The Chatham School Affair

“Do you want her dead?”

I heard no answer, but only the sound of Miss Channing’s footsteps as she headed toward the door, and after that her voice again, anguished, pleading.

“Leland, please. Let me go.”

“But don’t you see that—”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Elizabeth, you can’t—”

I heard the door of the room fly open, then saw Miss Channing rush quickly past where I stood beside the tree, and into the school, her black hair flying like a dark pennant in her wake. Watching her go, then glancing back into her room to see Mr. Reed now slumped in a chair, his head in his hands, I felt the same soaring anger I’d glimpsed in Mrs. Reed’s face as she’d glared at Miss Channing the day before, but with Mrs. Reed now the object of my rage, Miss Channing and Mr. Reed the birds I wished to free from her bony, strangling grasp.

I was still seething nearly an hour later, Mr. Reed’s words echoing in my mind— Do you want her dead?—when Sarah found me on the front steps of the house on Myrtle Street.

“Your father sent me to get you,” she told me as she lowered herself onto the step just beneath me. “He’s at the school. He has something he wants you to do.”

“Tell him you couldn’t find me,” I replied sullenly.

I felt her hand touch mine.

“What’s the matter, Henry?”

I shook my head, unable to answer her.

For a moment she watched me silently, then she said, “Why are you so unhappy, Henry?”

I gave her the only answer I had at the time. “Because no one’s free, Sarah. None of us.”

Her question sprang from an ancient source. “What would happen if we were? Free, I mean.”

My answer signaled the dawning of a self-indulgent age. “We’d be happy,” I said angrily. “If we were free to do what we want, don’t you think we’d be happy?”

She had no answer for me, of course. Nor should I have expected one, since she was young, as I was, the hard fact that our lives cannot accommodate the very passions they inspire still a lesson waiting to be learned.

Sarah got to her feet again. “You’d better go to your father, Henry. He’s expecting you.”

I didn’t move. “In a minute,” I told her.

“I’ll go tell him that you’re on your way,” Sarah said.

With that, she walked away, leaving me to sit alone, watching as she reached Myrtle Street, then swung left and headed for the school, my mind by then already returning to its lethal imaginings, thoughts so malicious and ruthless that several weeks later, as Mr. Parsons and I made our way around that playing field, he could ask his question in a tone of stark certainty, So it was murder, wasn’t it, Henry? and to my silence he could add nothing more than How long have you known?

CHAPTER 22

I never answered Mr. Parsons’ question, but even as he asked it I recalled the very moment when I first thought of murder.

It was late on a Saturday afternoon, the first week of May. I was alone in the boathouse, Mr. Reed having gone to Mayflower’s for a bag of nails. The boat was nearing completion by then, its sleek sides gleaming with a new coat of varnish, the mast now fitted with ropes, its broad sail wrapped tightly and tied in place.

The lights were on inside the boathouse, but Mr. Reed had covered its windows with burlap sacks, the whole room shrouded, so that it resembled something gloomy and in hiding rather than the bright departure point of the great adventure it had once seemed to me.

I was standing near the stove, gathering the last few nails from the bottom of a toolbox, when the door suddenly opened. I turned toward it, expecting to see Mr. Reed, then felt my breath catch in my throat.

“You’re Henry,” she said.

She stood in the doorway, a bright noon light behind her, facing me, one hand on the door, the other at her side, the sun behind her turning the red tint of her hair into a fiery aurora.

“Mildred Griswald’s son,” she added.

Leveled upon me as they were, her green eyes shone out of the spectral light, wide and unblinking, like fish eyes from a murky tank.

I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

She stepped through the door, her gaze upon me with a piercing keenness, alert and wolfish. “You’re helping him,” she said. “Helping him build the boat.”

“Yes, I am.”

Her eyes drifted from me over to the gleaming side of the boat. Then, in a quick, nearly savage movement, they shot back to me.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“Gone to buy nails.”

She came toward me, and I felt my body tense. For there was something in her manner, a sense of having been slowly devoured over many weeks, fed upon by thousands of tiny, gnawing doubts, that gave her a strangely cadaverous appearance, as if the bones were already beginning to appear beneath the pale, nearly translucent film that had become her skin.