Dr. Craddock gave me a quick glance as he pressed the tympanum against Sarah’s chest. “And this young woman was driving it?”
“No,” I told him. “There’s someone in the car.”
I saw the first glimmer of that astonished horror that was soon to overtake our village settle like a gray mist upon his face.
“It’s a woman,” I added, unable to say her name, already trying to erase her from my memory. “She’s dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
He returned the stethoscope to the bag, then brought out a hypodermic needle and a vial of clear liquid. “How about you, are you all right?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
He looked at Miss Channing. “And you?” he asked as he pierced the vial with the needle, then pressed its silver point into Sarah’s arm.
“I’m all right,” Miss Channing said, her features now hung in that deep, strangely impenetrable grief that would forever rest upon her face.
“The woman in the car,” Dr. Craddock said. “Who is she?”
“Abigail Reed,” Miss Channing answered. Then she looked down at Sarah and drew back a strand of glossy wet hair. “And this is Sarah Doyle,” she said.
Sarah had already been taken away when Captain Lawrence P. Hamilton of the Massachusetts State Police arrived at Milford Cottage. He was a tall man, with gray hair and a lean figure, his physical manner curiously graceful, but with an obvious severity clinging to him, born, perhaps, of the dark things he had seen.
Miss Channing and I were standing beside the cottage when he arrived, the once-deserted lawn now dotted with other people, the village constable, the coroner, two of Chatham’s four selectmen, the tiny engine of local officialdom already beginning to crank up.
Captain Hamilton was not a part of that local establishment, as every aspect of his bearing demonstrated. There was something about him that suggested a breadth both of authority and of experience that lay well beyond the confines of Chatham village, or even of Cape Cod. It was in the assuredness of his stride as he walked toward us, the command within his voice when he spoke, the way he seemed to know the answers even before he posed the questions.
“You’re Henry Griswald?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
He looked at Miss Channing. “You live here at the cottage, Miss Channing?”
She nodded mutely and gathered her arms around herself as if against a sudden chill.
“I have most of the details,” Captain Hamilton said. “About the accident, I mean.” His eyes shifted toward the pond. A tractor had been backed to its edge, and I could see a man walking out into the water, dressed in a bathing suit, a heavy chain in his right hand.
“We’re going to pull the car out now,” Captain Hamilton told us.
The man in the water curled over and disappeared beneath the surface of the pond, his feet throwing up small explosions of white foam.
“There’s a husband, I understand,” Captain Hamilton said. “Leland Reed?”
Odd though it seems to me now, I had not thought of Mr. Reed at all before that moment, nor of the other person Captain Hamilton mentioned almost in the same breath.
“And there’s a little girl, I’m told. A daughter. Have you seen her?”
“No.”
“Could she have been in the car?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Well, nobody seems to be at home over there,” Captain Hamilton said, nodding out across the pond. “Do you have any idea where Mr. Reed and the little girl might be?”
I remembered the last thing I’d seen at Mr. Reed’s house, Mrs. Reed bolting across the lawn, Mary trotting at her side, both of them headed for the old gray shed.
“I think I know where she is,” I said.
Captain Hamilton appeared surprised to hear it. “You do?”
“In the shed,” I answered.
“What shed?”
“There’s a shed about a hundred and fifty yards or so from the house.”
Captain Hamilton watched me closely. “Would you mind showing it to me, Henry?”
I nodded. “All right,” I said, though the very thought of returning to Mr. Reed’s house sent a dreadful chill through me.
Captain Hamilton glanced at Miss Channing, then touched the brim of his hat. “We’ll be talking again,” he said as he took my arm and led me away.
