broadly, with Mary MacLane herself.) As you likely already know, they’d formed the Plain Bad Heroine Society as a way to show their devotion.
But who brought the book into the trees that day isn’t as certain as the fact that a copy was with them in their final moments. Some of the onlookers said Clara was carrying nothing at all on her march from the motorcar, while others swore that they saw the book gripped in her hand as she crossed the lawn. Though she’d been seen with it so frequently that school year, it’s natural to wonder if they might have imagined that part.
It was, after all, the book, the one that brought her and Flo together, the one that said, printed there on the page, the things Clara had once believed were her private thoughts alone. It was the book that Clara so often thought that truly, truly, she could have written herself. She could have had it sewn to her palm and still be unencumbered by it.
And if you asked Clara’s mother, she would have told you that Clara might as well have had that vile book sewn to her hand for the length of their summer in Newport, because there it had been, day in and day out.
Later, when Clara’s traveling case was searched—for it had been left there on the ground next to the car* where Charles had dumped it—no copy of The Story of Mary MacLane was found. This would seem to suggest that Clara Broward did take her book with her into the woods that day.
It would seem to suggest that, except for this: in a letter sent after her daughter’s unfortunate death, Mrs. Broward told her sister, in great detail, of the cold comfort she had taken in burning Clara’s copy of that hateful book in the flames of her bedroom fireplace. She wrote that she began at page one, tore it free, fed the fire, and continued on until the red binding flapped empty, like a mouth with no teeth. And then she burned the empty mouth.
Mrs. Broward certainly believed that she did this to the only copy of Mary MacLane’s memoir that she knew her daughter to have ever owned.
Of course, all of this was only spoken of later.
Perhaps you already know that when the story of Flo’s and Clara’s deaths reached the press, Mary MacLane herself, then staying nearby at a seaside hotel in Massachusetts, was asked to issue a statement. She’s reported to have said, “I wish I could have known those girls.” This was both uncharacteristically short for a Mary MacLane statement to the press in those days and the thing that the two of them no doubt would have wanted to hear the most from her.
Before we move on, one more thing about that copy of the book found with the bodies. It was handled by faculty and police, Pinkertons and even Flo’s and Clara’s bereaved family members (not one of whom claimed it as belonging to their kin). And then, not so long after, it was misplaced. Officially misplaced, anyway. Lost. Unable to be located when it was asked after by reporters who felt sure they’d missed something the first time they’d gone through it and who now wanted another look.
Even Principal Libbie Brookhants* herself could not find it. She was the school’s young if capable founder. She knew its grounds and buildings better than anyone else left alive, and she told those doubting reporters that she had made a point of looking for the copy in question in every place on campus that it might have conceivably ended up; it simply could not be found.
The book was gone.
This part won’t get more pleasant with my stalling so we might as well get on with it. And just so you know: the facts, such as they are, get foggier from here on out, too.
We know, based on where the girls were later found, that at some point Clara veered from the orchard path. Whether this was due to Charles’s gaining speed or some tactic meant to prevent that from happening, I cannot say, but it proved a fateful choice.
To be sure, that path had its own difficulties, but now a tangle of hailstorm-downed branches and thick undergrowth snagged at the soft fabric of Clara’s dress and tripped up her steps. When she was found, her skirt was clogged with thorns and twigs, shredded from the things in the understory that had caught her.