Miss Channing lowered the cup to her lap. “Where would you like to go, Leland?”
Mr. Reed stared at her intently. “Places you’ve already been, I suppose.”
For an instant, they stared at each other silently, but with an unmistakable intensity and yearning that made the shortest distance between them seem more than they could bear. It was then I first recognized the full depth of what they’d come to feel for each other. It had emerged slowly, incrementally, building every day, word by word, glance by glance, until, at last, it had broken the surface of their long decorum, something irresistibly powerful now blazing up between them, turning all show of mere friendship into a lover’s ruse.
We walked out of the cottage a few minutes later, Mr. Reed and Miss Channing just ahead of me as we strolled out toward the pond, then turned to the right and walked to the end of the old wooden pier that stretched out over the water.
“In the spring we’ll go rowing,” Mr. Reed said. “On the Bass River. All of us together.”
I could see his house in the distance, the small white boat pulled up on dry land. I remembered that only a few weeks before, as we’d stood in the snow on the hill, the sight of his own house had appeared to disturb Mr. Reed, work in his mind like an unpleasant memory. Now it seemed very nearly invisible to him.
It did not seem so to Miss Channing, however, and as she looked across the water toward it, I saw something in her eyes darken, a little light go out. “You should be getting home, Leland,” she told him.
“Yes, I should,” he said, though he made no effort to do so. “That was the first boat I ever built, that little rowboat you can see on the bank there,” he said, his words now turned deeply inward, as if it had been in the process of building it that he’d discovered some abandoned part of himself, a part that had grown steadily since then, and was now poised to consume him. “I guess I wanted something that would let me drift by things,” he added. “Not sail toward them. But just drift by. Hardly make a mark.” He drew in a slow, troubled breath. “Your father would have despised me, Elizabeth,” he said.
Her eyes flashed toward him. “Don’t ever think that, Leland,” she told him. “It isn’t true.” She glanced at me, then away, clearly trying to determine exactly what she could do or say in my presence. Then, as if suddenly alarmed by the fact that I was there at all, she said sharply, “You’d better go, Leland.”
Mr. Reed nodded silently, turned, and headed off the pier, Miss Channing at his side, the two of them moving slowly across the yard toward where his car rested in the driveway, I off to the right at a little distance, trying to give them all the privacy I could, knowing that it was far less than they desired.
“Well, I’ll come for you on Monday morning,” Mr. Reed said to Miss Channing when we reached the car. “We’ll drive into school together, just like always.”
Miss Channing smiled very faintly, then, in a gesture that seemed to come from deep within her, she suddenly stepped forward and pressed her hand against the side of his face. “Yes,” she whispered. “Monday morning.”
It was the only act of physical intimacy I ever saw between them. And yet it was enough so that when Mr. Parsons asked his question several months later—
CHAPTER 17
And so it never surprised me that in the photograph taken nearly two months later, they were still together, standing side by side, Mr. Reed holding to his cane, Miss Channing with her arms at her sides, the trees that tower over them still locked in the grip of that long winter, their limbs stripped and frigid, as bare and fruitless as a bachelor’s life can sometimes be.
Mr. Reed and Miss Channing are not alone in the picture, however. To Mr. Parsons’ dismay, no photograph of them alone was ever located. Instead, they stand amid a throng of teachers and students from Chatham School, along with its office and janitorial staff, everyone assembled on the school’s front lawn, with my father standing proudly in front of them, the lordly captain of their tidy ship, dressed, as always, in his black suit and starched white shirt. The boys fan out to the left and right behind him, all of them dressed in their winter uniforms, shoes shined brightly, wool scarves around their necks, dark blue with gold fringes, the colors of Chatham School. I stand near the end of one flank, my sketchbook pressed manfully against my chest, a warrior behind his sturdy shield.
In every way, then, it was a picture typical of the time, a group photograph artlessly taken and presumed to have little value save to the people pictured in it. Nor would I ever have specifically recalled it had my father not cut it out of the school annual some months after its publication, then added it to his little archive, his reason for doing so made obvious by what he wrote on the back:
But for Mr. Parsons, the principal importance of the photograph was that it showed Mr. Reed and Miss Channing standing beside each other as late as the first week of March 1927, their “illicit affair,” as he called it, still clearly going on. For their arms are touching lightly, as he noted for the jury, a fact that indisputably suggested, as he said in his closing argument, “that Elizabeth Channing and Leland Reed remained united in a relationship whose adulterous and malevolent nature witness after witness has already made clear.”
The testimony of those witnesses was dutifully recorded in Mr. Parsons’ book, but even had I never read it, I would have remembered what they said, a catalogue of random sightings that stretched through the winter and nosed into the following spring, a scattering of words snatched from longer conversations, often innocent in themselves, but within the context of what later happened on Black Pond, as profoundly sinister and unnerving as a trail of bloody footprints around a scene of slaughter.
