The Chatham School Affair

Praise For THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR

Winner of the 1996 Edgar Award for Best

Novel! And chosen By The Drood Review,

as one of 1996’s Ten Best Mysteries.

“THOMAS COOK IS AN ARTIST,

A PHILOSOPHER, AND A MAGICIAN;

HIS STORY IS SPELLBINDING.”—The Drood Review of Mystery“Swift, thoughtful and plausible … As in nearly all good crime fiction, the moral and practical complications … expand like ripples in a pond…. The Chatham School Affair is the tragic, lyrically told story of a sordid scandal, the town’s revenge on the perpetrators, and one man’s long-delayed journey toward redemption.”—The Boston Herald“MOODY, ELOQUENT.”—The San Francisco Chronicle Examiner“Cook is one of the most lyrical of today’s novelists. His prose flows effortlessly, yet beneath its rhythm Cook’s characters perform the most shocking and deadly of deeds…. An extraordinary writer.”—Sun, Calgary, Alberta“TRANSFIXING SUSPENSE.”—Booknews from The Poisoned Pen“[Cook’s] portrait of a small—and ultimately small-minded—town is a skillful one. And just when you think the puzzle is complete, Cook artfully presents yet another piece—rearranging all your expectations.”—The Orlando Sentinel

PRAISE FOR THOMAS H. COOK’S

BREAKHEART HILL“Expert storytelling … haunting … gains power and resonance with each twist.”—Publishers Weekly“Haunting, lyrical … a mesmerizing tale of love and betrayal.”—Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine“Intense … Impossible to put down.”—Rendezvous“Cook has crafted a novel of stunning power, with a climax that is so unexpected the reader may think he has cheated. But there is no cheating here, only excellent storytelling.”—Booklist“Cook’s writing is distinguished by finely cadenced prose, superior narrative skills, and the author’s patient love for the doomed characters who are the object of his attention…. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal (starred review)

MORE PRAISE FOR THOMAS H. COOK“Cook’s night visions, seen through a lens darkly, are haunting.”—The New York Times Book Review“A gifted novelist, intelligent and compassionate.”—Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

MORTAL MEMORY“Cook builds a family portrait in which violence seems both impossible and inevitable. One of [Mortal Memory’s] greatest accomplishments is the way it defies expectations … surprising and devastating.”—Chicago Tribune“Haunting … Don’t pick this up unless you’ve got time to read it through … because you will do so whether you plan to or not.”—Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

EVIDENCE OF BLOOD“In [his] previous novels … Cook has shown himself to be a writer of poetic gifts, constantly pushing against the presumed limits of crime fiction…. In this fine new book, he has gone to the edge, and survived triumphantly.”—Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times Book Review“A highly satisfying story, strong in color and atmosphere, intelligent and exacting.”—The New York Times Book Review

ALSO BY THOMAS H. COOK

FICTIONPeril

The Interrogation

Instruments of Night

Breakheart Hill

Mortal Memory

Evidence of Blood

The City When It Rains

Night Secrets

Streets of Fire

Flesh and Blood

Sacrificial Ground

The Orchids

Tabernacle

Elena

Blood Innocents

NONFICTIONEarly Graves

Blood Echoes

For Kate Miciak

Sine qua non

He sees enough who doth his darkness see.

LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

My father had a favorite line. He’d taken it from Milton, and he loved to quote it to the boys of Chatham School. Standing before them on opening day, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets, he’d pause a moment, facing them sternly. “Be careful what you do,” he’d say, “for evil on itself doth back recoil.” In later years he could not have imagined how wrong he was, nor how profoundly I knew him to be so.

Sometimes, particularly on one of those bleak winter days so common to New England, wind tearing at the trees and shrubbery, rain battering the roofs and windows, I feel myself drift back to my father’s world, my own youth, the village he loved and in which I still live. I glance outside my office window and see the main street of Chatham as it once was—a scattering of small shops, a ghostly parade of antique cars with their lights mounted on sloping fenders. In my mind, the dead return to life, assume their earthly shapes. I see Mrs. Albertson delivering a basket of quahogs to Kessler’s Market; Mr. Lawrence lurching forward in his homemade snowmobile, skis on the front, a set of World War I tank tracks on the back, all hooked to the battered chassis of an old roadster pickup. He waves as he goes by, a gloved hand in the timeless air.

Standing once again at the threshold of my past, I feel fifteen again, with a full head of hair and not a single liver spot, heaven far away, no thought of hell. I even sense a certain goodness at the core of life.

Then, from out of nowhere, I think of her again. Not as the young woman I’d known so long ago, but as a little girl, peering out over a glittering blue sea, her father standing beside her in a white linen suit, telling her what fathers have always told their children: that the future is open to them, a field of grass, harboring no dark wood. In my mind I see her as she stood in her cottage that day, hear her voice again, her words like distant bells, sounding the faith she briefly held in life. Take as much as you want, Henry. There is plenty.

In those days, the Congregationalist Church stood at the eastern entrance of Chatham, immaculately white save for its tall, dark spire. There was a bus stop at the southern corner of the church, marked by a stubby white pillar, the site where Boston buses picked up and deposited passengers who, for whatever reason, had no liking for the train.

On that August afternoon in 1926, I’d been sitting on the church steps, reading some work of military history, my addiction at the time, when the bus pulled to a stop yards away. From that distance I’d watched its doors open, the metal hinges creaking in the warm late-summer air. A large woman with two children emerged first, followed by an elderly man who smoked a pipe and wore a navy blue captain’s cap, the sort of old salt” often seen on Cape Cod in those days. Then there’d been a moment of suspension, when no one emerged from the shadowy interior of the bus, so that I’d expected it to pull away, swing left and head toward the neighboring town of Orleans, a trail of dust following behind it like an old feather boa.

But the bus had stayed in place, its engine rumbling softly as it idled by the road. I could not imagine why it remained so until I saw another figure rise from a seat near the back. It was a woman, and she moved forward slowly, smoothly, a dark silhouette. Near the door she paused, her arm raised slightly, her hand suspended in midair even as it reached for the metal rail that would have guided her down the stairs.

At the time I couldn’t have guessed the cause for her sudden hesitation. But in the years since then, I’ve come to believe that it was precisely at that moment she must have realized just how fully separate our world was from the one she’d lived in with her father during the many years they’d traveled together, the things she’d seen with him, Florence in its summer splendor, the canals of Venice, Paris from the steps of Sacre-Coeur. How could anything in Chatham ever have compared with that?

Something at last urged her forward. Perhaps necessity, the fact that with her father’s recent death she had no other option. Perhaps a hope that she could, in the end, make her life with us. I will never know. Whatever the reason, she drew in a deep breath, grasped the iron rail, and made her way down the stairs and into the afternoon stillness of a tiny seacoast village where no great artist had ever lived, no great event ever happened, save for those meted out by sudden storms or the torturous movement of geologic time.

It was my father who greeted her when she stepped from the bus that afternoon. He was headmaster of Chatham School, a man of medium height, but whose manner, so expansive and full of authority, made him seem larger than he was. In one of the many pictures I have of him from that time, this one printed in the Chatham School Annual for 1926, he is seated in his office, behind a massive oak desk, his hands resting on its polished surface, his eyes staring directly into the camera. It was the usual pose of a respectable and accomplished man in those days, one that made him appear quite stern, perhaps even a bit hard, though he was nothing of the kind. Indeed, when I remember him as he was in those days, it is usually as a cheerful, ebullient man with an energetic and kindly manner, slow to anger, quick to forgive, his feelings always visible in his eyes. “The heart is what matters, Henry,” he said to me not long before his death, a principle he’d often voiced through the years, but never for one moment truly lived by. For surely, of all the men I’ve ever known, he was the least enslaved by passion. Now an old man too, it is hard for me to imagine how in my youth I could have despised him so.

But I did despise him. Silently. Sullenly. Giving him no hint of my low regard, so that I must have seemed a perfectly obedient son, given to moodiness, perhaps, but otherwise quite normal, rocked by nothing darker than the usual winds of adolescence. Remembering him, as I often do, I marvel at how much he knew of Cicero and Thucydides, and how little of the boy who lived in the room upstairs.

Earlier that morning he’d found me lounging in the swing on the front porch, given me a disapproving look, and said, “What, nothing to do, Henry?”

I shrugged.

“Well, come with me, then,” he said, then bounded down the front steps and out to our car, a bulky old Ford whose headlights stuck out like stubby horns.

I rose, followed my father down the stairs, got into the car, and sat silently as he pulled out of the driveway, my face showing a faint sourness, the only form of rebellion I was allowed.

On the road my father drove at a leisurely pace through the village, careful to slow even further at the approach of pedestrians or horses. He nodded to Mrs. Cavenaugh as she came out of Warren’s Sundries, and gave a short cautionary beep on the horn when he saw Davey Bryant chasing Hattie Shaw a little too aggressively across the lighthouse grounds.

In those days, Chatham was little more than a single street of shops. There was Mayflower’s, a sort of general store, and Thompson’s Haberdashery, along with a pharmacy run by Mr. Benchley, in which the gentlemen of the town could go to a back room and enjoy a glass of illegal spirits, though never to the point of drunkenness. Mrs. Jessup had a boardinghouse at the far end of Main Street, and Miss Hilliard a little school for “dance, drama, and piano,” which practically no one ever attended, so that her main source of income came from selling cakes and pies, along with keeping house for several of the rich families that summered in spacious, sun-drenched homes on the bay. From a great height Chatham had to have looked idyllic, and yet to me it was a prison, its buildings like high, looming walls, its yards and gardens strewn around me like fields of concertina wire.

My father felt nothing of the kind, of course. No man was ever more suited to small-town life than he was. Sometimes, for no reason whatever, he would set out from our house and walk down to the center of the village, chatting with whoever crossed his path, usually about the weather or his garden, anything to keep the flow of words going, as if these inconsequential conversations were the very lubricant of life, the numen, as the Romans called it, that divine substance which unites and sustains us.

That August afternoon my father seemed almost jaunty as he drove through the village, then up the road that led to the white facade of the Congregationalist Church. Because of that, I knew that something was up. For he always appeared most happy when he was in the midst of doing some good deed.

“Do you remember that teacher I mentioned?” he asked as we swept past Warren’s Sundries. “The one who’s coming from Africa.”

I nodded dully, faintly recalling the brief mention of such a person at dinner one night.

“Well, she’s arriving this afternoon. Coming in on the Boston bus. I want you to give her a nice welcome.”

We got to the bus stop a few minutes later. My father took up his place by the white pillar while I wandered over to the steps of the church, slumped down on its bottom stair, and pulled the book I’d been reading from the back pocket of my trousers.

I was reading it a half hour later, by then lost in the swirling dusts of Thermopylae, when the bus at last arrived. I remained in place, grudgingly aware that my father would have preferred that I rush down to greet the new teacher. Of course, I was determined to do nothing of the kind.

And so I don’t know how he reacted when he first saw Miss Channing emerge from the bus that afternoon, for I couldn’t see his face. I do know how beautiful she was, however, how immaculately white her throat looked against the wine-red collar of her dress. I have always believed that as she stepped from the gray interior of the bus, her face suddenly captured in a bright summer light, her eyes settling upon my father with the mysterious richness I was to see in them as well, that at that moment, in that silence, he surely caught his breath.

CHAPTER 2

Inevitably, when I recall that first meeting, the way Miss Channing looked as she arrived in Chatham, so young and full of hope, I want to put up my hand and do what all our reading and experience tells us we can never do. I want to say “Stop, please. Stop, Time.”

It’s not that I want to freeze her there for all eternity, of course, a young woman arriving in a quaint New England town, but that I merely wish to break the pace long enough to point out the simple truth life unquestionably teaches anyone who lives into old age: since our passions do not last forever, our true task is to survive them. And one thing more, perhaps: I want to remind her how thin it is, and weaving, the tightrope we walk through life, how the smallest misstep can become a fatal plunge.

Then I think, No, things must be as they became. And with that thought, time rolls onward again, and I see her take my father’s hand, shake it briefly, then let it go, her face turning slightly to the left so that she must have seen me as I finally roused myself from the church steps and headed toward her from across its carefully tended lawn.

“This is my son, Henry,” my father said when I reached them.

“Hi,” I said, offering my hand.

Miss Channing took it. “Hello, Henry,” she said.

I can clearly recall how she looked at that first meeting, her hair gathered primly beneath her hat, her skin a perfect white, her features beautiful in the way certain female portraits are beautiful, not so much sensuous as very finely wrought. But more than anything, I remember her eyes, pale blue and slightly oval, with a striking sense of alertness.

“Henry’s going to be a sophomore this year,” my father added. “He’ll be one of your students.”

Before Miss Channing could respond to that, the bus driver came bustling around the back of the bus with two leather valises. He dropped them to the ground, then scurried back into the bus.

My father nodded for me to pick up Miss Channing’s luggage. Which I did, then stood, a third wheel, as he immediately returned the full force of his attention to Miss Channing.

“You’ll have an early dinner with us,” he told her. “After that we’ll take you to your new home.” With that, he stepped back slightly, turned, and headed for the car, Miss Channing walking along beside him, I trudging behind, the two leather valises hanging heavily from my hands.

We lived on Myrtle Street in those days, just down from Chatham School, in a white house with a small porch, like almost all the others in the village. As we drove toward it, passing through the center of town on the way, my father pointed out various stores and shops where Miss Channing would be able to buy her supplies. She seemed quite attentive to whatever my father told her, her attention drawn to this building or that one with an unmistakable appreciativeness, like someone touring a gallery or a museum, her eyes intently focused on the smallest things, the striped awning of Mayflower’s, the hexagonal bandstand on the grounds of the town hall, the knot of young men who lounged in front of the bowling alley, smoking cigarettes, and in whose desultory habits and loose morals my father claimed to glimpse the grim approach of the coming age.

A hill rose steadily from the center of town, curving to the right as it ascended toward the coastal bluff. The old lighthouse stood at the far end of it, its grounds decorated with two huge whitewashed anchors.

“We once had three lighthouses here in Chatham,” my father said. “One was moved to Eastham. The second was lost in the storm of ’twenty-three.”

Miss Channing gazed at our remaining lighthouse as we drifted by it. “It’s more striking to have only one,” she said. She turned toward the backseat, her eyes falling upon me. “Don’t you think so, Henry?”

I had no answer for her, surprised as I was that she’d bothered to ask, but my father appeared quite taken by her observation.

“Yes, I think that’s true,” he said. “A second makes the first less impressive.”

Miss Channing’s eyes lingered on me a moment, a quiet smile offered silently before she turned away.

Our house was situated at the end of Myrtle Street, and on the way to it we passed Chatham School. It was a large brick building with cement stairs and double front doors. The first floor was made up of classrooms, the second taken up by the dormitory, dining hall, and common room.

“That’s where you’ll be teaching,” my father told her, slowing down a bit as we drove by. “We’ve made a special room for you. In the courtyard.”

Miss Channing glanced over to the school, and from her reflection in the glass, I could see that her eyes were very still, like someone staring into a crystal ball, searching for her future there.

We pulled up in front of our house a few seconds later. My father opened the door for Miss Channing and escorted her up the front stairs to the porch, where my mother waited to be introduced.

“Welcome to Chatham,” my mother said, offering her hand.

She was only a few years younger than my father, but considerably less agile, and certainly less spirited, her face rather plain and round, but with small, nervous eyes. To the people of Chatham, she’d been known simply as the “music teacher” and more or less given up for a spinster. Then my father had arrived, thirty-one years old but still a bachelor, eager to establish a household in which he could entertain the teachers he’d already hired for his new school, as well as potential benefactors. My mother had met whatever his criteria had been for a wife, and after a courtship of only six weeks, he’d asked her to marry him. My mother had accepted without hesitation, my father’s proposal catching her so completely by surprise, as she loved to tell the women in her sewing circle, that at first she had taken it for a joke.

But on that afternoon nearly twenty years later, my mother no longer appeared capable of taking anything lightly. She’d grown wide in the hips by then, her figure large and matronly, her pace so slow and ponderous that I often grew impatient with it and bolted ahead of her to wherever we were going. Later in life she sometimes lost her breath at the top of the porch stairs, coming to a full stop in order to regain it, one hand grasping a wooden supporting post, the other fluttering at her chest, her head arched back as she sucked in a long, difficult breath. In old age her hair grew white and her eyes dimmed, and she often sat alone in the front room, or lay curled on her bed, no longer able to read and barely able to attend to the radio. Even so, something fiery remained in her to the very end, fueled by a rage engendered by the Chatham School Affair, one that smoldered forever after that.

She died many years after the affair had run its frightful course, and by then much had changed in all our lives: the large house on Myrtle Street no more than a memory, my father living on a modest pension, Chatham School long closed, its doors locked, its windows boarded, the playing fields gone to weed, all its former reputation by then reduced to a dark and woeful legacy.

My mother had prepared a chowder for us that afternoon, buttery and thick with clams and potatoes, the sort typical of Cape Cod. We ate at the dining table, Sarah Doyle, the teenage servant girl my father had brought from Boston only two years before, ladling the fragrant chowder into large china bowls.

Sitting at the table, Miss Channing asked few questions as my father went through his usual remarks about Chatham School, what its philosophy was, how it had come to be, a lecture my mother had heard countless times, but which clearly engaged Miss Channing’s interest.

“Why only boys?” she asked at one point.

“Because girls would change the atmosphere of the school,” my father answered.

“In what way?”

“The boys would feel their presence,” my father told her. “It would cause them to show off, to act foolishly.”

Miss Channing thought a moment. “But is that the fault of the girls or the boys, Mr. Griswald?”

“It’s the fault of the mixture, Miss Channing,” my father told her, obviously surprised by the boldness he detected in her question. “It makes the atmosphere more … volatile.”

My father fully expected to have brought the subject to a close with that. An expectation I snared so completely that when Miss Channing suddenly spoke again, offering what amounted to a challenge, I felt something like a call to arms.

“And without the girls, what’s the atmosphere?” she asked.

“Studious and serious,” my father answered. “Disciplined.”

“And that’s the atmosphere you want at Chatham School?”

“Yes,” my father replied firmly. “It is.”

Miss Channing said nothing more on the subject, but sitting across from her, I sensed that there was more she might have said, thoughts that were in her head, bristling there, or firing continually, like small explosions.

At the end of the meal my father led Miss Channing and my mother into the little parlor at the front of the house for a cup of tea. I lingered at the table, watching Sarah clear away the dishes after she’d served them. Though my father had closed the French doors that separated the parlor from the dining room, it was still possible for me to see Miss Channing as she sat listening quietly to my father.

“So, what do you think of the new teacher?” I asked Sarah as she leaned over my shoulder and plucked a bowl from the table.

Sarah didn’t answer, so I glanced up at her. She was not looking at me, but toward the parlor, where Miss Channing sat by the window, her hands held primly in her lap, the Joan Crawford hat sitting firmly on her head.

“Such a fine lady,” Sarah said in an almost reverential tone. “The kind folks read about in books.”

I looked back toward Miss Channing. She was taking a sip from her cup as my father went on, her blue eyes peering just over the rim, sharp and evaluating, as if her mind ceaselessly sifted the material that passed through it, allowing this, dismissing that, her sense of judgment oddly final, a court, as it would prove to be, from which there could be no appeal.

I was in my room an hour later, perusing the latest issue of Grady’s Illustrated Magazine for Boys, when my father summoned me downstairs.

“It’s time to take Miss Channing home,” he told me.

I followed him out the door, then down the front stairs to where Miss Channing was already waiting in the car.

“It’s only a short drive,” my father said to her as he pulled himself in behind the wheel. “Perhaps I can get you there ahead of the rain.”

But he could not, for as we drove toward the cottage, the overhanging clouds suddenly disgorged their burden, thunderously and without warning, as if abruptly being called to account.

Once outside the village center, my father turned right, onto the coastal road, past the great summer houses that rose along the shore, then on toward the marsh, with its shanties and fishermen’s houses, their unkempt yards scattered with stacks of lobster traps and tangled piles of gray netting.

Given the torrent, the drive was slow, the old Ford sputtering along, battered from all directions by sudden whipping gusts, the windshield wipers squeaking rhythmically as they swept ineffectually across the glass.

My father kept his eyes on the road, of course, but I noticed that Miss Channing’s attention had turned toward the landscape of Cape Cod, its short, rounded hills sparsely clothed in tangles of brush and scrub oak, wind ripping through the sea grass that sprouted from the dunes.

“The Cape’s pretty, don’t you think, Miss Channing?” my father said cheerfully.

Her reply must have startled him.

“It looks tormented,” she said, staring out the window on the passenger side, her voice suddenly quite somber, as if it came from some darker part of her mind.

My father glanced toward her. “Tormented? What do you mean?”

“It reminds me of the islands of the Florida Keys,” she answered, her eyes still concentrated on the landscape. “The name the Spanish gave them.”

“What name was that?”

“Los Martires,” Miss Channing answered. “Because they looked so tormented by the wind and the sea.”

“Forgive my ignorance,” my father said. “But what does ‘Los Martires’ mean?”

Miss Channing continued to gaze out the window. “It means ‘the martyrs,’” she said, her eyes narrowing somewhat, as if she were no longer looking at the dunes and the sea grass beyond her window, but at the racked and bleeding body of some ancient tortured saint.

My father drew his attention back to the road. “Well, I’ve never thought of the Cape as looking like that,” he said. Then, to my surprise, I saw his eyes lift toward the rearview mirror, fix on mine. “Have you ever thought of the Cape like that, Henry?”

I glanced out the window at my right, toward a landscape that no longer seemed featureless and inert, but beaten and bedeviled, lashed by gusts of wind and surging waters. “Not until just now,” I said.

At about a mile beyond town we swung onto a stretch of road bordered on all sides by dense forest and covered with what had once been a layer of oyster shells, but which past generations of hooves and feet and wagon wheels had since ground into little more than a fine powder.

The woods had encroached so far into the road that I could hear the surrounding vegetation slap and scrape against the side of the car as we bumped along the road.

“It gets pretty deserted out this way,” my father said. He added nothing else as we continued in silence until the road forked, my father taking the one to the right, moving down it for perhaps a quarter mile, until it widened suddenly, then came to an abrupt dead end before a small white cottage.

“There it is,” my father said. “Milford Cottage.”

It was tiny compared to our house on Myrtle Street, so dwarfed by the surrounding forest that it appeared to crouch fearfully within a fist of green, a dark stretch of water sweeping out behind it, still and lightless, its opaque depths unplumbed, like a great hole in the heart of things.

“That’s Black Pond,” my father said.

Miss Channing leaned forward slightly, peering at the cottage very intently through the downpour, like a painter considering a composition, calculating the light, deciding where to put the easel. It was an expression I would see many times during the coming year, intense and curious, a face that seemed to draw everything into it by its own strange gravity.

“It’s a simple place,” my father told her. “But quite nice. I hope you’ll at least find it cozy.”

“I’m sure I will,” she said. “Who lived here?”

“It was never actually lived in,” my father answered. “It was built as a honeymoon cottage by Mr. Milford for his bride.”

“But they never lived there?”

My father appeared reluctant to answer her but obligated to do so. “They were both killed on the way to it,” he said. “An automobile accident as they were coming back from Boston.”

Miss Channing’s face suddenly grew strangely animated, as if she were imagining an alternative story in her mind, the arrival of a young couple who never arrived, the joys of a night they never spent together, a morning after that was never theirs.

“It’s not luxurious, of course,” my father added quickly, determined, as he always was, to avoid disagreeable things, “but it’s certainly adequate.” His eyes rested upon Miss Channing for a moment before he drew them away abruptly, and almost guiltily, so that for a brief instant he looked rather like a man who’d been caught reading a forbidden book. “Well, let’s go inside,” he said.

With that, my father opened the door and stepped out into the rain. “Quickly now, Henry.” He motioned for me to get Miss Channing’s valises and follow him into the cottage.

He was already at the front door, struggling with the key, his hair wet and stringy by the time I reached them. Miss Channing stood just behind him, waiting for him to open the door. As he worked the key, twisting it right and left, he appeared somewhat embarrassed that it wouldn’t turn, as if some element of his authority had been called into question. “Everything rusts in this sea air,” I heard him murmur. He jerked at the key again. It gave, and the cottage door swung open.

“There’s no electricity out this way,” my father explained as he stepped into the darkened cottage. “But the fireplace has been readied for winter, and there are quite a few kerosene lamps, so you’ll have plenty of light.” He walked to the window, parted the curtains, and looked out into the darkening air. “Just as I explained in my letter.” He released the curtain and turned back to her. “I take it that you’re accustomed to things being a little … primitive.”

“Yes, I am,” Miss Channing replied.

“Well, before we go, you should have a look around. I hope we didn’t forget anything.”

He walked over to one of the lamps and lit it. A yellow glow spread through the room, illuminating the newly scrubbed walls, the recently hung lace curtains, the plain wooden floor that had been so carefully swept, a stone fireplace cleared of ash.

“The kitchen’s been stocked already,” he told her. “So you’ve got plenty of lard, flour, sugar. All of the essentials.” He nodded toward the bedroom. “And the linens are in the wardrobe there.”

Miss Channing glanced toward the bedroom, her eyes settling upon the iron bedstead, the sheets stretched neatly over the narrow mattress, two quilts folded at the foot of the bed, a single pillow at its head.

“I know that things take getting used to, Miss Channing,” my father said, “but I’m sure that in time you’ll be happy here.”

I knew well what my father meant by the word “happy,” the contentment it signified for him, a life of predictable events and limited range, pinched and uninspired, a pale offering to those deeper and more insistent longings that I know must have called to him from time to time.

But as to what Miss Charming considered happiness, that I could not have said. I knew only that a strange energy surrounded her, a vibrancy and engagement that was almost physical, and that whatever happiness she might later find in life would have to answer to it.

“I hope you’ll like Chatham as well,” my father said after a moment. “It’s quite a lovely little town.”

“I’m sure I will,” Miss Channing told him, though even as she said it, she might well have been comparing it to Rome or Vienna, the great cities she’d visited, the boulevards and spacious squares she’d strolled along, a wider world she’d long known but that I had only dreamed of.

“Well, we should be going now,” my father said. He nodded toward the two leather valises in my hands. “Put those down, Henry.”

I did as I was told, and joined my father at the door.

“Well, good night, then, Miss Channing,” he said as he opened it.

“Good night, Mr. Griswald,” she said. “And thank you for everything.”

Seconds later we were in the car again, backing onto Plymouth Road. Through the cords of rain that ran down the windshield as we pulled away, I could see Miss Channing standing at the threshold of the cottage, her face so quiet and luminous as she waved good-bye that I have often chosen to recall her as she was that first night rather than as she appeared at our last meeting, her hair clipped and matted, her skin lusterless, the air around her thick with a dank and deathly smell.

CHAPTER 3

My father’s portrait hangs on the large woodpaneled wall opposite my desk and over the now-unused marble hearth, shelves of law books arrayed on either side. He is dressed in a black three-piece suit, the vest neatly buttoned, a formal style of dress common to portraiture at that time. But there is something unusual about the composition nonetheless. For although my father is dressed appropriately enough, he is not posed behind his desk or standing before a wall of books, but at a large window with dark red curtains held in place by gold sashes. Outside the window, it is clearly summer, but nothing in the landscape beyond the glass in the least resembles either Chatham or Cape Cod.

Instead, my father gazes out into a strange, limitless plain, covered in elephant grass and dotted with fire trees, a vast expanse that sweeps out in all directions until it finally dissolves into the watery reaches of a distant blue lake, his attention focused on something in the exotic distance, perhaps the farther shore of that same lake, an effect that gives his face a look of melancholy longing.

It is the tragic fate of goodness to lack the vast attraction of romance. Because of that, I have never been able to see my father as a man capable of the slightest allure. And yet, for all that, he was a man in love, I think. Though with a school, rather than a woman. Chatham School was his great passion, and the years during which he served as its founder and headmaster, a guiding spirit to its boys, a counselor to its teachers, he’d felt more deeply than he ever would again that his life was truly whole.

I have looked at this portrait countless times, studying it as a way of studying my father, concentrating upon what lies mysteriously within it. Inevitably, I turn From it in a mood of vague frustration and uneasiness, my eyes drawn to the artist’s signature, her name written out in tiny broken letters: Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing.

The portrait was painted during the last days of that school year, my father standing at the window of his office, peering out, while Miss Channing remained stationed at her easel a few yards away, her body draped in a gray, paint-dabbled smock, her hair falling to her shoulders in a great unruly mass. By that April, she no longer looked as she had upon her arrival the previous August. The blush of youth was gone, a haggardness in its place, and glimpsing her alone in her classroom during those last days, or as she made her solitary way down the coastal road, I could see nothing left of the young woman who’d stood in the doorway of Milford Cottage only a few months before, waving good-bye as my father backed our car onto Plymouth Road.

I never knew precisely what Miss Channing did after my father and I drove away that evening, leaving her alone in the cottage. I have always imagined her opening the two valises and unpacking her things, putting her new hat on the narrow shelf at the top of the wardrobe, hanging her dresses on the wooden bar that ran nearly its entire length, tucking her undergarments in the drawers that rested at its base.

From the look of the cottage when I saw it again the next day, I know that she had found a nail already in place and hung a portrait of her father, one taken years before in the courtyard of the Uffizi, the Florentine sun pouring over him, dressed stylishly in white trousers, a navy blue jacket, and a straw bowler, his fingers around the silver head of a polished wooden cane.

I also know that the randomly placed kerosene lamps must have cast heavy shadows throughout her new home, because I could tell from the positions I later saw them in that at some point during her first night in the cottage she arranged them in different places throughout the rooms, moving them here and there until, at last, a steady, even glow pervaded its shadowy interior, its darkened corners now brushed with light.

But more than anything, and with a certainty I cannot claim for other things, I know that toward midnight, when the rain finally stopped, she strolled out to the very edge of the pond, glanced over the water, and noticed a faint movement on its otherwise unmoving surface. It was then that a bank of clouds parted, a shaft of moonlight falling upon the water so that she could see the white prow of a rowboat as it skirted briefly along the far rim of light, then disappeared into the covering darkness. There was a figure in the boat, almost completely draped in a black poncho, as she later described it, so that she could make out only one small square of flesh, a hand, large and masculine, gripping a single moving oar.

I know all this absolutely, because she said as much on a sweltering summer day nearly a year later, the crowd shifting frantically to get a better view of her, craning their necks and lifting their heads, muttering grimly as they did so, talking of death and suicide and murder, their eyes following with a macabre fascination as she moved across the room and took her seat upon the witness stand.

In later life, after I’d returned to Chatham and begun my legal practice, I had only to glance out my office window to see the name of the man who’d cross-examined Miss Channing on that August afternoon in 1927. For in those days, Mr. Parsons’ office had been located just across the street from where I now have mine, and which his son, Albert Parsons, Jr., still occupies, a lawyer who specializes in personal injury litigation and contract disputes, rather than the prosecution of criminal cases for which his father was renowned throughout the state.

The younger Parsons’ shingle swings above the same little rectangle of grass where his father’s once swung, and which I must have seen quite clearly on the very day my father picked up Miss Channing at the bus stop, our old Ford sweeping past it as we drove to our house on Myrtle Street, my father at the wheel, Miss Channing in the passenger seat, I crowded in the backseat with her luggage, so young and inexperienced, so lost to the iron laws of life that even had they been presented to me, I would have denied their right to hold me down. Certainly, I could not have known how often I would glance at Mr. Parsons’ shingle in the coming years, hear his voice thunder out of the past: It was you, Miss Channing, you and you alone who brought about this death.

In those days Albert Parsons held the office of commonwealth attorney. A short, stocky man with wire-rimmed glasses, I often saw him making his way along the wooden sidewalk to his office, puffing his briar pipe and doffing his gray homburg to passersby. He’d appeared perfectly self-assured back then, confident in his own abilities, a man who expected to live out his life in a world whose rides were clear to him, a paradise, as he must have considered Chatham, poised on the rim of heaven.

I remember seeing Mr. Parsons in old age, when he would sit on the wooden bench in front of the town hall, tossing broken pieces of soda cracker to the pigeons gathered at his feet, his eyes watching them with a curious lack of focus. But before that, in the first years of his retirement, he’d built a workroom in his backyard, furnished it with metal bookshelves, a wooden desk, a brass reading lamp, and an old black typewriter. It was there that he’d written his account of the Chatham School Affair, utterly convinced that he had unearthed the darkest of its secrets.

Down through the years I’ve often thought of him, the pride he took in having discovered the cause of so much death, then the way he later strode the streets of Chatham, boldly, proudly, as if he were now the exclusive guardian of its health, Miss Channing no more than a dark malignancy he’d successfully cut out.

It was a Saturday, clear and sunny, the last one before school was scheduled to begin, when I next saw Miss Channing.

My rather had already left for Osterville, as my mother told me that morning, but he’d left instructions for me to look in on Milford Cottage, see if Miss Channing needed anything, then run whatever errands she required.

Milford Cottage was almost two miles from the center of Chatham, so it took me quite some time to walk there. I arrived at around ten, knocked lightly at the door, and waited for Miss Channing to open it. When there was no answer, I knocked again, this time more loudly. There was still no answer, so I rapped against the door a third time.

That’s when I saw her. Not as I’d expected, a figure inside the cottage, or poised beside its open door, but strolling toward me from the edge of the woods, no longer dressed formally as she’d been before, but in a pale blue summer dress, billowy and loose-fitting, her black hair falling in a wild tangle to her shoulders.

She didn’t see me at first, and so continued to walk in the woods, edging around trees and shrubs, her eyes trained on the ground, as if following the trail of something or someone who’d approached the cottage from the surrounding forest, lingered a moment, then retreated back into its concealing depths. At the very edge of the forest she stopped, plucked a leaf from a shrub, lifted it to the sun, and turned it slowly in a narrow shaft of light, staring at it with a kind of childlike awe.

When she finally glanced away from the leaf and saw me, I could tell she was surprised to find me at her door.

“Good morning, Miss Channing,” I called.

She smiled and began to walk toward me, the hem of her skirt trailing lightly over the still-moist ground.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said.

She appeared amused by such a notion. “Scare me? You didn’t scare me, Henry. Why would you think that?”

I shrugged, finding her gaze so penetrating that I began to sputter. “Anyway, my father sent me to make sure that everything is all right. Particularly with the cottage. He wanted to know if anything else needed fixing. The roof, I mean. How it held up. Against the rain, that is. Leaks.”

“No, everything’s fine,” Miss Channing said, watching me intently, as if memorizing my features, carefully noting their smallest dips and curves, the set of my jaw, the shape of my eyes.

It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of being exposed, my skin peeled away layer by layer, revealing what lay beneath, the bony tower, the circuitry of arteries and veins, the resentment I so carefully suppressed. I felt my hand toy with the button at my throat.

“Well, is there anything else you need?” I asked, still mindful of my father’s instructions, but eager now to get away. “I mean, between now and Monday, when school starts?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“All right, then,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you at school on Monday.”

With that, I nodded good-bye and started back toward the road, ambling slowly, not wanting to give an impression of flight.

I was halfway down the path that led from her door to the road when I heard her call to me.

“Are you walking back to the village, Henry?”

I stopped and turned toward her. “Yes,” I said.

“Would you mind if I came along with you? I haven’t really seen it yet.”

I didn’t relish the idea of being seen with a teacher outside a classroom setting. “It’s a long way into town, Miss Channing,” I said, hoping to dissuade her.

She was undeterred. “I’m used to long walks.”

Clearly, there was no way out. “All right,” I said with an unenthusiastic shrug.

She came forward, quickening her pace slightly until she reached my side.

Sometime later, after I’d read her father’s book and realized all the exotic places he’d taken her during the years they’d traveled together, it would strike me as very strange mat she’d wanted to go into the village at all that morning. Certainly, given the breadth of her experience, Chatham could only have seemed quaint. And yet her curiosity seemed real, her need to explore our small streets and shops not in the least diminished by the fact that she’d strolled the narrow alleyways of Naples and the plazas of Madrid, her father at her side relating gruesome stories of Torquemada’s Inquisition and the visions of Juana the Mad in that same tone of ominousness and impending death that later fathers would use as they led their children along the banks of Black Pond, grimly spinning out a tale whose dreadful course they thought had ended there.

CHAPTER 4

I have always wondered if, during that first walk down Plymouth Road with Miss Channing, I should have noticed some hint of that interior darkness Mr. Parsons later claimed to have unearthed in her. Often, I’ve tried to see what he saw in his first interrogation of her, the “eeriness” he described in his memoir, the sense that she had “delved in black arts.”

She carefully kept pace with me that morning, a breeze playing lightly in her hair, her conversation generally related to the plant life we saw around us. She asked the names of the trees and flowers that bordered the road, often very common ones like beach plum or Queen Anne’s lace.

“I guess you had different plants in Africa,” I said.

“Yes, very different,” she said. “Of course, it wasn’t at all the sort of place people think of when they think of Africa. It wasn’t a jungle, or anything like that. It was a plain, mostly grasslands. With a river running through it, and animals everywhere.” She smiled. “It was like living in the middle of an enormous zoo.”

“Did you like living there?”

“I suppose,” she answered. “But I really didn’t live there long. Only a few months after my father died. With my uncle and his family.” She stopped and peered out into the surrounding forest. “It must have looked like this when the first explorers came.”

I could hardly have cared less about anything so distant. “Why did you leave Africa?” I asked.

She drew her attention back to me. “I needed a job. My uncle went to school with your father. He wrote to him, hoping he might know of a position. Your father offered me one at Chatham School.”

“What do you teach?”

“Art.”

“We’ve never had an art teacher,” I told her. “You’ll be the first one.”

She started to speak, then glanced toward the ground at the white dust that had begun to settle on her feet and shoes.

“It comes from the oyster shells,” I told her, merely as a point of information. “That white dust, I mean.”

She turned toward me sharply. “Oyster shells?”

“Yes. That’s what they used to put on the roads around here.”

She nodded silently, then walked on, suddenly preoccupied, my first hint of the strange life she’d lived before coming to Chatham, how deeply it had formed her. “That’s what they killed Hypatia with,” she said.

She saw the question in my eyes, and immediately answered it. “She was the last of the pagan astronomers. A Christian mob murdered her.” Her eyes drifted toward the road. “They scraped her to death with oyster shells.”

I could tell by the look on her face that she was seeing the slaughter of Hypatia at the instant she described it, the mocking crowd in its frenzy, Hypatia sinking to the ground, bits of her flesh scooped from her body and tossed into the air.

“There was nothing left of her when it was over,” she said. “No face. No body. Torn to bits.”

It was then I should have glimpsed it, I suppose, the fact that she had lived in many worlds, that they now lived in her, strange and kaleidoscopic, her mind a play of scenes. Some quite beautiful—Mont Saint Michel like a great ship run aground in dense fog. Others hung in death and betrayal—the harbor in which the last weary remnants of the Children’s Crusade had trudged onto waiting ships, then disappeared into the desert wastes of Arab slavery.

But at the time I could only react to what Miss Channing had just told me. And so I grimaced, pretending a delicacy I didn’t actually feel, knowing all the while that some part of her story had intrigued me.

“How do you know about Hypatia?” I asked.

“My father told me about her,” Miss Channing answered.

She said nothing more about her father, but merely began to move forward again, so that we walked on in silence for a time, the sound of our feet padding softly over the powdered shells as the wind rustled through the forest that bore in upon us from both sides.

When we reached the outskirts of Chatham, Miss Channing stopped for a moment and peered down the gently curving road that led from the center of the village to the lighthouse on the bluff. “It looks very … American,” she said.

I’d never heard anyone say anything quite so odd, and I suppose that it was at that moment I knew that something truly different had entered my life.

Of course, I kept that early intimation to myself, and so merely watched silently as she stood at the threshold of our village. From there she would have been able to see all the way down Main Street, from the Congregationalist Church, where the bus had let her off the day of her arrival, to the courthouse, where she would later come to trial, hear the shouts of the crowd outside: Murderess. Murderess. If she’d looked closely enough, concentrating on the small details, she might even have seen the wooden bench where, years later, Mr. Parsons would sit alone in the afternoon, thinking of his memoir, convinced that he had plumbed the black depths of her heart.

I left Miss Channing on the outskirts of town, then walked up the hill that ran along the edge of the coastal bluff. At the top, I turned onto Myrtle Street, passing Chatham School as I made my way home.

By then some of the boys had begun to arrive. I could see them lugging their trunks and traveling cases down the long concrete walkway that led to the front of the building. From there I knew they would drag them up the stairs to the dormitory, then empty their contents into the old footlockers that rested at the end of each bed.

Many of the boys have blurred with time, but I can remember Ben Calder, who would later run a large manufacturing enterprise, and Ted Spencer, destined for the New York Stock Exchange, and Larry Bishop, who would go on to West Point and die leading his men toward the shores of Okinawa.

In general, they were from good families, and most of them were good boys who’d merely exhibited a bit of rude behavior their parents sought to correct by placing them at Chatham School. They were reasonably bright, at least adequately studious, and for the most part they later followed the route that had been prepared for them all along, taking up acceptable professions or running either their own businesses or those first established by their fathers or grandfathers. They did not seek a grandly romantic life, nor anticipate one. They had no particular talents, except, perhaps, for that peculiar one that enables us to persevere—often for a lifetime—in things that do not particularly interest us and for which we feel little genuine passion. In later life, after leaving Chatham School, they would do what had always been expected of them, marry, support themselves, have children of their own. I thought them dull and uninspired, while my father saw them as inestimably dutiful and fine.

I was sitting in the swing on our front porch when my father returned from Osterville at around five that afternoon. Coming up the stairs, he spotted me slouched languidly before him, my legs flung over the wooden arm of the swing, a posture he clearly didn’t care for.

“So there wasn’t much to do at Milford Cottage, I take it?” he asked doubtfully.

“No, there wasn’t,” I told him.

“The roof didn’t leak?”

“No.”

“You asked Miss Channing that directly?”

“Yes, sir. I told her you were concerned about it. She said it was fine.”

He nodded, still looking at me in that questioning way of his. “Well, did you do anything at all for Miss Channing?”

“I walked her into town. That’s all she wanted me to do.”

He thought a moment, then said, “Well, get in the car, Henry. I want to make sure she’s got everything she needs.”

Had I not gone with my father to Milford Cottage that afternoon, I might never have seen what Miss Channing later captured in her portrait of him, the look on his face as he peered through the red curtains, his eyes fixed on the exotic blue lake that so clearly beckoned to him with an unmistakable sensuousness, but toward which he would not go.

The cottage looked deserted when my father brought the car to a halt in front of it. The front door was securely closed, no lamp yet lighted, despite the fact that it was late afternoon by then, the sun already setting.

“Maybe she’s still in the village,” I said as my father and I lingered in the car.

“Could be,” my father said. He stared at the cottage a moment longer, perhaps trying to decide whether to knock at the door or simply return to Chatham, content that he had at least done his duty in dropping by.

Then the door of the cottage opened, and Miss Channing walked out onto the cool grass of the front lawn. She was barefoot, and as she came toward us, I noticed that my father’s eyes dropped toward her feet, his lips parting. Then, just as suddenly, he returned to himself, opened the door of the car, and stepped out.

“I have only a moment,” he said a little stiffly and hurriedly, like a man who had more important things to do.

Miss Channing continued to move toward him, her feet padding softly across the grass.

“But I wanted to make sure that everything was in order,” my father added in the same vaguely harried tone. I remained inside the car, but despite its dusty windshield, I could see that she had washed her hair so that it now hung wet and glistening in the darkening air, giving her that appearance of female dishabille that has forever after seemed so beautiful to me.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” my father continued.

She came to a halt perhaps no more than three feet from where he stood. “Thank you for sending Henry to me this morning,” she said. “There was really nothing more for him to do.”

“Yes, he told me that.” My father paused for a moment, lifting his eyes upward slightly as he reached into the pocket of his jacket. “I wanted to bring you this,” he said, drawing out a large envelope. “It’s the schedule for the school. It tells you when your classes are held, when you take lunch, that sort of thing. You should bring it with you Monday morning. I would have mailed it to you, of course,” my father added quickly as she took the envelope from him, “as I generally do with the other teachers. But then, you were in Africa, and so … well …”

A silence fell over him and I expected him to break it with a quick good-bye, then get back into the car. Instead, he uttered a question that seemed very odd to me. “Do you ever plan to have a family of your own, Miss Channing?”

I could tell that she’d never been asked such a question, so ordinary and domestic, nor once considered the way of life it suggested. “I don’t know,” she answered quietly.

“It has its compensations,” my father said, though more to himself, it seemed, than to her. “Family life.”

She stared at him, puzzled, as I was, by his remark.

He looked suddenly embarrassed by what he’d said, like a man who’d inadvertently revealed some small, sad aspect of himself. Then he spoke hurriedly again, resuming his schoolmaster pose. “Well, Henry and I had best be getting home. Good night, Miss Channing.”

“Good night,” she answered, the same quizzical look in her eyes as she watched my father stride back to his car, get in, and pull away.

We arrived back home a few minutes later. My mother had prepared one of her pot roasts and throughout the meal my father appeared no different than usual, eating with the same careful attention to manners, dabbing the white cloth napkin at the corners of his mouth after almost every bite.

But when it was over, rather than retiring to the parlor as was his custom, he walked down Myrtle Street to the school, saying only that he had “a few last minute details” he wanted to look over before classes started the following Monday morning.

My mother didn’t question him. Nor did I. But toward sunset, while I was sitting on the front steps of our house, I glanced up and saw my father standing in the school’s bell tower, alone, facing out over the village. It was only minutes before nightfall, and a great stillness had settled over everything. I knew that from his place in the bell tower my father could stare out over all the roofs of Chatham and watch the low, unhurried beam of the lighthouse as it swept smoothly across the darkening sea, then over the village and finally beyond it, to the ebony waters of Black Pond.

I have always believed that at that moment he was thinking of Miss Channing, of her oval eyes and wet, glistening hair, seeing her again as he had earlier that afternoon, her bare feet nestled in a cool bed of dark green grass, his eyes closing for a moment as he reveled in that vision, then opening again, focused now upon the village, the school he’d labored all his life to build, the house on Myrtle Street, its small lights, his mind accepting without bitterness or rancor the path that he had taken, along with all the obligations it required, yet recognizing, too, as I believe he must have, that there was a certain shuddering ecstasy he would never know.

CHAPTER 5

I’ve kept only a single photograph to remind me of what I was, what I aid, all that followed after that. It is a grainy photograph, artlessly taken from the roof of one of the buildings across from the courthouse, its vista crosshatched with wooden poles and power lines, but clear enough to show the swarm of men and women who’d gathered around the building that day, their numbers pouring down its wide cement steps. And yet, it wasn’t the crowd of people that had caught my attention when I’d first seen it, but a single, crudely written sign thrust up from among them, its message scrawled in huge black letters: Hang her.

It is a phrase that has returned to me often over the years, and which can still prompt my deepest speculations. Especially given the fact that on her arrival at Chatham School, no one would have been able to suggest that Miss Channing might ever stir up such violent emotions, or even that her time among us would be any different from that of the many other teachers who’d come and gone over the years.

On that first day, as I stood with the other boys, all of us gathered in front of the school to hear my father’s customary opening remarks, I saw her turn onto Myrtle Street, her arms at her sides, no books or papers in them, no overstuffed briefcase dangling from her bare hand.

In all other ways, however, she’d done her best to blend in, wearing a plain white dress with a pleated skirt, and a pair of square-heeled black shoes with large silver buttons. She’d changed her hair as well, so that it was now wound in a tight bun at the back of her neck and secured with an ornate silver clasp. I could almost imagine her standing before the mirror in her bedroom a moment before leaving the cottage, looking herself over, her mind pronouncing an identity that—given the exalted vision of life her father had presented to her—she may well have found rather uninspired: School marm—

“Good morning, Miss Channing,” I said as she passed by.

She glanced toward me, smiled, then continued on across the lawn, over to where the other teachers were assembled. I saw a few of them turn and greet her, Mr. Corbett, the math teacher, even going so far as to remove his old felt hat. Later, some of them would tell their fellow villagers that she’d never really fit in, that from the very beginning she’d set herself apart, telling the boys grim and savage tales from her travels with her father, creating dark and bloody landscapes in their young minds. Some went even further, claiming powers of clairvoyance, as if they’d known all along that Miss Channing was destined to be the prime mover in what Professor Peyton would later call with typical hyperbole “a grim Shakespearean orgy of violence and death.” “I saw trouble the minute I laid eyes on her,” I heard my history teacher Mrs. Cooper say one afternoon in Warren’s Sundries, though I’m sure she’d seen nothing of the kind.

Of course, the one thing that did unquestionably separate Miss Channing from me other teachers at Chatham School was her youth and beauty, and from the way my fellow students watched her as she approached that morning, it was clear that their interest in her went far deeper than the usual curiosity inspired by a new teacher.

“Who’s that?” I heard Jamie Phelps ask Winston Bates, poking him with his elbow.

I took the opportunity to demonstrate the insider’s knowledge I possessed as the headmaster’s son. “That’s the new teacher,” I told them authoritatively. “She came all the way from Africa.”

“That’s where she got that bracelet, I guess,” Jamie said, pointing to the string of brightly colored wooden beads that circled Miss Channing’s wrist, the very one Mr. Parsons would later find at the edge of Black Pond, broken by then, the beads scattered across the muddy ground.

As usual on the first day of classes, my father stood at the entrance of the school, the teachers and administrative staff to his left, the boys to his right, all of them dressed in what amounted to the uniform of Chatham School, white shirts, black trousers, gray ties, and black suspenders. Dark gray jackets would be added later in the fall.

“All right, let me have your attention, please,” my father began. “I want to welcome all of you back to Chatham School. Most of us are very familiar with the routine, as well as each other, but we have a new teacher this year, and I want to introduce her to you.”

He motioned for Miss Channing to join him on the stairs, which she did, moving gracefully beside him, glancing first at her fellow teachers, then at the boys.

“This is Miss Channing,” my father said. “She has come all the way from Africa to join us here at Chatham School, and she’ll be teaching art.”

There was polite applause, then Miss Channing stepped back into the cluster of teachers and listened quietly while my father continued his introductory remarks, going over the necessary administrative details, reminding the boys of various school rules, that there was to be no cheating, no plagiarism, no profanity, no smoking, nor any drinking of alcoholic beverages, as he put it, “anywhere, anytime, for any reason, ever.”

I have often wondered what came into Miss Channing’s mind as she listened to my father recite the rules by which we were all to conduct ourselves at Chatham School, rules that stressed humility, simple honesty, and mutual faith, and which stood four-square against every form of recklessness and betrayal and self-indulgence. How different they must have seemed to the visionary teachings her father had laid down, how deeply rooted in the very kind of humble, uninspired, and profoundly predictable village life he had taught her to revile.

Once my father had finished, the boys already shifting restlessly and muttering impatiently to each other, he clapped his hands together once, then uttered a final remark whose tragic irony he could not have guessed. “Welcome to another splendid year in the history of Chatham School,” he said.

I entered Miss Channing’s class about an hour later.

It was a small room, formerly used to store school furniture and various supplies, but now converted to other purposes. It was not physically connected to the school, but stood apart from it in a little courtyard to the rear. Still, it seemed adequate enough, with three long tables lined up one behind the other in front of the much smaller one that served as Miss Channing’s desk. On the far wall, half a dozen gray aprons hung from wooden pegs beside a metal cabinet upon which someone had painted the words art supplies in large white letters. In the far corner a few wooden sculpting pedestals had been stacked base to base, the legs of the upper pedestals stretching almost to the room’s tin ceiling.

As for art, there were portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, along with a framed photograph of the current president, Calvin Coolidge.

There were only five of us in the class, but we scattered ourselves widely throughout the room. Ralph Sherman and Miles Clayton took possession of the rear table, Biff Conners and Jack Slaughter the middle one, leaving the front table to me.

Miss Channing didn’t smile at us or say a word of welcome as we entered the room. She’d already placed one of the sculpting pedestals in front of her, and as we filed in, she began to knead the clay gently, hardly glancing up from it as we took our seats. Then, once we’d taken our places, she drew her hands from the clay and looked at us, her eyes moving from one boy to another. She did not acknowledge me in any way.

“I’ve never taught art,” she said. “Or been taught it by anyone else.”

Her fingers moved over the clay’s wet surface, shaping it with slow, graceful strokes as she searched for her next remark.

“When my father died, I went to live with my uncle and his family in Africa,” she said finally. “He had a mission near a village where the natives lived in wooden huts. It was just a clearing in the plain. The people who lived in the village did all their cooking in their huts, and there was no way for the smoke to get out except through a small hole in the roof. When they came out of their huts in the morning, a sheet of smoke trailed behind them.” Her eyes lifted toward us, and I saw them take on a certain wonder and delight. It was as if in telling stories, she could find a voice to teach in, a way of reaching us. “Like wings that dissolved in the light,” she said.

“That’s where I learned to paint.” She was kneading the clay more quickly now, in short, quick thrusts. “In Africa.” She stopped suddenly and settled her eyes upon us. I could tell that a thought had just occurred to her, that in the very course of talking to us she’d discovered something. “That’s where I learned that to be a painter or a sculptor, you have to change your senses,” she said. “Switch them around, so that you see with your fingertips and feel with your eyes.”

I didn’t see Miss Channing again until much later that same day. The last class had been dismissed for nearly an hour, and I was busily doing my assigned tasks around the school.

Under my father’s leadership, it was the policy of Chatham School to combine academics with physical labor, and so from the time of his arrival, each boy was assigned various chores. Some of the boys swept the classrooms and the dormitory, some washed the sheets and blankets, some worked on the grounds, pruning shrubbery or mowing grass or maintaining the playing fields. In the winter everyone shoveled snow or took turns unloading coal.

On that particular afternoon it was my job to return any books that lay on the library tables to their proper shelves, carefully keeping them in order according to the Dewey decimal system Mrs. Cartwright, the school librarian, had established. After that I was to dust the bookshelves with the old feather duster my mother had donated to the school after buying a new one at Mayflower’s a month before.

It was nearly four by the time I’d finished. Mrs. Cartwright surveyed the now-empty tables and ran a finger over the top of one of the bookshelves. “Very good, Henry,” she said when she found it clear of dust. With that statement of satisfaction I was released for the remainder of the afternoon.

I remember the feeling of relief that swept over me each time I ran down the stairs, bolted through the broad double doors of Chatham School, and raced out into the open air. I don’t know why I felt the weight of Chatham School so heavily, or so yearned to be rid of it, for it was by no means a prison, my father by no means a tyrant. And yet, in my raw youth, the days seemed to drag along behind me like a ball and chain. Every stricture burned like a lash, and sometimes, at night, I would feel as if my whole life lay smothered beneath a thick blanket of petty obligations and worn-out rules.

Miss Channing’s class had offered a certain relief from that musty atmosphere, so that even on that first afternoon I found that I looked forward to the next one in a way that I’d never looked forward to Mr. Crawford’s Latin lectures or the interminable recitations of Mrs. Dillard’s history class. There’d been a freshness to her approach, a sense of something less hindered by the ancient forms of instruction, something young, as I was young, already free in a way I one day hoped to be.

As I came out of the school, already vaguely considering a quick stroll into the village, perhaps even a secret cigarette behind the bowling alley, I saw Miss Channing sitting on one of the wooden benches that rested near the edge of the coastal bluff. Normally it would not have occurred to me to approach a teacher outside of class, but she already seemed less a teacher to me than a comrade of some sort, both of us momentarily stranded at Chatham School, but equally destined to go beyond it someday.

She didn’t appear surprised when I drifted past her, took hold of the rail that stretched along the edge of the bluff, and stared out to sea, my back to her, pretending that I hadn’t noticed her sitting directly behind me.

“Hello, Henry,” she said.

I turned toward her. “Oh, Miss Channing,” I said. “I didn’t see—”

“It’s a marvelous view, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

I glanced back over the bluff. Below, the sea was empty, but a few people strolled along the beach or lounged beneath striped umbrellas. I tried to see the view through her eyes. From behind me, I heard her say, “It reminds me of the Lido.”

“The Lido?”

“A beach near Venice,” she said. “It was always filled with striped umbrellas. The changing rooms were painted with the same stripes. Yellow. Bright yellow.” She shook her head. “Actually, it doesn’t remind me of the Lido at all,” she said, her voice a shade lower, as if now talking to me in confidence. “It’s just that I was thinking of it when you came up.”

“Why?” I asked, no other question occurring to me.

“Because my father died on the Lido,” Miss Channing said. “That’s what I was really thinking of just now.”

In later life we forget what it was like, the sweetness and exhilaration of being spoken to for the first time as something other than a child. And yet that was what I felt at that moment, sweetness and exhilaration, a sense that some part of my boyhood had been peeled away and cast aside, the man beneath allowed to take his first uneasy breaths.

“I’m sorry,” I said, immediately using a phrase I’d heard so many times on similar occasions.

Her expression did not change. “There’s nothing to be sorry for, really. He lived a good life.”

I could see the love she’d had for him and wondered what it was like to have had a father you admired.

“What did he do?” I asked.

“He was a writer. A travel writer.”

“And you traveled with him?”

“From the time I was four years old. That was when my mother died. After that we traveled all the time.”

As if my father had suddenly assumed my shape, I asked a question that seemed more his than mine. “What about school?”

“My father was my school,” Miss Channing answered. “He taught me everything.” She rose and joined me at the rail, the two of us now looking out over the beach below. “He believed in going his own way.” She paused a moment, a line coming to her, one I later read in her father’s book, and which she now repeated to me.

“An artist should follow only his passions,” she said. “All else is a noose around his neck.”

Now, when I recall that line, the calm with which she said it, I feel its dreadful premonition, and in my mind see an old car hurling down a weedy, overgrown embankment, a figure turning at the water’s edge, eyes wide, aghast, uncomprehending. And after that, forever after that, the long, unfading echo of her scream.

CHAPTER 6

In the years following Miss Channing’s trial, my father assembled a small collection of materials concerning the Chatham School Affair, one he bequeathed to me at his death, and which I’ve been unable to discard. I’ve given other things away—my mother’s knitting needles, my father’s quill pen, stacks of books to the village library. But my father’s collection has remained intact, tucked into the bottom corner of the bookshelf in my office, all but hidden by the floor lamp that stands in front of it. It is a slender archive, especially given the events it summons up. Madness and suicide and murder, the forlorn world left in their wake. And yet there are times when my attention lingers on it with a curious nostalgia. For I know that it holds the defining moment of my youth.

It consists of nothing more than a folder containing a single copy of the Chatham School Annual for 1927, a few newspaper clippings and photographs. There is even one of Sarah Doyle, though it was unintended. In the picture she is rushing down the little walkway beside the school. Her back is to the camera, and snow is falling all around her, gathering on her long, dark cape, while the boys in the yard—the real focus of the picture—playfully heave packed snowballs at each other, my father on the front steps of the school, arms folded over his chest, looking on with mock disapproval.

To these few things my father added three books, two of them directly related to what happened on Black Pond, one considerably less so.

The first is Mr. Parsons’ memoir, the work he quickly put together and had privately published just after the trial. As a book, it leaves a great deal to be desired. In fact, it is little more than an assortment of quotations from the trial transcript awkwardly strung together by Mr. Parsons’ own rather tedious narrative.

The second volume is more detailed. Titled A Mortal Flaw, it was written by one Wilfred M. Peyton, a professor of moral philosophy at Oberlin College. Scarcely a hundred pages long, it is essentially an extended essay published in 1929 by a small religious press, and hampered not only by Professor Peyton’s harsh, sermonizing tone, but by the way he singled out Miss Channing as the true villain in what he insists on calling—over and over again, like words from a warlock’s chant—“The Black Pond Murders.” Such was his rage against Miss Channing that whenever he spoke of her, it was with an Old Testament prophet’s infuriated rebuke. “To her father, she was ‘Libby,’” he wrote in a typical passage, “for by such endearment did he call her in her youth. But to the ages she should be more rightly known as Elizabeth, a cold and formal name that must be included among those of other women like herself: Delilah, Salome, and Jezebel.”

Of the three volumes of my father’s archive, Professor Peyton’s was the only one he clearly hated. So much so that he scribbled angry notes throughout its text, sometimes disputing a small, inconsequential fact (noting, for example, that the school library had three thousand books, not the mere two thousand attributed by Peyton), sometimes quarreling with an interpretation, but always seeking to undermine the book’s authority to those who might later read it.

The reason my father so detested Professor Peyton’s book is obvious. For it was not only an attack upon Miss Channing, but upon Chatham School itself, as an “indulgent, coddling retreat for wealthy, dissolute boys.” Indeed, at the end of the book Professor Peyton flatly concluded that “the unspeakable outrage which occurred on the otherwise tranquil surface of Black Pond on 29 May 1927 was emblematic of the moral relativism and contempt for established authority that has emerged in educational theory during the last two decades, and of which Chatham School is only the most odious example.” It never surprised me, of course, that this was a passage my father had underlined in black ink, then appended his own heartrending cry of “NO! NO! NO!”

But for all its bluster and moral posturing, for all the pain it caused my father, A Mortal Flaw was, at last, a completely dismissible book, one which, after I read it, I never found the slightest need to pick up again.

I can’t say the same for the final volume in my father’s collection, however. For it was a book I have returned to many times, as if looking for some answer to what happened on Black Pond that day, perhaps even for what might have prevented it, some way to sedate our hearts, make them satisfied with less.

The third book is entitled A View from the Window, and on the back of the book’s cover there is a photograph of its author, Jonathan Channing, a tall, somber man in his late forties, staring at the camera from the courtyard of the Louvre.

“You can take it if you want,” Miss Channing said the day she lent it to me.

It was late on a Friday afternoon, the first week of class now ended. My father had sent me to Miss Channing’s classroom with a box of art books he’d picked up at a Boston bookstore the day before. Always somewhat impulsive, he’d been eager to get Miss Channing’s opinion of them before turning them over to Mrs. Cartwright in the library on Monday morning.

She’d been standing at the cabinet, putting away her supplies, when I came through the door.

“My father wanted you to take a look at these.” I lifted the box slightly. “Art books.”

She closed the door of the cabinet and walked to her desk. “Let’s see them,” she said.

I brought them to her, then watched while she looked through each book in turn, slowly turning the pages, pausing to gaze at the paintings she found reproduced there, sometimes mentioning the name of the gallery in which a painting now hung. “This is in Florence,” she’d say, or “I saw this at the Prado.” She turned the book toward me. “This one always frightened me. What do you think, Henry?”

I looked at the painting. It showed a little girl with stringy blond hair, crouched before an enormous tree, its jagged limbs stretching to both sides of the canvas, the gnarled limbs hung with surreal images of floating heads and body parts, the colors livid, greens the color of bile, reds the color of fresh blood. Staring at the tree, the child appeared frozen by the terror and immensity of what she faced.

“Have you ever felt like her?” Miss Channing asked me quietly, her gaze fixed on the illustration, rife with its malicious and chaotic gore.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Miss Channing.” Which was true then, though it is no longer so.

She turned the book back around, leafing through it once again, until she came upon a photograph of the courtyard at the Louvre. “There’s a picture of my father standing here,” she told me. “They used it for his book.”

“His book?”

“Yes,” Miss Channing said. “He was a travel writer. He wrote a great many articles, but only one book.”

Out of mere politeness I said, “I’d like to read it sometime.”

She took this as a genuine expression of interest, opened the drawer of her desk, and drew out a single volume. “This is it,” she said as she handed it to me. “The picture I mentioned is on the back.”

I turned the book over and looked at the photograph. It showed a tall, slender man, handsome in a roguish sort of way, dressed in dark trousers and a white dinner jacket, his hair slicked back in the fashion of the time, but with a wilder touch added in the form of a single black curl that fell just over the corner of his right eye.

“I was ten years old when that picture was taken,” Miss Channing said. “We’d just gotten back from a visit to Rouen. My father was interested in the cathedral there.”

“Was he religious?”

“Not at all,” she said with a smile I found intriguing.

I lifted the book toward her, but she made no move to reclaim it.

“You can take it if you want,” she said.

I had not really wanted to read her father’s book, but I took it with me anyway, reluctantly, unable to find an acceptable way to refuse it.

As it turned out, I read it that same afternoon, sitting alone on the coastal bluff, the other boys of Chatham School either engaged in a game of football on the playing field or gathered outside Quilty’s Ice Cream Parlor in the village.

In earlier years I’d tried to be one of them. I’d joined them in their games, even participated in the general mischief, playing pranks on teachers or making up nicknames for them. But in the end it hadn’t worked. For I was still the headmaster’s son, a position that made it impossible for them to accept me as just another boy at Chatham School, one with whom they could be as vulgar and irreverent as they pleased, calling my father “Old Grizzlewald,” as I knew they often did.

Though never exactly ostracized, I’d finally turned bookish and aloof, a boy who could often be found reading in the porch swing or at the edge of the playing field, a “scholarly lad” as my father sometimes called me, though in a tone that never struck me as entirely complimentary.

Recalling the boy I was in those days, so solitary and isolated, I’ve sometimes thought myself one of the victims of the Chatham School Affair, my life no less deeply wounded by the crime that rocked Black Pond. Then, as if to bring me back to what really happened there, my mind returns me to a little girl on a windy beach. She is running against the wind, an old kite whipping left and right behind her. Finally it lifts and she watches it joylessly, her eyes wreathed in that forsakenness that would never leave them after that. Remembering how she looked at that moment in her life, I instantly recognize who Black Pond’s victims truly were, and in that captured moment perceive the terror I escaped, the full depth of a loss that was never mine.

I learned a great deal about Miss Channing the afternoon I read her father’s book. I learned about her father too: the fact that he’d been born into a privileged Massachusetts family, educated at Harvard College, and worked as a journalist in Boston during the years following his graduation. At twenty-three he’d married the former Julia Mason Rockbridge, also from a distinguished New England family. The two had taken up residence on Marlborough Street, near Boston Common, and in 1904 had a daughter, Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing. After that Mr. Channing continued to work for the Boston Globe, while his wife performed the usual functions of an upper-class woman of that time. Then, in the fall of 1908, Julia Channing fell ill. She lingered for some weeks, but finally died in January 1909, leaving four-year-old Elizabeth entirely to her father’s care.

More than anything, A View from the Window is a day-to-day record of the years Miss Channing lived and traveled with her father, a period during which they’d never actually had a fixed abode of any and, nor any permanent attachments, save for each other. The purpose of such a rootless life, Mr. Channing’s purpose in insisting upon it, is revealed in the opening paragraphs of his narrative:After my wife’s death, to stay in Boston seemed doom to me. I walked about our house on Marlborough Street, gazing at the many luxuries she had acquired over the years, the velvet curtains, the Tiffany lamp, and a host of other appendages that, like Julia, were elegant in their way, but for which I could no longer feel any enduring affection. And so I decided to move on, to live in the world at large, to acquaint my daughter Libby with its most spacious and inaccessible climes.As to my reasoning in this matter, I have never hidden it, nor wished to hide it. I chose to educate my daughter as I saw fit. And with what purpose in mind? For none other than that she should live a life freed from the constrictive influence of any particular village or nation, nor ever be bound by the false constraints of custom, ideology, or blood.

And yet, despite its grandly stated purpose, A View from the Window remained essentially a travelogue, though one that detailed not only sights and sounds and historical backgrounds, but the life Miss Channing and her father had lived as together they’d roamed the world.

It had been a vagabond life, the book made clear, a life lived continually in transit, with nothing to give it direction save for Mr. Channing’s furious determination to teach his daughter his own unique philosophy of life, relentlessly driving it home by escorting young Libby, as he called her, to bizarre and tragic sites, locations he’d selected for the lessons he planned to teach.

Reading that philosophy on the bluff that afternoon, I felt myself utterly swept away by a view of life so different from my father’s, from the governing assumptions of Chatham and of Chatham School, from any way of seeing things I’d ever encountered before, that I felt as if I’d suddenly entered a new galaxy, where, according to Mr. Channing, there should be “no rules for the rule of life,” nor any hindrance whatsoever to a man’s unbridled passions.

It was a world directly opposite to the one I’d been taught to revere, everything reversed or turned topsy-turvy. Self-control became a form of slavery, vows and contracts mere contrivances to subdue the spirit, the moral law no more absolute than a passing fad. More than anything, it was a world in which even the darkest evils were given a strange and somber dignity:We took a boat from Sorrento, and disembarked a short time later at Marina Grande, on the eastern coast of Capri. The town was festive and welcoming, and Libby took great delight in its scents and in the winding labyrinth of its streets, skipping playfully ahead of me from time to time. She seemed captivated by the nearly tropical lushness of the place, particularly with the luxuriousness of its vegetation, forever plucking leaves and petals from the shrubs and flowers we encountered on the way.But I had brought her to Capri for more than an afternoon’s lark. Nor was it the quaint village byways and varied plant life I had brought her here to see. Mine was another purpose, as well as another destination, one I could but indistinctly glimpse from the town’s narrow pathways.And so we journeyed upward and upward for over an hour, baked in a nearly blinding summer heat, through the spectacular flowered hedges that lined both sides of the earthen walkway. The smell of flowers was everywhere, as were the sounds of small lizards, dozens of them, scurrying through the brush or darting like thin green ribbons across our path.The walk was arduous, but the great ruin of the Villa di Giovi made infamous by Suetonius, loomed enticingly above, beckoning me with the same sinister and mysterious call the sirens had issued to Odysseus from the Bay of Naples far below. For like the ancient world of those mythic seamen, the place I journeyed to that morning had been bloody and perverse.And yet there was something glorious here as well, something incontestably free in the wild pleasure gardens the emperor had designed, the human bodies he’d formed into living sculptures, even in the heedless and unrestrained delight he’d taken in their libidinous show. For it was in this place that Tiberius had exalted physical sensuality over spiritual aridness, breaking every known taboo, pairing boys with boys, girls with girls, covering his own wrinkled frame with the smooth bodies of the very young. And though hideous and unnatural as it might seem, still it remained the pagan world’s most dramatic gesture toward the truly illimitable.And so I brought Libby here, to walk with her within the bowers of this ruined yet still magnificent grove, and once there, I sat with her in full view of the infamous Salto di Tiberio and spoke to her of what life should be, the heights it should reach, the passions it should embrace, all this said and done in the hope that she might come to live it as a bird on the wing. For life is best lived at the edge of folly.

An evening shade had fallen over the bluff, the deserted beach beneath it, the whole small realm of Chatham, when I finished A View from the Window. I tucked the book under my arm and wandered back down Myrtle Street toward home. On the way I saw Danny Sheen loping across the playing field, and Charlie Patterson lugging a battered trunk along the front walkway of Chatham School. Upstairs the lights were on, and I knew the boys were either studying in the library or talking quietly in the common room, that soon the bell would call them to their dinner, my father dining with them as he always did on Friday evenings, rising at the end of the meal, ringing his little bell, then dismissing them with some quotation he hoped might serve them in the years to come.

Thinking of all that, Myrtle Street like a flat, turgid stream flowing sluggishly ahead of me, I realized that I’d never known any way of life other than the one defined by Chatham School, nor felt that any other might be open to me. Certainly I’d never conceived of my destiny as anything but derided. I would graduate from Chatham School, go to college, make my living, have a family. I would do what my father had done, and his father before him. A different date marked my birth, and a different date would mark my death. Other than that, I would live as they had lived, die as they had died, find whatever joy or glory there might be in life along the same beaten path they’d trod before me through the misty ages.

But as I made my way home that evening, none of that seemed any longer as settled as it once had. The restlessness that seized me from time to time, the sullenness into which I fell, the way I cringed as my father offered his trusty platitudes to the assembled boys, the whole inchoate nature of my discontent began to take a certain shape and definition so that for the first time, I dimly began to perceive what I really wanted out of life.

It was simple. I wanted to be free. I wanted to answer only to myself, to strike out toward something. I didn’t know at that moment how to gain my freedom, or what to do with it. I knew only that I had discovered what I wanted, and that with that discovery a great pall had lifted, a door opened. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I had to go in a different direction than my father had gone, or that any of the other boys of Chatham School would likely go.

I ran down Myrtle Street, breathless, my mind glittering in a world of fresh ideas. Though night had nearly fallen by the time I reached home, it felt like dawn to me. I remember bounding up the stairs, stretching out on my bed, and reading Mr. Channing’s book again, cover to cover. One sentence held for all time: Life is best lived at the edge of folly.

I remember that a fierce exhilaration seized me as I read and reread that line in my bedroom beneath the eaves, that it seemed to illuminate everything I had ever felt. Even now it strikes me that no darkness ever issued from a brighter flame.

PART 2

CHAPTER 7

In old age and semiretirement I’d finally come to a time in life when I never expected to think of her again. By then years had gone by with little to remind me of her, save the quick glimpse of an old woman moving heavily across a wide wooden porch or rocking slowly in her chair as I drove by. And so Miss Channing had at last grown distant. When I thought of her at all, it was as a faded thing, like a flower crushed within the pages of an ancient, crumbling book. Then, suddenly, my own life now drawing to a close, she came back to me by a route I’d never have expected.

I’d come to my office early that morning, the village street still empty, a fog sweeping in from the sea, curling around the corner of Dalmatian’s Cafe and nestling under the benches outside the town hall. I was sitting at my desk, handling the few cases that still came my way, when I suddenly looked up and saw an old man standing at my door.

“Morning, Henry,” he said.

It was Clement Boggs, dressed as he always was, in a flannel shirt and baggy pants, an old hat pulled down nearly to his ears. I’d known Clement all my life, though never very well. He’d been one of the local rowdies who’d smoked in front of the bowling alley, the type my father had always warned me against, a rough, lower-class boy who’d later managed to pull himself together, make a good life, even put away a considerable fortune. I’d handled quite a few of his legal affairs, mostly closings in recent years, as he’d begun to divest himself of the property he’d accumulated throughout his life.

He sat down in one of the chairs in front of my desk, groaning slightly as he did so. “I’ve got an offer on some land I bought a long time back,” he told me. “Out on Plymouth Road.” He hesitated, as if the words themselves held all the terror, rather than the events that had happened there. “’Round Black Pond. The old Milford cottage.”

As if I’d suddenly been swept back to that terrible summer day, I heard Mr. Parsons say, You often went to Milford Cottage, didn’t you, Henry? My answer simple, forthright, as all of them had been: Yes, sir, I did.

Clement watched me closely. “You all right, Henry?”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

He didn’t seem convinced, but continued anyway. “Well, like I said, I’ve got an offer on that land ’round Black Pond.” He leaned back slowly, watching me intently, no doubt wondering at the scenes playing in my mind, the swirling water, a face floating toward me from the green depths. “He wants to know if he can get a zoning variance. I thought you might look into it, see if the town might give him one.”

Clement sat only a few feet from me, but he seemed far way; Mr. Parsons bore in upon me so closely I could almost feel his breath upon my face. When were you last on Black Pond? Matter-of-factly, with no hint of passion, and certainly none of concealment, my answer came: On May 29, 1927. That would be a Sunday? Yes.

“You’ll have to go out there, of course,” Clement said, his gaze leveled upon me steadily, his head cocked to the right, so that for an instant I wondered if he might also be reliving my day in the witness box, listening once again to Mr. Parsons’ questions as they’d resounded through the crowded courtroom. What happened on Black Pond that day?

Clement’s eyes narrowed, as if against a blinding light, and I knew that he could sense the upheaval in my mind no matter how hard I labored to contain it. “I don’t guess you’ve been out that way in quite some time,” he said.

“Not in years.”

“Looks the same.”

“The same as what?”

My question appeared to throw him into doubt as to what his answer should be. “Same as it did in the old days,” he replied.

I said nothing, but I could feel myself helplessly returning to the days he meant. I saw an old car moving through the darkness, two beams of yellow light engulfing me as it came to a halt, a figure staring at me from behind the wheel, motioning now, whispering, Get in.

“Well, let me know what you find out,” Clement said, rising from his chair. “About the variance, I mean.”

“I’ll look into it right away.”

Once at the door, he turned back to face me. “You don’t have to stay out there for long, of course,” he told me, his way of lightening the load. “Just get an idea of what the town might think of somebody developing it.”

I nodded.

He seemed unsure of what he should say next, or if it should be me to whom he said it. Finally, he spoke again. “There’s one more thing, Henry. The money. From the land, I mean. I want it to go to somebody in particular.” He paused a moment, then said her name. “Alice Craddock.”

She swam into my mind, an old woman, immensely fat, her hair gray and bedraggled, her mind unhinged, the butt of a cruel school-yard poem I’d heard repeated through the years:Alice Craddock,

Locked in the paddock

Where’s your mama gone?

“It just seems right that she should get whatever the land out there brings,” Clement said. “I’m an old man. I don’t need it. And they say Alice has come on bad times.”

I saw Alice as a middle-aged woman, slack-jawed, growing fat on potato chips and candy bars, her eyes dull and lightless, a gang of boys chasing after her, pointing, laughing, until Mr. Wallace chased them away, his words trailing after them as they fled down the street: Leave her alone. She’s suffered enough.

“Not much left of what was given her,” Clement said.

“Not much, no.”

He shrugged. “Well, maybe this can help a little,” he said, then turned and walked through the door.

Once he’d gone, I went to the window and looked out. I could see him trudging toward the dusty old truck he’d parked across the street. But I could see him, too, as he’d looked years before, during the days of the trial, the way he’d stood with his cronies on the courthouse steps as Miss Channing had been rushed down them, jeering at her as she swept past, the dreadful word I’d heard drop from his mouth as he glared at her: Whore.

It was not something I’d ever expected to do, see Milford Cottage again, feel the allure I’d known there, the passions it had stirred. But once Clement’s old truck had pulled away, I felt myself drawn back to it, not in a mood of youthful reminiscence, but as someone forced to look at what he’d done, view the bodies in their mangled ruin, a criminal returning to the scene of his crime.

And so I drove out to Milford Cottage only an hour later. It was still early, the streets deserted, with only a few people having breakfast at Dalmatian’s Cafe. Driving along Main Street, it seemed to me that the village had changed very little since the days of Miss Channing’s trial, when the crowds had swirled around the courthouse or milled about in front of Quilty’s and Mayflower’s, muttering of murder and betrayal.

Once outside the village, I followed the road that led along the seashore. There were bogs and marshes on either side, just as there’d always been, and from time to time I spotted a gull circling overhead, a crow skirting just over a distant line of trees.

A mile out of the village I turned onto Plymouth Road, taking the same route my father had taken the afternoon we’d first driven down it together, Miss Channing in the front seat, I in the back with her two valises. The forest thickness pressed in upon me no less thickly than it had that day, the green vines slapping once again against both sides of the car.

As I rounded the last curve, Milford Cottage swept into view.

It looked much smaller than it had the last time I’d seen it. But that wasn’t the only change time had wrought. For the cottage had gone completely to ruin during the intervening years, the tar roof now ripped and curled, the screen door torn from its rusty hinges, the yard a field of weed and bramble, the whole structure so weathered and dilapidated that it seemed hardly able to hold its own against the changeless waters of Black Pond.

I stared at it, reviewing the story of its abandonment. I knew that no one would ever live there again, no young woman would ever rearrange the lanterns inside it or hang her father’s picture on its walls. From the trial transcripts so generously quoted in Mr. Parsons’ book, I knew what had been said in its small rooms, what had been felt as well. But I also knew that there’d been other voices, too, other feelings, things Mr. Parsons, for all his effort, had been unable to unearth. As if her lips were at my ear, I heard Miss Channing say, I can’t go on. Then my reply, What can I do to help?

For a time I peered at the front door that had barred my father’s way that first afternoon, remembering how Miss Channing had stood behind him, waiting silently in the rain as he’d struggled to unlock it. Then I walked up to it, gave a gentle push, and watched as it drifted back, revealing the emptiness inside.

I stepped into the cottage, my eyes moving along the leaf-strewn floor, settling for a moment on the old fireplace with its heap of gray ash. I heard Miss Channing say, Get rid of this, and closed my eyes abruptly, as if against a vision I expected to appear before them at any moment, Miss Channing standing at the hearth, staring into it with a steely glare, feeding letters into its leaping flames.

When I opened them again, the cottage was as empty as before, with nothing to give it sound or movement but the drama playing in my mind.

I glanced into the vacant bedroom, to where a little wooden bookshelf had once rested beside her bed. I could remember the books I’d seen collected there, the words of her father’s heroes bound in dark vellum: Byron, Shelley, Keats.

A gust of wind slammed against the cottage, rattling what remained of its few dusty windowpanes. I saw a bare limb rake across the glass, a bony finger motioning me outside. And so I nodded silently, like someone agreeing to be led into another chamber, then walked to the back of the cottage, out the rear door, and across the yard to the water’s edge.

The great willow still rose above the pond, the one Miss Channing had so often painted, its long, brown tendrils drooping toward the surface of the water. I wondered how many times during her first weeks in Chatham she’d stood beneath it, remembering the poems her father had so often read to her, sometimes in the very places where they’d been written, odes to nightingales and Grecian urns, pleasure domes and crystal seas, women who walk in beauty like the night. But there’d been other things as well, other titles on the shelf beside her bed, the speculations of Mesmer, the visions of Madame Blavatsky, the gruesome ravings of de Sade.

All of that, I thought, standing now where she had stood, my eyes fixed upon the motionless surface of Black Pond, All of that was in her mind. Then I looked out across the pond, and heard a voice, cold, lean, mouthing its grim question: Do you want them dead?

I was there when she saw him for the first time. Or, at least, I think I was. Of course, she’d already glimpsed him with the other teachers or disappearing into a classroom down the hall. But I don’t think she’d actually seen him before, that is, picked him out from among the others, noticed something that distinguished him and drew her attention toward him more intently.

It was toward the middle of October, near the end of Miss Channing’s first month at Chatham School. She was standing behind a sculptor’s pedestal, as she often did, though this time there was no mound of clay. We were only to imagine it there, she said, shape it only in our minds.

“When you imagine the muscles, you have to feel their power,” she told us. “You have to feel what is beneath the figure you’re working with. What is inside it.” She picked up a large book she’d previously placed on her desk and turned it toward us, already open to the page she’d selected to illustrate her point.

“This is a picture of Rodin’s Balzac.” She began to walk along the side of the room, the book still open, pressing the picture toward us. “You can’t see Balzac’s body,” she added. “He’s completely covered in a long, flowing cape.”

She continued to move along the edge of the room, the boys now shifting in their seats to keep her in view. “But if you opened the cape,” Miss Channing went on, “you’d see this.” With a purposely swift gesture, she turned the page, and there before us, in full view, was a monstrously fat and bulging Balzac, immense and naked, his belly drooping hugely toward his feet.

“This figure is actually under the cape,” she said. “Rodin added the cape only after he’d sculpted the body beneath it. The actual body of Balzac.”

She closed the book and for a moment stared at us silently. Then she lifted her hands and wriggled her fingers. “You must imagine what’s beneath the skin of the figure you’re working on. Feel the muscles stretch and contract.” She swept her hands back until they came to a halt at the sides of her face. “Even the smallest muscles are important, like the tiny ones that open and close your eyes.”

We stared at her in shocked silence, stunned by the naked figure she’d just displayed to us, but awed by it as well.

“Remember all that when you start to work on your figures in class tomorrow,” Miss Channing said just as the bell sounded our dismissal.

It was her last class of the day, and I remember thinking that her first month of teaching at Chatham School had gone quite well. Even my father had commented upon it, mentioning to my mother over dinner one evening that Miss Channing had “gotten a grip on things right away,” that teaching seemed to “fit her nature.”

I was already at the door that afternoon, the other boys rushing by, when I turned back and saw her alone, standing behind her sculpting pedestal. It seemed the perfect time to approach her.

“Miss Channing,” I said, coming toward her slowly.

She looked up. “Yes, Henry?”

I took her father’s book from my bag and held it out to her. “I thought it was great,” I said. “I’ve read it quite a few times. Even copied things out of it. I thought he was right about everything. About ‘living on the run.’”

She did not take the book, and I felt certain that she could sense the life I craved, how much I needed to bound over the walls of Chatham School, race into the open spaces, live on the edge of folly. For a moment she seemed to be evaluating me, asking herself if I had the will to see it through, possessed the naked ruthlessness such freedom might require.

“It isn’t easy to live the way my father did,” she said, her blue eyes focused powerfully. “Most people can’t do it.”

“But everything else … the way people do live …” I stammered. “I don’t want to live like my father does. I don’t want to be like him … a fool.”

She didn’t seem in the least shocked by my ruthless evaluation of my father. “How do you want to be, Henry?”

“Open to things. To new things.”

She watched me a moment longer, and I could see that she was thinking of me in a way that no one else ever had, not merely as the boy I was, but as the man I might someday be. “I’ve been noticing your drawing,” she said. “It’s really quite good, you know.”

I knew no such thing. “It is?”

“There’s a lot of feeling in it.”

I knew how strangely twisted my drawings were, how wreathed in a vampire blackness, but it had never occurred to me that such characteristics added up to “feeling,” that they might spring from something deep within me.

I shrugged. “There’s not much to draw around here. Just the sea. The lighthouse. Stuff like that.”

“But you put something into them, Henry,” Miss Channing said. “Something extra. You should get a sketchbook and take it around with you. That’s what I did in Africa. I found that just having it along with me made me look at things differently.” She waited for a response, then continued when I failed to offer one. “Anyway, when you’ve done a few more drawings, bring them in and let me look at them.”

I’d never been complimented by a teacher before. Certainly none had ever suggested that I had a talent for anything but moodiness and solitude. To the other teachers I had always been a disappointment, someone tolerated because I was the headmaster’s son, a boy of limited prospects and little ambition, a “decent lad,” as I’d once heard my father describe me in a tone that had struck me as deeply condescending, a way of saying that I was nothing, and never would be.

“All right, Miss Channing,” I said, immensely lifted by her having seen something in me the other teachers had not seen.

“Good,” she said, then returned to her work as I headed down the aisle and out the door.

I walked into the courtyard and drew in a deep, invigorating breath. It was autumn now, and the air was quite brisk. But my mood had been so heated up by Miss Channing’s high regard that I could not feel its hint of winter chill.

A few hours later I took my seat for the final class of the day. I glanced out the window, then at the pictures that hung on the wall. Shakespeare. Wordsworth. Keats. My attention was still drifting aimlessly from one face to another when I heard the steady thump … thump … thump of the approaching teacher’s wooden cane, soft and rhythmic, like the distant muffled beating of a drum.

Was he handsome, the man who came into the room seconds later, dressed, as always, in a chalk-smeared jacket and corduroy pants?

Yes, I suppose he was. In his own particular way, of course.

And yet it never surprised me that the people of the village later marveled that such fierce emotions could have stormed about in a so visibly broken frame.

He was tall and slender, but there was something in his physical arrangement that always struck me as subtly off kilter, the sense of a leaning tower, of something shattered at its base. For although he always stood erect, his back pressed firmly against the wall of his classroom while he spoke to us, his body often appeared to be of another mind, his left shoulder a few degrees lower than the right, his head cocked slightly to the left, like a bust whose features were classically formed yet eerily marred, perhaps distorted, the product of an unsteady hand.

Still, it was his face that people found most striking, the ragged black beard, lined here and there with gray, and the dark, deep-set eyes. But more particularly the cream-colored scar that ran crookedly from just beneath his left eye, widening and deepening until it finally disappeared into the thick bramble of his beard.

His name was Leland Reed.

I often recall my first glimpse of him. It was a summer afternoon several years before. I’d been slouched on the front porch of our house when I looked up to see a man coming down the street. He walked slowly, his shoulders dipping left and right like a little boat in a gently swelling sea. At last he came to a halt at the short metal gate that separated our house from the street. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m looking for Mr. Arthur Griswald.”

“That’s my father,” I told him.

He did not open the gate, but merely peered at me like someone who could see both my past and my future in a single glimpse, how I had been reared, what I would become as a result.

“He’s inside the house,” I said, stung by his inspection.

“Thank you,” Mr. Reed answered.

Seconds later I heard my father say, “Ah, Mr. Reed,” as he opened the door and let him in. Not long after that I found my father and Mr. Reed in the parlor, my father so engrossed in interviewing Mr. Reed that he never noticed me standing at the door, listening with a little boy’s curiosity for the world of men.

Mr. Reed had come from Boston, as it turned out, where he’d taught at the Boston Latin School for the past three years. He’d grown tired of the city, he said, then went on to provide other details in a self-confident, manly voice, but with something distant in it, too, a voice that later struck me as somewhat similar to his face, strong and forthright in its own way, but irreparably scarred.

“I’m surprised a man like yourself doesn’t want to live in Boston,” my father said. “I’ve always found it very stimulating.”

Mr. Reed gave no answer.

“Would you mind if I asked your age?”

“Twenty-eight.”

I could tell that my father had thought him older, perhaps because of the wisps of gray visible in his beard, or, more likely, because his manner was so deliberative, his eyes so still.

“Twenty-eight,” my father repeated. “And … single?”

“Yes.”

They talked for well over an hour that afternoon, and although I drifted past the parlor’s open door on several occasions, idly listening as their conversation continued, there was onto one small fragment of it that later struck me as revealing of the kind of man Mr. Reed actually was. It had come toward the end of the interview, my father’s pipe now lying cold and smokeless in the ashtray beside his chair, Mr. Reed still seated opposite him, both feet pressed firmly on the floor.

“And what about travel,” my father asked. “Have you done much of that?”

Mr. Reed shook his head. “Only a little.”

“Where to, if I may ask?”

“France.”

My father seemed pleased. “France. Now, that’s a beautiful country. What part did you visit?”

“Only the countryside,” Mr. Reed answered quietly, adding nothing more, so that my father had to finally coax him forward with another question.

“You were there on business?”

Mr. Reed shook his head, and I saw one of his large hands move down to a right knee that had begun to tremble slightly.

“Just there on vacation, then?” my father asked lightly.

“No,” Mr. Reed answered, a single coal-black eyebrow arching suddenly, then lowering again. “The war.”

I remember that his voice had become strained as he’d answered, and that his eyes had darted toward the window briefly. At that, both my father and I suddenly realized that the casualness of my father’s question had plumbed an unexpectedly raw aspect of Mr. Reed’s experience, miraculously revealing to us what Mr. Reed himself must have seen some years before, an exploded shell lifting mounds of muddy earth, men hurling upward, then plummeting down, his own body spinning in a cloud of smoke, bits of himself flying away in surreal tongues of flame.

“Oh,” my father said softly, glancing toward the cane. “I didn’t know.”

Mr. Reed drew his eyes back to my father but didn’t speak.

“In your letter you didn’t mention that you were a veteran. Most men do when they’re applying for a job.”

Mr. Reed shrugged. “I find it difficult to do that,” he said.

My father reached for his pipe, though I noticed that he didn’t light it. “Well, tell me why you think you’d like to teach at Chatham School.”

I don’t remember Mr. Reed’s answer, but only that my father had appeared satisfied with it, and that Mr. Reed left the house a few minutes later, presumably walking back to the bus stop in Chatham center, then boarding a bus for Boston. I didn’t see him again until almost two months later, and even then only briefly, a man moving down the corridor of Chatham School, one hand clutching a book, the other a cane, whose steady, rhythmic thump announced him like a theme.

As it still did when I heard it tapping down the hallway that autumn afternoon seven years later, followed by the inevitable cautionary whispers of, “Shhh. Mr. Reed is coming.”

However, on that particular day he didn’t come into the room as he usually did, but stopped at the door instead, leaning one shoulder into it, so that he stood at a slant. “There probably won’t be many more days as pleasant as this one,” he said, nodding toward the window, the clear, warm air beyond it. “So I thought we’d have class out in the courtyard this afternoon.”

With that, he turned and led us down the corridor to the rear of the school, then out into the little courtyard behind it. Once there, he positioned himself beside the large oak that stood near the center of the courtyard and motioned for us to sit down on the ground in a semicircle around him. Then, he leaned against the tree and glanced down at the book he’d brought with him. “Today we’re going to begin our study of Lord Byron,” he said, his voice a curious combination of something soft and rough, and which at times seemed almost physical, like the touch of a fine, unsanded wood. “You should pay close attention, for Byron lived the poetry he wrote.”

As always, Mr. Reed began by giving us the details of the poet’s life, concentrating on his travels and adventures, a wild vagabond existence that Mr. Reed clearly admired. “Byron didn’t settle for what the rest of us settle for,” he told us. “He would find the lives we lead intolerably dull.”

During the next hour we learned that Byron had been raised in a place called Aberdeen, that as a child he’d been stricken with infantile paralysis, his right leg and foot so terribly contracted that he’d walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. “Like me,” Mr. Reed said with a quiet smile, nodding toward his cane, “except that he refused to let it hinder him, or change his life in any way.”

Byron had had what Mr. Reed called “an adventurous nature,” throwing wild parties at his own castle, drinking burgundy from a human skull. “He lived his ideas,” Mr. Reed declared. “Nothing ever stood in his way.”

Class was nearly over by the time Mr. Reed finished telling us about Byron’s life. But before releasing us completely, he opened the book he’d brought with him. “I want you to listen now,” he said as he began flipping the pages briskly until he found the lines he’d been searching for. Then he looked toward us and smiled in that strange way I’d already noticed, a smile that seemed to require an undisclosed amount of effort. “Words need to be heard sometimes,” he said. “After all, in the beginning all poetry was spoken.”

With that he read the lines he’d selected for us, his voice low, almost a whisper, so that the words themselves sounded inordinately private, an intimate message sent by one whose peculiar sadness seemed at one with Mr. Reed’s.Every feeling hath been shaken;

Pride, which not a world could bow,

Bows to thee—by thee forsaken

Even my soul forsakes me now;But ’tis done—all words are idle—

Words from me are vainer still;

But the thoughts we cannot bridle

Force their way without the will.

His voice trailed off at the end of the recitation, though his eyes remained on the lines a moment longer, his head bowed wearily, as if beneath the weight of thoughts he himself could not bridle.

“I think it’s sometimes a good idea to end class with a poem,” he said at last. Then he paused, watching us silently, perhaps hoping for a response. When none came, he closed the book. “All right, you may go,” he said.

We scrambled to our feet quickly, gathering our books into our arms, and began to disperse, some heading back into the building, others toward the rear entrance of the courtyard and the playing fields beyond. Only Mr. Reed stayed in place, his back pressed against the tree, the volume of Byron’s poetry dangling from his hand. He looked as if he might crumple to the ground. But then I saw him draw in a long, reviving breath, straighten his shoulders, step away from the tree, and begin to make his way toward the building. “Good night, Henry,” he said as he went by me.

“Good night, Mr. Reed,” I answered.

I picked up my books and turned to the right. Miss Channing’s classroom was directly in front of me, and when I glanced toward it, I saw that she stood at one of the three large windows that overlooked the courtyard. Her eyes were fixed upon Mr. Reed with a clearly appreciative gaze, taking in the slight limp, the narrow cane, perhaps even the jagged cream-colored scar. I’d never seen a woman look at a man in exactly the same way, almost as if he were not a man at all, but a painting she admired for the boldness of its execution, the way the standard symmetries had been discarded in favor of jaggedness and instability, her earlier sense of beauty now adjusting to take it in, finding a place for mangled shapes.

CHAPTER 8

From my place beneath the willow, staring out across the water, I could barely make out the house in which Mr. Reed had lived so many years before, and so I stepped away from the tree and took a narrow footpath that hunters and swimmers and the occasional forest solitaire had maintained over the years, and which I knew to be the one Miss Channing had taken on that Saturday evening two weeks later, when she’d set out for Mr. Reed’s house on the other side of Black Pond. As I began to move down that same path, I heard Mr. Parsons say, So, from the beginning you were aware of their meetings? My answer, Yes, I was. And what were your impressions, Henry? I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Do you now? Yes.

A tangle of forest had surrounded Miss Channing that evening, and she might well have seen a lone white gull as it plummeted toward the surface of the pond. No doubt she heard the soft crunch of the leaves beneath her feet, but she may have heard an assortment of bird cries, too, or the scurrying of a field mouse, or the plop of a frog as it leaped into the water. For those were the things I saw and heard as I retraced her steps that morning, moving slowly, at an old man’s pace.

Her dinner at Mr. Reed’s house had been arranged several days before. By then my father had told Miss Channing that it was getting a bit too cold for her to continue walking back and forth from her cottage to Chatham School. He’d gone on to inform her that there was another teacher who lived on Black Pond. It would be a simple matter for him to drop by for her each morning and return her to Milford Cottage in the afternoon.

And so at some point before the end of October, I saw Mr. Reed escort Miss Channing to his car, a battered sedan, its wheels mud-spattered, its running board hardly more than a drooping sheet of rust, its windows streaked and scratched as if they’d been sandblasted with sea salt.

As to what they’d said to each other on that first drive, no one would ever have known had not Mr. Parsons later been so insistent on learning every word ever spoken between them, requiring revelations so detailed that I could still hear their voices whispering in the air around me as I struggled to make my way along the edges of Black Pond.

I live just on the other side of the pond. You can probably see my house from your cottage.

Yes, I’ve seen it.

You may have seen me on the pond too. I go rowing on it occasionally.

Do you row at night?

Sometimes.

Then I think I saw you once. It was my first night in the cottage. I went out to stand by the pond. It was overcast, but I think I saw you for just a moment. Not you, exactly. Just part of the boat, and your hand. Why do you go out at night?

For the solitude, I suppose.

You don’t live alone?

No. I have a wife and daughter. What about you? Do you live alone?

Yes.

You’re not afraid? Living out here?

No.

Some people would be.

Then they should live elsewhere, I suppose.

Listening to their voices as I continued my journey around Black Pond that morning, I realized that such a statement had to have struck Mr. Reed as amazingly self-possessed. How different she must have seemed from any other woman he had ever known.

I’ve seen you teaching. The boys seem very interested in your class.

I hope they are.

They look very attentive.

I’ve seen you with your class too. You were reading to them in the courtyard.

Oh, yes, a couple weeks ago. I wanted to take advantage of what I thought might be the last day we could go outside before winter sets in.

It was from Byron.

You recognized it.

Yes, I did. My father read a great deal of Byron. Shelley too. And Keats.

At that moment Miss Channing told him of her visit to the cluttered Roman apartment in which Keats had died. His books were still there, she said, along with pages written in Keats’s own hand.

The interest Mr. Reed by then had come to feel for Miss Channing can be gauged by what he did next.

I know this is rather sudden, Miss Channing. But I wonder if you’d like to have dinner with my family and me tomorrow evening?

I would like that very much, Mr. Reed.

Around six, then?

Yes.

Shall I pick you up?

No. I like to walk. Besides, your house is just on the other side of the pond.

∗ ∗ ∗

Only a ruin remained of Mr. Reed’s house, and even that was so overgrown, I nearly missed it as I made my way along the water’s edge that morning. Hung with vines, its roof covered with forest debris, a scattering of shattered lobster traps strewn across its grounds, it gave off a forlorn sense of having been abruptly abandoned, then left to rot forever.

The stairs creaked loudly as I climbed them, grabbing a shaky railing as I went, then stood silently on the porch for a moment, looking into the house, thinking of the terrible words that had been said within its cramped few rooms, wondering if some element of all that might linger still, like a poison mold growing on the walls. A tiny voice pierced the air. Mama. Mama.

It was then that I glanced back out into the yard, where for a single visionary instant I saw a small girl in a white boat closely tethered to the shore, playfully pulling at the oars, her blond hair held in place by a thin red ribbon.

From behind me, a second, disembodied voice called her name. Mary, Mary.

I turned and saw Mrs. Reed standing at the door of a house that was no longer overgrown with vines, its paint no longer peeling from wood gone black and sodden in the years since its abandonment. She seemed to stare directly through me, as if I were the ghostly one, she brought back to life. Then her eyes narrowed, and she brushed back a loose strand of red hair as she called to her daughter once again, her words echoing in the air, bounding and rebounding across the unresponsive surface of Black Pond. Mary, come inside.

I felt a cold wave rush through me, then saw Mary dart past her mother and into the house, laughing happily as she dissolved into its darkened space, her laughter growing faint in the distance, as if she were still running, though now down the passageway of a vast, unending tunnel.

Like a blast of arctic air, I felt all the terror of the past sweep over me in a breathless shiver, as if it were Mrs. Reed and her daughter who had drawn me back into their world rather than I who had returned them unwillingly to mine.

I peered into the interior of the house, its front door long ago pulled down. The walls were now stripped and bare, the fireplace crumbling, the floor little more than a loose assemblage of sagging wooden slats. The kitchen was at the rear of the house, silent, empty, a dusky shaft of light pouring in from the rear window, and with nothing but four rust-colored indentations in the floor to indicate the heavy iron stove Mrs. Reed had used to prepare dinner for her family.

From court testimony I knew that Mrs. Reed had made a special meal for Miss Channing that night, that it had consisted of cabbage and boiled ham, deviled eggs, and a rhubarb pie. I knew that after dinner Mary Reed had busied herself in the front room while the Reeds and Miss Channing lingered over a pot of coffee whose phantom aroma I could almost smell, as if, down all the passing years, it had continued to waft out of the deserted kitchen, filter through the long-abandoned rooms, drift out onto the creaky, leaf-strewn porch where I stood.

Throughout dinner Mr. Reed had kept the conversation centered on Miss Channing, forever returning her to one place or another from her travels, so that during the course of the dinner she’d described everything from the look of Vesuvius as it loomed menacingly over the ruins of Pompeii to the tiny Danish village beloved by Christian Andersen. “How interesting,” had been Mr. Reed’s repeated responses. “How the boys at school must enjoy listening to you.”

As for Abigail Reed, she’d listened quietly, watching her husband as he watched Miss Channing, smiling politely from time to time, nodding occasionally, perhaps already beginning to sense that something unexpected had entered her life, a woman in a pretty dress, talking of the books she’d read, the things she’d seen, a world Mrs. Reed had never known, nor thought it important to know. Mr. Parsons’ voice echoed in the air around me. How well did you know Abigail Reed? Her face appeared before me, floating wide-eyed in the green depths. Not very well.

The dinner had come to an end at around ten o’clock. By then Mary had drifted out of the front room and disappeared into the darkness surrounding the house. On the porch Miss Channing had politely thanked Mr. Reed and Abigail for the dinner, then turned and headed down the stairs and out toward the narrow path that followed along the water’s edge. From a distance she heard Mr. Reed calling for his daughter, then Mrs. Reed’s assurance that there was nothing for him to be worried about, that she was only playing near the shed.

It had never occurred to me that it might still be there, but as I eased myself down the stairs of what was left of Mr. Reed’s house, I looked to the left and saw it. In contrast to the house, it was remarkably well-preserved, an unpainted wooden shed, tall and narrow, with a roof of corrugated tin. It stood in a grove of Norway spruce, perhaps a hundred yards on the other side of the Reed house. The trail that had once led to it was overgrown, and the tin roof was covered with pine needles, but the terrible weathering and neglect that had left the Reed house and Milford Cottage in such disrepair seemed hardly to have affected it.

I approached it reluctantly, as anyone might who knew the terror that had shivered there, the sound of small fingers clawing at its door, the whimpering cries that had filtered through the thick wooden slats, Daddy, Daddy.

It was windowless, its walls covered with tar paper, the heavy door trimmed in black rubber, creating a tight seal. Though very dark inside, it nonetheless gave off a sense of spaciousness because of the high roof, the great boards that ran its length nearly ten feet above, the large, rusty hooks that pierced the base of the boards and hung toward the floor like crooked red fingers. During Miss Channing’s trial, Mr. Parsons had repeatedly referred to it as a “slaughterhouse,” but it had never been any such thing. Rather, it was one of those outbuildings, common at the time, in which large slabs of meat were hung for smoking or salting or simply to be carved into pieces fit for cooking. The floor had been slightly raised, with half-inch spaces between the boards, so that blood could trickle through it, be soaked up by the ground beneath. Mr. Reed had rarely used it, although it rested on his land, but Mary had often been seen playing both inside it and nearby.

It was this latter fact that had finally brought Captain Lawrence P. Hamilton of the Massachusetts State Police to its large gray door that afternoon. The captain had already searched Mr. Reed’s house by then, the little earthen basement beneath it, the cramped, unlighted attic overhead. That’s where he’d found a battered cardboard box, a knife, and length of rope inside, along with an old primer curiously inscribed. But Captain Hamilton had not been looking for such things when he’d first come to the Reed house that day. His concerns had been far more immediate than that. For although Mrs. Reed had already been found by then, Mary was still missing.

CHAPTER 9

It was nearly ten in the morning when I returned to my car, pulled myself behind the wheel, and headed back toward Chatham. By then, the atmosphere of the places I’d just revisited—Milford Cottage, Mr. Reed’s house, the little shed Captain Hamilton had warily approached on that sweltering May afternoon—had sunk into my memory like a dark, ineradicable stain. I thought of all that had followed the events of that terrible day, some immediately, some lingering through all the intervening years. I remembered my father at his desk, desperately trying to reclaim some part of a dream already lost, my mother staring at him bitterly, locked in her own sullen disillusionment. I saw a young world grow old, the boys of Chatham School expanding into adulthood, then shrinking into old age just as I had, though with less than they had to show for my time on earth, wifeless, childless, a man known primarily for a single boyhood act.

Then, in the midst of all that dead or aged company, I glimpsed the youthful face of Sarah Doyle.

∗ ∗ ∗

I remember that it was a Saturday afternoon in early November, only a week following Miss Channing’s dinner with Mr. Reed and his family. I was sitting on a bench at the edge of the coastal bluff. On the beach below I could see several people strolling about or lounging under large striped umbrellas. There was no one in the water, of course, the season for swimming having passed by then. But far out to sea, I could make out the white sail of a fifteen-footer as it skirted along the shoreline. Watching it drift by, I yearned to be on it, to be cutting across an illimitable blue vastness.

Sarah was wearing a long blue skirt and red blouse when she came up to me that morning, and she’d wrapped a flowered scarf over her shoulders, the knot tied loosely at her throat. Her hair was long and extraordinarily dark, and had a continually frazzled and unruly look to it, as if she’d just been taken by the heels, turned upside down, and shaken violently, her hair left in tangled disarray.

Still, for all that, she was quite a lovely girl, the same age I was, and I often found my attention drawn to her as she swept past my room or bounded up the stairs, but most particularly when I found her lounging on the porch swing, her arms at her sides, her eyes half-closed and languid, as if lost in a dream of surrender.

In those days, of course, the classes were more rigidly divided than they have since become, and so I knew that whatever my feelings for Sarah might be, they would always have to be carefully guarded. For unlike the other deadly sins, lust is sometimes joined to love, and such a prospect would no doubt have met with stern disapproval from my mother. And so, up until that day, I’d allowed myself only those hidden thoughts and secret glances that were within my sphere, thinking of Sarah at night, but by day returning her to the status of a servant girl.

“And hello to you, sir,” she said as she approached me, the Irish lilt now striking me as somewhat thrilling and exotic.

I nodded. “Hi, Sarah.”

She smiled brightly, but seemed unsure of what to do next. “Well, should I sit with you, then?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said casually, as if the nearness of her body meant no more to me than that of the lamppost a block away.

She sat down and looked out over the water. I did the same, careful to conceal the fact that all I could think of was her skin, the color of milk, her hair black as coal, the mysteries of her body infinitely enticing.

As to her history, I knew only the broad details. But from the bits and pieces of conversation I’d overheard as I roamed the house on Myrtle Street, I’d learned of her mother’s early death in Limerick and had some picture of the bleak coastal village she’d grown up in after that. She’d had three brothers, two killed in the Great War, one an aimless drifter who’d disappeared into the dreary slums of East London. As to her father, he’d died of tuberculosis five years before, leaving her with only enough money to book passage to America. I’d heard my father speak grimly of that passage, the horrors of the steerage, the way the men had leered at her in the dank quarters of the ship’s belly, the stale bread and dried beef that alone had sustained her until she’d finally disembarked at the Port of Boston.

After that Sarah had fallen upon the mercy of the Irish Immigrant Aid Society, who’d fed, clothed, and given her shelter until she’d landed a job as a serving girl in a great Boston house. It was there she’d met my father three years later, told him how much she longed for village life again, particularly if the village happened to be located near the sea. By all accounts she had spoken to my father with great earnestness, and my father, never one to remain deaf to such heartfelt solicitations, had first cleared it with her employer, then offered her a place in our house at Chatham, one she’d taken without a moment’s further thought and performed dutifully ever since.

But as I looked at her that morning nearly two years later, she seemed not altogether pleased with her earlier decision. There was a melancholy wistfulness in her eyes, a deep dissatisfaction.

“Something’s bothering you,” I said bluntly, my own intense restlessness now spilling over into a general sense of radical impatience.

Her eyes shot over to me, as if I’d accused her of stealing the silverware. “Now, why do you say that?” she asked in a sharp, defensive tone.

I gave her a knowing look.

She turned her head away, touched her cheek. “I’ve nothing to complain about. I’ll not be thought of as a whiner.”

I was too consumed with my own complaint to feel much tenderness toward Sarah’s, so I said nothing more.

This seemed to jar her. “Well I want you to know that I don’t at all regret coming to Chatham. Not at all, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t ever want your father to think I wasn’t grateful for what he’s done for me. It’s just that I didn’t come to America to be a serving girl. I’m after more than that. I want to better myself, to break away from the cleaning and cooking. To be something, don’t you know. Not just a serving girl … like I am now.” She shook her head violently. “It’s no good, feeling like I do. Like I’m all tied up in ropes.”

I could see it in her face, a vast, billowing need to leap beyond the mundane and unglamorous life she otherwise seemed destined for, and which, since reading Mr. Channing’s book, I had also begun to feel far more powerfully than I ever had before. Watching her agitation, the restlessness that swept over her, I suddenly felt absolutely in league with her, the two of us castaways on a narrow strip of land whose strictures and limitations both appalled and threatened to destroy us. I saw my father as grimly standing in our way, reading his ancient books, mouthing their stony maxims. In my mind I heard his steady drone: Do this, do that. Be this, be that. I had never felt such a deep contempt for everything he stood for.

“Maybe you should just take off, Sarah,” I told her. “Just take the train to Boston and disappear.”

Even as I said it, I saw myself doing it. It would be a moment of wild flight, the real world dissolving behind me, all its gray walls crumbling, the sky a vast expanse before me, my life almost as limitless as the unbounded universe.

“You should do whatever you have to, Sarah,” I continued boldly. Then, as if to demonstrate my zeal, I said, “If I can help you in any way, let me know.”

Her response came as a question that utterly surprised me. For it had nothing to do with flight, with night trains to Boston, or disappearing into the multitude. Instead, she studied me intently, then said, “Do you remember Miss Channing? The lady that came to the house at the end of summer, the one that’s teaching art?”

“I’m in her class.”

“Such a fine lady, the way she talks and all. So smart, don’t you think?”

“Yes, she is.”

Sarah hesitated, now suddenly reluctant to ask what she had perhaps come to ask me all along. Then the wall fell, and she spoke. “Do you think that such a fine lady as Miss Channing is—talking so fine the way she does—that she might be of a mind to teach me how to read?”

We headed down Myrtle Street together the following Sunday morning, Sarah walking beside me, a basket of freshly baked cookies hanging from one arm, her offering to Miss Channing.

At the bluff we swung to the left, passed beneath the immense shadow of the lighthouse, then down the curving road that led into the village.

“What if Miss Channing says no,” Sarah asked. “What if she won’t teach me?”

“I don’t think she’ll say no, Sarah,” I said, though I know that part of me hoped that she would, wanted Sarah to be refused so that she would have to consider the other choice I’d already suggested, far bolder, as it seemed to me, edged in that frenzied sense of escape whose attractions had begun to overwhelm me.

“But what if she doesn’t want to?”

I answered with a determination that was new to me, an icy ruthlessness already in my voice. “Then we’ll find another way.”

This appeared to satisfy her. She smiled brightly and took my arm with her free hand.

Still, by the time we’d turned onto Plymouth Road, her fear had taken root again. She walked more slowly, her feet treading very softly over the bed of oyster shells, as if it were an expensive carpet and she did not want to mar it with her prints.

“I hope I look all right, then,” she said as we neared Miss Channing’s cottage.

She’d dressed as formally as she knew how, in what looked like her own schoolgirl version of the Chatham School uniform. Her skirt was long and dark, her blouse an immaculate white. She’d tied a black bow at her throat and pinned a small cameo to her chest, one that had belonged to her mother, her sole inheritance, she told me.

It was not a look I admired, and even as I gazed at her, I imagined her quite differently, dressed like Ramona in The Gypsy Band, bare-shouldered, with large hoop earrings, a lethal glint in her eye, a knife clutched between her teeth as she danced around the raging campfire. It was as adolescent a fantasy as any I had ever had, and yet it was also tinged with a darkness that was very old, a sense of woman as most lusty and desirable when poised at the edge of murder.

∗ ∗ ∗

At Milford Cottage Sarah glanced down at her skirt and frowned. “There’s dust all over the hem.” She bent forward and brushed at the bottom of her skirt. “Sticks like glue,” she said, finally giving up. Then she lifted her head determinedly and I felt her hand tighten around my arm. “All right,” she said. “I’m ready.”

We walked down the little walkway that led to the door of the cottage. Without a pause Sarah knocked gently, glanced at me with a bright, nervous smile, and waited.

When no one answered, she looked at me quizzically.

“Try again,” I said. “It’s early. She must be here.”

Sarah did as I told her, but still there was no answer.

I remembered the occasion several weeks before, when I’d come to the cottage at nearly the same time, found it empty, as it now appeared to be, Miss Channing strolling along the edge of the forest.

“Sometimes she takes a walk in the morning,” I told Sarah confidently, although I could not be sure of any such thing. “Let’s look around.”

We stepped away from the door, walked to the far side of the cottage, then around it to the rear yard, toward the pond. A heavy morning mist still hung over the water, its lingering cloud rolling out over the edges of the land, covering it in fog.

For a moment Sarah and I stood, facing the pond, the impenetrable mist that drifted out from it covering the small area behind the cottage.

Nothing moved, or seemed to move, neither the air, nor the mist that cloaked the water, nor anything around us, until suddenly I saw a figure drift slowly toward us, the thick gray fog thinning steadily as she came nearer so that she appeared to rise toward us smoothly, like a corpse floating up from a pool of clouded water.

“Miss Channing,” Sarah said.

Miss Channing smiled slightly. “I was out by the pond,” she said. “I thought I heard someone at the door.” Dimly I could see the easel she’d set up at the water’s edge, a large pad of drawing paper already in place upon it, all of it still shrouded in curling wisps of gray cloud.

“This is Sarah Doyle,” I told her. “You may remember her from when you had dinner at our house the night you first came to Chatham.”

Sarah lifted the basket toward her. “I brought you some cookies, Miss Channing,” she said nervously. “I baked them special for you. As payment, ma’am.”

“Payment?” Miss Channing asked. “For what?”

For an instant, Sarah hesitated, and I could see that she believed her entire future to be at stake at that moment in her life, all her limitless prospects to be placed in someone else’s hands.

“For teaching me to read,” she said boldly, eyes on Miss Channing’s face. “If you’d be willing to do it, ma’am.”

Miss Channing did not pause a beat in her response. “Of course I will,” she said, and stepped forward to take the basket from Sarah’s trembling hand.

An hour later they were still at it. From my place at the edge of the water I could see Miss Channing sitting at a small table she’d brought from the cottage and placed beneath the willow tree. Sarah sat opposite her, a writing pad before her, along with a sheet of paper upon which Miss Channing had written the alphabet in large block letters.

I heard Miss Channing say, “All right. Begin.”

Sarah kept her eyes fixed upon Miss Channing’s, careful not to let them stray toward the page as she began. “A, B, C…”

She continued through the alphabet, stumbling here and there, pausing until Miss Channing finally provided the missing letter, then rushing on gleefully until she reached the end.

“Good,” Miss Channing said quietly. “Now. Once more.”

Again Sarah made her way through the alphabet, this time stopping only once, at U, then plunging ahead rapidly, completing it in a flourish of pride and breathlessness.

When she’d gotten to the end of it, Miss Channing offered her an encouraging smile. “Very good,” she said. “You’re a very bright girl, Sarah.”

“Thank you,” Sarah said, a broad smile lighting her face.

They continued their work until almost noon, when I heard Miss Channing say, “Well, I think we had a very good lesson, Sarah.”

Sarah rose, then did a small curtsy, a servant girl once again, taking leave of her superior. “Thank you, Miss Channing.” Her earlier nervousness had now completely returned. “Do you think we could have another lesson sometime, then?” she asked hesitantly.

“Yes, of course we could,” Miss Channing told her. “Actually, we should have a lesson once a week. Would Sunday mornings be all right?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” Sarah burst out, a great relief and happiness sweeping over her. “You can depend on it, Miss Channing. I’ll be here every Sunday morning from this day on.”

“Good,” Miss Channing said. “I’ll be waiting for you.” She turned to me. I could see that something was on her mind. “You didn’t bring a sketchbook with you, Henry,” she said.

I shrugged. “I guess I didn’t …”

“You should have it with you all the time,” Miss Channing told me. She smiled, then said a line I later repeated to Mr. Parsons. “Art is like love. It’s all or nothing.

With that she quickly walked into the cottage, then returned, this time with a sketchbook in her hand.

“Take one of mine,” she said as she handed it to me. “I have a few left from my time in Africa.”

I looked at the book, the soft burgundy cover, the clean, thick paper that rested beneath it. Nothing had ever looked more beautiful to me. I felt as if she’d passed me a golden locket or a strand of her hair.

“Now, don’t let me see you without a sketchbook ever again, Henry,” she said with a mocking sternness.

I tucked the book beneath my arm. “I won’t,” I told her.

She gazed at me a moment, then nodded toward the table and chairs. “Would you mind taking all this back into the cottage?” she asked.

“Not at all.”

I grasped one chair in each hand and headed for the cottage. On the way I heard Sarah say, “So you were painting this morning, were you?” And Miss Channing’s reply, “Yes. I often do in the morning.”

Inside the cottage I placed the chairs at the wooden table in the kitchen. Through the rear window I could see Miss Channing and Sarah as they strolled toward the easel that still stood at the water’s edge, the pages of the drawing book fluttering slightly in a breeze from off the pond. Miss Channing had opened the drawing book and was showing one of her sketches to Sarah. Sarah had folded her hands before her in the way Miss Channing often did, and was listening attentively to her every word.

After a while I turned and walked back into the small living room at the front of the cottage. The picture of Miss Channing’s father still hung in the same place. But since that time, several sketches had been added to the wall, carefully wrought line drawings that she had brought out of Africa and which portrayed vast, uncluttered vistas, borderless and uncharted, devoid of both animals and people, the land and sky stretching out into a nearly featureless infinity. This, I knew, was her father’s world, unlimited and unrestrained.

I stared at her drawings a few seconds longer, then walked outside again, retrieved the table, placed it just inside the cottage door, and made my way over to where Miss Channing and Sarah still stood at the edge of the pond.

“I like that one,” Sarah said brightly, her eyes on one of the drawings Miss Channing had just displayed.

“It’s not finished yet,” Miss Channing told her. “I was working on it this morning.”

I peered at the drawing. It showed a body of water that only faintly resembled Black Pond. For it was much larger, as well as being surrounded by a world of empty hills and valleys that appeared to roll on forever. So much so, that the mood of the drawing, its immensity and sense of vast, unbounded space struck me as very similar to the ones I’d just seen inside the cottage. But there was something different about it too. For near the center of the drawing, hovering near the middle of a huge, unmoving water, Miss Channing had drawn a man at the oars of a small boat. His face was caught in a shaft of light, his eyes locked on the farther shore.

Sarah leaned forward, looking closely at the figure in the boat. “That man there, isn’t that—”

“Leland Reed,” Miss Channing said, the first time I’d ever heard her say his name.

Sarah smiled. “Yes, Mr. Reed. From Chatham School.”

Miss Channing let her eyes settle upon the painting. She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, a gesture which, months later, after I’d described it to Mr. Parsons, he forever called “a lover’s sigh.”

CHAPTER 10

I was still thinking of Miss Channing’s drawing a few minutes later when I brought my car to a halt in front of Dalmatian’s Cafe. It had long been my favorite place in Chatham, not only because it had been the place where the boys of Chatham School had sometimes gathered after a game or on the weekends, but because it had pretty much remained unchanged from that now-distant time. The grill and counter were still in the same place; so were the booths by the window. Even the old rusty plow blade that Mrs. Winthrop, the cafe’s first owner, claimed her great-grandfather had used to break ground on their family farm in 1754 still hung on the back wall, though now hemmed in by bright neon signs hawking beer and soft drinks.

I took my usual seat in the booth farthest from the door, the one that nestled in a corner by the window, and from which I could look out and watch the village’s activities. And without warning I saw Dr. Craddock pull up in front of our Myrtle Street house just as he had on that night so long ago, driving the sleek black sedan in which he paid house calls in the twenties, saw him as he walked through the rain to where my father stood gloomily on the porch. The doctor had been dressed in a black suit, and had taken off his hat as he came up the stairs, his question delivered almost like a plea. I’m sorry to trouble you, Arthur, but could we talk about the little girl?

And as I sat there hearing the doctor’s voice, time reversed itself, old buildings replacing more recent ones, the blue pavement of Main Street suddenly buried beneath a stretch of earth marked by both wooden wagon wheels and the narrow rubber tread of clanging Model A’s.

Far in the distance I saw an old iron bell materialize out of the motionless air of the long-empty bell tower of what had once been Chatham School, then begin to move, as if it had been pushed by an invisible hand, its implacable toll reverberating over the buildings and playing fields of Chatham School summoning us to our classes in the morning, and releasing us from them in the afternoon, ringing matins and vespers with an authority and sense of purpose that had little diminished from the time of monks and kings.

And then, as if from some high aerie where I sat perched above them, I saw the boys pour out of the great wooden doors at the front of the school, sweep down its wide cement stairs, and fan out into the surrounding streets, myself among them, the gray school jacket now draped over my shoulders, its little shield embroidered on the front pocket, along with the single phrase, Veritas et Virtus, truth and virtue, the words my father had long ago selected as the motto of Chatham School.

It was a Friday afternoon in late November, around three weeks after I’d taken Sarah to Miss Channing’s cottage for her first reading lesson. By then Sarah and I had become somewhat closer, she no longer simply a servant girl, I no longer simply the son of her master. Her yearning to make something of herself fired my own emerging vision of living an artist’s life, a life lived “on the run,” as Jonathan Channing had called it, and whose vast ambitions Sarah’s own great hope seemed to mirror in some way.

We were on our way to the lighthouse that afternoon, Sarah in a cheerful mood, strolling almost gaily over a carpet of red and yellow leaves, Sarah with a new purse she’d bought at a village shop, I with my sketchbook tucked firmly beneath my arm.

“I just want you to look at them before I show them to Miss Channing,” I told her as we strode across the street, then onto the broad yard that swept out from the whitewashed base of the lighthouse. “And if they’re bad, Sarah, I want you to tell me so. I don’t want Miss Channing to see them if they’re bad.”

Sarah flashed me a smile. “Give them to me, Henry, and stop going on so about it,” she said, playfully snatching the sketchbook from my hand.

“It’s just pictures of places around here mostly,” I added as she opened it. “Just beaches and stuff.”

But to me they were anything but local scenes. For what they portrayed was not Chatham, but my view of it. As such, they were moody drawings of shrouded seascapes and gloomy woods, each done with an unmistakable intensity, everything oddly torn and twisted, as if I’d begun with an ordinary scene in mind, some commonplace beach or village lane, then dipped it in black ink and put it through a grinder.

And yet, for all their adolescent excess, they’d had a certain sense of balance and proportion, the intricate bark of a distant tree, the grittiness of beach sand, drawings that suggested not only the look of things, but their physical textures. There was a vision of the world in them as well, a feeling for the claustrophobia of life, so that even the vistas, wide though they seemed, appeared pinched and walled in at the same time, the earth, for all its spinning vastness, no more than a single locked room from which nothing seemed able to escape.

Sarah remained silent while she flipped through my sketchbook. Then, with a quick flick of her hand, she closed it, a wry smile on her lips.

“I like them, Henry,” she said happily. “I like them a lot.”

She no doubt expected a smile to burst onto my face, but nothing of the sort happened. Instead, I stared at her with a decidedly troubled look. “But do you think Miss Channing will like them?” I demanded.

She looked at me as if the question were absurd. “Of course she will,” she said. She gave me a slight nudge. “Besides, even if Miss Channing didn’t like your drawings, all she’d want to do is teach you how to make them better.”

“All right,” I said, drawing the sketchbook from her hand as I got to my feet.

I walked a short distance away from her across the lighthouse grounds, then stopped and glanced back to where she remained seated on the little cement bench. “Thank you, Sarah,” I said.

She watched me closely, clearly sensing my insecurity, her teasing, carefree mood now entirely vanished. “Do you want me to come with you, Henry?”

I knew she’d read my mind. “Yes, I think I do.”

“All right,” Sarah said, coming to her feet with a sweep of her skirt. “But only as far as the courtyard, not into Miss Channing’s room. When you show her your drawings, you should do it on your own.”

I’d expected to find her alone, doing what she normally did at the end of the school day, washing the tables and putting away her supplies. It was only alter I’d reached the door of her classroom and peered inside that I realized she was not. Even so, I don’t know why it surprised me so, finding Mr. Reed in her room, leaning casually against the front table while she stood a few feet away, her back to him, washing the blackboard with a wet cloth. After all, I’d often seen them arriving at school in the morning and leaving together in the afternoon, Mr. Reed behind the wheel of his sedan, Miss Channing seated quite properly on the passenger side. I’d seen them together at other times as well, strolling side by side down the school corridor, or sitting on the steps, having lunch, usually with a gathering of other teachers, yet slightly off to the side, a mood surrounding them like an invisible field, so that even in the midst of others, they seemed intimately alone.

“Hello,” Miss Channing said when she turned away from the blackboard and saw me standing at the door. “Please, come in, Henry.”

I came into her room with a reluctance and sense of intrusion that I still can’t entirely explain, unless, from time to time, we are touched by the opposite of aftermath, feel not the swirling eddies of a retreating wave, but the dark pull of an approaching one.

“Hello, Henry,” Mr. Reed said.

I nodded silently as I came down the aisle, sliding the sketchbook back slightly, trying to conceal it.

“I thought you’d be at the game,” Mr. Reed said, referring to the lacrosse match that had been scheduled for that same afternoon. “It’s against New Bedford Prep, you know.” He glanced toward Miss Channing. “Traditionally, New Bedford Prep has been our most dreaded opponent.”

I said nothing, tormented now with second thoughts about showing my drawings to Miss Channing since Mr. Reed would be there to see them too. I’m not sure I would have shown them at all had not Miss Channing’s eyes drifted down to the sketchbook beneath my arm.

“Did you bring that for me?” she asked.

She could see my reluctance to hand it over. To counteract it, she smiled and said, “You know, my father used to stand me in front of a bare wall. He’d say, ‘Look closely, Libby. On that wall there is a great painting by someone who was afraid to show it.’ If no one ever sees your work, Henry, then what’s the point of doing it at all? Let’s see what you’ve done.”

I drew the sketchbook from beneath my arm and handed it to her.

She placed it on the table and began to turn the pages, studying one drawing at a time, commenting from time to time, mentioning this detail or that one, how the trees appeared to bulge slightly, something in them trying to get out, or the way the sea tossed and heaved.

“They have a certain—I don’t know—a certain controlled uncontrol about them, don’t you think?” she asked Mr. Reed.

He nodded, his eyes on her. “Yes, I do.”

She drew in a long breath. “If we could only live that way,” she said, her eyes still on one of my drawings.

She’d said it softly, without undue emphasis, but I saw Mr. Reed’s face suddenly alter. “Yes,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper, yet oddly charged as well, as if he were responding not to an idle remark made in an open room, but to a note slipped surreptitiously beneath his chamber door.

I left Miss Channing’s room a few minutes later, reasonably satisfied with her response, but in other ways somewhat troubled and ill at ease, as if something had been denied me, a moment alone with her.

“I knew she’d like them,” Sarah said firmly when I told her what had happened.

She’d waited for me at the back of the school, the two of us now moving down its central corridor, other boys brushing past us, a few turning to get a better look at Sarah after she’d gone by.

Once outside, we returned to our little cement bench beside the lighthouse. From it we could see Chatham School just across the street.

“I wish I could leave here,” I said abruptly, almost spitefully, my mind turning from my drawings to the escape route they represented for me. Not art, as I know now, but an artist’s life as I then imagined it.

Sarah looked surprised by the depth of my contempt. “But you have everything, Henry. A family. Everything.”

I shook my head. “I don’t care. I hate this place.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere else, that’s all.”

She looked at me knowingly. “There are lots of places worse than Chatham,” she said.

It was then that Miss Channing and Mr. Reed came out the front door of the school and began strolling slowly toward the parking lot. Despite the formal distance they maintained, the fact that they at no point touched, there was something in the way they walked along together that drew my attention to them, called forth those first small suspicions that would later grow to monstrous size.

“I’ll bet they’d like to go someplace else too,” I said.

Sarah said nothing, but only turned toward the school and watched as Mr. Reed and Miss Channing continued toward Mr. Reed’s car. When they reached it, he opened the door for Miss Channing, waited until she’d gotten in, then closed it once again.

The car rumbled past us a few seconds later, Mr. Reed at the wheel as always, and Miss Channing seated beside the passenger door. A late afternoon chill had settled over the village by that time, and I noticed that she’d rolled her window up to shut it out. Her face, mirrored in the glass, seemed eerily translucent as the car swept by.

More than anything, I remember that she appeared to sit in a great stillness as the car drifted by. Just as she would some months later, after the verdict had been rendered, and she’d been hustled down the courthouse stairs and rushed into the backseat of a black patrol car. She’d sat next to the window on that occasion too, staring straight ahead as the car inched through the noisy, milling crowd, slowly picking up speed as it continued forward, bearing her away.

CHAPTER 11

I found that I couldn’t go directly to my office after leaving Dalmatian’s Cafe that morning. For there was yet another place that called to me even more darkly than Milford Cottage or Mr. Reed’s house or the silent reaches of Black Pond. For although the final act had occurred there, its tragic origins lay somewhere else, a different conspiracy entirely from the one Mr. Parsons felt so certain he’d unmasked in the courtroom the day I took the stand.

And so, after a second cup of coffee at Dalmatian’s Cafe, I walked back to my car, pulled out of the parking space, and headed up the steadily ascending coastal road that curved along the outerbank to Myrtle Street.

At the top of the bluff I wheeled to the right. The lighthouse gleamed in the bright morning air as I drove past it, a vast blue sky above, with only wisps of skirting clouds to suggest the tearing wind and rain that had rocked us during most of the preceding week.

Dolphin Hall rose just down the street from the lighthouse, and even at that early hour there were a couple of cars parked in its lot. One of them, a sleek BMW, bright red with thin lines of shimmering chrome, was parked beneath the same ancient oak that had once shaded the battered chassis of Mr. Reed’s old Model T.

I pulled in next to it and stopped. Through my windshield I could see the gallery a few yards away, its red brick portico little changed since the days when the building had housed the boys of Chatham School.

Other things had been altered, of course. The tall, rattling windows had been replaced by sturdy double paned glass, and a wide metal ramp now glided up the far right side of the cement stairs, granting access to the handicapped.

But more than any of these obvious changes, I noticed that a tall plaster replica of the lighthouse had been placed on the front lawn in almost exactly the spot where Miss Channing’s column of faces had briefly stood, my own face near the center of the column, my father’s near the bottom, where a circular bed of tulips had been planted.

On the day the school’s governing board ordered it battered down, my father had stood with his arms folded over his chest, listening to the ring of the hammer as it shattered the plaster faces one by one. Standing rigidly with his back to the small group of people who’d come to observe its destruction, clothed in his neatly pressed black suit, he’d watched it all silently and with complete dignity. It was only after it had been done, the faces gathered in a dusty pile, that he’d glanced back toward me, his head cocked at an angle that allowed the morning sun to touch his face, its brief glimmer caught in the tears of his eyes.

The cement walkway to the gallery had been replaced by a more attractive cobblestone, but the path itself was still as straight and narrow as before.

At the door, a small cardboard sign read simply WELCOME, so I opened the door and walked inside, entering what had once been Chatham School for the first time in all the many years that had passed since its closing.

From the foyer I could see the wide central corridor that had led from the front of the school all the way to the rear courtyard, the stairs that rose toward the second floor dormitory, and even the door of what had once been my father’s office, its brass knob reflecting the newly installed halogen lights.

Beside the front window there was a little table filled with information about the various exhibitors represented in the gallery. I reached for the one nearest me and moved down the corridor, more or less pretending to read it, acting quite unnecessarily like some secret agent who’d been sent from the past to bring back news from the present, inform the ghostly legions as to how it had turned out.

I’d gotten only a little way down the corridor before I was intercepted.

“Well, Mr. Griswald. Hello.”

I recognized the man who greeted me as Bill Kipling, the gallery’s owner, and whose grandfather, Joe Kipling, had once played lacrosse for Chatham School. Joe had been a lanky, energetic boy, later a town selectman and real estate baron, more recently an old man who’d swallowed handfuls of vitamins and food supplements before he’d finally died of liver cancer in a private hospital room in Hyannis.

“Well, what made you decide to drop by after all this time?” the younger Kipling asked cheerily.

“Just thinking about old times, I guess. When Chatham School was here.”

“My grandfather went to Chatham School, you know.”

“Yes, I remember him.”

And saying that, I saw Joe Kipling not as a boy rushing forward with a lacrosse stick raised in the air, but as he’d stood beside the gray column, a sledgehammer in his hand, swinging it fiercely at the plaster faces Miss Channing had fashioned, a layer of dust gathering upon the shoulders of his school jacket.

“My father loved Chatham School,” his grandson told me now.

“We all did.”

Some few minutes of small talk followed, then he left me to browse through the gallery undisturbed, knowing that I had not really come to see the pictures he’d hung from its walls, but to hear the shouts and laughter of the boys as they’d tumbled chaotically down the wide staircase at seven-thirty sharp, some fully dressed, others still looping their suspenders over their shoulders or pulling on their jackets, but always under the watchful eye of my father. For each morning he’d taken up his position at the bottom of the stairs, his arms folded over his chest like a Roman centurion, greeting each boy by name, then adding a quick “Work well, play well.” I could still remember how embarrassed I’d felt at such a scene each morning, the boys rushing by, trying so hard to please, to be what my father wanted them to be, sturdy, upright “good citizens.” At those times he’d appeared almost comical to me, a caricature of the Victorian schoolmaster, an artifact from that dead time, bloodless as a bone dug out of an ancient pit. Of all the mired and passionless things I did not wish to be, my father was chief among them. As for the “good life” about which he sometimes spoke, standing before the boys in his Ciceronian pose, it struck me as little more than a life lived without vitality or imagination, a life hardly worth living, and from which death could come only as a sweet release.

His office had faced the staircase, and its great mahogany door was still in place. Stepping up to it, I could almost hear him uttering the ominous words I’d overheard as I’d swept down the stairs that faced his office on that drizzly afternoon in May of 1927. The door had still been fully open when I’d begun to make my way from the upper landing, but he’d begun to close it, his attention so focused on the people already inside his office that he hadn’t seen me descending the stairs. “This is Mr. Parsons, the commonwealth attorney,” I’d heard him say as he stepped farther into his office, slowly drawing the door behind him.

I’d been able to glance inside the office and see a man in a dark suit, a homburg held in his hand. He stood in front of my father’s desk, a large cardboard box in the chair beside him. “Please sit down, Miss Channing,” I heard him say.

Through the narrowing space that remained open as I reached the bottom of the stairs, I could see Miss Channing standing stiffly before Mr. Parsons, her hands folded together at her waist, her hair in a tight bun. As the door closed, I heard her reply to him, her words spoken softly, but in a tone that struck me as deathly cold. “I prefer to stand,” she said.

The door to what had formerly been my father’s office now had a little sign tacked to it, one that read “Private,” so I could not go in. I stood, facing it, remembering that a completely different sign had once been there, one that had read “Arthur H. Griswald, Headmaster.”

My father had removed that sign himself, placed it in a shoe box, and kept it in the cellar of the little house we rented after leaving Chatham School. But it was not very difficult for me to imagine that it was still in place, and that beyond the door his desk was still there too, along with the crystal inkwell my mother had given him on their tenth anniversary, the ceremonial quill pen he’d used to sign important documents, even the brass lamp with the dark green shade that had given the room an indisputable authority.

I knew that a whole world had once held its ground in that small room, made what amounted to its last stand. How fully all of that had been visible in my father’s face the day he’d marched onto the front lawn of the school, then instructed Joe Kipling to take his place before Miss Channing’s carved column of faces. He’d paused a moment, his gaze lingering on the column, then turned to Joe and given the order with a single word: Begin.

I felt my eyes close against the awesome spectacle of that moment, the sound of the hammer as it slammed into the column, the severe and unsmiling faces of the people who watched as Joe Kipling pounded it into dust.

I turned away from the door. On either side, large rooms were filled with paintings of more or less modern design, the paint splattered upon the canvas or lathered over it in chaotic swirls, fragments of color pressed jaggedly one against another. I could only imagine how their disharmony would have offended my father, how much he would have preferred the idyllic scenes and passive landscapes he’d scrupulously selected for these same corridors during his tenure as headmaster, works governed by order and design, harmony and the laws of reason, a vision of life he’d striven to maintain at Chatham School … and failed.

Toward the rear of the corridor I stepped into the room that had once been Mr. Reed’s. Able to accommodate no more than ten or twelve student desks, its large windows looked out into the courtyard. Through them he had been able to see the little converted storeroom where Miss Channing taught. How often he must have glanced out those windows and caught her in his eyes, a slender young woman with raven black hair and light blue eyes, standing behind a sculpting pedestal or before an easel, spinning stories of fabled lands and tragic people while she worked with paint and clay. Although I never saw it happen, I’m sure that from time to time Miss Channing must have glanced toward her own window and caught Mr. Reed watching her from across the courtyard, at first through veils of autumn rain, then through swirls of windblown snow, and finally through the shimmering air of that final spring, their eyes now locked in a dreadful stare, a look as desperate and harrowing as the words I’d heard them speak: How do you want to do it? Without looking back.

∗ ∗ ∗

I didn’t remain in Mr. Reed’s classroom for very long. For I could feel a heat and sharpness in the air, as if it had begun to sizzle.

And so I turned and fled to the courtyard where the outbuilding that had once been Miss Channing’s classroom still stood, though it had long been converted into the gallery’s framing shop.

The door was open, and standing at its threshold I could see the wide counter that ran along the rear of the building, stacks of empty frames leaning against the wall behind it. Frame samples of various colors and materials—brass, wood, aluminum—hung from a large square of pressed board. To the right, where I’d once sat at the front of the room, a work space had been created, complete with a large table and circular saw. A layer of sawdust and wood chips coated the floor beneath the table, and a bright red metal toolbox rested alongside.

Clearly, of the several places I visited that day, it was Miss Channing’s room that had been most transformed. No trace remained of the tables and chairs where the boys had sat watching her sculpt and paint, nor of the sculpting pedestals and easels and canvases we’d used to fashion our own crude works of art; nor the cabinet where she’d returned the room’s modest supplies before joining Mr. Reed for their drive home each afternoon; nor even the portraits of Washington and Lincoln that had watched us from the room’s opposite walls, their faces stern but kindly, like two old-fashioned fathers.

And yet, for all that, I sensed Miss Channing’s presence more within that transformed and cluttered space than in any of the other places I’d revisited. And I could feel Mr. Reed as well, the two of them together as I had found them on that long-ago afternoon, she behind the front table, he at the far door, moving toward her irrevocably, his words spoken so softly that I’d barely been able to hear them: Because I love you, I can do it.

It was more than I could bear. And so I wheeled around and walked back through the courtyard and down the central corridor of the building, then swiftly out of it, like someone in flight from a surging fire.

At last I came to a halt at the little cement bench where Sarah and I had sat together years before, the lighthouse behind us, the school in front. In my mind I saw Miss Channing and Mr. Reed walk once again to the car beneath the oak, Mr. Reed open the door, Miss Channing slip inside, the car begin to move, turning out of the parking lot and onto Myrtle Street, finally drifting by me as it had that day so many years before, Miss Channing staring straight ahead, so silent and so still, with nothing but a dark strand of loosened hair to leave its mark upon her face.

I returned to my office, sat down at my desk, my eyes involuntarily drifting over to the archive my father had long ago assembled, perhaps as something to remind him of his tall, though without in the least knowing that it had been mine as well.

I rose and walked to the file cabinet beneath my father’s portrait. Glancing up at it, I heard his voice in old age, hung with the bleakness of his final years, perhaps even the deepest of its disappointments: So there’ll never be a wife, Henry? Never a child? My answer as stark as it had always been: No.

I turned away from the portrait, opened the cabinet, and pulled out the forms I would need to begin my work for Clement Boggs, already considering what the last phase of that work would inevitably require, the cruel lyrics of a dreadful song playing in my mind as I made my way back to my desk:Alice Craddock

Locked in a paddock

Where’s your daddy gone?

PART 3

CHAPTER 12

During the final years of his life, with my mother gone, and few means of passing the idle hours, my father took to walking through the countryside. I was a middle-aged bachelor by then, with little to engage me but my legal practice. And so I often accompanied him on his rambles, the two of us first driving to a particular spot, then setting off into the woods. Usually we went to Nickerson State Park, where the trails were easiest. But from time to time we would wander into some more remote area, park the car along the road, then follow a less well-defined path around a nearby hill or up a gently angled slope.

Most of these walks were routine affairs, my father talking quietly about whatever he’d read most recently, a book or magazine article that had briefly held his attention. The past, particularly his years at Chatham School, seemed nearly to have disappeared from his consciousness altogether.

Then, one afternoon only a year before his death, we found ourselves on a hilltop outside Chatham, the spires and roofs of the village in the distance, and down below, like a dark, sightless eye, the unruffled waters of Black Pond.

He remained silent for a time, but I could see that he was struggling to say something, release some pronouncement he’d long kept inside. It was a struggle that surprised me. For except for those times when my mother had insisted upon bringing up the subject, my father had seemed more than satisfied to let all thought of the Chatham School Affair sink unmourned into oblivion.

“So much death, Henry,” he said finally. “Down there on Black Pond. So much destruction.”

I saw bodies swirling in green water, small hands clawing at a strip of black rubber, a boat lolling in an empty sea, a middle-aged woman rocking on her front porch, her eyes vacant and emotionless, staring into nowhere, her hair a sickly yellow streaked with gray.

My father continued to peer down at the pond, his hands behind his back, two wrinkled claws. “I sometimes forget that I ever really knew them. Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, I mean.” He shook his head. “How about you, Henry? Do you ever think of them?”

I glanced about, recalling the slow trudge we’d all made up the hill that morning, Mr. Reed in the lead, Miss Channing just behind him. I could still feel the cold November air that had surrounded us, how we’d had to brush snowflakes from our eyes.

“I came up here with them,” I said. “To the top of this same hill. Sarah came with us too.” My eyes settled on the very place where we’d stood together and looked out over the pond. “It all seemed harmless at the time.”

I remembered Miss Channing and Mr. Reed strolling through Chatham, pausing to gaze in shop windows, or standing beside the fence at London Livery, Miss Channing stroking the muzzle of one of the horses. Once I’d come upon them in Warren’s Sundries, Mr. Reed with a model boat in his hand, turning it at various angles, pointing out its separate parts, the mast, the spinnaker, the fluttering sail, his words spoken quietly, bearing, at the time, no grave import. It wouldn’t be hard to do it.

My father’s eyes searched the near rim of the pond. The thick summer foliage blocked the spot I knew he was looking for.

“Why did you go to Milford Cottage so often?” he asked, still peering down the hillside.

“Because of Sarah. I went to her reading lessons.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.”

My father kept his tone matter-of-fact, but I knew how charged his feelings were, how many questions still plagued him. At last he asked one he’d kept inside for a long time. “Were you in love with her, Henry?”

I remembered the night I’d gone to her room, how gently she’d received me, her eyes shy and downcast, her Body beneath a white nightgown, a satin ribbon dangling just above her chest. “She was a lovely girl,” I said. “And living in our house the way she did, I might have—”

“I wasn’t talking about Sarah,” my father said, interrupting me. “I was talking about Miss Channing.”

I heard rain batting against the windowpanes of Milford Cottage as it had that night, wind slamming at the screen door, saw candles burning in her bedroom, a yellow light pouring over her, the stillness in her eyes when she spoke. Will you do it, Henry? Then my reply, obedient as ever, Yes.

“I always thought that was the reason you took it so hard,” my father added. “Because you had a certain … feeling for Miss Channing.”

Her face dissolved in a haze of yellow light, and I saw her as she’d appeared the day we’d stood there on the hill, snow clinging to her hair and gathered along the shoulders of her long blue coat. “I wanted her to be free,” I said.

“To do what?”

“Live however she wanted to.”

He shook his head. “It didn’t turn out that way.”

“No, it didn’t.”

I felt my father’s arm settle on my shoulders, embrace me like a child. “Never forget, Henry,” he said, offering his final comment on the Chatham School Affair, “never forget that some part of it was good.”

I’m not sure I ever fully believed that, though I couldn’t deny that there’d been good moments, especially at the beginning. One of those moments had been the very day we’d all gone up the hill and stood together in the first snow of the season.

Sarah and I had walked to Milford Cottage that November morning, Sarah eager to get on with her lessons, confident that she would soon master the skills she needed to “better” herself, childlike in her enthusiasm, adult in her determination.

Not long after we’d left Chatham it had begun to snow, so that by the time we’d finally reached Milford Cottage we were cold and wet.

As we neared the cottage, I saw Miss Channing part the plain white curtains of one of its small windows and peer out. She was wearing a white blouse, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and her hair fell loosely over her shoulders. From the look on her face, I could tell that she was somewhat surprised to see us.

“You didn’t have to come, you know,” she called to us as she opened the door. “I would have understood that the weather—”

Sarah shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no, Miss Channing,” she said, “I wouldn’t think of missing a lesson.”

Miss Channing eased back into the cottage and motioned us inside. “Well, come in quickly, then,” she said. “You must be frozen stiff.”

We walked into the cottage, and I realized that it looked considerably different from when I’d last been inside. Some of Miss Channing’s older sketches had been replaced by more recent ones, quiet village scenes, along with intricate line drawings, beautifully detailed, of various leaves and vegetation she’d found in the surrounding woods, some of which now rested in a large glass vase on her mantel.

“You’ve made it very cozy inside the house here,” Sarah said. She glanced about the room, taking in other changes, the hooked rug in front of the fireplace, the bookshelf in the far corner, the small red pillows that rested against the wooden backs of the room’s two chairs. “You’ve made it look like a regular house,” she added, drawing her scarf from her head. “It’s quite grand, Miss Channing.” She lifted the basket she’d brought with her from Myrtle Street. “I brought a fruitcake for you. There’s a bit of spirits in it though.” Her mischievous smile flickered. “So we shouldn’t be having too much of it, or we won’t stay clearheaded, you know.”

Miss Channing took the cake and deposited it on the small table by the window. “We’ll have some after the lesson,” she said.

They got down to their lessons right away, Miss Channing opening the notebook Sarah had brought along, peering at the writing inside, evaluating it closely before commenting. “Good,” she said warmly. “Very good, Sarah.”

After that they went to work in the usual way, Miss Channing writing short, simple sentences which Sarah then read back to her. From my place in a chair not far away, I could see how well they got along, how much Sarah admired Miss Channing, perhaps even dreamed of being like her, “a fine lady,” as she’d always said.

I suppose it was something in that “fineness” that made me take out my sketchbook that morning and begin to draw Miss Channing, concentrating on the way she leaned forward, her head cocked slightly, her hair falling in a dark wave across her shoulders. I found that I could capture her general appearance, but that there was something else I couldn’t get, the way her eyes sometimes darkened, as if a small light had gone off behind them, and which Mr. Parsons later described as “sinister,” the very word he used at her trial.

She was still working with Sarah when I heard a car coming down Plymouth Road, its engine rattling chaotically as it slid to a halt in the driveway of the cottage.

Miss Channing rose, walked to the window, and looked out.

“We have a guest,” she said. There was a hint of excitement in her voice, something Sarah must have heard too, for her eyes swept over to me with a quizzical expression in them.

By then Miss Channing had walked to the door and opened it, a gust of wind sweeping her black hair across her face.

“Well, good morning,” she called, waving her arm. She turned toward Sarah and me. “It’s Mr. Reed,” she said.

I walked to the window. At the edge of the yard I could see Mr. Reed as he got out of his car. He was wearing a heavy wool coat, brown boots, and a gray hat he’d pulled somewhat raffishly to the left. He waved to Miss Channing, then came tramping down the walkway, the snow nearly an inch deep by then.

“You’re just in time for fruitcake,” Miss Channing told him as he neared the door.

“Fruitcake,” Mr. Reed said. “Well, it’s certainly the right weather for it.” For a moment he stood on the threshold of the cottage, facing Miss Channing from the bottom of the stairs, his eyes lifted toward her, gazing at her. “I wanted to—” he began, then stopped when he saw Sarah and me inside the cottage. “Oh, I see you have company,” he said, his manner now stiffening slightly.

“Yes, I do,” Miss Channing said. “Sarah’s here for her reading lesson. She made the fruitcake I mentioned.”

Mr. Reed appeared at a loss as to what he should do next, whether he should come into the cottage or leave immediately. “Well, I wouldn’t want to disturb Sarah’s lesson,” he said.

“No, no. We’ve just finished it,” Miss Channing told him. She stepped back into the room. “Please, come in.”

Mr. Reed hesitated a moment, but then came into the cottage and took a seat by the window as Sarah and Miss Channing disappeared into the kitchen to serve the cake.

For a time Mr. Reed said nothing. I could tell that my presence disturbed him. Perhaps at that time he thought me an informer, certain that I’d rush back to Chatham, tell my father about his visit to Miss Channing’s cottage. Then he glanced at me with a certain apprehensiveness I’d never seen in him before. “Well, Henry, are you enjoying your classes this year?”

“I guess so,” I answered.

He smiled thinly and returned his attention to the window.

He was still staring out of it a few seconds later, when Miss Channing and Sarah came back into the room. Miss Channing placed the cake on the table in front of him and began to cut. The first piece went to Sarah, the second to Mr. Reed. Then, turning to me, she said, “Would you like a large piece?”

I shook my head, trying to be polite.

She smiled, no doubt sensing my hunger, then spoke a line that life forever proves to be a lie. “Take as much as you want, Henry. There is plenty.”

A few minutes later the four of us walked out of Miss Channing’s cottage, swung to the left, and followed Mr. Reed as he led us down Plymouth Road, then up a gentle slope to a clearing at the top of a nearby hill.

Once there, we sat down on a fallen tree, the four of us in a single line, facing back down the hill toward Black Pond. The snow had thickened by then; a layer of white gathered on the leafless trees and settled onto the brim of Mr. Reed’s hat.

“A snow like this,” Miss Channing said. “The flakes so small, but so many of them. Like confetti.”

Mr. Reed smiled at her. “Is that how you’d paint it, Elizabeth? As confetti?”

She smiled, but didn’t answer him. Instead, she walked a few paces farther on, while Mr. Reed remained in place, watching her as she reached the crest of the hill, then stood, peering out over the pond. For a moment she remained very still, as if lost in thought. Then she lifted her arms and drew them around her shoulders. It was a gesture made against the cold, quite unselfconsciously, I think, but one Mr. Reed must have experienced as a vision so beautiful and so brief that it remained with him forever after that, set the mark against which everything else would ultimately be measured.