the pickup truck just beyond the reach of the inn’s porch, my natural instinct was to run over and catch her. Susan had told me Shauna needed help, but the woman I had seen only a day earlier at her husband’s funeral seemed physically degraded, as though whatever had happened in the last twenty-four hours had deflated her, wrung her like a rag. There was an angry blue bruise spreading up her jaw, and a split in her lip, and she walked slightly bent, nursing an obviously battered frame.
“Jesus, Shauna,” I said to her as I went and took her arm. “Whathappened?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” She waved me off. “I fell, that’s all.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Just my ego.”
I walked her to the porch and sat with her on a bench there. Effie came striding around the side of the house, toting a gardenrake in one hand and garbage can in the other, and took in the sight of the truck and the suitcases strapped in the back as she passed.
“You said you needed my help,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here, but you should have called me earlier, before you drove all this way. I could have stayed in Boston.”
“Oh, it’s not like that,” Shauna said. “I’ve just been rattling around the house, trying to make myself useful, and I needed a change of scene. The grief makes you restless. You can probably relate.”
“I remember.” I nodded. “I couldn’t sit still after Siobhan. I lost a few pounds just walking around.”
“Well, while I was trying to keep myself busy last night, I started going through all of Mark’s clothes,” she said. “I thought I’d donate them to Goodwill.” She gestured to the three suitcases on the truck. “I loaded them up on the truck myself. Guess I overdid it and fell. Then I decided maybe I’d been overzealous with the packing. Too brutal. Perhaps there are things within those cases of Mark’s that I’d like to keep. And then I… I drove here.”
“Jeez,” I said. “You’re a bit muddled up, aren’t you.”
Shauna nodded, gazing at the sea beyond the horizon, and I noticed her mouth twitch just a little. I regretted my words immediately. The last thing she needed right now was to be patronized. I expected there would be plenty of that from her son, her friends and neighbors, the people who had been around her when Mark died. She’d come to me, I guessed, because she’d seen in me a friend, just the way that Nick had. Someone who would trust her judgment and not question her or try to direct her. As a widower myself, I was someone she could trust not to mishandle her grief.
“What can I do?”
“It’s the truck.” Shauna gestured to the vehicle. “It’s a stick shift. I’m just not great with those. My little Honda is in the shop, and the Corvette is too fast for me.”
“No problem,” I said. “You can borrow my car. I’ll drive the truck back, and—”
“I was thinking of staying at the beach house.” Shauna put a hand up. “It’s just too painful back home without Mark there. There are so many little reminders of him. I need fresh scenery.”
“All right,” I said. “Sure. You guys kept that place at Manchester-by-the-Sea, huh?”
“We did.”
