“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 mo
ment, 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:
The Chatham School Affair Page 22