I knew it was a long shot, but as we headed up to Jefferson Pen, Laura got on the phone with Will in Tallahassee who got on the phone with the guys in Gainesville where Aggrawal had taken whatever he had found before the tide came in and started saturating the ground in his excavation site. Will begged them to stop worrying about defleshing the bones or any other scientific protocol and instead look through the mess for any plastic or metal objects that might have been on the children’s bodies the night of the murders. Plastic not so much, but metal might have survived.
“They say sure would help if they knew what they were looking for,” Will said.
Laura had examined every photo the night before, and now while Will had her on a conference call with Gainesville she described roughly a dozen items while paging through the little album to make sure she didn’t forget one. There was Kirsten showing off a wristwatch in front of a Christmas tree. I glanced over. “I bet it’s a Swatch; they were popular in the nineties. But there were lots of styles, so describe it in detail. Maybe that will help. And look for pierced earrings.” Both Kirsten and Sara had them, but they weren’t unusual, just studs. Still, they went on the list.
“What about these jeans?” Laura asked, spotting something she had not in her first go-round. “They have an odd triple snap thing.”
I said, “I remember those. They’re Cavariccis. Maybe the snaps survived. Chances are they were in their pajamas but still.”
In a photo of the three kids standing in front of Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World, Sara was wearing a trinket on a black string. Laura looked closely at it but couldn’t make it out. “A bumblebee?” she asked. “Look for a bee,” she said more loudly so Will and Aggrawal could hear.
“What about shoes?” Will asked over the speaker. “We know an expert who can identify shoes by the tread.”
“We don’t have any shoe tread to compare it to.” Laura tried not to yell with impatience and pretty much succeeded.
“No shoes,” Aggrawal said.
It was a ghoulish scavenger hunt—I pictured Aggrawal fishing through the sludge with tweezers—and Laura and I felt certain that if we won, Marcus Creighton would get to live. At least while the remains were examined thoroughly.
Gainesville understood the importance and was working for us. Will called when we were still a half hour’s drive from the prison to let Laura know that several items had been found. A wristwatch was in there, but it was so mangled it would take some time to analyze what the brand was.
And then the anthropologist described a corroded pewter figure of Dumbo the elephant, ears outstretched in flight.
I knew that image, and I knew what Laura would have mistaken it for. “That’s the bumblebee Sara is wearing,” I said. “Tell Will they should keep looking, and send them our photo for analysis to confirm Dumbo, but I’ll bet we’ve got a match. Those are the Creighton kids.”
* * *
We were ushered into a smaller room than the one we were in last time, in a different building. This was the building where executions took place, and Marcus Creighton had been moved to the death watch cell. Wally, the guard he’d known for so long, who had been his friend on the inside, was not his guard here. If Wally had been there, he would certainly have seen the news and told Marcus about the bodies being found. The guard who took us to the meeting room looked like even if he knew about the bodies, he didn’t care. No names were exchanged. Too little time was left for politeness, but Creighton didn’t seem to recognize this.
Marcus greeted Laura, and, with a screw-you-and-the-prison-rules glance at me, she put her arms around him and drew him close. He was passive through it, his arms barely lifting in response, but over her shoulder I saw his chin lifted and his mouth opened as if he was receiving a sacrament. I wondered how many years had passed since he was last touched.
Even this gesture didn’t tip him off that something about our visit was not good. He sat back in his chair a little dazed from the human contact. Then he pulled himself together once more and said with a wink, “Hello there, Brigid Quinn. I still don’t want to die.”
“I don’t want you to die.” I winked back.
“There must be good news,” Marcus said, searching our faces for a sign of more. “You got the stay.” He rubbed his hands together, making the cuffs jingle, unable to suppress his hope.
Then Laura first told him about finding the bodies of the children, succinctly and without showing any of the emotion I warned her about. Caring more for him than herself.
At first all he did was blink. Then he rubbed his hand over his unshaven face. When he didn’t speak, Laura told him more about the burial scene, on the shore of an island that had been undeveloped at the time of the murders. That’s how she spoke of it, murders. Trying to break through his denial. Each word she spoke carefully and slowly, but as she spoke she took his hand, a hand so unresponsive it could have belonged to a corpse.
Not responding, not looking at either of us, Marcus moved his jaw from side to side, grinding his teeth.
“Marcus,” Laura said, “do you understand what I just told you?”
He managed to rub his stubbled face again, and for a moment it seemed that was all he could manage.
Then, “It’s not them,” he said, finally.
“We think it’s them, Marcus,” Laura said.
“Think? You think. What proof do you have?” he said. His voice was soft and weak, but there he was, rising to the surface again. I had seen him do this the last time, sinking and rising and sinking again as despair and hope tossed him about in their wake.
Laura gestured to me to confirm what she said, but I shook my head.
“How do you know it’s not them, Marcus?” I asked. Even now I had some small hope that he would confess and I could let him go to a justified death. “Do you know where they are?”
His voice grew stronger but not angry. He said, speaking slowly and patiently as if I was a half-wit, “I told you, no. That’s why Alison Samuels is looking for them. Because I don’t know where they are. I keep telling you I don’t know where they are. You don’t listen.”
Laura took the photo album, open to the photograph of the children posed in a line in front of Cinderella’s Castle, and slid it in front of him, saying, “Tell us about this picture, Marcus.”
He was only too happy to talk about something other than dead bodies. “I took them to Disney World for the twins’ eighth birthday.”
“How long was that before they … before this?” Laura asked.
“Their birthday is March tenth. We always joke that it’s appropriate the twins were born under the Pisces sign. It was a great trip, a whole week. We did it all, Epcot, SeaWorld, stayed at the Polynesian resort.” Marcus’s smile faded. “I think it was an apology for screwing up their lives. It cost me a bundle that I didn’t have, but now I’m grateful I did it.”
“They don’t look here like they thought their lives were screwed up,” I said, in a stop-that-nonsense voice.
Something didn’t seem right about the chronology, though. The photo album was a Father’s Day present, and by that date they were all dead. It made the album feel ghostly. I asked.
Creighton said, “Sara was so cute. She remembered making this for me the year before and would add pictures as we took them. She added these a few weeks before she disappeared.”
I asked, “What about their mother? Was she with you?”
“She didn’t want to go.” He sounded very sad at that, as if it had happened yesterday.
Laura, who was sitting close enough to Marcus to reach the photo, pointed to Sara. “It’s hard to see, but we know Sara is wearing something around her neck. Do you recognize it?”
Marcus nodded at Laura’s question but didn’t answer it. “Have you talked to Alison Samuels?”
“Not lately, no,” Laura said with a frown.
“So she doesn’t know what you’re telling me.”
“I think she might, Marcus. It was on the news.”
“You must tell Alison Samuels to keep looking, that they haven’t found my children. Will you do that for me? Please? I don’t know if she’ll come to see me again, so you have to get to her.”
Laura put her hand over her mouth involuntarily as if she could not bear to be the person who would force him to acknowledge the truth. But then she forced the hand away, took a breath, and said softly, “Marcus, just for now, could we talk about Sara’s necklace? Do you recognize it?”
I watched Creighton’s eyes come back into focus and appear to recognize Laura. “I don’t have to recognize it. I remember everything about it. Each of the kids, Kirsten included, got to pick out a souvenir. We saw this little Dumbo character made from pewter in one of the gift shops, and Sara asked me about it. I promised her we’d rent the movie and watch it when we got home. We did, and I remember she rubbed the little Dumbo and asked if you could make a wish on it. Sometimes when I look at this picture I wish I had asked her what she wanted to wish for. But I never did. I played along, told her any wish would be granted as long as she kept Dumbo close to her. She said she’d never take it off,” he said. “You know how little girls are, so over the top with their emotions. Never, ever, take it off! I can hear her saying that. But of course kids, they don’t know what never ever means.”
Marcus Creighton stopped talking, finally, and stared at the reluctant truth in Laura’s eyes. He made the connections. He said, “Oh my God, she never took it off.”