The Chatham School Affair

I arrived at his house a few minutes later. His car was sitting in the driveway, but the yard was deserted, and I heard no sounds coming from the house.

Then I saw her, Mrs. Reed walking toward me from the old gray shed that stood in the distance, her body lumbering heavily across the weedy ground, so deep in thought she did not look up until she’d nearly reached the front steps of the house.

“Good morning, Mrs. Reed,” I said.

She stopped abruptly, startled, her hand rising to shield her eyes from the bright morning sun, gazing at me with a strange wariness, as if I were a shadow she’d suddenly glimpsed in the forest or something she’d caught lurking behind a door.

“I’m Henry Griswald,” I reminded her. “The boy you—”

“I know who you are,” she said, her chin lifting with a sudden jerk, as if in anticipation of a blow. “You helped him with the boat.”

I could hear the accusation in her voice, but decided to ignore it. “Is Mr. Reed home?”

The question appeared to throw her into distress. “No,” she answered in a voice now suddenly more agitated. “He’s out somewhere, walking.” Her eyes shot toward the pond, the little white cottage that rested on its far bank. “I don’t know where he is.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No, I don’t,” she answered, her manner increasingly tense, brittle, a single reddish eyebrow arching abruptly, then lowering slowly, like a dying breath. “Why are you here?” she asked, peering at me with a grave distress, as if I were diving toward her from a great height, a black bird in fatal descent. “What did you come here for?”

“I just wanted to see Mr. Reed.”

Another thought appeared to strike her, her mind now twisting in a new direction.

“Is he running away?” she demanded, her eyes upon me with a savage spite, her voice very thin, a cutting wire drawn taut. “Leaving me and Mary?” She tilted her head to the left, toward the pond. “Running away with her?”

I shrugged. “I … don’t …”

Something seemed to ignite in her mind. “He wouldn’t be the first, you know. The first one to leave me.”

I said nothing.

She was watching me apprehensively, as if I were not a boy at all, but someone sent to do her harm, my fingers wrapped not around a frail glass necklace, but a length of gray rope, the steel grip of a knife.

“I just wanted to see Mr. Reed,” I told her. “I’ll come back some other time.”

She stared at me angrily. “You tell him I’ll not have it again,” she said loudly, distractedly, as if she were speaking to someone in the distance. “He said he would be home.”

“I’m sure he’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.

She remained silent, locked in what now seemed an impenetrable distraction, her eyes drifting, unhinged, so that they seemed unable to focus on anything more definite than the old apron her fingers now began to squeeze and jerk.

Looking at her at that moment, I could not imagine that she would ever embrace Mr. Reed again, draw him into her bed, or even go walking with him through the woods on a snowy afternoon. How could he possibly live the rest of his life with her, eating a milky chowder while she stared at him from the other side of the table, babbling about the price of lard, but thinking only of betrayal?

Suddenly, the alternative to such a fate presented itself more forcefully than it ever had, and I saw Miss Channing rushing from the lighthouse, Mr. Reed at her side, the two of them making their way down the coastal road, through the village streets, until they reached the Elizabeth, its broad sails magnificently unfurled, the trade winds waiting like white stallions to carry them away.

It was then, in a moment of supreme revelation, that the answer came to me. Someone else had to do it. Someone else had to set them free. Miss Channing and Mr. Reed were helplessly imprisoned in the dungeon of Chatham School, my father its grim warden, Mrs. Reed the guardian of the gate. It was up to me to be the real hero of their romance, turn the iron key, pull back the heavy door.

And so I leveled my eyes upon Mrs. Reed and said, “Let them go, Mrs. Reed. They want to be free.”

Her eyes froze, everything in her face tightening, her features now a twisted rope. “What did you say?”

“They want to be free,” I repeated, now both astonished and emboldened by my own daring.

She stared at me stonily. “Free?”

I glanced toward the pond. In the distance I could see the willow behind Milford Cottage, the pier that stretched out over the water. I thought of the moment when Miss Channing had pressed a trembling hand against Mr. Reed’s cheek, the look in his eyes as he’d felt her touch.

It was a vision that urged me onward with a ruthless zeal. “Yes,” I said coldly. “To be free. That’s what they want. Miss Channing and Mr. Reed.”

For a moment she stared at me silently, her eyes now strangely dull, her features flat and blunted, as if they’d been beaten down by a heavy rod. Then her body stiffened, like someone jerked up by a noose, and she whirled around and bolted away from me, calling out as she did so, Mary, come inside, her voice pealing through the surrounding woods as she swept up the stairs and disappeared into the house, a little girl darting around its far corner only seconds later, climbing up the wooden stairs, laughing brightly as she vanished into its unlighted depths.

Miss Channing and Sarah were inside Milford Cottage when I arrived there a few minutes later, standing very erectly in their midst, still in awe of the great thing I felt sure I had just accomplished.

Sarah had obviously waited for my arrival before giving Miss Channing her present. “This is for you,” she said, smiling delightedly, as she brought the shawl from her basket.

“Thank you,” Miss Channing said, taking it from her gently, as if it were an infant. “It’s beautiful, Sarah.”

We were all standing in the front room of the cottage. Many of Miss Channing’s belongings were now packed into the same leather traveling cases I’d brought there nearly a year before, along with a few boxes in which she’d placed a small number of things she’d acquired since then. In my mind I saw myself loading them onto Mr. Reed’s boat, then standing at the edge of the pier, waving farewell as they drifted out of the moonlit marina, never to be seen again at Chatham School.

“I have something for you too,” Miss Channing said to Sarah. She walked into her bedroom, then came out with the African bracelet in her hand, its brightly colored beads glinting in the light. “For all your work,” she said as she handed it to Sarah.

Sarah’s eyes widened. “Oh, thank you, Miss Channing,” she said as she put it on.

Miss Channing nodded crisply. “Well, we should start our lesson now,” she said.

They took their seats at the table by the window, Sarah arranging her books while Miss Channing read over the writing she’d assigned the Sunday before.

I left them to their work, strolled to the edge of the pond. In the distance I could see Mr. Reed’s house half concealed within a grove of trees, his car sitting motionless in the driveway.

I was still at the water’s edge an hour later, when I saw Sarah and Miss Channing come walking toward me, Sarah chatting away, as she often did at the end of a lesson.

“Where is it you will be going now?” she asked Miss Channing as they strolled up to me.

Miss Channing’s answer came more quickly than I’d expected, since I hadn’t heard anyone in my household mention her intentions.

“Boston, perhaps,” she said. “At least for a while.”

Sarah smiled excitedly. “Now, that’s a fine city,” she said. “And what do you plan to be doing once you’re settled in?”

Miss Channing shrugged. “I don’t know.” It was a subject that appeared to trouble her. To avoid it, she said to me, “Henry, I have some books from the school library. Would you mind taking them back for me?”

“Of course, Miss Channing.”

She turned and headed toward the cottage, walking so briskly that I had to quicken my pace in order to keep up with her. Once inside, she retrieved a box of books from her bedroom. “Henry, I’d like to apologize for the state I was in when you came to the cottage the other night,” she said as she handed it to me.

“There’s nothing to apologize for, Miss Channing,” I told her, smiling inwardly at how much she might soon have to thank me for, the fact that I’d taken the fatal step, done what neither she nor Mr. Reed had been able to do, struck at the heavy chain that bound them to Chatham.

After that we walked out of the cottage to stand together near the willow. It was nearly noon by then, quiet, windless, the long tentacles of the tree falling motionlessly toward the moist ground. To the right I could see Sarah moving toward the old wooden pier. At the end of it she hesitated for a time, as if unsure of its stability, then strolled to its edge, a slender, erect figure in her finest dress.

“I hope you’ll look after Sarah,” Miss Channing said, watching her from our place beside the willow. “Encourage her to keep at her studies.”

“I don’t think she’ll need much encouragement,” I said, glancing out across the pond toward Mr. Reed’s house, where I suddenly saw Mrs. Reed as she rushed down the front steps, dragging Mary roughly behind her. At the bottom of the stairs she paused a moment, her head rotating left and right, like someone looking for answers in the air. Then she wheeled to the left and headed toward the shed, moving swiftly now, Mary trotting along beside her.

For a time they disappeared behind a wall of foliage. Then Mrs. Reed emerged again, marching stiffly toward the car. She’d begun to pull away when I glanced at Miss Channing and saw that she was staring across the pond, observing the same scene.

“She’s crazy,” I said. “Mrs. Reed.”

Miss Channing’s eyes shot over to me. She started to speak, then stopped herself. I could see something gathering in her mind. I suppose I expected her to add some comment about Mrs. Reed, but she said nothing of the kind. “Be like your father, Henry,” she said. “Be a good man, like your father.”

I stared at her, shocked by the high regard she’d just expressed for my father, and searching desperately for some way to lower her regard for him. But I found that I could discover nothing that, in saying it, would not lower Miss Channing’s regard for me as well. Because of that, we were still standing silently at the water’s edge when we suddenly heard a car approaching from Plymouth Road, its engine grinding fiercely, the sound rising steadily as it neared us, becoming at last a shuddering roar.

I turned to the right and saw it thunder past us in a thick cloud of white dust, a wall of black hurling down the weedy embankment, its ancient chassis slamming left and right as it plunged at what seemed inhuman speed toward the rickety wooden pier.

For a single, appalling instant, I felt utterly frozen in place, watching like a death mask fixed to a lifeless column until Miss Channing’s scream set the world in motion again, and I saw Sarah wheel around, the car then jerk to the right, as if to avoid her, but too late, so that it struck her with full force, her body tumbling over the left side of the hood and into the water, the car plowing past her, then lifting off the end of the pier like a great black bird, heavy and wingless as it plummeted into the depths of Black Pond, then sank with a terrible swiftness, its rear tires still spinning madly, throwing silver arcs of water into the summer air.

We rushed forward at the same time, Miss Channing crashing into the water, where she sank down and gathered Sarah’s broken body into her arms. I ran to the edge of the pier and dove into the still wildly surging water.

When I surfaced again only a minute or so later, drenched and shaken, my mind caught in a dreadful horror of what I had just seen, I found Miss Channing slumped at the edge of the pond, Sarah cradled in her arms.

“It’s Mrs. Reed,” I told her as I trudged out of the water.

She looked at me in shock and grief. “Is she dead?”

My answer came already frozen in that passionlessness that would mark me from then on. “Yes.”

CHAPTER 26

I’ve never been able to remember exactly what happened after I came out of the water. I know that I ran over to where Miss Channing now sat, drenched and shivering, on the bank, with Sarah’s head resting in her lap. I remember that Sarah’s eyes were open as I approached her, blank and staring, but that I saw them close slowly, then open again, so that I felt a tremendous wave of hope that she might be all right.

At some point after that I took off down Plymouth Road, soaking wet, with my hair in my eyes, and flagged down the first passing car. There was an old man behind the wheel, a local cranberry farmer as I later found out, and he watched in disbelief as I sputtered about there having been an accident on Black Pond, that he had to get a doctor, the police, that he had to please, please hurry. I remember how he sprang into action suddenly, his movements quick and agile, as if made young by a desperate purpose. “Be right back, son,” he promised as he sped away, the old gray car thundering toward Chatham.

After that I rushed back to Milford Cottage. Miss Channing was still where she’d been when I left her, Sarah cradled in her arms, alive, though unconscious, her eyes closed, her breath rattling softly, a single arrowhead of white bone protruding from the broken skin of her left elbow, but otherwise unmarked.

We sat in an almost unbroken silence with nothing but the lapping of the pond and an occasional rustle of wind through the trees to remind us that it was real, that it had actually happened, that Sarah had been struck down, and that beneath the surface of Black Pond, Mrs. Reed lay curled over the steering wheel of the car.

Dr. Craddock was the first to arrive. His sleek new sedan barreled down Plymouth Road, then noisily skidded to a halt in front of Milford Cottage. He leaped from the car, then bolted toward us, a black leather bag dangling from his hand.

“What happened?” he asked as he knelt down, grabbed Sarah’s arm, and began to feel for her pulse.

“A car,” I blurted out. “She was hit by a car.”

He released Sarah’s arm, swiftly opened his bag, and pulled out a stethoscope. “What car?” he asked.

I saw Miss Channing’s eyes drift toward the pond as she waited for my answer.

“It’s in the water,” I said. “The car’s in the water. It went off the pier.”

Dr. Craddock gave me a quick glance as he pressed the tympanum against Sarah’s chest. “And this young woman was driving it?”

“No,” I told him. “There’s someone in the car.”

I saw the first glimmer of that astonished horror that was soon to overtake our village settle like a gray mist upon his face.

“It’s a woman,” I added, unable to say her name, already trying to erase her from my memory. “She’s dead.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He returned the stethoscope to the bag, then brought out a hypodermic needle and a vial of clear liquid. “How about you, are you all right?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

He looked at Miss Channing. “And you?” he asked as he pierced the vial with the needle, then pressed its silver point into Sarah’s arm.

“I’m all right,” Miss Channing said, her features now hung in that deep, strangely impenetrable grief that would forever rest upon her face.

“The woman in the car,” Dr. Craddock said. “Who is she?”

“Abigail Reed,” Miss Channing answered. Then she looked down at Sarah and drew back a strand of glossy wet hair. “And this is Sarah Doyle,” she said.

Sarah had already been taken away when Captain Lawrence P. Hamilton of the Massachusetts State Police arrived at Milford Cottage. He was a tall man, with gray hair and a lean figure, his physical manner curiously graceful, but with an obvious severity clinging to him, born, perhaps, of the dark things he had seen.

Miss Channing and I were standing beside the cottage when he arrived, the once-deserted lawn now dotted with other people, the village constable, the coroner, two of Chatham’s four selectmen, the tiny engine of local officialdom already beginning to crank up.

Captain Hamilton was not a part of that local establishment, as every aspect of his bearing demonstrated. There was something about him that suggested a breadth both of authority and of experience that lay well beyond the confines of Chatham village, or even of Cape Cod. It was in the assuredness of his stride as he walked toward us, the command within his voice when he spoke, the way he seemed to know the answers even before he posed the questions.

“You’re Henry Griswald?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

He looked at Miss Channing. “You live here at the cottage, Miss Channing?”

She nodded mutely and gathered her arms around herself as if against a sudden chill.

“I have most of the details,” Captain Hamilton said. “About the accident, I mean.” His eyes shifted toward the pond. A tractor had been backed to its edge, and I could see a man walking out into the water, dressed in a bathing suit, a heavy chain in his right hand.

“We’re going to pull the car out now,” Captain Hamilton told us.

The man in the water curled over and disappeared beneath the surface of the pond, his feet throwing up small explosions of white foam.

“There’s a husband, I understand,” Captain Hamilton said. “Leland Reed?”

Odd though it seems to me now, I had not thought of Mr. Reed at all before that moment, nor of the other person Captain Hamilton mentioned almost in the same breath.

“And there’s a little girl, I’m told. A daughter. Have you seen her?”

“No.”

“Could she have been in the car?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Well, nobody seems to be at home over there,” Captain Hamilton said, nodding out across the pond. “Do you have any idea where Mr. Reed and the little girl might be?”

I remembered the last thing I’d seen at Mr. Reed’s house, Mrs. Reed bolting across the lawn, Mary trotting at her side, both of them headed for the old gray shed.

“I think I know where she is,” I said.

Captain Hamilton appeared surprised to hear it. “You do?”

“In the shed,” I answered.

“What shed?”

“There’s a shed about a hundred and fifty yards or so from the house.”

Captain Hamilton watched me closely. “Would you mind showing it to me, Henry?”

I nodded. “All right,” I said, though the very thought of returning to Mr. Reed’s house sent a dreadful chill through me.

Captain Hamilton glanced at Miss Channing, then touched the brim of his hat. “We’ll be talking again,” he said as he took my arm and led me away.

Moments later, as he would testify the following August, Captain Hamilton and I made our way along the edges of Black Pond. The old shed stood in a grove of trees, its door tightly closed, locked from the outside with a large, rusty eyebolt.

Only a few feet away we heard a sound coming from inside. It was low and indistinct, a soft whimper, like a kitten or a puppy.

“Step back, son,” Captain Hamilton said when we reached the door.

I did as he told me, waiting a short distance away from the shed as he opened the door and peered in. “Don’t be afraid,” I heard him say as he disappeared inside it. Seconds later he stepped back out into the light, now with Mary in his arms, her clothes drenched with her own sweat, her long blond hair hanging in a tangle over her shoulders, her blue eyes staring fearfully at Captain Hamilton, asking her single question in a soft, uncomprehending voice—Where’s my mama gone?—and which she would hear answered forever after in a cruel school-yard song:Into Black Pond

Is where she’s gone

Drowned by a demon lover

Mr. Reed’s car had already been dragged from the pond when Captain Hamilton and I got back to Milford Cottage. Mrs. Reed’s body had been taken from it by then, transported to Henson’s Funeral Parlor, as I later learned, where it was placed on a metal table and covered with a single sheet.

Miss Channing and I were standing near the cottage when my father arrived. He looked very nearly dazed as he moved toward us.

“Dear God, is it true, Henry?” he asked, staring at me.

I nodded.

He looked at Miss Channing, and in that instant I saw a terrible dread sweep into his face, a sense that there were yet darker things to be learned from Black Pond. Without a word he stepped forward, took her arm, and escorted her inside the cottage, where they remained for some minutes, talking privately, my father standing by the fireplace, Miss Channing in a chair, looking up at him.

They had come back outside again by the time Captain Hamilton strode up to the cottage. He nodded to my father in a way that made it obvious that they already knew each other.

“Your son’s a brave boy, Mr. Griswald,” Captain Hamilton said. “He tried his best to save her.”

I felt my eyes close slowly, saw Mrs. Reed staring at me through a film of green water.

“The car looks fine,” Captain Hamilton added, now talking to all of us. “No problem with the brakes or the steering column. No reason for an … accident. Henry, when the car went by, could you see Mrs. Reed behind the wheel?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t notice anything but the car.”

Captain Hamilton started to ask another question, but my father intervened.

“Why would that matter, Captain?” he asked. “Whether Henry saw Mrs. Reed or not?”

“Because if there was nothing wrong with the car, then we begin to wonder if there was something wrong with the person driving it.” He shrugged. “I mean something like a seizure or a heart attack, some reason for Mrs. Reed to lose control the way she did.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Captain Hamilton turned his attention to Miss Channing. “This young woman, Sarah Doyle. Did Mrs. Reed know her?”

Miss Channing shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Captain Hamilton appeared to turn this over in his mind, come to some conclusion about it before going on to his next thought. “And what about you, Miss Channing? Did Mrs. Reed know you?”

“Only slightly.”

“Had she ever visited you here at the cottage?”

“No.”

The captain’s eyes drifted toward the road, remained there briefly, then returned to Miss Channing. “Well, if Mrs. Reed didn’t know you, why would she have been coming this way?” he asked her. “It’s a dead end, you see. So if she didn’t have any business with you, Miss Channing, then why would she have been headed this way at all?”

Miss Channing replied with the only answer available to her. “I don’t know, Captain Hamilton,” she said.

With that, my father suddenly stepped away, tugging me along with him. “I have to get my son home now,” he explained. “He needs a change of clothes.”

Captain Hamilton made no attempt to stop us, and within a few seconds we were in my father’s car. It was the middle of the afternoon by then, the air impossibly bright and clear. As we backed away, I saw Captain Hamilton tip his hat to Miss Channing, then step away from her and head out toward the pier, where, at the very end of it, I could see Mr. Parsons facing out over the water, clothed in his dark suit, his homburg set firmly on his head.

CHAPTER 27

Once we got back home, my father told me to change quickly and come downstairs. Sarah had been taken to Dr. Craddock’s clinic, he said, and all of us were to come to her bedside as soon as possible. I did as I was told, pulling off clothes that had once been soaked through but were now only damp, then rushed back downstairs to find my father waiting edgily on the front porch, my mother already in the car.

“I knew something bad was coming,” she said as I climbed into the backseat of the car. “A woman knows.”

Dr. Craddock’s clinic was situated in a large house on the eastern end of Chatham. It had once been the home of a prosperous sea captain, but now functioned as what amounted to a small hospital, complete with private rooms on the second floor.

He met us at the door, dressed in a long white coat, a stethoscope dangling from his neck.

“How is she?” my father asked immediately.

“She’s still unconscious,” Dr. Craddock replied. “I think you should prepare for the worst.”

“Do you mean she may die?”

Dr. Craddock nodded. “She’s in shock. That’s always very dangerous.” He motioned us into the building, then up the stairs to where we found Sarah in her bed, her eyes still closed, but now motionless behind the lids, her breathing short and erratic.

“Oh, Lord,” my mother whispered as she stepped over to the bed. “Poor Sarah.”

Looking at her, it was hard to imagine that she was in such peril. Her face was unmarked and lovely, like a sleeping beauty, her long black hair neatly combed, as I found out later, by Dr. Craddock himself. A gesture that has always struck me as infinitely kind.

My father moved to touch her cheek, then drew back his hand and turned toward Dr. Craddock. “When will you know if she’s … if she’s going to be all right?”

“I don’t know,” Craddock answered. “If there’s no brain injury, then it’s possible she could—” He stopped, clearly unwilling to offer unfounded hope. “I’ll know more in the next few hours.”

“Please let me know if there are any changes, or if there’s anything I can do,” my father said.

Dr. Craddock nodded. “How long has she been with you?”

“Nearly two years,” my father answered. He looked down at her tenderly. “Such a lovely child. Bright. Ambitious. She was learning to read.”

Watching her from where I stood directly beside the bed, it was hard to imagine that only a few hours before she’d been so fully alive, so proud of the progress she’d made in her lessons with Miss Channing, drawing the African bracelet onto her wrist as if it were an emblem of her newfound mastery. Nothing had ever made life seem so tentative to me, so purely physical, and therefore utterly powerless to secure itself against the terrible assaults of accident or illness or even the invisible deadliness of time. It was just a little point of light, this life we harbored, just a tiny beam of consciousness, frail beyond measure, brief and unsustainable, the greatest lives like the smallest ones, delicately held together by the merest thread of breath.

We returned home that afternoon in an icy silence, my mother in the front seat of the car, fuming darkly, my father with his eyes leveled on the road, no doubt trying to fix this latest catastrophe within his scheme of things, give it the meaning it deserved, perhaps even some imagined grace.

As for me, I found that I could not bear to think of what had happened on Black Pond, either to Sarah or to Mrs. Reed, could not bear to hold such devastation in my mind, envision Sarah’s shattered bones or the last hellish gasps of Mrs. Reed.

And so I concentrated only on Miss Channing, imagining her alone in her cottage or out wandering in the nearby woods. It seemed entirely unfitting that she should be left to herself under such circumstances. And so, as we neared Myrtle Street, I said, “What about Miss Channing? Do you think we should …”

“Miss Channing?” my mother blurted out, twisting around to face me.

“Yes.”

“What about her?”

“Well, she may be all alone. I was thinking that we might bring her …”

“Here?” my mother demanded sharply. “Bring her here? To our home?”

I glanced at my father, clearly hoping for some assistance, but he continued to keep his eyes on the road, his mouth closed, unwilling to confront the roaring flame of my mother’s rage.

“That woman will never set foot in our house again,” my mother declared. “Is that clear, Henry?”

I nodded weakly and said nothing else.

∗ ∗ ∗

The atmosphere in the house on Myrtle Street had grown so sullen by nightfall that I was happy to leave it. My father dropped me off in front of Dr. Craddock’s clinic, saying only that someone would relieve me at midnight.

The doctor met me at the door. He said that Sarah’s condition hadn’t changed, that she appeared reasonably comfortable. “There’s a nurse at the end of the corridor,” he added. “Call her if you notice Sarah experiencing any distress.”

“I will,” I told him, then watched as he moved down the stairs, got into his car and drove away.

Sarah lay in the same position as before, on her back, a sheet drawn up to her waist, her shattered arm in a plaster cast. In the light from the lamp beside her bed, her face took on a bloodless sheen, all its ruby glow now drained into a ghostly pallor.

I watched her a moment longer, touched her temple with my fingertips, then settled into the chair beside the window to wait with her through the night. I’d brought a book with me, some thick seafaring tale culled from the limited collection available from the school library. I would concentrate on it exclusively, I’d told myself as I’d quickly pulled it from the shelf, let it fill my mind to the brim, allow no other thoughts inside it.

But I’d gotten through only twenty pages or so when I saw someone emerge out of the dimly lighted hallway, tall and slender, her dark hair hung like a wreath around her face.

“Hello, Henry,” Miss Channing said.

I got to my feet, unable to speak, her presence like a splash of icy water thrown into my face, waking me up to what I’d done.

“How is she?”

I let the book drop onto my chair. “She hasn’t changed much since the … since …”

She came forward slowly and stood by the bed, peering down. She was wearing a plain white dress, the shawl Sarah had knitted for her draped over her shoulders. She watched Sarah silently for a time, then let her eyes drift over to where I continued to stand beside my empty chair. “Tell your father that I’d like to sit with Sarah tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes, Miss Channing.”

“For as long as she needs me.”

“I’ll tell him.”

She pressed her hand against the side of Sarah’s face, then turned and walked past me, disappearing from the room as quickly as she’d entered it.

I know that for the rest of that long night she remained alone in her cottage, no doubt staring at the old wooden pier as she sat in her chair by the window, the unlighted hearth only a few feet away, the ashes of Mr. Reed’s letters still resting in a gray heap where, three days later, Mr. Parsons would find them when he came to question her about what he called “certain things” he’d heard at Chatham School.

As for me, I remained at Sarah’s bedside, trying to lose myself in the book, but unable to shut out the sound of her breathing, the fact that as the hours passed, it grew steadily more faint. From time to time a soft murmur came from her, but I never saw any sign of the “distress” Dr. Craddock had warned me about. If anything, she appeared utterly at peace, so that I often found myself looking up from my book, imagining her unconsciousness, wondering if, locked so deeply within the chamber of herself, she could feel things unfelt by the rest of us, the slosh of her blood through the valves of her heart, the infinitesimal firings of her brain, perhaps even the movement of those tiny muscles Miss Channing had once spoken of, and which any true artist must come to understand.

And so I didn’t know until nearly midnight when Dr. Craddock came into the room, walked over to her bed, took hold of her wrist, held it briefly, then released it, shaking his head as he did so, that whatever small sensations Sarah might have felt from the depths of that final privacy, she now could feel no more.

My father had already been told that Sarah had died when he came for me. As he trudged toward me from down the hallway he looked as if he were slogging through a thick, nearly impenetrable air. He drew in a long breath as he gathered me into his arms. “So sad, Henry,” he whispered, “so sad.”

We went directly home, drifting slowly through the center of the village, its shops closed, the streets deserted, no one stirring at all save for the few fishermen I saw as we swept past the marina. Glancing out over its dark waters, I could see Mr. Reed’s boat lolling peacefully. The Elizabeth’s high white mast weaved left and right, and for a moment, I remembered it all again, he and Miss Channing sitting together on the steps of Chatham School or on the bench beside the bluff, the cane like a line drawn between them. By spring, as I recalled, they’d begun to stroll through the village together, companionably, shoulder to shoulder, their love growing steadily by then. No, not growing, as I thought suddenly, but tightening around them like a noose, around Mrs. Reed and Sarah, too, and even little Mary, so that love no longer seemed a high, romantic thing to me at all, no longer a fit subject for our poems and for songs, nor even to be something we should seek.

And so I never sought it after that.

“We’ll have to make an announcement in school tomorrow morning,” my father told my mother as he came into the parlor. “The boys have to be told. And Captain Hamilton wants to question a few people tomorrow afternoon.”

My mother, working fiercely at her knitting, so much death burning in her mind, aid not seem in the least surprised by such a development. “No doubt there’ll be plenty of questions,” she said without looking up.

“Who do they want to question?” I asked my father.

“Me, of course,” he answered, now trying to pretend that it was merely some kind of police routine, a formality. “Some of the teachers.”

“They’ll want to talk to me as well,” my mother said, her eyes glowing hotly, clearly looking forward to the prospect.

“Why would they want to talk to you, Mildred?” my father asked.

“Because of what Mrs. Reed told me,” she answered, her eyes fixed on her knitting. “About that woman and Mr. Reed.”

For the first time, I saw my father bristle. “You’re not to be spreading tales, Mildred,” he told her.

My mother’s head shot up, her eyes narrowing fiercely. “Tales?” she said. “I’m not talking about tales, Arthur. I’m talking about what Mrs. Reed told me right here in this room, things she asked me to keep quiet about, and so I did … until now.”

“And what are these ‘things,’ may I ask?”

“She thought that there were bad things afoot,” my mother replied. “In the boathouse. Down at the marina. She thought there was a plot against her.”

Aghast, my father looked at her. “You can’t be serious.”

My mother stood her ground. “She thought he might murder her. Mr. Reed, I mean. She was terrified of that.”

“But Mrs. Reed wasn’t murdered, Mildred,” my father replied. “It was an accident.”

The needles stopped. My mother leaned forward, glaring at him. “She saw a knife, Arthur. A rope too. And they’d already mapped out where they were running to.” Her eyes narrowed menacingly. “And poison too.”

I felt my breath abruptly stop. “Poison?”

My mother nodded. “A bottle of arsenic. That’s what she saw. Right there with the knife and the rope.”

I could hardly believe my ears. “That was for the rats,” I told her. “In the boathouse. I helped Mr. Reed spread it myself.”

She appeared not to have heard me, or to have ignored what she heard. She eased herself back, the needles whipping frantically again. “Oh, there’re going to be questions all right,” she said. “Lots of questions, that’s for sure.”

I suppose it was at that moment that the further consequences of what had happened on Black Pond that afternoon first occurred to me. It would not end with Mrs. Reed dead behind the wheel or Sarah dead in her bed at Dr. Craddock’s clinic. Their deaths were but the beginning of more destruction still.

CHAPTER 28

Throughout that long night I floated in green water, saw Mrs. Reed’s head plunge toward me from out of the murky depths, her features pressed frantically against the glass, eyes wide and staring.

By morning I was exhausted, and I felt as if I could barely stand with the other boys when they assembled on the front lawn of Chatham School and listened as my father told them all he thought they needed to know about the previous day’s events, the fact that “a tragic accident” had occurred on Black Pond, that Mrs. Reed’s car had “gone out of control,” and that both she and Sarah Doyle were now dead.

As to the state of Mr. Reed and Miss Channing, my father told them nothing whatsoever, save that they remained in their respective homes, Mr. Reed tending to his daughter, Miss Channing continuing to prepare for her departure from Chatham. He did not know if either of them would return to Chatham School before it closed for the summer, and asked the boys to “keep them in their thoughts.”

∗ ∗ ∗

For most of the rest of that long day I stayed in my room, almost in an attitude of concealment, not wanting to meet my mother’s gaze as she stormed about the house, nor talk to any of the boys of Chatham School, since it was only natural that they’d ply me with questions about what had happened on Black Pond. Most of all, however, I wanted to avoid any chance meeting with Captain Hamilton, the way I felt when he looked at me, as if I were a small animal scurrying across a strip of desert waste, he the great bird diving toward me at tremendous speed and from an impossible height, looking only for the truth.

And so I was in my room when I heard a knock at the front door, cautiously peered downstairs and saw Mr. Parsons, his hat in his hand, facing my mother in the foyer. “Is Mr. Griswald here?” he asked.

“No. He’s at the funeral parlor,” my mother told him. “Making arrangements for Sarah.”

Mr. Parsons nodded. “Well, would you tell him to call me when he returns?”

My mother said she would, but added nothing else.

Mr. Parsons smiled politely and turned to leave. I thought my mother was going to let him go, that she had decided to hold her tongue. But abruptly, the door still open, Mr. Parsons halfway through it, she said, “Such a terrible thing, what happened to Sarah … and, of course … Mrs. Reed.”

Mr. Parsons nodded. “Yes, terrible,” he said, though with little emphasis, heading out the door, other matters clearly on his mind.

“She came to see me, you know,” my mother added. “Mrs. Reed did.”

Mr. Parsons stopped and turned to face her. “When was that, Mrs. Griswald?” he asked.

“Only a short time ago,” my mother answered. She paused a moment, then added with a grim significance, “She seemed quite troubled.”

“About what?”

“Family matters. Troubles in the family.”

Mr. Parsons eased himself back into the foyer. “Would you be willing to talk about that conversation, Mrs. Griswald?” he asked.

I saw my mother nod, then lead him into the parlor and close the door.

My father returned home an hour or so later. Mr. Parsons had left by then, but my mother made no attempt to conceal his visit, nor what she had told him during it. From the top of the stairs, crouched there like a court spy, I listened to her tell my father exactly what had transpired.

“I wasn’t making accusations,” my mother said. “Just speaking the plain truth, that’s all.”

“What truth is that, Mildred?”

“Just what Mrs. Reed said.”

“About Mr. Reed?”

“Him and that woman.”

“You mentioned Miss Channing? You mentioned her to Mr. Parsons?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Mrs. Reed said she saw her picture in the boathouse. She knew it was her that Mr. Reed was involved with.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That she suspected something. Between the two of them. That it frightened her.”

“Frightened her?”

“That she was afraid of them, the two of them. What they might do. Run off together. Or worse.”

“Or worse?”

“What she found in the boathouse. The knife she saw, and the …”

“You told Mr. Parsons that?”

“I told him what Mrs. Reed said. That’s all.”

I waited for something more, but there was only silence. From my place at the top of the stairs I saw my father walk out the door, my mother behind him, then both of them in the car, pulling out of the driveway, no doubt headed for the funeral parlor where Sarah now lay in a room decked with flowers sent by the teachers of Chatham School.

When they returned home sometime later, the air grown dark by then, the same silence enveloped them. They sat silently in the parlor, and silently through dinner. Nor did they ever speak to each other with any real tenderness again.

I spent the rest of the next day in my room, lying on my bed. Downstairs, I could hear my mother doing the chores that had once been Sarah’s. I suppose from time to time I drifted into sleep, but if so, I don’t remember it.

By noon the summer heat had begun to make the room unbearable, and so I walked out onto the porch and sat down in the swing, drifting slowly back and forth, recalling Sarah in random pieces of memory, words and glances flying through my mind like bits of torn paper in a whirling wind. At some point my mother brought me a sandwich and a glass of water, but the sandwich was never eaten, nor the water drunk.

Later I decided to take a short walk, perhaps to the beach, where I hoped to get some relief from the terrible scenes playing in my mind. I made my way down Myrtle Street, the bluff widening before me. To my left I could see the now-deserted grounds of Chatham School, Miss Channing’s column of faces still standing in the bright summer light, and to my right, the lighthouse, a dazzling white tower, motionless and eternal, as if in mute contradiction to the human chaos sprawled around it.

I made it to the bluff but did not go down. So a few minutes later I was still sitting on the same bench that had once accommodated Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, when I saw Mr. Parsons’ car mount the hill, then glide to the left and come to a stop directly before me.

“Hello, Henry,” Mr. Parsons said as he got out.

I nodded.

He walked to the bench and sat down beside me. “I wonder if we might have a talk,” he said.

I said nothing, but rather than press the issue, Mr. Parsons sat quietly for a moment, then said, “Let’s go for a little walk, Henry.”

We both rose and headed down Myrtle Street, past Chatham School, and, still strolling at a leisurely pace, made our way out toward the playing field and then around it.

“I’ve talked to quite a few people at Chatham School,” Mr. Parsons said.

I stared straight ahead, gave him no response.

“Your name has been mentioned quite a few times, Henry. Everybody seems to think that you were pretty close to both of them. Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, I mean.”

I nodded, but offered nothing more.

“They say that you spent a lot of time with Mr. Reed. In a boathouse he’s got down at the harbor. That you helped him build a boat, that’s what they say.” He stopped and turned toward me. “The thing is, Henry, we’ve begun to wonder how all this happened. I mean, we’ve begun to wonder what Mrs. Reed was intending when she drove over to Milford Cottage last Sunday.”

I said nothing.

Mr. Parsons began to walk again, gently tugging me along with him. “Now, you’re a brave young man,” he said. “Nobody can question that. You did your best to save Mrs. Reed. But now you’ve got another duty. We know that Mrs. Reed was pretty sure that her husband was involved with another woman. And we know that that other woman was Elizabeth Channing.”

I felt my eyes close slowly as we walked along, as if by such a motion I could erase everything that had happened on Black Pond.

“We think she was after Miss Channing that day,” Mr. Parsons said. “That it wasn’t an accident, what happened on Black Pond.”

I kept silent.

“We think Mrs. Reed mistook Sarah Doyle for Elizabeth Channing, and so killed her instead.”

We walked a few seconds more, then Mr. Parsons once again stopped, his eyes bearing into me. “So it was murder, wasn’t it, Henry? It was murder Mrs. Reed intended when she aimed that car at Sarah Doyle.”

He saw the answer in my eyes.

“How long have you known?”

I shrugged.

“Look, Henry, everybody’s proud of you, of how you went into the water and all. But like I said before, you have another duty now. To tell the truth, the whole truth … I’ll bet you know the rest of it.”

“And nothing but the truth,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

“That’s right,” Mr. Parsons said. He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go down to the boathouse, son, and talk a little more.”

I gave him a private tour of the boathouse, watching as his eyes continually returned to my drawing of Miss Channing. “She’s what did it to him,” he said with a certainty that astonished me. “She’s what drove him mad.” Then he walked to the back window. In the distance we could see the Elizabeth bobbing gently in the quiet water. “Somebody has to pay for all this, Henry,” he said without looking back toward me. “There’re just too many deaths to let it go.”

We left the boathouse together shortly after that, walked to his car, and drove back up the coastal road to the house on Myrtle Street. Before pulling away, he made a final remark. “What we can’t figure out is what finally set her off,” he said almost absently, a mere point of curiosity. “Mrs. Reed, that is. I mean, she’d known about her husband and Miss Channing for quite some time. We just wonder what happened on that particular day that sent her over the edge like that, made her go after Miss Channing the way she did, kill that poor girl instead.”

He never posed it as a question, and so I never answered him, but only stepped away from the car and watched as it pulled away, my silence drawing around me like a cloak of stone.

CHAPTER 29

It was not until many years later that I learned exactly what had happened the next day. I knew only that Mr. Parsons and Captain Hamilton arrived at our house early that morning, that my father ushered them quickly into the parlor, then departed with them a few minutes later, sitting grimly in the backseat of Captain Hamilton’s patrol car as it backed out of our driveway. He returned in the same car a few minutes later, this time with a little girl in a light blue dress in his arms, her long blond hair tumbled about her face, and whom I immediately recognized as Mary Reed.

“They want us to keep Mary for a while,” he explained to me. Then he sent me off on a picnic with her, my mother having packed a basket for the occasion, the same one Sarah had used to bring cakes and cookies to Miss Channing. “Take her to the beach and try to keep her mind off things, Henry,” he told me. “She’s going to be pretty scared for a while.”

And so, before leaving that morning, I ran up to my room and got an old kite I hadn’t flown in years. At the beach I taught Mary Reed how to string it, then to run against the wind so that it would be taken up. For a long time we watched it soar beneath the blue, and I will always remember the small, thin smiles that sometimes rose precariously to her lips, then vanished without a trace, her face darkening suddenly, so that I knew the darkness came from deep within.

“It was because they suspected that Mr. Reed might have been plotting to kill his wife, that’s why they took Mary,” my father told me many years later when I was a grown man, and he an old one, the two of us sitting in the tiny, cluttered room he used as his private chamber. “To make sure she was safe, that’s what Mr. Parsons told me when he drove me over to Mr. Reed’s house that morning.”

What my father witnessed on Black Pond a few minutes later stayed with him forever, the anguish in Mr. Reed’s face so pure, so unalloyed by any other feeling, that it seemed, he told me, “like something elemental.”

At first Mr. Reed had appeared puzzled to find so many men at his door, my father told me. Not only himself, Mr. Parsons, and Captain Hamilton, but two uniformed officers of the Massachusetts State Police as well.

It was Mr. Parsons who spoke first. “We’d like to talk to you for a moment, Mr. Reed.”

Mr. Reed nodded, then walked outside, closing the door behind him.

“We’ve been looking into a few things,” Mr. Parsons said. He glanced inside the house and saw Mary’s face pressed against the screen of an otherwise open window. “Let’s go into the yard,” he said, taking Mr. Reed by the elbow and guiding him down the stairs and out into the yard, where he stood by the pond, encircled by the other men.

“Mr. Reed,” Mr. Parsons began. “We’ve become concerned about the welfare of your daughter.”

It was then, my father said, that Mr. Reed appeared to understand that something serious was upon him, though he may well not have grasped exactly what it was. “Concerned about Mary?” he asked. “Why are you concerned about Mary?”

“We’ve heard some suggestions,” Mr. Parsons told him. “Having to do with your relationship with Mrs. Reed.”

“What suggestions?”

“There’s no need to go into them at this time,” Mr. Parsons said. “But they nave caused the commonwealth to feel some concern about your daughter.”

“What kind of concern?”

“For her safety.”

“She’s perfectly safe,” Mr. Reed said firmly.

Mr. Parsons shook his head, then drew a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to Mr. Reed. “There’s been enough death. We can’t take the chance on there being any more.”

Mr. Reed stared at Mr. Parsons, still vaguely puzzled. “What are you talking about?” he asked. He glanced at the paper. “What is this?”

“We’re going to take custody of your daughter,” Mr. Parsons told him. “Mr. Griswald has agreed to look after her until certain things can be cleared up.”

Mr. Reed thrust the paper toward Mr. Parsons. “You’re not going to take Mary,” he said. “You’re not going to do that.

Mr. Parsons’ voice hardened. “I’m afraid we are, Mr. Reed.”

Mr. Reed began to back away, the men gathering around him as he did so. “No,” he said, “you can’t do that.”

Captain Hamilton stepped forward. “Mr. Reed, your daughter doesn’t need to see us use force, does she?”

Mr. Reed glanced toward the porch, where Mary now stood, a little girl in a pale blue dress, staring down at him. “Please, don’t do this,” he said in a desperate whisper, his attention now riveted on Mr. Parsons. “Not now. Not with her mother just—” He gazed imploringly at my father. “Please, Mr. Griswald, can’t you—”

“It’s only until we can clear things up,” Mr. Parsons said, interrupting him. “But for now we have to be sure that your daughter is safe.”

Suddenly, Mr. Reed shook his head and began to push his way out of the circle. The men closed in upon him, and as he thrashed about, he lost his grip on his cane, crumpled to the ground and lay sprawled before them, laboring to get up, but unable to do so. It was then, my father said, that a cry broke from him, one that seemed to offer up the last frail measure of his will.

“He looked like a different man when he got to his feet,” my father told me. “Like everything had been drained out of him. He didn’t say anything. He just looked over to the porch, where Mary was, and waved for her to come to him. At first she wouldn’t. She was so scared, of course. All those men she didn’t know. The way they’d surrounded her father.” He shook his head. “You can imagine how she felt, Henry.”

But at last the child came. Mr. Reed met her, lifted her into his arms, kissed her softly, then handed her to my father, his words oddly final as he did so: She’ll be better off this way. He reached out and touched her hair; he never said good-bye.

Only an hour or so after those harrowing events, Mary walked to the beach with me, the two of us flying my old red striped kite until the first line of thunderclouds appeared on the horizon, its jagged bolts of lightning still far away, so that we’d gotten home well in advance of the rain.

By nightfall the rain had subsided, but a few hours later it began again. It was still falling when Dr. Craddock’s car came to a halt in front of our house. The doctor was wearing a long raincoat and a gray hat which he drew from his head as he mounted the stairs to where my father sat in a wicker chair a few feet away, I in the swing nearby.

“I’ve come about the little girl,” he said. “Mary Reed.”

My father got to his feet, puzzled. “Mary Reed? What about her?”

Dr. Craddock hesitated a moment, and I could tell that something of vast importance lay in the balance for him. “I’m sure you know that my wife and I … that we’ve … that we have no children.”

My father nodded.

“Well, I wanted to let you know that we would be very interested in taking Mary in,” Dr. Craddock said. “My wife would be a good mother for her, I’m sure. And I believe that I would be a good father.”

“Mary has a father,” my father answered with an unexpected sternness, as if he were talking to one who wished to steal a child.

Dr. Craddock stared at him, surprised. “You’ve not heard?” he asked.

“Heard what?”

I remember rising slowly and drifting across the porch toward my father as Dr. Craddock told him that Mr. Reed’s boat had been found adrift in the bay, with nothing but his old wooden cane inside it, save for a note written on a piece of sail and tacked to the mast. Please see to it that Mary is treated well, and tell her that I do this out of love.

I think that over the years Mary Reed was well-treated, that, overall, despite the many problems that later arose, the howling phantoms that consumed her, the bleak silences into which she sometimes fell, that despite all that, Dr. Craddock and his wife continued to love her and strive to help her. At first it looked as though they had succeeded, that Mary had come to think of them as her parents, put her own dreadful legacy behind her. By the time she entered the local school, she’d come to be called by her middle name, which was Alice, as well as that of her adoptive parents, which was Craddock.

It was a deliverance my father had hoped for, and perhaps even believed to be possible. “In time, she’ll heal,” I heard him say as Dr. Craddock took her small white hand and led her down the stairs and out into the rain.

But she never did.

Mr. Reed’s death left only Miss Channing upon whom the law could now seek retribution, and so, after a few more days of investigation, and at Mr. Parsons’ direction, the grand jury charged her in a two-count indictment, the first count being the most serious, conspiracy to murder Abigail Reed, but the second also quite grave at that time, adultery.

It was my father who delivered the news of the indictment to Miss Channing, allowed to do so by Captain Hamilton, whose duty it otherwise would have been.

“Get in the car, Henry,” my father said the morning we made our final drive to Milford Cottage. “If she becomes … well … difficult … I might need your help.”

But Miss Channing did not become difficult that morning. Instead, she stood quite still, listening as my father told her that the two indictments had been handed down, that she would have to stand trial, then went on to recommend a local attorney who was willing to defend her.

“I don’t want a lawyer, Mr. Griswald,” Miss Channing said.

“But these are serious charges, Miss Channing,” my father said somberly. “There are witnesses against you. People who should be questioned as to whatever it is they’re claiming to have seen or heard.” I could feel the pain his next words caused him. “My wife will be one of those witnesses,” he told her. “Henry too.”

I’d expected her eyes to shoot toward me at that moment, freeze me in a hideous glare, but she did not shift her attention from my father’s face. “Even so” was all she said.

We left a few minutes later, and I didn’t say a single word to Miss Channing that morning, but only gazed at her stonily, my demeanor already forming into the hard shell it would assume on the day I testified against her, answering every question with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing all the while that there was one question Mr. Parsons would never ask me, nor even remotely suspect that I had the answer to: What really happened on Black Pond that day?

CHAPTER 30

Miss Channing came to trial that August. During that interval I never saw her, nor knew of anyone who did. My father was now more or less banned from any further contact with her by my mother’s abject fury.

As to the charges against her, the evidence was never very great. But bit by bit it was presented to the jury, tales of odd sightings and snatches of conversation, a portrait hung in a boathouse, an old primer curiously inscribed, a nautical map with what Mr. Parsons called an “escape route” already drawn, a boat named Elizabeth, a pile of letters hastily burned in an otherwise empty hearth, a knife, a piece of rope, a bottle of arsenic.

Against all that, as well as Chatham’s ferocious need to “make someone pay,” Miss Channing stood alone. She listened as the witnesses were called, people who had seen and heard things distantly, as well as the more compelling testimony that I gave, shortly followed by my mother.

Through it all she sat at the defense table in so deep a stillness, I half expected her not to rise when the time finally came and the bailiff called her to the stand.

But she did rise, resolutely, her gaze trained on the witness box until she reached it and sat, waiting as Mr. Parsons approached her from across the room, the eyes of the jurors drifting from her face to her white, unmoving fingers, peering at them intently, as if looking for bloodstains on her hands.

I will always remember that my father watched Miss Channing’s testimony with a tenderness so genuine that I later came to believe that understanding and forgiveness were the deepest passions that he knew.

My mother’s expression was more severe, of course, less merciful thoughts no doubt playing in her mind—memories of people she had known, a husband’s career now in the balance, a school teetering on the brink of ruin. Her eyes were leveled with an unmistakable contempt upon the woman she held responsible for all that.

As for me, I found that I glanced away from Miss Channing as she rose and walked toward the witness box, unable to bear the way she looked, so set upon and isolated that she resembled a figure out of ancient drama, Antigone or Medea, a woman headed for a sacrificial doom, and in relation to whom I felt like a shadow crouched behind a tapestry, the secret agent of her fall.

She wore a long black dress that day, ruffled at the throat and at the ends of the sleeves. But more than her dress, more than the way she’d pulled back her hair and bound it tightly with a slender black ribbon, I noticed how little she resembled the young woman I’d seen get off a Boston bus nearly a year before, how darkly seasoned, as if she’d spent the last few weeks reviewing the very events about which she’d now, at her own insistence, been called to speak.

I know now that even at that moment, and in the wake of such awesome devastation, some part of me still lingered in the throes of the high romantic purpose that had seized me on Black Pond, driven me to the reckless and destructive act I was still laboring to conceal. And yet, despite all the pain and death that had ensued, I still wanted Miss Channing to speak boldly of love and the right to love, use the same brave and uncompromising words her father had used in his book. I wanted her to rise and take the people of Chatham on like Hypatia had taken on the mobs of Alexandria, standing in her chariot, lashing at them with a long black whip. I wanted her to be as ruthless and determined with Mr. Parsons and all he represented as I had been toward Mrs. Reed, to justify, at least for a brief but towering moment, the dreadful thing that I’d done to her, and through her, to Sarah Doyle. For it seemed the only thing that might yet be salvaged from the wreckage of Black Pond, a fierce, shimmering moment when a woman stood her ground, defied the crowd, sounded the truth with a blazing trumpet. All else, it seemed to me, was death and ruin.

But Miss Channing did not do what I wanted her to do on the stand that day. Instead, she meekly followed along as Mr. Parsons began to question her about the early stages of her “relationship” with Mr. Reed, convinced, as he was, that everything that had later transpired on Black Pond had begun in the quiet drives she and Mr. Reed had taken back and forth from Milford Cottage to their classes at Chatham School, their leisurely strolls into the village, the idle hours they’d spent together, seated on a bench on the coastal bluff, all of which had flowed like an evil stream toward what he insisted on calling the “murders” on Black Pond.

Through it all, Miss Channing sat rigidly in place, her hands in her lap, as prim and proper as any maiden, her voice clear and steady, while she did the opposite of what I’d hoped, lied and lied and lied, shocking me with the depths of her lies, claiming that her relationship with Mr. Reed had never gone beyond “the limits of acceptable contact.”

At those words, I saw myself again at Milford Cottage on a cold January day, her fingers trembling as she pressed them against Mr. Reed’s cheek, then, weeks later, in the cottage, the rain battering against the window, the anguish in her face when she’d said, “I can’t go on.” That she could now deny the depths of her own passion appalled me and filled me with a cold contempt, made everything I’d done, the unspeakably cruel step I’d taken on her behalf, seem like little more than a foolish adolescent act that had gone fatally awry.

Watching her as she sat like a schoolmarm, politely responding to Mr. Parsons’ increasingly heated questions, I felt the full force of her betrayal. For I knew now how Mrs. Reed must have felt, that I had given love and devotion, and in return received nothing but lies and deception.

And so I felt a kind of hatred rise in me, a sense that I’d been left to swing from the gallows of my own conscience, while Miss Channing now attempted to dismiss as mere fantasy that wild romantic love I’d so clearly seen and which it seemed her duty to defend, if not for me, then for Mr. Reed, perhaps even her own father.

In such a mood, I began to root for Mr. Parsons as he worked to expose Miss Channing, ripping at her story even as she labored to tell it, continually interrupting her with harsh, accusatory questions. When you went driving with Mr. Reed, you knew he was married, didn’t you, Miss Channing? You knew he had a child?

As she’d gone on to give her answers, I recalled the many times I’d seen her in Mr. Reed’s car, growing more animated as the days passed, happy when he dropped by her cottage on that snowy November day when we’d all eaten Sarah’s fruitcake together, happy to sit with him on the bluff, stroll with him along the village streets, chat with him in her classroom at the end of day. If, during all that, the “limits of acceptable contact” had never been breached, then I’d played my fatal card for nothing, worshipped at the altar of a love that had never truly existed, save in my own perfervid imagination.

And yet, as Miss Channing continued, so self-contained and oddly persuasive, I began to wonder if indeed I had made it all up, seen things that weren’t there, eyes full of yearning, trembling fingers, a romantic agony that was only in my head.

Because of that, I felt an immense relief sweep over me when Mr. Parsons suddenly asked, “Are you saying, Miss Channing, that you were never in love with Leland Reed?”

Her answer came without the slightest hesitation:Witness: No. I am not saying that. I would never say that. I loved Leland Reed. I have never loved anyone else as I loved him.

In a voice that seemed to have been hurled from Sinai, Mr. Parsons asked, “But you knew that he was married, didn’t you, Miss Channing? You knew he had a child?”Witness: Yes, of course I knew he was married and had a child.Mr. Parsons: And each time Mr. Reed left you—whether it was at your cottage or in some grove in the middle of a cemetery, or after you’d strolled along some secluded beach—he returned to the home across the pond that he shared with his wife and daughter, did he not?Witness: Yes, he did.Mr. Parsons: And what did the existence of a wife and child mean to you, Miss Channing?

Her answer lifted me like a wild wind.Witness: It didn’t mean anything to me, Mr. Parsons. When you love someone the way I loved Leland Reed, nothing matters but that love.

Heroic as her statement seemed to me, it was the opening Mr. Parsons had no doubt dreamed of, and he seized it.Mr. Parsons: But they did exist, didn’t they? Mrs. Reed and little Mary?Witness: Yes, they did.Mr. Parsons: And had Mr. Reed told you that he and Mrs. Reed had had terrible arguments during the past two weeks, and that his daughter had witnessed these arguments?Witness: No, he had not.Mr. Parsons: Had he told you that Mrs. Reed had become suspicious of his relationship with you?Witness: No.Mr. Parsons: That she had even come to suspect that he was plotting her murder?Witness: No, he didn’t.Mr. Parsons: Well, isn’t it true that Mr. Reed wanted to be rid of his wife?

Sitting in the courtroom at that moment, I recalled the last time I’d heard Mr. Reed speak of Mrs. Reed, the two of us in his car together, a yellow shaft of light disappearing down the road ahead, his own house in the distance, his eyes upon its small square windows, the coldness of his words: Sometimes I wish that she were dead.

Because of that, Miss Channing’s answer, coming on the heels of the proud figure she’d only recently begun to assume, utterly astonished me.Witness: No, he did not want to be rid of his wife, Mr. Parsons.Mr. Parsons: He never spoke ill of Mrs. Reed?Witness: No, he never did.Mr. Parsons: Nor conspired to murder her?Witness: Of course not.Mr. Parsons: Well, many people have testified that Mr. Reed was very upset during the last days of the school year. Do you deny that?Witness: No, I don’t.Mr. Parsons: And in that state he did peculiar things. He named his boat after you, Miss Channing, rather than his wife or daughter.Witness: Yes.Mr. Parsons: He made some rather ominous purchases as well. He bought a rope and a knife. He bought poison. It would seem that at least during his last Jew weeks at Chatham School, Mr. Reed surely wanted to rid himself of somebody, don’t you think, Miss Channing?

It was a question Mr. Parsons had asked rhetorically, for its effect upon the jury, knowing that he had no evidence whatever that any of these things had been purchased for the purpose of murdering Abigail Reed. Because of that, I’d expected Miss Channing to give him no more than a quick, dismissive denial. But that was not what she did.Witness: Yes, he wanted to be rid of someone, Mr. Parsons. But it was not Mrs. Reed.Mr. Parsons: Well, if it wasn’t Mrs. Reed, then who did he want to be rid of, Miss Channing?Witness: He wanted to be rid of me.Mr. Parsons: You? You’re saying he wanted to be rid of you?Witness: Yes, he did. He wanted me to leave him alone. To go away. He told me that in the strongest possible terms.Mr. Parsons: When did he tell you these things?Witness: The last time I saw him. When we met in the lighthouse. That’s when he told me he wanted to be rid of me. He said that he wished that I were dead.

When I left the courthouse that afternoon, the final seconds of Miss Channing’s testimony were still playing in my mind:Mr. Parsons: Leland Reed said that to you, Miss Channing? He said that he wished that you were dead?Witness: Yes.Mr. Parsons: And is it also your testimony, Miss Channing, that Mr. Reed never actually loved you?Witness: He may have loved me, Mr. Parsons, but not enough.Mr. Parsons: Enough for what?Witness: Enough to abandon other loves. The love he had for his wife and his daughter.Mr. Parsons: You are saying that Mr. Reed had already rejected you and wished to be rid of you and return to his wife and daughter, that he had already come to that decision when Mrs. Reed died?Witness: He never really left them. There was never any decision to be made. They were the ones he truly cared about and wished to be with, Mr. Parsons. It was never me.

In my mind I saw Mrs. Reed rushing up the stairs as she had on that final day, calling to Mary, then back down them again sometime later, dragging her roughly toward the shed. After that it was a swirl of death, a car’s thunderous assault, Sarah’s body twisting in the air, Mrs. Reed staring at me from infinite green depths, Mr. Reed lowering his cane to the bottom of the boat, slipping silently into the engulfing waves. Had all of that come about over a single misunderstood remark? Sometimes I wish that she were dead. Had it really been Miss Channing whom Mr. Reed, rocked by such vastly conflicting loves, had sometimes wanted dead? Had I gotten it all wrong, and in doing that, recklessly done an even greater wrong? I thought of the line I’d so admired in Mr. Channing’s book—Life is best lived at the edge of folly—and suddenly it seemed to me that of all the reckless, ill-considered lies I’d ever heard, this was the deepest, the gravest, the most designed to lead us to destruction.

CHAPTER 31

At the end of Miss Channing’s testimony, the prosecution rested its case. The jury began its deliberations. During the next two days, a hush fell over Chatham. The crowds no longer gathered on the front steps of the courthouse. Nor huddled in groups on street corners or on the lawn of the town hall.

In the house on Myrtle Street we waited in our own glum silence, my mother puttering absently in her garden, my father working unnecessarily extended hours at the school, I reading in my room, or going for long walks along the beach.

On the following Monday morning, at nine A.M., the jury returned to its place in the courtroom. The foreman handed the verdict to the bailiff, who in turn gave it to Judge Crenshaw. In a voice that was resolutely measured, he delivered the news that Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing had been found not guilty on the first count of the indictment, conspiracy to murder. I remember glancing at my father to see a look of profound relief sweep into his face, then a stillness gather on it as the verdict on the second count was read.Court: On the charge of adultery, how do you find the defendant, Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing?

A smile of grim satisfaction fluttered onto my mother’s lips as the foreman gave his answer: Guilty.

I glanced at the defense table where Miss Channing stood, facing the judge, her face emotionless, save that her eyes closed briefly and she released a soft, weary breath. Minutes later, as she was led down the stairs to the waiting car, the crowd pressing in around her, I saw her glance toward my father, nod silently. In return, he took off his hat with a kind of reverence, which, given the nature of her testimony, the portrait of herself as little more than a wanton temptress, struck me as the oddest thing he had ever done.

I don’t think Miss Channing saw me at all, since I’d stationed myself farther from her, the crowd wrapped around me like a thick wool cloak. But I could see her plainly nonetheless, her face once again held in that profound sense of self-containment I’d first glimpsed months before, her eyes staring straight ahead, lips tightly closed, as if determined—perhaps like proud Hypatia—to hold back her cry.

She was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, the maximum allowed by Massachusetts law, and I remember that my father greeted the severity of her punishment with absolute amazement, my mother as if it had been handed down from heaven. “It’s finally over,” she said with obvious relief. She didn’t mention the trial again during the rest of that week, but she did insist upon visiting Sarah’s grave, as well as Mrs. Reed’s, carrying vases of fresh flowers for each of them. Mr. Reed had been buried only a short distance from them, but I never saw my mother give his grave so much as a sideward glance.

It was not over, of course, despite my mother’s declaration. At least not for my father. For there was still the matter of Chatham School to deal with.

During the next few weeks its fete hung in the balance. My father labored to restore its reputation, along with that part of his own good name that had been tarnished by the tragedy on Black Pond. A governing board was established to look into the school’s affairs and consider its future prospects. One by one, over the few weeks that remained of that summer, benefactors dropped away and letters came from distant fathers to say that their sons would not be returning to Chatham School next fall.

At last, all hope for the school’s survival was abandoned, and on a meeting in late September, it was officially closed, my father given two weeks’ severance pay and left to find his way.

He found it in a teaching job at a public school in neighboring Harwichport, and during that long, rain-swept autumn, he rose early, pulled on his old gray duster, and trudged to the car from our new, much smaller house to the east of Chatham.

Others at Chatham School made similar accommodations to their abrupt unemployment. Mrs. Benton took a job as a clerk at Warren’s Sundries, Mrs. Abercrombie as a secretary for Mr. Lloyd, a prominent local banker. Other teachers did other things, of course, although most of them, in the end, drifted away from Chatham to take jobs in Boston or Fall River or other towns along the Cape.

The first snows did not arrive until the last of the village Christmas decorations had been pulled down and returned to their boxes in the basement of the town hall. By February, when the snows were deepest and the sky hung in a perpetual gloom of low-slung clouds, the building that had once housed Chatham School had been converted into a small dressmaking factory, its second floor stacked with bolts of cloth and boxes of thread and buttons, the sound of sewing machines humming continually from its lower rooms.

But in other ways, things went back to normal, and there seemed to be little thought of Miss Channing, with only quick glimpses of Mary Reed sitting between Dr. and Mrs. Craddock at Quilty’s or building a snowman on her front lawn to remind me of her fate.

And so the years passed as they always do, faster than we can grasp where we have been or may be going to. New buildings replaced older ones. Streets were paved, new lights hung. And high above the sea, the great bluff crumbled in that slow, nearly undetectable way that our bodies crumble before time, and our dreams before reality, and the life we sought before the one we found.

Then, in December of the final year of Miss Channing’s imprisonment, when I was home for the Christmas break of my freshman year in Princeton, a letter came, addressed to my father, in an envelope sent from Hardwick Women’s Prison, and which he later slipped into the little brown folder that became his archive of the Chatham School Affair.

The letter read:Dear Mr. Griswald:I write concerning one of my prisoners, Elizabeth Rockbridge Channing, and in order to inform you that she has fallen ill. Her file lists neither relatives nor friends who, under such circumstances, should be contacted. However, in conversations with Miss Channing, I have often heard mention of your name, of her time in, I take it, your employ, and I wonder if you could provide me with the names and addresses of any relatives or other close associates who should be informed of her condition.Best regards,

Mortimer Bly

Warden, Hardwick Women’s Prison

My father replied immediately, sending the name and address of Miss Channing’s uncle in British East Africa. But he did more than that as well, did it with an open heart and against the firmly stated wishes of my mother, who seemed both shocked and appalled by the words he said to her that same night over dinner: I’ve decided to look in on Miss Channing, and take Henry with me.

Four days later, on a cold, rainy Saturday, my father and I arrived at the prison in which Miss Channing had been kept for the last three years. We were greeted by Warden Bly, a small, owlish man, but whose courtly manner seemed almost aristocratic. He assured us that Miss Channing was slated to be taken to the prison hospital as soon as a bed was available, and thanked us for coming. “I’m sure it will brighten her spirits,” he said.

After that, my father and I were directed into the heart of the prison, walking down a long corridor, the bars rising on either side, our ears attuned to the low murmur of the women who lived behind them, dressed in gray frocks, smelly and unkempt, their bare feet padding softly across the concrete floor as they shuffled forward to stare at us, their faces pressed against the bars, their eyes following us with what seemed an absolute and irreparable brokenness.

“She’s at the back, all by herself,” the guard said, the keys on the metal ring jangling as he pulled it from his belt. “She ain’t one for mixing.”

We continued to walk alongside him, our senses helplessly drawn toward the cells that flowed past us on either side, the dank odor that emanated from them, the faces that peered at us from behind the steel bars, women in their wreckage.

Finally, we reached the end of the corridor. There the guard turned to the left and stopped, his body briefly blocking our view into the cell. While we waited, he inserted the key, gave it a quick turn, and swung open the door. “In here, gentlemen,” he said, waving broadly. “Step lively.”

With that, he drew away, and my father and I saw her for the first time since the trial, so much smaller than I remembered her, a figure sitting on the narrow mattress of an iron bed, her long hair now cut short, but still blacker than the shadows that surrounded her, her pale eyes staring out from those same shadows like two small blue lights.

“Miss Channing,” I heard my father murmur.

Standing together, silent and aghast, we saw her rise and come toward us, her body shifting beneath the gray prison dress, her hand reaching out first to my father, then to me, cold when he took it, no warmer when I let

“How good of you to come, Mr. Griswald,” she said, her voice low and unexpectedly tender, her eyes still piercingly direct, yet oddly sunken now, as if pressed inward by the dungeon’s leaden air. “And you, Henry,” she said as she settled them upon me.

“I’m so sorry I never came before,” my father told her, expressing what I recognized as a true regret.

For an instant she glanced away, a gray light sweeping over her face, revealing the purple swell of her lips, the weedy lines that had begun to gather at her eyes. “I had no wish to trouble you,” she said as she turned back to us.

My father smiled delicately. “You were never a trouble to me, Miss Channing,” he said.

She nodded softly, then said, “And how are things at Chatham School?”

My father shot me a pointed look. “Just fine,” he said quickly. “Quite back to normal, as you can imagine. We think we may beat New Bedford come next spring. Several of the new boys are very good at the game.”

I watched her silently as my father went on, noting the ragged cut of her hair, oily and unwashed, a nest of damp black straw, remembering how she’d looked at Chatham School and laboring to make myself believe that there was some part of her fate that she deserved.

For the next few minutes they continued to talk together, and at no time did my father let slip the true state of our affairs, or of what had happened to Chatham School. Instead, he spoke of things that had long passed, a school that had once existed, a marriage for a time not frozen in a block of ice, villagers who never whispered of his poor judgment from places safe behind his back.

Finally, we heard a watchman call out to us, and rose to leave her.

“It was good seeing you, Miss Channing,” I said as lightly as I could.

“You too, Henry,” she replied.

My father draped his arm over my shoulder. “Henry won a scholarship to Princeton, you know. All he does is study now.”

She looked at me as if nothing had changed since our first meeting. “Be a good man, Henry,” she told me.

“I will try, Miss Channing,” I said. Though I knew that it was already too late for so high a word as goodness ever to distinguish me.

She nodded, then turned to my father. “I so regret, Mr. Griswald, that you and the school were ever brought into my—”

My father lifted his hand to silence her. “You did nothing wrong, Miss Channing. I have never doubted that.”

“Still, I regret that—”

In an act whose unexpected courage has never left my mind, my father suddenly stepped forward and gathered her gently into his arms. “My dear, dear child,” he said.

Standing beside them, I saw Miss Channing draw him closer and closer, holding him very tightly, and for what seemed a long time, until, at last, she let him go.

“Thank you, Mr. Griswald,” she said as she released him and stepped away.

“We will come again,” my father told her. “I promise you that.”

“Thank you,” Miss Channing said.

We stepped out of her cell, my father quickly moving away from it and back down the corridor, while I remained, my eyes fixed upon her as she retreated to the rear of her cell, to the place where we had found her. For a time she stared at her hands, then her eyes lifted and she saw me lingering in the corridor. “Go, Henry,” she said. “Please.”

I wanted to do exactly that, even felt the impulse to rush down the corridor as my father had, unable to bear a moment longer the tragedy before me. But I found that for the briefest instant I couldn’t draw my eyes away from her, and as she turned away, I saw her once again as she’d first appeared, so beautiful as she’d stared out at the landscape of Cape Cod, pronounced it a world of stricken martyrs. It was then I felt something break in me, a little wall that had held through all my nightmarish dreams of Sarah and Mrs. Reed, of women floating in dark water. I thought of the rash and terrible thing I’d done and knew that I would never be able to trust myself again. And so the only answer seemed never to get close to anyone, to hold books as my sole companions, accept a bloodless, unimpassioned life, revere the law’s steadfast clarity against the lethal chaos of the heart.

I was silent for a long time after that, silent as I turned from her cell, silent as I walked down the corridor to where my father waited, hollow-eyed, before the iron door, silent as we drove back to Chatham, a clear night sky above us.

“What is it, Henry?” my father asked finally as we crossed the bridge from the mainland, the old car rumbling over the wooden trellis.

I shook my head. “You can never take anything back,” I said, feeling for the first time the full call of confession, wanting to let it go, to tell him what had really happened on Black Pond.

He looked at me worriedly, his eyes filled with a father’s care. “What do you mean, Henry?”

I shrugged, closing myself off again, retreating, as Miss Channing had, into the shadowy darkness of my own cell.

“Nothing,” I told him.

And I never told him more.

I’m sure that my father fully intended to visit Miss Channing again, despite the objections my mother had already voiced. But he still had the remainder of the school year to contend with, and so it was not until summer that he began to mention making such a visit.

I had returned home from college by then, taken a summer job as a clerk in a law office in Chatham, its cordial atmosphere a pleasant respite from the mood at home, the way my mother and father forever bickered over small matters, while leaving the great one that had long ago divided them buried deep inside.

And so I was once again in Chatham when another letter arrived suddenly from Hardwick Prison, addressed to my father, just as the first one had been, but this time bearing graver news.

My father read it in the small room he’d turned into a cluttered study, sitting in one of the great chairs that had once been in the parlor of our house on Myrtle Street and which seemed to fill up the entire room.

“Here, Henry,” he said, lifting it toward me after he’d read it.

I took the letter from him and read it while standing beside his chair. It had been written by Warden Bly, and it informed us in language that was decidedly matter-of-fact that following a short recovery, Miss Channing had fallen ill again, that she had finally been transferred to the prison clinic, then to a local hospital, where, two days after her admittance, she had died. Her body was currently being housed in the local morgue, Warden Bly said, and he wished instructions as to what should be done with it.

I will always remember how curiously exhausted my father looked after reading this letter, how his hands sank down into his lap, his shoulders slumped. “Poor child,” he murmured, then rose and went to his room, where he remained alone throughout that long afternoon.

The next day he telegraphed Miss Channing’s uncle, informing him of his niece’s death and requesting instructions as to the disposition of her body. Two days later, Edward Channing replied with a telegram requesting my father to make whatever arrangements he deemed necessary, and to forward him “a bill for all expenses incurred in the burial of my unfortunate niece.”

Miss Channing was buried in the little cemetery on Brewster Road four days later. Her plain wooden coffin was drawn by four uniformed guards from a prison hearse and carried on their shoulders to her grave.

“Would you be wanting us to hang about?” one asked my father, no doubt noticing that no one else had come to, as he put it, “see her off.”

“No,” my father answered. “You didn’t know her. But thank you for asking.”

With that, the guards left, the prison wagon sputtering along the far edge of the cemetery, past the grove with its cement pond, then disappearing down Brewster Road.

My father opened the old black Bible he’d brought with him, and while I stood silently at his side, read a few verses from the Song of Songs, Lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

“We’ll need to send her things back to her uncle,” he said when he’d finished and we’d begun to make our way out of the cemetery.

My father had gotten permission to store Miss Channing’s things at Milford Cottage, fully expecting that she would one day return to Chatham to reclaim them. When we walked into its front room, we found most everything still in place, the table by the window, the red cushions on the chairs.

Everything else had been packed away. We found three boxes stacked neatly in Miss Channing’s bedroom, along with the two leather valises she’d brought with her from Africa. Only the black dress she’d worn on the day she’d taken the stand hung inside the large wooden armoire. My father took it out, opened one of the boxes, and placed it inside. Then he turned and looked at me, his face suddenly very grave. “Someone should know the truth, Henry,” he said. “If I died suddenly, no one would.”

I said nothing, but only stood before him, a grim apprehensiveness settling upon me.

“The truth about Miss Channing,” he added. “About what really happened.”

I felt my heart stop. “On Black Pond?” I asked, trying to keep the dread out of my voice.

He shook his head. “No. Before that. In the lighthouse.” He lowered himself onto the bed, paused a moment, then looked up. “You remember when I came here the day of the … accident?”

I nodded.

“And Miss Channing and I went into the cottage alone to have a private talk?”

“Yes,” I said, remembering how he’d stood by the mantel, Miss Channing in a chair, her eyes lifted toward him.

“That’s when she told me, Henry,” my father said. “The truth.”

Then he told me what she’d said.

She had not wanted to go to the lighthouse that afternoon, Miss Channing told my father, had not wanted to meet Mr. Reed, be alone with him again. For it seemed to her that each time they were together, something unraveled inside of him. Still, he’d asked her to meet him one last time, asked her in letter after letter during that last month, until she’d finally agreed to do it.

He was standing against the far wall of the lighthouse when she entered it, his back pressed into its softly rounded curve, the old brown jacket draped over his shoulders, his black hair tossed and unruly.

“Elizabeth,” he whispered. “I’ve missed you.”

She closed the metal door behind her but did not move toward him. “I’ve missed you too, Leland,” she said, though careful to keep a distance in her voice.

He smiled delicately, in that way she’d noticed the first time she’d seen him, a frail, uneasy smile. “It feels strange to be alone with you again.”

She remembered the few times they’d been alone in the way he meant, with his arms around her, his breath on her neck, the warmth of his skin next to hers.

“You haven’t forgotten, have you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No,” she admitted.

He drew himself from the wall, staring at her silently. The chamber’s single light glowed faintly from behind a cage of wire mesh, throwing a gray crosshatch of shadows over his face. “How has it been for you, Elizabeth? Being away from me?”

She looked at him sadly, mournfully, knowing that she would never allow herself to be taken into his arms again. “We have to go on, Leland,” she said.

“Go on to what?” he asked. “To nothing?” He seemed on the verge of sweeping toward her.

“I can’t stay long,” she told him quickly, then glanced out the small square window of the door, the playing field beyond it, the boys of Chatham School scurrying about in a game of touch football.

“Is it so hard to be with me now?” he asked, an edginess in his voice.

She shook her head wearily, now regretting that she’d come at all. “Leland, there’s no point in this. The only answer is for me to leave.”

“And what will I do then, Elizabeth?”

“What you did before.”

His eyes darkened, as if she had insulted him. “No. Never. I can never go back to the life I used to live.” He began to pace back and forth, his cane tapping sharply on the cement floor. “I can never do that, Elizabeth.” He stopped, his eyes now glaring at her. “Do you want to just throw me away? Is that what you want?”

She felt a sudden surge of anger toward herself, the fact that she had ever let him love her as he did, or loved him in return, ever pretended that they lived in a world where no one else lived, where no other hearts could be broken.

“We can go away, Elizabeth,” he said. “We can do what I always planned for us to do.”

The very suggestion returned her to her own childhood, to a father with grand notions of freedom he never followed out of love for her, how bereft she would have felt, how worthless and unloved, had he been taken from her by any force less irresistible than death. “You know I won’t do that,” she said. “Or let you do it.”

He stepped toward her, opening his arms. “Elizabeth, please.”

She lifted her hand, warning him away. “I have to go, Leland.”

“No, don’t. Not yet.”

She looked at him imploringly. “Leland, please. Let me leave, still loving you.”

He stepped forward again, closing the space between them, staring at her needfully, but now with a terrible cruelty in his eyes. “Sometimes I wish I’d never met you,” he told her. “Sometimes I wish that you were dead.”

She shook her head. “Stop it.”

He closed in upon her, his hands reaching for her shoulders.

She turned and grabbed the handle of the door, but he suddenly swept up behind her and jerked her around to face him, his hands grasping at her waist.

“Stop it,” she repeated. “Let me go.”

His grip tightened around her, drawing her into a violent embrace.

“Stop it. Leland … Leland …”

He thrust up and pushed her hard against the door, then spun her roughly to the right, away from the door, and pressed her against the wall, so that she could feel it, hard and gritty, at her back.

“I can’t let you go,” he said, his eyes now shining wildly in the gray light.

She pressed her hands flat against his shoulders. “Stop it!” she cried, now thrusting, right and left, desperately trying to get free.

But each time she moved, he pressed in upon her more violently, until she stopped suddenly, drew in a deep breath, leveled her eyes upon him, her body now completely still, her voice an icy sliver when she spoke. “Are you going to rape me, Leland? Is that what you’ve become?”

He rocked backward, stricken by her words.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, releasing her, stepping away, his eyes now fixed upon her with a shattered, unbelieving gaze. “Elizabeth, I only—” He stopped and looked at her brokenly, saying nothing more as she turned and fled toward the door, her red scarf flowing behind her like a blood-soaked cloth.

My father watched me silently for a moment, then rose and walked to the window, his hands behind his back as he stared out into the yard.

I kept my place by the door, my eyes fixed on the two leather valises beside the bed as I tried to keep the rhythm of my breath quiet and steady, so that it would not reveal the upheaval in my mind. “So it was all a lie,” I said at last. “What Miss Channing said in court. About never going beyond the ‘acceptable limits.’ They were lovers.”

“Yes, they were, Henry,” my father said. “But at the trial Miss Channing didn’t want Mary to ever know that.”

I saw the Elizabeth sailing in an open sea, a ghost ship now, drifting eerily through a dense, engulfing fog.

My father walked over to me and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Miss Channing had a good heart, Henry,” he said, then added pointedly, as if it were the central truth of life, “Never forget, that it’s the heart that matters.”

We left Milford Cottage a few minutes later, took Miss Channing’s belongings to the post office, then returned home. My mother was preparing dinner, and so my father and I retired to his office. He sat down in his chair, took out his pipe. I sat opposite him, still thinking about what Miss Channing had told him, how much she must have trusted him to have done so, my eyes studying the portrait she’d painted of him, not as the staid schoolmaster I’d so despised at the time, but as a man who had something restless and unquenchable in him, something that stared out toward the thin blue lake that shimmered seductively in the distance. It was then I realized that Miss Channing had painted my father not as himself alone, but in some sense as herself as well, perhaps as ail of us, stranded as we are, equally tormented by conflicting loves, trying, as best we can, to find a place between passion and boredom, ecstasy and despair, the life we can but dream of and the one we cannot bear.

“I’m glad I told you what I did this afternoon,” he said. “You deserved to know the truth. Especially since you were there on Black Pond that day.” He shook his head. “The sad thing is that it was all over between Miss Channing and Mr. Reed. She was going away. And in the end, he would have taken up his life again.” He seemed captured by the mystery of things, how dark and unforgiving the web can sometimes be. “Nothing would have happened if Mrs. Reed hadn’t died in Black Pond that day.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

He leaned back in his chair. “So that’s the whole story, Henry,” he said, bringing the pipe toward his lips. “There’s nothing more to know about the Chatham School Affair.”

I didn’t answer him. But I knew that he was wrong.

CHAPTER 32

Many years have passed since then, and all the others have departed now, taking with them, one by one, small pieces of the Chatham School Affair, my mother and father, Mr. Parsons and Captain Hamilton, the last of the teachers who taught at Chatham School that year, even the boys who went there, all dead now, or living far away, probably in decrepitude, near death, with their final year at Chatham School no more than a faint remembrance of a curious and unhappy time.

Through all these many years, only Alice Craddock has remained to remind me of what happened on Black Pond, first as a little girl with melancholy eyes, then as a teenager, sullen and withdrawn, later as a woman of late middle age, grown monstrously fat and slovenly by then, friendless, alone, the village madwoman, chased by little boys, and finally as an old woman, rocking on her porch, with nothing but Dr. Craddock’s steadily dwindling fortune to sustain her.

I know that sometimes I would simply shake my head as she went by, dressed so strangely, as she often was, her toenails painted green, her mind so often lost in a sea of weird imaginings. Once, standing beside Mrs. Benton on the village square, I saw her attention drawn to Alice as she drifted vacantly down the opposite street, wrapped in a ragged shawl, feet in rubber thongs. “Now, there’s a tatty one,” Mrs. Benton said, then added in a tone so casual it shocked me with its flippancy. “Probably end up like her mother.”

But as the years had proven, Alice had not “ended up” like Mrs. Reed, so that after I’d done my work for Clement Boggs, gotten the zoning variance he needed to sell the land around Black Pond, it finally became my duty to deliver the money he’d received for it to the old house where Alice still lived, wandering aimlessly through its many dusty rooms, a candle sometimes in her hand, so people said, despite the fact that all the lights were on.

At first I’d declined to do it, not wanting to face Alice up close, see what time had wrought, along with suicide and murder. But Clement, determined that his gift remain anonymous, had refused the task himself, and so it had fallen to me to do it for him. “It’s only right that it should be you who tells her about the money, Henry,” he said. “After all, you knew her father, and it was you at the pond when her mother died.”

It was an argument I had no defense against. And so, late on a clear December night, I drove to the house on the bay, the very one that had once housed Dr. Craddock’s clinic, and in which Sarah Doyle had died so many years before.

It was quite cold, but she was sitting on the large side porch when I arrived, wrapped in a thick blanket, her huge frame rocking softly in a high-backed chair.

She turned when she heard my footsteps on the stairs, squinting into the darkness, yet with a strange, expectant air, as if she had been waiting for some important guest.

“Hello, Alice,” I said as I came up the stairs, moving slowly, closing the space between us. “You remember me, don’t you?”

She watched me silently, her eyes moving up and down.

“I’m Henry,” I told her. “Henry Griswald.”

She stared at me, uncomprehending.

“I knew you when you were Mary Reed,” I said. “Back when you lived on Black Pond.”

Her face brightened instantly. “With Mama,” she said.

“Yes.”

She smiled suddenly, a little girl’s smile, then stood, lumbered heavily to a wide bench that rested, facing the sea, at the far end of the porch. She sat down and patted the space beside her, offering another slender smile. “You can sit here,” she said.

I did as she told me, lowering myself unsteadily onto the bench, my eyes averted from her briefly before I forced myself to look at her again.

“I have something for you,” I told her, drawing the envelope from the pocket of my overcoat. “It’s a gift. From a friend. A check. I’m going to deposit it in your account tomorrow. Mr. Jamison, at the bank, he’ll handle it for you.”

She glanced at the envelope but did not take it from my hand. “Okay,” she said, then returned her gaze to the sea. “Boats go by,” she said. “Sailboats.”

I nodded. “Yes, they do.”

I saw her as a little girl again, heard her laughter as she’d darted up the stairs, answering her mother’s call, Mary, come inside, then later, on the beach, her eyes so still as she’d watched the red striped kite dip and weave in the empty sky.

“We flew a kite once,” I told her. “Do you remember that?”

She did not look at me, nor give an answer.

I looked away, out toward the nightbound sea, and suddenly it shattered, all of it around me, the great shell I had lived in all my life. I felt the air warm up around me, a green water spread out before me, my body plunging into it from off the wooden pier, the world instantly transformed into a dense, suffocating green as I surged forward, first toward the rear end of the car, then along its side, my eyes open, searching, everything held in a deathly stillness as I peered inside, staring frantically into what seemed an impenetrable wall of green. Then I saw her face swim out of the murky darkness, her red hair waving behind her, her eyes open, staring at me helplessly, her mouth agape, a wave of blood pouring from it as she gasped for breath. I grabbed the handle of the door, started to jerk it open, free her from a watery grave, then heard a voice pierce the depths, cold and cruel, as if the dark mouth of Black Pond were whispering in my ear: Sometimes I wish that she were dead. I felt my fingers wrap more tightly around the metal handle, Mrs. Reed now staring at me desperately, her face pressed against the glass, her green eyes blinking through the swirl of blood that had gathered around her head, her mouth moving wordlessly, unable to cry or scream, her eyes growing large, bulging, gaping at me with a strange incomprehension as I faced her through the glass, my hand on the handle, poised to pull open the door, but pressing against it instead, holding it in place. For a moment she saw it in my face, knew exactly what was happening. Her lips parted with her last words, Please, no. Then a wave of bloody water came from her mouth, and I saw her hands lift with an immense heaviness, her fingers claw almost gently at the glass as the seconds fell upon her like heavy weights, and her eyes dimmed, and the last bubbles rose, and her body began to drift backward, rising slowly as the weight of life deserted her, so that the last thing I saw was her body as it made a slow roll, then began to descend again, curling finally over the jutting wheel, her eyes lifted upward in the final moment, searching for the surface of the pond, its distant glimmer of bright summer air.

I closed my eyes and felt winter gather around me once again, the faintly sweet odor of Alice Craddock’s blanket wafting over me. I could feel my fingers trembling as I returned the envelope to my jacket pocket, listening first to my father’s voice as it rang over the boys of Chatham School, Evil on itself doth back recoil, then to the last stanza of a song I’d heard repeated all my life and whose every word had served to prove him wrong:For the fear and slaughter

In the dark green water

Miss Channing pays alone.

I started to rise, now wanting only to rush away, back to my house, my books, retreat once again behind the shield of my isolation, but I felt Alice’s soft, fleshy hand grab my coat, draw me back down onto the place beside her.

“You can stay with me awhile,” she said in a voice that sounded like a child’s command.

I eased myself back down upon the bench. “All right,” I said. “I’ll stay awhile.”

She smiled softly, unwrapped her blanket, and draped it over both of us.

We sat very still for a long time, then I felt her fingers reach for my hand and close around it. “Pretty night,” she said.

I nodded, waited a moment, then, because I couldn’t stop them, let the words fall from my lips. “I’m sorry, Mary,” I told her.

Her fingers tightened around mine. “Oh, that’s all right,” she said almost lightly, a child’s forgiveness for some small slight, but her gaze lifting toward the sky, a curious gravity gathering in them, so that for a moment she seemed to take on the greater burden, a whole world of broken bodies, mangled hearts, her eyes searching through the vastness for some reason that would explain their ruin, past stars and worlds of stars, the boundless depths, the last dim light, where still there was no answer to her Why?

I put my arm around her shoulders, and drew her close against my side. It seemed so little, all I had.

“You’re right,” I told her. “It is a pretty night.”

About the Author

THOMAS H. COOK is the author of fifteen novels, including The Chatham School Affair, winner of Edgar Award for Best Novel; Instruments of Night; Breakheart Hill; Mortal Memory; Sacrificial Ground and Blood Innocents, both Edgar Award nominees; and two early works about true crimes, Early Graves and Blood Echoes, which was also nominated for an Edgar Award. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod, where he is at work on his next novel.

If you enjoyed Thomas Cook’s Edgar-Award-winning THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR, you will want to read all of his mesmerizing novels of psychological suspense.Look for EVIDENCE OF BLOOD in paperback at your favorite bookstore now.And turn the page for an exciting preview of EVIDENCE OF BLOOD.EVIDENCE

OF

BLOOD

byThomas Cook

He’d seen shadows of his own. Hers did not surprise him. It was only surprising how often they recurred, as if something in the mind still insisted that it had never really happened. Daphne Moore had seen one pass her bedroom window with something large and bulky in its hand. It had been tall and slender when Ellen Ferry had seen it glide swiftly across her closet door. Wyndham Knight had only glimpsed a head and shoulders as they skirted along the bright blue surface of her lighted, nightbound pool. Try as he had, he’d never been able to imagine what little Billy Flynn had seen.“So you saw his shadow first?”She nodded slowly, ponderously, as if underwater. “It came up from behind me. He was real close. Then he opened the door on the driver’s side. He said, ‘Get in. Get in, or you’re dead.’ Something like that. Then he came in after me, sort of pushing me in, you know?”“Did he speed away?”“No. He was going slow, like he didn’t want to attract attention, and he was doing everything like he’d really studied about it, very, very …” She searched for the word. He did his job, found it for her.“Methodical?”“Yeah, like that.”Her voice was weak, her eyes slightly diverted, a shy maiden reluctantly going over the unseemly details. He could sense her groping through the tale, hesitant, disordered, whole segments lost or out of sequence.“I stayed in the frontseat, where he put me. I didn’t know what else to do.”His pencil whispered softly as it glided across the lined yellow paper of his notebook. All around, the world seemed very still, despite the patter of the rain against her window, the sounds of traffic moving along the nearby street. It was a stillness that seemed to radiate out from her testimony in a cold, numbing wave.Her eyes drifted to the window, then about the room, before finally returning to him. It was a gesture that reminded him of someone who could have been a nun, perhaps should have been a nun, secure in a cloistered life, beyond the reach of shadows.“I was sitting up. I could see everything. It was at night. But I could see things.”She seemed mildly surprised by the fact that she’d never been pressed down onto the floorboard or locked in the trunk, that she’d been sitting up for the whole ride, as if she were his wife, sister, girlfriend. She considered it for a moment. “I saw people. It was dark, but we passed people walking down the road.” She shrugged slightly. “But there was nothing they could do.”Kinley nodded. He’d heard this before, too, and always with the same tone of irony and unreality. How could other people be so near, and yet so far away? Patricia Quinn had passed three security guards as she was led down the corridor toward the room in which she would be slaughtered. Felicia Sanchez had seen her mother approach the house and peer toward the wrong bedroom window for a moment before going on her way. In those who survived their experiences of sudden, mortal danger, there was always a sense of being in and out of the world at the same time, a feeling that time had stopped, that everything had suddenly gone mute and motionless, except for the rope’s flapping ends, the crack of the belt, the slight nudge of the muzzle.“Did you talk to him?”“I guess I did, but I don’t know what I said. I guess I was asking him things. Like: ‘Why?’ Like: ‘Why are you doing this?’”She flicked a bit of ash into the small plastic ashtray on the table, and the gentle, retiring nun disappeared. Now she was just a jittery woman with dry skin and a Death Valley emptiness in her eyes. The universal victim. She could be a battered wife sucking at her broken fingernail or a factory worker slumped in a fat recliner. The falling ash would fall in exactly the same way, the mouth tighten into the same red scar. It was a look he’d seen a thousand times: the eyes closing languidly as if indifferent to the lash; the head drooping very slightly, ready for the axe; then, inevitably, the eyes opening again, though vacant and passionless, as if any remaining rage would be dismissed as self-indulgence, even by the drowsy reporter taking down the tale. It’s all ashes, ashes. Who really gives a shit about what happened to me?Kinley made his own stage move, pretending to write something in his notebook as he glanced about the room, taking in its small details. He had always assumed that if God was in the details, then Satan must be in them too, leering unrepentantly from a pile of tangled sheets or from behind a spent ring of masking tape. His experience had taught him that nothing betrayed the quirkiness of the mind more than the odd minutiae of crime: the pasteboard box Perry had laid Mr. Cutter on to keep him comfortable until he cut his throat; the can of deodorant Whitman had taken with him to the Texas Tower, not wanting to offend; the little Christmas ornament Mildred Haskell had dangled out the door to coax in Billy Flynn.As his eyes moved about the room, he could feel them gather in its small details. It had always been this way, his mind, a thing that feasted on the tiniest particulars. The apartment it inventoried now was a kingly banquet. There was a large, slightly faded doily on the boxy television. The lamp on top of it resembled a small mound of seashells or various other beach droppings, all of them glued together and polished to a glassy sheen. In a far bedroom, he could see part of the wooden bed frame, and a bit of the wallpaper behind it, English fox-hunting scenes, red jackets, horses, dogs. He remembered similar wallpaper in the little house where he’d grown up, only it had been a Southern scene, little girls in bonnets and hoopskirts dancing on a vast green lawn. Tara, his grand-mother had called it, though always with that arctic smile.Other walls, other rooms had suggested other things: the illuminated Christ that hung over Wilma Jean Comstock’s bed (how fervently she must have prayed to it during the hours it took for Colin Bright to kill her); the pentagram in Mildred Haskell’s dripping smokehouse (what must little Billy Flynn have thought?); the life-sized, semen-stained diagram of internal organs that Willie Connors had slept with before trying the real thing (had Wyndham Knight seen that?). He wondered what his grandmother would have called such adornments had she seen them as he had seen them, live, in living color.His eyes returned to the witness. “Did he ever mention why he was doing any of this?” he asked.She shook her head determinedly. “No, no, he never said anything like that.”Kinley brought his pencil to attention. “Okay, just tell me what happened after you got in the car.”“Right after he pushed me in. He made me do it.” She looked away shyly, a nun again. “To myself.”Kinley noted the slight hesitation before the last two words, and the barely perceptible sense of shame which accompanied them, all common victim reactions, a strange, irrational belief that nothing ever happened entirely by accident, that even the most horrible events had some kind of explanation, something you’d done to make it happen. Maybe my hair was too loose, my sweater too tight; maybe that’s what made him do it to me.“Play with myself. He made me do it. In the car while we were going.” She took a long draw on the cigarette. Her foot began to tap at the floor in a soft, rapid beat. “He looked like he’d done it before, made girls do that.”“Did he say he’d done it before?”If she said yes, he’d have to do more leg work, track down the possibility, however remote, that he had, in fact, done it before. He waited as she considered the question.“No.”“You just had that feeling?”“Yes. Just the way he did things. Like he’d done it before. Like it wasn’t just something he was making up as he went along.”The “he” was Fenton Norwood, now resident number EG14679 at the Walpole Correctional Institute in Walpole, Massachusetts. At the time he’d abducted her, fall, 1974, he’d been twenty-four years old, a high school dropout and U.S. Army deserter roaming the Portuguese districts of New Bedford. As far as Kinley had been able to track down, Maria Spinola had been his first victim. Still, he needed to be sure.“So he didn’t actually mention anything about having done it before?”“No.”“Did he tell you where he was taking you?”“No, but we were on the highway. Going east. Southeast. Toward the Cape.”At the time of the incident, Maria Spinola had been sixteen years old. Now she was just over thirty, an alcoholic with an edgy manner, twice divorced, the mother of two children currently in her former husband’s custody, her life in ruins, she claimed, because of what Fenton Norwood had done to her.But as he looked at her, Kinley found he could not wholly accept the notion that Fenton Norwood was entirely to blame for Spinola’s fate. He had seen too many other people like her, programmed for misfortune, as if there were a trapdoor at the core of their makeup. He had checked her school records, talked with her former guidance counselor. When Norwood had picked her up, she’d already been pregnant by a high school boy who periodically beat her, and Kinley suspected it had been her pregnancy that had probably prevented Norwood—the former Catholic altar boy, working through his own oblique moral gymnastics: murder one thing, abortion another—from killing her. In any event, her life had already begun to strike him as one of those for which no safe harbor was ever really available, a wingless and descending life that on one particular afternoon had simply drifted aimlessly toward a shadow.For the first time she seemed to stiffen slightly, as if in a sudden surge of resentment. “I couldn’t ever go to the Cape after what happened. I’ve never been to Cape Cod, you know? Not since that night. My whole life. Only a few miles away. But I can’t go there.” The momentary flash was quickly smothered by a thin, wet smile. “He didn’t look like he could do what he did. Strange, huh?”Kinley stared at Spinola, but saw Norwood instead, a pudgy pink face, bug eyes and fat lips. The ultimate disguise, Jack the Ripper in the body of Elmer Fudd.She lifted her head slightly. “He should have killed me. Right there in the woods that night. In a way, he did.”But he didn’t. All of that had come later. First the woman in the discount clothing store in New Bedford; then the little girl in Boston, the one he’d kept for nearly three weeks, walking her on a leash through the Commons the rainy afternoon before he killed her; finally two at a time, twelve-year-old twins vacationing at Nickerson State Park on the Cape. The one similarity had been in their looks, all of them with dark skin, eyes and hair. Once, when Kinley had pointed it out to Norwood, his fat face had gone blank for a few seconds before brightening with an impish grin. “Maybe I just like em slightly toasted,” he’d said.Spinola’s resentment built a moment, then reached its crescendo in a sudden burst. “Just left me in the woods. All dirty, filthy. Just left me there, the bastard.” She pulled in a long, exhausted breath, regained control. “Did you see the pictures?”Kinley gave no indication of an answer, but he’d seen them, ail right, the way he’d seen hundreds of others. Maria Spinola’s were nothing special in the gallery of his mind. They showed a young girl in torn clothes, with a muddy face and wet, matted hair. The forest was apathetically beautiful behind her, and there was even a hint of the blue-green pond Norwood had planned to drown her in. As pictures, they were a long way from others he had seen: dark cellars fitted with chains, pulleys, eyebolts, jungles of rope, clothesline, straps and latches, miniature racks, pillories, dunking stools, and everywhere, in every vision, the shadows of hooks.She shook her head despondently, reaching out for his tender word. “I sometimes wish he’d gone ahead and done his worst to me,” she said.Kinley looked at her distantly, remembering. No, you don’t Believe me. No, you don’t.

He took the five o’clock shuttle out of Logan and arrived at La Guardia less than an hour later. The cab ride to his apartment on the Upper West Side came to almost thirty dollars, and once there, he walked to his desk, pulled out his business expense notebook and recorded the amount precisely for the IRS. Precision was everything to him, and he often clung to it the way another might cling to a log in a maelstrom, as something fixed within the chaos. It gave him comfort to see all his notes in order, all his books in a neat row. And though he recognized his obsessive orderliness, with its accompanying mother lode of rock-ribbed discipline and self-control, as a mild form of compulsiveness, its exact source continued to elude him. It was one of his own shadows, he supposed, but one that had always served him well, ensuring that he would complete one book after another while others foundered in a seedy alcoholism or stumbled groggily from one domestic horror to the next. Whatever else could be said of a clean, unencumbered life, he often thought, it certainly was clean and unencumbered, and he had never felt the inclination to apologize for the choices he had made.Even the simple arrangement of his desk for the night’s work brought him a sense of stability and resourcefulness, and after he’d done it, Kinley fixed himself a scotch and slouched down on the small sofa by the window. He always allowed himself a few minutes of calm between the interview and its transcription, though this, too, was “working” time, his mind playing it all through again, from the moment Spinola had opened the door until the time she closed it, her small brown face continuing to watch him, as witnesses always watched him, warily from the shadows behind their windows, as if he were somehow as threatening as the ones who’d done them harm.He looked at the digital clock on his desk. It was now almost seven o’clock, and the evening shade was falling over the streets below. He could hardly wait for it to deepen, since, in a way, he had always thought of night as his best friend. It was silent and unpeopled, a world of vastly reduced distractions. In the quiet he could let his mind do what it did best, retrieve and analyze, order and distinguish.He was nearly finished playing back the interview with Maria Spinola when the phone rang. It was Wendy Lubeck, his agent, and for the next few minutes, Kinley listened as she related the details of a series of murders that had occurred in the Maine woods along the Canadian border. A publisher had asked if he might be interested in doing a book on the case, Wendy told him, and in response Kinley promised to think about it.But he didn’t. Instead, as he sat down on the sofa by the window, he thought about something else entirely, a place about as far from Maine as he could imagine, the northern Appalachian foothills of Georgia in which he’d been brought up by Granny Dollar, the maternal grandmother who’d taken him in after his parents had been killed in an automobile accident.Granny Dollar had died only two months before, and since then he’d noticed his tendency to drift back to his past from time to time, quietly, unexpectedly, in those dead moments when his work left him, and he found himself alone in his apartment, wifeless, childless, with only Granny Dollar to remind him of the texture of family life he’d once known.That texture had been very dense, indeed, it seemed to him now. She’d raised him in almost complete solitude, the two of them perched on an isolated ridge overlooking a desolate canyon, with nothing but the sounds of crickets and night birds to break the silence that surrounded them. Since that time he’d been a loner, and over the years, he’d come to believe that for people like himself, the true solitaires, it was better to have no one to answer to, wonder about, no one whose affections mattered more to him than the esteem he expected from the little Chinese woman who did his shirts: Goo to see you, Missur Kahnley.

He was working at his desk when the phone rang. He looked at the clock. It was just nearly seven-thirty, so he suspected it might be Wendy, still chewing at her idea. It could not be Phyllis, his old-time drinking buddy, because she was on assignment in Venezuela. As for the type of woman other men spent so much time searching for, or trying to figure out, Kinley had long ago admitted that the Mythical She had either eluded him or he had eluded her. Instead, he dwelt in harmony with the dark-eyed murderesses of his work, admiring their coldly calculating eyes, the edge of cruelty and dominion which clung to their false smiles, their minds even more intricate, limitless and unknowable than his own.The phone rang a third time, and he glanced at the message machine. He’d turned it off when he’d started to work, and now regretted it. There was no choice but to pick up the phone.“Yes?” he answered curtly.“Hello, Mr. Kinley?”“Yes.”“It’s Serena Tindall.”He thought it was odd that she’d said her last name, but he made nothing of it. “Hello, Serena,” he said. “Are you in New York?”“No, I’m at home,” Serena said. “For summer break. I’ve been working at the high school.”“Your father’s old stomping ground.”He heard her breath catch in that tense, briefly suspended way he’d often heard others pause before making the great plunge into their tragic tales. “It’s about Daddy,” she said.“Ray? What? What is it?”Her voice broke as she told him. “He died this afternoon.”

He tried to continue with his transcription of the Spinola interview after talking to Serena, but found he couldn’t, so after a while, he poured himself another scotch and sat down at the small desk by the window. On the hanging shelf just above it, he’d arranged all his books, as if he still needed solid, physical evidence of how far he’d come from where he’d started. Up north, he sometimes referred to his native region as “Deliverance country,” but in his own mind, it had always remained “Ray’s country.”Joe Ray Tindall.Kinley turned on his computer, as if with Ray gone, it was now his only completely reliable friend, and wrote out Ray’s name. Including it among the body of data he’d accumulated in his work seemed to give it an honored resting place, and for a moment, Kinley stared at the name, his mind conjuring up the face that went with it. It was a large, broad-boned face, and Kinley could clearly recall the first time he’d seen it. He’d been standing in the crowded corridor of Sequoyah High, small, timid, aloof, not only the new boy in school, but the one who’d been singled out by a group of Yankee IQ researchers, branded “very superior” by their tests, and reported, almost like a dangerous alien, to the Sequoyah County Board of Education. The Board had subsequently pulled him from his mountain grammar school and rushed him down into the valley to join, at mid-year, the more advantaged freshman class of Sequoyah High School.Ray had been the first person to speak to him there, an oversized boy clad in blue jeans and a checkered shirt, staring at him from across the hall, his eyes, as they always were, motionless and intense, as if taking aim before finally speaking to him.You that freshman from up on the mountain?Yes.The one that’s supposed to be a genius?I guess.Special tests and everything, you must be a whiz. My name’s Ray Tindall.Jackson Kinley.Sounds like two last names. You give them to me in the right order?Yeah.You ever go hunting?Yeah.Maybe we’ll go up to the canyon sometimes, shoot something.Okay.How about this Saturday? I’ll meet you on the road to Rocky Ridge. Then we’ll just head into the woods up there.Okay.Kinley peered at the name on the screen. He typed something else under it: ROCKY RIDGE. That’s where they’d gone that first time. And as it turned out, it was also where they’d found Ray face down on the forest’s leafy floor. It was the only question he’d asked Serena beyond the usual ones about the funeral: “What was he doing down in the canyon?”“I don’t know.”“Who found him?”“Some old man who lives up on the ridge.”“Was Ray on a case?”“He was always on a case. That’s just the way he was.”“What was it anyway?”“I don’t know. Something in the District Attorney’s Office, I guess.”“No, Serena. I’m sorry. I meant, what killed him?”“Oh. Well, it was probably his heart.”It had not been a soft heart, in the sense of great compassion or an infinitely extended understanding, Kinley thought as he continued to sit at his desk, still watching the computer screen, but it was a rich, difficult, complicated heart. There was something about Ray that could never be figured out exactly. Even the way he looked led you slightly off the mark. He had had wiry reddish-brown hair and a sallow complexion that easily burned in the summer sun. He had not been an intimidatingly large man, but when he came into a room, he seemed to shrink it just a bit. He had liked the woods but hated the water, loved fast cars but avoided planes, talked religion but never gone to church, read but rarely spoken of what he read. There had been something mysterious about him, something Kinley had noticed even mat first day in the canyon, the way his eyes seemed to focus on something far away, unreachable even when he spoke of something near at hand, perhaps no further than a short walk into the woods.There’s an old house down here, but nobody lives in it anymore.In the canyon? Where?Not far from here. You want to see it?I guess.It’s the perfect place. You can only find it if you really look hard.Even now, it was impossible for Kinley to know why he’d followed Ray down the narrow, granite ledge and into the dark labyrinth of the canyon. He could remember the frothy green river that had tumbled along the canyon bottom, the sounds of its waters moving softly through the trees, even the unseasonably cool breeze that shook the slender green fingers of the pines, then swooped down to rifle through the leaves at his feet. It was his one great gift. He could remember everything.And now he remembered that as they’d advanced on the house, the going had gotten rougher, the sharp claws of the briers grabbing at his shirt, low-slung limbs suddenly flying into his face like quick slaps to warn him back. The last hundred yards had seemed to take forever, as if the air had thickened, turned to an invisible gelatin which had to be plowed through as arduously as the bramble. It had taken them almost an hour to make it to the general vicinity of the old house Ray had spoken of, and by that time, Kinley remembered, the trek had begun to exhaust him, his legs growing more feeble with each step, his breathing more labored and hard-won, the old plague of his asthma snatching at his breath. It had been enough to rouse his new friend’s concern.Kinley, are you all right? We don’t have to keep going.How far is it?Not far. Just through those last trees. Then we hit the vines.What vines?The ones around the house. Like a wall almost. You want to keep going?Yes.Okay, let’s go.The wall of vines had been exactly as Ray described it, a tall impenetrable drapery of coiling green that hung from the trees and sprouted from the ground simultaneously, its sticky shafts so covered with the dry husks of thousands of insects that in certain places the vines themselves appeared like lengths of tightly knotted rope. The very look of it, Kinley remembered now, had unnerved him so much that he’d actually drawn back, his breath now coming in short, agonized gasps.I think we’d better stop, Kinley.Why?You need to get back. I think you may need a doctor.No.You can’t really get to the old house anyway. There’s no break in the vines.But I want …No.Ray had said it just that firmly. There was to be no argument in the matter. They would go no further. Then he’d taken Kinley by the arm and led him away, the great wall of green disappearing behind him forever.“Forever,” Kinley whispered now, realizing that they’d never tried to find the old shack after that, but had simply let it sink, first from their conversation, then from their boyhood plans, and finally from their remembered hopes.

The phone rang again around ten. It was Serena again.“I just wanted to tell you about the autopsy,” she said. “My mother called to let me know, and I thought you might want to hear about it, too.”“Yes, I do.”“It was a heart attack,” Serena said. “Massive. That’s what the doctor said. Massive.”“So he died quickly,” Kinley said before he could stop himself.“And so young,” Serena said. “I guess that’s why they wanted an autopsy.”“Who did?”“Mr. Warfield,” Serena said, “the District Attorney, the man he worked for.”“Ray was working for the District Attorney’s Office?”“Yeah. He didn’t run for Sheriff again. Didn’t he tell you that?”“No.”“Well, I guess he just got tired of it, decided not to run. That’s when he took this job with the District Attorney.”“I see.”“Anyway, Mr. Warfield wanted an autopsy.”“It’s probably a good idea.”“You know about this kind of thing, I guess. From your work, I mean.”“A little.”“He was a good man,” Serena said. “I’m just sorry he had to die alone, way down in the canyon.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “Looking for something, I guess. What do you think it was?”Kinley shook his head silently. Maybe just a way through the vines, he thought.

The Chatham School Affair

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1996 by Thomas H. Cook.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-4021

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eISBN: 978-0-307-43483-8

v3.0

Table of Contents

Cover

Other Books By This Author

Title Page

Dedication

Part 1Chapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6

Part 2Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11

Part 3Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15

Part 4Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22

Part 5Chapter 23Chapter 24Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28Chapter 29Chapter 30Chapter 31Chapter 32

About the Author

Copyright