2.
Had you asked Claire in the year after the Ashburys if she would ever live somewhere coastal again, the answer would’ve been a resounding no.
Not that anyone did ask. In the immediate aftermath of the disappearance, she’d been interviewed by the FBI, though they made it clear that it was only to see if Elias had ever said anything strange about his family in the time before his abrupt death.
They found the email from Audrey inviting her to the funeral, but Claire said that it’d been a perfectly normal affair before she left, and they didn’t push it.
There was no strict date on when the Ashburys had actually disappeared.
Their employees had reached out with concerns only after a month had passed with no one able to contact Wellington Ashbury V.
Someone must’ve cleaned up the body after he fell over the cliff. Someone or something. Claire didn’t think about it too hard.
All in all, it was kind of a letdown. There was no Netflix special, no breathless podcasts postulating about aliens.
One news story on MSNBC about Wellington’s disappearance, but even that was more about who would control the company than it was about what the hell had happened to him.
The reins of Ashbury Marinography were now held by Rhodes-Hodge Infrastructure.
The constant news cycle—and, she assumed, a shit ton of cash—quickly drowned the story out.
As far as she knew, Dierdre and Theo were just fine.
When Theo had brought the yacht up to the dock on the mainland, none of them had spoken.
Dierdre was tapping on her phone as she disembarked, ordering an Uber, all the blood showered off her and a new outfit found somewhere stashed on the boat.
Theo had stood for a moment on the gangplank, dazed, before ambling off in the other direction, saying nothing.
He’d waved at Claire as he disappeared around the corner, though. She’d waved back.
She assumed both of them had been called in for questioning, likely far more extensive than her own.
But if any kind of charge had been filed, she never heard about it.
She had no idea how they’d managed to pull it off, but it was a gift horse she wasn’t keen to look in the mouth, a hornet’s nest she had no intention of swatting.
Sometimes she wondered if Theo had ever started dating that guy from the bank.
After disembarking from the yacht, Claire had walked until she found a Greyhound station. She’d found a T-shirt and shorts in one of the bedrooms on board, along with a stack of hundreds, thick in a sterling cash clip. She’d felt no moral compunction at all about taking it.
When she got off the bus, she’d gone to the first diner she saw. Ordered a steak, as close to raw as the health code would allow. She’d eaten the whole thing, but still felt so hungry.
The cash got her back to the house in Connecticut and rented her an apartment for the two months it took to sell. She offered the house furnished, paid to have it cleaned, and never set foot in it again. Apparently whoever bought it had been excited about the giant aquarium.
After closing, she’d stayed in Connecticut awhile.
But it never felt like home, always like she was just visiting.
It wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation—even being with Elias had never felt like home, just security—but it was fine.
She knew where she needed to go, and she spent a year avoiding it, not thinking, the same way she didn’t think about what she really wanted when she ate bloody ground beef straight from the fridge, her left arm itching like a motherfucker.
But eventually the call was too much to ignore. Claire needed the sea.
So she ended up in Hastings.
It was a tiny town on the coast of Maine, not cool enough for tourists, but cool enough to have a fairly vibrant group of locals.
Her apartment was one of four inside an old house, with built-in bookcases and pitching floors and a roof that leaked when it rained too hard.
She could have afforded better, after the Connecticut house sold for five million, but she didn’t want to.
She kept the cash squirreled away in a bank account that she sometimes looked at incredulously, like it would start to empty before her very eyes.
Her new apartment was within walking distance of the beach.
Claire had picked up a waitressing job at a crab shack, mostly for a reason to leave and be around other people, and the Hastings locals surprisingly tipped very well.
She went on dates, sometimes, but nothing ever went beyond casual, and she never felt let down by that.
The last guy who took her out to dinner had called her “mysterious,” apparently meaning it to be a compliment.
“How do you figure?” she’d asked around a mouthful of rare steak.
“Just your vibe.” He grinned; he was someone who used the word vibe with no hint of irony. “The eyes help. Heterochromia is so cool.”
Claire had snorted so hard beer came through her nose, and he didn’t call her again after that.
There was a handful of friends she’d made waitressing who got together for dinner sometimes, who invited her along on weekend camping trips, who seemed genuinely interested in her life.
Sometimes she even told them about it. She answered their texts, and they answered hers.
They remembered her birthday. It was nice.
When the aching in her arm was unbearable, she took her camera—the Hasselblad, returned to her when Dierdre brought a few things that had apparently been either taken or looted from Harrow Point—and walked the beach.
Her walls were covered with variations on the same theme, photos she developed at a darkroom downtown.
The beach at night, the wide expanse of mirrorlike water, shining lines of tide with the moon hung above like a star on a Christmas tree.
Claire had stopped wondering if her photography was any good, and instead took pictures because she almost felt a compulsion to.
A compulsion to pace back and forth at the tide line.
Almost like she was a lighthouse beam, trying to draw someone home.
Her arm ached nearly all the time, though some nights were worse than others.
The red scars had lightened, become roadways of white against her pale skin, barely noticeable unless you caught them at the right angle.
Her friends asked about it. She said it was a childhood accident—that part was a lie, but it was the only one.
She told them about the storm and the boat, about Mom and Dad and Haddie.
She cried when she did it. They bought her drinks.
When she stood in one place on the beach, where the tide could wash up on the toes of her boots, sometimes the water would glow. Bioluminescence, tiny creatures made to shine. Her arm would ache and ache, and sometimes Claire felt the urge to dip her scarred fingers into the salt water.
She never did. It wasn’t time yet.
Tonight, she had a shift at the crab shack. The TV was on over the bar, tuned to the news, and she barely listened to it as she took a drink order from one of her regulars.
“Another disappearance in the corporate world,” Rachel Maddow intoned. “This time, the missing employee is Richard Marsden of Rhodes-Hodge Infrastructure. Marsden’s family says he was attending a retreat in the mountains with the company when he failed to return home.”
“They won’t even look into it.” A harried woman, Instagram-faced, talked into the camera and twisted her hands. Behind her, dense forest, dark green. “I tried to file a missing person report and Mr. Rhodes said Rich was a grown man, and he could leave if he wanted.”
“We’re following the story,” Rachel said, the camera snapping back to her. “Even if corporate lobbyists don’t want us to. This disappearance comes just over a year after the disappearance of Wellington Ashbury the Fifth, the CEO of Ashbury Marinography, which was notably acquired by Rhodes-Hodge.”
Claire stood in silence, staring at the television. Her tray trembled in her hand.
“You OK?” The regular spoke softly, lightly touching her arm.
“Fine.” Claire shook herself. “I’m fine.” She drifted back to the kitchen.
After her shift was over, she went to her apartment and got her camera. She went down to the beach, took a photo of her boots in the surf. Her arm itched.
Sister companies. Working closely. Monsters in the ocean, monsters in the mountains. Rhodes-Hodge’s main office wasn’t too far, in New York, near the Catskills.
Claire turned and headed to the marina, her thoughts trailing back in time.
○ ○ 2. ○ ○
“What the fuck do you want me to do with it?”
It was three months ago, in Claire’s mind, and Dierdre had changed her hair. She’d stood at the Hastings Marina with her arms crossed and her newly bleached locks tangling in the wind and looked at Claire like she was an idiot.
“Sell it or something.” She waved a hand, rolled her eyes. “I don’t give a damn what you do with it, Claire, but it was deeded to you, and I really don’t want to make myself more known to lawyers than I have to right now.”
Claire had shifted on her feet. At the dock, the sleek shape of the Poseidon bobbed in the water, looking totally ludicrous next to the sun-bleached boards and fishing skiffs. A far cry from the Ashbury dock, all glass and white tile.
“I don’t want it,” Claire said.
“I truly do not care.” The sun came out from behind a cloud, and Dierdre pulled designer sunglasses over her eyes, grimacing.
“It’s yours. Enjoy. I have a flight to Moscow in an hour.
” She threw Claire a small bunch of silver keys.
“Doubt you’ll ever want to take it out, but if you do, here.
It’s pretty easy to work, kinda like a car. ”
Then she was gone, slipping into the back of a black limo and headed to fucking Russia. Figured. Dierdre loved her oligarchs.