More on Stakes 10/11/12

Something else: Jade needs to clear the path for the rest of her life. She has other things to do, sail around the world, have a family, get her PhD. She finds planning for these things, let alone planning for her next classes, an insurmountable task. It is as if there could be no other possibility in her life but to push this grief out of her way.

Pushing the grief out of her way involves dealing with the loss, but more than that, dealing with the facts of the disappearance. It is the lack of knowledge that has plagued her these many years, and now the Sleuth comes along offering a possible avenue. She knows he is wrong about M&C finding their way to SC without contacting their families. She knows the photos are all off and the facts of the case he is pursuing. But she is intrigued, wanting more on the Jaques & Jill case. She begins to see a parallel: two people murdered and no families; two families looking for their vanished children. This parallel is at the center of the Jade/Sleuth story.

She also begins to see the reasons that the Sleuth is drawing the connection, but her suspicion that he is ignoring some basic inconsistencies in the two cases is as strong as  her feeling that he has another motive, which itself becomes a new mystery. She feels she has entered into a kind of hall of mirrors. It isn’t without a conscious desire to know the truth that she continues her interaction with the Sleuth. In fact, she feels that he offers a certain usefulness to her own pursuit, putting her into contact, for example, with  the FBI files he has procured on the M&C investigation.

All of the above is true. All of the above is conjecture. What needs to be provided is what’s in it for the Sleuth. He mentions that his own life is in danger because others who have investigated the Sumter murders have been killed. So what motivates the Sleuth? Answer this and I have a key to one of the locks of this story.

One thing that occurs to me right now is the very nature of the Sleuth’s investigation, starting as he is from a known angle, an established set of facts. The Sumter case has various clues about it that make it somewhat more approachable than a case of disappearance with no trace. The clues available lead somewhere externally; while the lack of clues lead somewhere internally. This is a basic realization that the reader needs to understand through the story. Jade is essentially on a journey inward, and the fact that she on some level resists the external journey only demonstrates how attached she is to this pursuit.

But what of the external pursuit? What if the Sumter case actually enhanced her discovery? This also can be a small motivator towards the larger picture, the point of release that Jade is seeking. It may be that the point of convergence of these two currents is the riptide of the story. In the choppy middle is Drum, her occupants and their own wishes and dreams. Some how these three items converge to allow Drum to proceed in our imaginations, and for slain pair in Sumter, a parallel in their own right, to spark new questions. Somewhere there is a family who is looking for these two people, and somewhere they have a home.