flying through my mind like bits of torn paper in a whirling wind. At some point my mother brought me a sandwich and a glass of water, but the sandwich was never eaten, nor the water drunk.
Later I decided to take a short walk, perhaps to the beach, where I hoped to get some relief from the terrible scenes playing in my mind. I made my way down Myrtle Street, the bluff widening before me. To my left I could see the now-deserted grounds of Chatham School, Miss Channing’s column of faces still standing in the bright summer light, and to my right, the lighthouse, a dazzling white tower, motionless and eternal, as if in mute contradiction to the human chaos sprawled around it.
I made it to the bluff but did not go down. So a few minutes later I was still sitting on the same bench that had once accommodated Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, when I saw Mr. Parsons’ car mount the hill, then glide to the left and come to a stop directly before me.
“Hello, Henry,” Mr. Parsons said as he got out.
I nodded.
He walked to the bench and sat down beside me. “I wonder if we might have a talk,” he said.
I said nothing, but rather than press the issue, Mr. Parsons sat quietly for a moment, then said, “Let’s go for a little walk, Henry.”
We both rose and headed down Myrtle Street, past Chatham School, and, still strolling at a leisurely pace, made our way out toward the playing field and then around it.
“I’ve talked to quite a few people at Chatham School,” Mr. Parsons said.
I stared straight ahead, gave him no response.
“Your name has been mentioned quite a few times, Henry. Everybody seems to think that you were pretty close to both of them. Miss Channing and Mr. Reed, I mean.”
I nodded, but offered nothing more.
“They say that you spent a lot of time with Mr. Reed. In a boathouse he’s got down at the harbor. That you helped him build a boat, that’s what they say.” He stopped and turned toward me. “The thing is, Henry, we’ve begun to wonder how all this happened. I mean, we’ve begun to wonder what Mrs. Reed was intending when she drove over to Milford Cottage last Sunday.”
I said nothing.
Mr. Parsons began to walk again, gently tugging me along with him. “Now, you’re a brave young man,” he said. “Nobody can question that. You did your best to save Mrs. Reed. But now you’ve got another duty. We know that Mrs. Reed was pretty sure that her husband was involved with another woman. And we know that that other woman was Elizabeth Channing.”
I felt my eyes close slowly as we walked along, as if by such a motion I could erase everything that had happened on Black Pond.
“We think she was after Miss Channing that day,” Mr. Parsons said. “That it wasn’t an accident, what happened on Black Pond.”
I kept silent.
“We think Mrs. Reed mistook Sarah Doyle for Elizabeth Channing, and so killed her instead.”
We walked a few seconds more, then Mr. Parsons once again stopped, his eyes bearing into me. “So it was murder, wasn’t it, Henry? It was murder Mrs. Reed intended when she aimed that car at Sarah Doyle.”
He saw the answer in my eyes.
“How long have you known?”
I shrugged.
“Look, Henry, everybody’s proud of you, of how you went into the water and all. But like I said before, you have another duty now. To tell the truth, the whole truth … I’ll bet you know the rest of it.”
“And nothing but the truth,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
“That’s right,” Mr. Parsons said. He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go down to the boathouse, son, and talk a little more.”
I gave him a private tour of the boathouse, watching as his eyes continually returned to my drawing of Miss Channing. “She’s what did it to him,” he said with a certainty that astonished me. “She’s what drove him mad.” Then he walked to the back window. In the distance we could see the
We left the boathouse together shortly after that, walked to his car, and drove back up the coastal road to the house on Myrtle Street. Before pulling away, he made a final remark. “What we can’t figure out is what finally set her off,” he said almost absently, a mere point of curiosity. “Mrs. Reed, that is. I mean, she’d known about her husband and Miss Channing for quite some time. We just wonder what happened on that particular day that sent her over the edge like that, made her go after Miss Channing the way she did, kill that poor girl instead.”
He never posed it as a question, and so I never answered him, but only stepped away from the car and watched as it pulled away, my silence drawing around me like a cloak of stone.
CHAPTER 29
It was not until many years later that I learned exactly what had happened the next day. I knew only that Mr. Parsons and Captain Hamilton arrived at our house early that morning, that my father ushered them quickly into the parlor, then departed with them a few minutes later, sitting grimly in the backseat of Captain Hamilton’s patrol car as it backed out of our driveway. He returned in the same car a few minutes later, this time with a little girl in a light blue dress in his arms, her long blond hair tumbled about her face, and whom I immediately recognized as Mary Reed.
“They want us to keep Mary for a while,” he explained to me. Then he sent me off on a picnic with her, my mother having packed a basket for the occasion, the same one Sarah had used to bring cakes and cookies to Miss Channing. “Take her to the beach and try to keep her mind off things, Henry,” he told me. “She’s going to be pretty scared for a while.”
