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Blond Ambition: Chad (Billy Flynn, l.) and Jack (Matthew Ashford) stumble upon a blonde beauty — but is it Abigail?
On the heels of discovering a beaten-up John in the abandoned building in which they had hoped they might find Abigail alive, Jack and Chad try to make sense of the twisted situation.
A New Twist
“This is a very strange piece of a puzzle,” says Matthew Ashford about his character, Jack, learning that John was knocked out in Greece, mysteriously transported to Poplar Bluff, and has no information about Abigail. “Suddenly, there’s a whole other layer of something. It makes you think, ‘Is Clyde involved in this? Are we being led on this goose chase?’ We don’t want to think that we’re being played, because that makes somehow even Abigail a pawn. That’s the most painful part of it all this, that Abigail is just a casualty. Jack wants this to be about finding Abigail and not part of some more elaborate game. That’s his biggest fear and what he’s fighting against.”
Fortunately, it’s not a total dead end for Jack and Chad, as later, Chad shows Jack something he found on the floor in the room where they discovered John. “It’s a bracelet that was Abigail’s,” reveals Ashford. “Chad knew she wore it.”
The trinket reinforces the two men’s hope that, perhaps, Abigail might actually be alive. “Absolutely. It’s something,” asserts Ashford. “And I don’t think [the bracelet] was something Abigail was buried with, so that’s just creepy. It’s another odd thing, and it’s another proof of life kind of moment for them.”
While discussing how the bracelet could have ended up in the room, Jack and Chad discover a woman listening at the door. As she turns to run off, they give chase and come face-to-face with the mystery woman, who’s being played by AnnaLynne McCord.
“She’s not that fast on her feet,” delivers Ashford with a chuckle. “Jack and Chad see her and grab her, and she says, ‘Who are you?’ It gets kind of complicated… Now begins the much more difficult part of [the story].”
The big question being, Is this woman or is she not the late Abigail DiMera? “Chad is struggling with it so much, but Jack’s had this experience where he went through something extraordinary, so he says, ‘I just can’t rule anything out,’ ” explains Ashford, whose character returned from the dead after being seemingly murdered by the Salem Stalker in 2003 and then again after being thought to have met his demise via an elevator crash in 2012. “It makes no sense. How could this girl possibly be Abigail? But Jack’s trying to be open to that, because he knows what he’s been through.”