“Yes, Miss Channing.”
“For as long as she needs me.”
“I’ll tell him.”
She pressed her hand against the side of Sarah’s face, then turned and walked past me, disappearing from the room as quickly as she’d entered it.
I know that for the rest of that long night she remained alone in her cottage, no doubt staring at the old wooden pier as she sat in her chair by the window, the unlighted hearth only a few feet away, the ashes of Mr. Reed’s letters still resting in a gray heap where, three days later, Mr. Parsons would find them when he came to question her about what he called “certain things” he’d heard at Chatham School.
As for me, I remained at Sarah’s bedside, trying to lose myself in the book, but unable to shut out the sound of her breathing, the fact that as the hours passed, it grew steadily more faint. From time to time a soft murmur came from her, but I never saw any sign of the “distress” Dr. Craddock had warned me about. If anything, she appeared utterly at peace, so that I often found myself looking up from my book, imagining her unconsciousness, wondering if, locked so deeply within the chamber of herself, she could feel things unfelt by the rest of us, the slosh of her blood through the valves of her heart, the infinitesimal firings of her brain, perhaps even the movement of those tiny muscles Miss Channing had once spoken of, and which any true artist must come to understand.
And so I didn’t know until nearly midnight when Dr. Craddock came into the room, walked over to her bed, took hold of her wrist, held it briefly, then released it, shaking his head as he did so, that whatever small sensations Sarah might have felt from the depths of that final privacy, she now could feel no more.
My father had already been told that Sarah had died when he came for me. As he trudged toward me from down the hallway he looked as if he were slogging through a thick, nearly impenetrable air. He drew in a long breath as he gathered me into his arms. “So sad, Henry,” he whispered, “so sad.”
We went directly home, drifting slowly through the center of the village, its shops closed, the streets deserted, no one stirring at all save for the few fishermen I saw as we swept past the marina. Glancing out over its dark waters, I could see Mr. Reed’s boat lolling peacefully. The
And so I never sought it after that.
“We’ll have to make an announcement in school tomorrow morning,” my father told my mother as he came into the parlor. “The boys have to be told. And Captain Hamilton wants to question a few people tomorrow afternoon.”
My mother, working fiercely at her knitting, so much death burning in her mind, aid not seem in the least surprised by such a development. “No doubt there’ll be plenty of questions,” she said without looking up.
“Who do they want to question?” I asked my father.
“Me, of course,” he answered, now trying to pretend that it was merely some kind of police routine, a formality. “Some of the teachers.”
“They’ll want to talk to me as well,” my mother said, her eyes glowing hotly, clearly looking forward to the prospect.
“Why would they want to talk to you, Mildred?” my father asked.
“Because of what Mrs. Reed told me,” she answered, her eyes fixed on her knitting. “About that woman and Mr. Reed.”
For the first time, I saw my father bristle. “You’re not to be spreading tales, Mildred,” he told her.
My mother’s head shot up, her eyes narrowing fiercely. “Tales?” she said. “I’m not talking about tales, Arthur. I’m talking about what Mrs. Reed told me right here in this room, things she asked me to keep quiet about, and so I did … until now.”
“And what are these ‘things,’ may I ask?”
“She thought that there were bad things afoot,” my mother replied. “In the boathouse. Down at the marina. She thought there was a plot against her.”
Aghast, my father looked at her. “You can’t be serious.”
My mother stood her ground. “She thought he might murder her. Mr. Reed, I mean. She was terrified of that.”
“But Mrs. Reed wasn’t murdered, Mildred,” my father replied. “It was an accident.”
The needles stopped. My mother leaned forward, glaring at him. “She saw a knife, Arthur. A rope too. And they’d already mapped out where they were running to.” Her eyes narrowed menacingly. “And poison too.”
I felt my breath abruptly stop. “Poison?”
My mother nodded. “A bottle of arsenic. That’s what she saw. Right there with the knife and the rope.”
I could hardly believe my ears. “That was for the rats,” I told her. “In the boathouse. I helped Mr. Reed spread it myself.”
She appeared not to have heard me, or to have ignored what she heard. She eased herself back, the needles whipping frantically again. “Oh, there’re going to be questions all right,” she said. “Lots of questions, that’s for sure.”
I suppose it was at that moment that the further consequences of what had happened on Black Pond that afternoon first occurred to me. It would not end with Mrs. Reed dead behind the wheel or Sarah dead in her bed at Dr. Craddock’s clinic. Their deaths were but the beginning of more destruction still.
CHAPTER 28
Throughout that long night I floated in green water, saw Mrs. Reed’s head plunge toward me from out of the murky depths, her features pressed frantically against the glass, eyes wide and staring.
By morning I was exhausted, and I felt as if I could barely stand with the other boys when they assembled on
