Mr. Reed smiled, but with a curious wistfulness, as if it were something he remembered fondly from a distant past. “Yes,” he said, his eyes now fixed on the far bank of the pond. “Yes, it looks just like a Christmas card.” Then he turned away and I saw his eyes light upon Miss Channing, linger upon her profile for a moment.
“And are you going away for the Christmas holiday then?” Sarah asked him. The cold air had caused the color to rise in her cheeks and her eyes sparkled with excitement.
He seemed reluctant to answer, but did so anyway. “Yes,” he said. “I’m going to Maine for a couple of weeks. We always do that, go to Maine.”
With that, he turned quickly and led us back down the hill to Miss Channing’s cottage.
Mr. Reed stopped when he reached his car. “I’ll be getting home now,” he said, his eyes on Miss Channing.
“I’m glad you dropped by,” she told him, her voice quite soft, almost inaudible.
“Perhaps I’ll come again,” Mr. Reed said in a tone that struck me as subtly imploring, as if he were asking for some sign from her that he should return.
If she gave him one, I didn’t see it. Instead, she shivered slightly. “It’s really quite cold.”
“Yes, it is,” Mr. Reed answered, his voice now entirely matter-of-fact. “Would you like a ride into the village?” he asked Sarah and me.
We accepted his offer and climbed into the car. Mr. Reed remained outside it, facing Miss Channing, the snow falling between and around them. He spoke to her again, words I couldn’t hear, then stepped forward and offered his hand. She took it, held it for just an instant, then let it go, smiling quietly as he stepped away. It was then I saw it in all its naked force, the full measure of the love that had begun to overwhelm Mr. Reed, perhaps even some hint of the exquisite agony that was inseparable from it, not yet fierce, and certainly not explosive, but the fuse already lit.
Instead of going directly to Chatham, Mr. Reed swung to the right and drove to his own house on the other side of the pond. “I should tell my wife that I’m going to the marina,” he told us.
“The marina?” Sarah asked.
Mr. Reed nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I rented a boat-house there a few years ago. I’m building a boat in it. A fifteen-footer.”
Sarah stared at him admiringly, the thought of such a grand endeavor playing in her eyes. “When will it be finished?” she asked.
“With a little help, I could probably finish it by summer,” Mr. Reed answered.
Impulsively, without giving it the slightest thought, I suddenly made an offer that has pursued me through the years, following me through time, like a dog through the night, its black muzzle forever sniffing at my heels. “I could help you finish it,” I said. “I’d like to learn about boats.”
Mr. Reed nodded, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Really, Henry? I didn’t know you were interested in that sort of thing.”
“Yes, I am,” I told him, though even now I don’t know why I felt such an interest. I do know that it had not come from the seafaring adventure novels I often read, though that was the reason I offered Mr. Parsons the day we walked through the boathouse together. More likely, it had sprung from a voyeur’s dark urge, the allure of the forbidden already working like a drug in my mind.
We reached his house a few minutes later. Sarah and I remained in the car while Mr. Reed went inside.
“He’s such a nice man,” Sarah said. “Not an old fogy like some of them at Chatham School.”
I nodded. “Yes, he is.”
He came back out of the house almost immediately, a long roll of white paper beneath his arm, bound with twine, like a scroll. I watched as he made his way across the yard, his daughter Mary rushing down the stairs behind him while Mrs. Reed stood at the edge of the porch, wiping her hands on her apron as she watched him trudge back toward us through the falling snow. She was still in that position when he pulled himself into the car, but Mary had bounded toward us, then stopped, smiling mischievously as she attempted to roll a snowball in her hands.
Once inside the car, Mr. Reed started the engine and began to pull away. We’d drifted back only a few feet, when Mary suddenly rushed forward and hurled the snowball toward us. It landed on the hood and exploded just at the base of the windshield, sending a flurry of white onto the glass. Mr. Reed turned on the wipers, and as they swept across the windshield, I saw Mrs. Reed still standing on the porch, watching motionlessly as Mr. Reed continued backward, away from her, leaving two dark cuts in the snow.
I told my father about that scene as we stood together on the hill overlooking Black Pond.
“Do you think she’d already sensed it?” my father asked me when I’d finished the story. “I mean, before Christmas. Before they all went to Maine together? Do you think Mrs. Reed already suspected something?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
His eyes shifted to the left, and I could tell he was gazing in the general direction of where Mr. Reed had once lived with his wife and daughter. “If she did know, or if she already suspected something by that time, then she had to have dealt with it for a long time before …”
“Yes, she had,” I said. And with those words I saw her again, Abigail Reed standing beside me as she had in the boathouse that day, her eyes staring down into a cardboard box, fixed on the things that lay inside it—the rope, the knife, a nautical map with a route already drawn in red ink.
“So what finally broke her, I wonder. Sent her over the edge, I mean.”
I said nothing.
He looked at me, his puzzlement returning once again. “We’ll never get to the bottom of it, will we, Henry? We’ll never know what she was thinking in the end.”
I did not answer him, but in my mind I saw her in that final moment, a face pressing toward me out of the murky depths, her red hair waving behind her like a shredded banner.
