“Of course, Miss Channing.”
She turned and headed toward the cottage, walking so briskly that I had to quicken my pace in order to keep up with her. Once inside, she retrieved a box of books from her bedroom. “Henry, I’d like to apologize for the state I was in when you came to the cottage the other night,” she said as she handed it to me.
“There’s nothing to apologize for, Miss Channing,” I told her, smiling inwardly at how much she might soon have to thank me for, the fact that I’d taken the fatal step, done what neither she nor Mr. Reed had been able to do, struck at the heavy chain that bound them to Chatham.
After that we walked out of the cottage to stand together near the willow. It was nearly noon by then, quiet, windless, the long tentacles of the tree falling motionlessly toward the moist ground. To the right I could see Sarah moving toward the old wooden pier. At the end of it she hesitated for a time, as if unsure of its stability, then strolled to its edge, a slender, erect figure in her finest dress.
“I hope you’ll look after Sarah,” Miss Channing said, watching her from our place beside the willow. “Encourage her to keep at her studies.”
“I don’t think she’ll need much encouragement,” I said, glancing out across the pond toward Mr. Reed’s house, where I suddenly saw Mrs. Reed as she rushed down the front steps, dragging Mary roughly behind her. At the bottom of the stairs she paused a moment, her head rotating left and right, like someone looking for answers in the air. Then she wheeled to the left and headed toward the shed, moving swiftly now, Mary trotting along beside her.
For a time they disappeared behind a wall of foliage. Then Mrs. Reed emerged again, marching stiffly toward the car. She’d begun to pull away when I glanced at Miss Channing and saw that she was staring across the pond, observing the same scene.
“She’s crazy,” I said. “Mrs. Reed.”
Miss Channing’s eyes shot over to me. She started to speak, then stopped herself. I could see something gathering in her mind. I suppose I expected her to add some comment about Mrs. Reed, but she said nothing of the kind. “Be like your father, Henry,” she said. “Be a good man, like your father.”
I stared at her, shocked by the high regard she’d just expressed for my father, and searching desperately for some way to lower her regard for him. But I found that I could discover nothing that, in saying it, would not lower Miss Channing’s regard for me as well. Because of that, we were still standing silently at the water’s edge when we suddenly heard a car approaching from Plymouth Road, its engine grinding fiercely, the sound rising steadily as it neared us, becoming at last a shuddering roar.
I turned to the right and saw it thunder past us in a thick cloud of white dust, a wall of black hurling down the weedy embankment, its ancient chassis slamming left and right as it plunged at what seemed inhuman speed toward the rickety wooden pier.
For a single, appalling instant, I felt utterly frozen in place, watching like a death mask fixed to a lifeless column until Miss Channing’s scream set the world in motion again, and I saw Sarah wheel around, the car then jerk to the right, as if to avoid her, but too late, so that it struck her with full force, her body tumbling over the left side of the hood and into the water, the car plowing past her, then lifting off the end of the pier like a great black bird, heavy and wingless as it plummeted into the depths of Black Pond, then sank with a terrible swiftness, its rear tires still spinning madly, throwing silver arcs of water into the summer air.
We rushed forward at the same time, Miss Channing crashing into the water, where she sank down and gathered Sarah’s broken body into her arms. I ran to the edge of the pier and dove into the still wildly surging water.
When I surfaced again only a minute or so later, drenched and shaken, my mind caught in a dreadful horror of what I had just seen, I found Miss Channing slumped at the edge of the pond, Sarah cradled in her arms.
“It’s Mrs. Reed,” I told her as I trudged out of the water.
She looked at me in shock and grief. “Is she dead?”
My answer came already frozen in that passionlessness that would mark me from then on. “Yes.”
CHAPTER 26
I’ve never been able to remember exactly what happened after I came out of the water. I know that I ran over to where Miss Channing now sat, drenched and shivering, on the bank, with Sarah’s head resting in her lap. I remember that Sarah’s eyes were open as I approached her, blank and staring, but that I saw them close slowly, then open again, so that I felt a tremendous wave of hope that she might be all right.
At some point after that I took off down Plymouth Road, soaking wet, with my hair in my eyes, and flagged down the first passing car. There was an old man behind the wheel, a local cranberry farmer as I later found out, and he watched in disbelief as I sputtered about there having been an accident on Black Pond, that he had to get a doctor, the police, that he had to please, please hurry. I remember how he sprang into action suddenly, his movements quick and agile, as if made young by a desperate purpose. “Be right back, son,” he promised as he sped away, the old gray car thundering toward Chatham.
After that I rushed back to Milford Cottage. Miss Channing was still where she’d been when I left her, Sarah cradled in her arms, alive, though unconscious, her eyes closed, her breath rattling softly, a single arrowhead of white bone protruding from the broken skin of her left elbow, but otherwise unmarked.
We sat in an almost unbroken silence with nothing but the lapping of the pond and an occasional rustle of wind through the trees to remind us that it was real, that it had actually happened, that Sarah had been struck down, and that beneath the surface of Black Pond, Mrs. Reed lay curled over the steering wheel of the car.
Dr. Craddock was the first to arrive. His sleek new sedan barreled down Plymouth Road, then noisily skidded to a halt in front of Milford Cottage. He leaped from the car, then bolted toward us, a black leather bag dangling from his hand.
“What happened?” he asked as he knelt down, grabbed Sarah’s arm, and began to feel for her pulse.
“A car,” I blurted out. “She was hit by a car.”
He released Sarah’s arm, swiftly opened his bag, and pulled out a stethoscope. “What car?” he asked.
I saw Miss Channing’s eyes drift toward the pond as she waited for my answer.
“It’s in the water,” I said. “The car’s in the water. It went off the pier.”
