“Your mother and I were friends when we were girls,” she said with a faint, oddly painful smile.
She continued to come forward, and seconds later, when she spoke to me again, I could feel her breath on my face. “The boat’s nearly finished.”
“Yes, it is,” I said hollowly.
She glanced about the room, her eyes moving randomly until, with a terrible suddenness, they fixed on the drawing I’d made of Miss Channing, which now hung over the desk in the far corner. Her face became instantly expressionless and void, as if an invisible acid were being poured over her features, melting her identity away.
“Does she come here?” she asked, her gaze still concentrated upon the drawing.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She lifted her head and twisted it sharply to the left, her attention now focused on the cardboard box that rested on the desk, just below the portrait. Like someone lifted on a cushion of smoky air, she drifted toward it effortlessly, soundlessly, the world held in a motionless suspension until she reached it, dropped her head forward, and peered inside.
I knew what she was looking at. A map. A knife. A coil of gray rope. And in the corner, a small brown bottle, the letters printed boldly in black ink: ARSENIC.
She stared into the box for what seemed a long time, like someone recording everything she saw. Then she raised her head in what I will always remember as a slow, steady movement, as if drawing it from the dark, airless water in which it had been submerged, and turned to face me once again. “Is it just me?” she asked.
“Just you?”
“Is it just me? Or is it Mary too?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mrs. Reed.”
During all the years that have passed since that moment, I have seen my share of fear and uncertainty and sorrow, but I don’t think I ever saw it in the same combination again, terror so delicately blended with pain, pain so inseparably mingled with confusion, that the final effect was of a shivering, anguished bafflement.
That was what I saw in Mrs. Reed’s face. It is what I still see when I remember her. It was clear and vivid, all her misery in her eyes. Anyone might have seen it. It could hardly have been more obvious. The only mystery is why her plight, so dark and terrible, did not move me in the least.
It was my mother that it moved.
It was late in the afternoon when I returned home that same day. Sarah was in the dining room, setting places for the evening meal, but she stopped when she saw me enter the house, and rushed into the foyer. I could tell that she was alarmed. “Henry, I have to talk to you,” she said urgently. “Mrs. Reed came here today. To talk to your mother.”
As Mrs. Reed had turned up at our door only a short time after she’d appeared in the boathouse, I had little doubt as to the purpose of her visit. Still, I kept that earlier encounter to myself, allowing Sarah to go on with her story as if I had no hint of where it might be headed.
“She looked odd, Henry,” Sarah said. “Mrs. Reed did. An odd look in her eye.” She shivered slightly. “It gave me a … a creepy feeling, the way she looked.”
“What did she want?”
“She asked to speak with your mother.”
“Did they speak?”
“Oh, yes, they spoke, all right. Your mother called for tea, and I brought it to them. Right in the parlor. With the door closed, of course.”
I could see my mother and Mrs. Reed sitting beside the empty hearth of the parlor, our best china teacups in their hands, Mrs. Reed tormented beyond measure, telling of her husband’s betrayal, my mother growing more and more angry and alarmed as she listened to her story.
“I couldn’t hear what they said,” Sarah added. “But it looked serious.”
“Where are they now?”
“They went for a walk, the two of them.” Sarah gave me a piercing look. “What’s this all about, Henry?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” I lied, then turned away and mounted the stairs to my room.
I was still there an hour later when my father returned from his office at Chatham School. He called me downstairs and asked me directly where my mother was. I glanced toward where Sarah stood silently at the entrance of the dining room, waiting for my answer.
“She went out for a walk,” I said.
“A walk?” my father asked. “At this hour? With whom?”
“With Mrs. Reed,” I told him.
He could not conceal his troubled surprise at such a visit. “Mrs. Reed? Mrs. Reed came here?”
“Yes. She came by this afternoon.”
“What did she want?”
“Just to see Mother, I guess.”
He nodded casually, determined to put the best possible light on such a meeting. “Well, they were neighbors, you know,” he said. “Your mother and Mrs. Reed. They’re probably talking about old times, that sort of thing.”
“I didn’t know they were neighbors,” I said.
