Squeezing her eyes shut, she tries to silence the obsessive voice chattering away in the back of her head, and abruptly snaps them open again when she realizes she’s dozing off. Sleeping with the box unsecured might not be such a smart idea, she decides.
“Is it safe?” she suddenly asks out loud, without intending to. She looks down at the suitcase again. The flight is less than ninety minutes long. What’s the worst that can happen if she takes a little catnap? She doesn’t know and she’s not willing to find out. She can sleep when she gets home.
Is it safe? She’s thinking of the old Dustin Hoffman movie now with the evil Nazi dentist. Is it safe?
When it comes to the button box, Gwendy knows the answer to that question. The box is never safe. Not really.
“We’re number two for take-off, Congresswoman,” the co-pilot says, peeking out from the cockpit. “We should have you on the ground in Castle Rock a few minutes before noon.”
22
IF GWENDY’S BEING HONEST with herself—and as the King Air 200 climbs high in the clouds above a muddy twist of Potomac River she’s determined to be exactly that—she has to admit that her crummy mood this morning is coming from one overwhelming source: a long-forgotten memory from her youth.
It was a mild and breezy August day shortly before the start of her tenth-grade year in high school, and Gwendy just finished running the Suicide Stairs for the first time in months. When she reached the top, she sat and rested on the same Castle View bench where years earlier she’d first met a man named Richard Farris. She stretched her legs for a moment, and then she leaned her head back and closed her eyes, enjoying the feel of the sun and the wind on her face.
The question that had bloomed in her mind while sitting on the bench that long ago summer day resurfaced—and rather rudely—earlier this morning as Gwendy was busy cushioning the button box in her carry-on bag with rolled up wads of socks and sweaters: How much of her life is her own doing, and how much the doing of the box with its treats and buttons?
The memory—and the central thought contained within that memory—was almost enough to make Gwendy scream in rage and fling the box across the bedroom like a toddler in the midst of a temper tantrum.
No matter how she looks at it, Gwendy knows she’s led what most people would call a charmed life. There was the scholarship to Brown, the writers’ workshop in Iowa, the fast-track job at the ad agency, and of course, the books and movies and Academy Award. And then there was the election, what many pundits called the biggest political upset in Maine history.
Sure, there were failures along the way—a lost advertising account here, a film option that didn’t pan out there, and her love life before Ryan could probably best be described as a barren desert of disappointment—but there weren’t too many, and she always bounced back with an ease of which others were envious.
Even now, glaring at the button box resting securely between her feet, Gwendy believes with all her heart that the bulk of her success can be attributed to hard work and a positive attitude, not to mention thick skin and persistence.
But what if what she believes to be true… simply isn’t?
23
A LIGHT SNOW IS falling from a low-hanging, slate gray sky when Gwendy lands at the Castle County Airport out on Route 39. Nothing heavy, just a kiss on the cheek from the north that will leave yards and roadways coated with an inch or so of slush by dinnertime.
She called ahead before boarding the plane and asked Billy Finkelstein, one of only two full-timers at Castle County Airport, to jump her car battery back to life and pull her Subaru hatchback out of one of the three narrow hangars that run alongside the wooded shoulder of Route 39.
Billy is true to his word, and the car’s waiting for her in the parking lot, both the engine and heater running hard. She thanks Billy, sliding him a tip even though it’s against the rules, and nods hello to his boss, Jessie Martin, one of her father’s old bowling partners. She loads her carry-on into the front passenger seat and tosses her tote bag on top of it.
On her way home, Gwendy makes a pair of quick phone calls. The first is to her father to let him know she landed safely and that she’ll be there for dinner tonight. Mom’s asleep on the sofa, so she doesn’t get to speak to her, but Dad’s pleased as punch and looking forward to seeing Gwendy later.
The second call is to Castle County Sheriff Norris Ridgewick’s cellphone. It rings straight to voicemail, so she leaves a message after the beep: “Hey, Norris, it’s Gwendy Peterson. I just got back into town and figured we ought to touch base. Give me a buzz when you can.”
As she presses the END button on her phone, Gwendy feels the Subaru’s back tires momentarily loosen their grip on the road. She carefully steers back into the center of the lane and drops her speed. That’s all you need, she thinks. Hit a telephone pole, knock yourself unconscious, and have the button box discovered by some nineteen-year-old snowplow driver with a tin of Red Man in his back pocket and frozen snot crusted on his lip.
24
THERE ARE ONLY TWO ways up to Castle View in 1999: Route 117 and Pleasant Road. Gwendy steers the Subaru onto Pleasant, climbing past a winding half-mile stretch of single homes—ranchers, Cape Cods, and saltbox colonials; many of them decorated for Christmas—and takes a left after the new American Legion playground onto View Drive. She drives another couple hundred yards and then makes a right into the snow-covered parking lot of Castle View Condominiums. Several years ago, she and Ryan were among the first half-dozen folks to purchase a unit in the newly built complex. Despite their busy travel schedules, they’ve been happy there ever since.
Gwendy swings into a reserved spot in the front row and turns off the engine. Circling to the passenger side to pull out her suitcase, she glances down a series of gently sloping hills to a fenced-off precipice where she once ran a zigzagging metal staircase called the Suicide Stairs. Standing out like a dark scar on the snowy hillside is the wooden bench where she first met the stranger in the black hat.
Gwendy punches in a four-digit security code to gain entrance to her building and climbs the stairs to the second floor. Once inside Unit 19B, she shrugs off her jacket, leaving it on the foyer floor, unzips her suitcase and takes out the button box, carries it down the hallway to the bedroom, places it on her husband’s side of the bed, and curls up next to it. Thirty seconds later, she’s snoring.
25
GWENDY OPENS HER EYES to the dark silence of her bedroom, disoriented by the lack of daylight at the window, and momentarily forgets where she is. She hustles into the bathroom to pee and experiences a sharp spike of panic in her chest when she remembers dinner with her parents.
After stashing the button box inside a fireproof safe in the office she shares with Ryan, she spends the next five minutes searching for her keys. She finally finds them in the pocket of her jacket on the floor and rushes out the door, determined not to be late.
Driving faster than she should on the slick roads, she’s a block away from her parents’ house when she thinks about the box again. “It should be safe in the safe,” she says out loud and laughs.
The safe was originally her husband’s idea. Convinced that they both needed a place to store their valuables, he supervised the purchase and installation of the SentrySafe a few months after they moved into the condo. Of course, several years later, there was nothing inside the thing except for a handful of contracts, old insurance papers, an envelope containing a small amount of cash, and a signed Ted Williams baseball inside a plastic cube—and now the button box.