PART 3 — THE ENVELOPE FROM MAINE
The woman who mailed the ring called me three days later. Her name was Ruth, and she had been Elaines closest friend in the little Maine town where she had lived in secret for nine years.
Elaine had passed that winter, Ruth told me gently. Peacefully, in her sleep. Her last request was that Ruth send me the ring, and the photograph, once there was no longer any danger.
Then Ruth told me the rest. The weekend Elaine vanished, she had not fallen into a ravine. She had overheard something she was never meant to hear, something that made her certain our youngest son was not safe. She had no proof anyone would believe. So she did the only thing a terrified mother could think of. She took Caleb and ran, and she made it look like the mountain had swallowed them.
For nine years I grieved a wife and a son who were alive the whole time, hidden in a little town by a lake, waiting for the day it would be safe to come home.
The danger had a name, and once I carried Elaines account and what she had written down to the authorities, that name answered for what it had done. My brother-in-law Russell stopped telling me to let it go. He had a great deal of explaining to do instead.
Three weeks after the ring arrived, a tall boy of fifteen with a scar over his left eyebrow stepped off a bus in our town.
Caleb. My Caleb.
He did not remember much of the life before, but he remembered the jacket I ran out to the car in my socks. His sisters wrapped their arms around a brother they thought they had buried.
I lost Elaine twice, and I will grieve her the rest of my life. But she gave our boy back to us from the other side of the grave. She kept him safe. In the end, that was the only thing she ever wanted.