forest debris, a scattering of shattered lobster traps strewn across its grounds, it gave off a forlorn sense of having been abruptly abandoned, then left to rot forever.
The stairs creaked loudly as I climbed them, grabbing a shaky railing as I went, then stood silently on the porch for a moment, looking into the house, thinking of the terrible words that had been said within its cramped few rooms, wondering if some element of all that might linger still, like a poison mold growing on the walls. A tiny voice pierced the air.
It was then that I glanced back out into the yard, where for a single visionary instant I saw a small girl in a white boat closely tethered to the shore, playfully pulling at the oars, her blond hair held in place by a thin red ribbon.
From behind me, a second, disembodied voice called her name.
I turned and saw Mrs. Reed standing at the door of a house that was no longer overgrown with vines, its paint no longer peeling from wood gone black and sodden in the years since its abandonment. She seemed to stare directly through me, as if I were the ghostly one, she brought back to life. Then her eyes narrowed, and she brushed back a loose strand of red hair as she called to her daughter once again, her words echoing in the air, bounding and rebounding across the unresponsive surface of Black Pond.
I felt a cold wave rush through me, then saw Mary dart past her mother and into the house, laughing happily as she dissolved into its darkened space, her laughter growing faint in the distance, as if she were still running, though now down the passageway of a vast, unending tunnel.
Like a blast of arctic air, I felt all the terror of the past sweep over me in a breathless shiver, as if it were Mrs. Reed and her daughter who had drawn me back into their world rather than I who had returned them unwillingly to mine.
I peered into the interior of the house, its front door long ago pulled down. The walls were now stripped and bare, the fireplace crumbling, the floor little more than a loose assemblage of sagging wooden slats. The kitchen was at the rear of the house, silent, empty, a dusky shaft of light pouring in from the rear window, and with nothing but four rust-colored indentations in the floor to indicate the heavy iron stove Mrs. Reed had used to prepare dinner for her family.
From court testimony I knew that Mrs. Reed had made a special meal for Miss Channing that night, that it had consisted of cabbage and boiled ham, deviled eggs, and a rhubarb pie. I knew that after dinner Mary Reed had busied herself in the front room while the Reeds and Miss Channing lingered over a pot of coffee whose phantom aroma I could almost smell, as if, down all the passing years, it had continued to waft out of the deserted kitchen, filter through the long-abandoned rooms, drift out onto the creaky, leaf-strewn porch where I stood.
Throughout dinner Mr. Reed had kept the conversation centered on Miss Channing, forever returning her to one place or another from her travels, so that during the course of the dinner she’d described everything from the look of Vesuvius as it loomed menacingly over the ruins of Pompeii to the tiny Danish village beloved by Christian Andersen. “How interesting,” had been Mr. Reed’s repeated responses. “How the boys at school must enjoy listening to you.”
As for Abigail Reed, she’d listened quietly, watching her husband as he watched Miss Channing, smiling politely from time to time, nodding occasionally, perhaps already beginning to sense that something unexpected had entered her life, a woman in a pretty dress, talking of the books she’d read, the things she’d seen, a world Mrs. Reed had never known, nor thought it important to know. Mr. Parsons’ voice echoed in the air around me.
The dinner had come to an end at around ten o’clock. By then Mary had drifted out of the front room and disappeared into the darkness surrounding the house. On the porch Miss Channing had politely thanked Mr. Reed and Abigail for the dinner, then turned and headed down the stairs and out toward the narrow path that followed along the water’s edge. From a distance she heard Mr. Reed calling for his daughter, then Mrs. Reed’s assurance that there was nothing for him to be worried about, that she was only playing near the shed.
It had never occurred to me that it might still be there, but as I eased myself down the stairs of what was left of Mr. Reed’s house, I looked to the left and saw it. In contrast to the house, it was remarkably well-preserved, an unpainted wooden shed, tall and narrow, with a roof of corrugated tin. It stood in a grove of Norway spruce, perhaps a hundred yards on the other side of the Reed house. The trail that had once led to it was overgrown, and the tin roof was covered with pine needles, but the terrible weathering and neglect that had left the Reed house and Milford Cottage in such disrepair seemed hardly to have affected it.
I approached it reluctantly, as anyone might who knew the terror that had shivered there, the sound of small fingers clawing at its door, the whimpering cries that had filtered through the thick wooden slats,
It was windowless, its walls covered with tar paper, the heavy door trimmed in black rubber, creating a tight seal. Though very dark inside, it nonetheless gave off a sense of spaciousness because of the high roof, the great boards that ran its length nearly ten feet above, the large, rusty hooks that pierced the base of the boards and hung toward the floor like crooked red fingers. During Miss Channing’s trial, Mr. Parsons had repeatedly referred to it as a “slaughterhouse,” but it had never been any such thing. Rather, it was one of those outbuildings, common at the time, in which large slabs of meat were hung for smoking or salting or simply to be carved into pieces fit for cooking. The floor had been slightly raised, with half-inch spaces between the boards, so that blood could trickle through it, be soaked up by the ground beneath. Mr. Reed had rarely used it, although it rested on his land, but Mary had often been seen playing both inside it and nearby.
It was this latter fact that had finally brought Captain Lawrence P. Hamilton of the Massachusetts State Police to its large gray door that afternoon. The captain had already searched Mr. Reed’s house by then, the little earthen basement beneath it, the cramped, unlighted attic overhead. That’s where he’d found a battered cardboard box, a knife, and length of rope inside, along with an old primer curiously inscribed. But Captain Hamilton had not been looking for such things when he’d first come to the Reed house that day. His concerns had been far more immediate than that. For although Mrs. Reed had already been found by then, Mary was still missing.
CHAPTER 9
It was nearly ten in the morning when I returned to my car, pulled myself behind the wheel, and headed back toward Chatham. By then, the atmosphere of the places I’d just revisited—Milford Cottage, Mr. Reed’s house, the little shed Captain Hamilton had warily approached on that sweltering May afternoon—had sunk into my memory like a dark, ineradicable stain. I thought of all that had followed the events of that terrible day, some immediately, some lingering through all the intervening years. I remembered my father at his desk, desperately trying to reclaim some part of a dream already lost, my mother staring at him bitterly, locked in her own sullen disillusionment. I saw a young world grow old, the boys of Chatham School expanding into adulthood, then shrinking into old age just as I had, though with less than they had to show for my time on earth, wifeless, childless, a man known primarily for a single boyhood act.
Then, in the midst of all that dead or aged company, I glimpsed the youthful face of Sarah Doyle.
