The Chatham School Affair (35 page)

He rocked backward, stricken by her words.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, releasing her, stepping away, his eyes now fixed upon her with a shattered, unbelieving gaze. “Elizabeth, I only—” He stopped and looked at her brokenly, saying nothing more as she turned and fled toward the door, her red scarf flowing behind her like a blood-soaked cloth.

My father watched me silently for a moment, then rose and walked to the window, his hands behind his back as he stared out into the yard.

I kept my place by the door, my eyes fixed on the two leather valises beside the bed as I tried to keep the rhythm of my breath quiet and steady, so that it would not reveal the upheaval in my mind. “So it was all a lie,” I said at last. “What Miss Channing said in court. About never going beyond the ‘acceptable limits.’ They
were
lovers.”

“Yes, they were, Henry,” my father said. “But at the
trial Miss Channing didn’t want Mary to ever know that.”

I saw the
Elizabeth
sailing in an open sea, a ghost ship now, drifting eerily through a dense, engulfing fog.

My father walked over to me and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Miss Channing had a good heart, Henry,” he said, then added pointedly, as if it were the central truth of life, “Never forget, that it’s the heart that matters.”

We left Milford Cottage a few minutes later, took Miss Channing’s belongings to the post office, then returned home. My mother was preparing dinner, and so my father and I retired to his office. He sat down in his chair, took out his pipe. I sat opposite him, still thinking about what Miss Channing had told him, how much she must have trusted him to have done so, my eyes studying the portrait she’d painted of him, not as the staid schoolmaster I’d so despised at the time, but as a man who had something restless and unquenchable in him, something that stared out toward the thin blue lake that shimmered seductively in the distance. It was then I realized that Miss Channing had painted my father not as himself alone, but in some sense as herself as well, perhaps as ail of us, stranded as we are, equally tormented by conflicting loves, trying, as best we can, to find a place between passion and boredom, ecstasy and despair, the life we can but dream of and the one we cannot bear.

“I’m glad I told you what I did this afternoon,” he said. “You deserved to know the truth. Especially since you were there on Black Pond that day.” He shook his head. “The sad thing is that it was all over between Miss Channing and Mr. Reed. She was going away. And in the end, he would have taken up his life again.” He seemed captured by the mystery of things, how dark and unforgiving the web can sometimes be. “Nothing would have happened if Mrs. Reed hadn’t died in Black Pond that day.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

He leaned back in his chair. “So that’s the whole story, Henry,” he said, bringing the pipe toward his lips. “There’s nothing more to know about the Chatham School Affair.”

I didn’t answer him. But I knew that he was wrong.

M
any years have passed since then, and all the others have departed now, taking with them, one by one, small pieces of the Chatham School Affair, my mother and father, Mr. Parsons and Captain Hamilton, the last of the teachers who taught at Chatham School that year, even the boys who went there, all dead now, or living far away, probably in decrepitude, near death, with their final year at Chatham School no more than a faint remembrance of a curious and unhappy time.

Through all these many years, only Alice Craddock has remained to remind me of what happened on Black Pond, first as a little girl with melancholy eyes, then as a teenager, sullen and withdrawn, later as a woman of late middle age, grown monstrously fat and slovenly by then, friendless, alone, the village madwoman, chased by little boys, and finally as an old woman, rocking on her porch, with nothing but Dr. Craddock’s steadily dwindling fortune to sustain her.

I know that sometimes I would simply shake my head as she went by, dressed so strangely, as she often was, her toenails painted green, her mind so often lost in a sea of weird imaginings. Once, standing beside Mrs. Benton on the village square, I saw her attention drawn to Alice
as she drifted vacantly down the opposite street, wrapped in a ragged shawl, feet in rubber thongs. “Now, there’s a tatty one,” Mrs. Benton said, then added in a tone so casual it shocked me with its flippancy. “Probably end up like her mother.”

But as the years had proven, Alice had not “ended up” like Mrs. Reed, so that after I’d done my work for Clement Boggs, gotten the zoning variance he needed to sell the land around Black Pond, it finally became my duty to deliver the money he’d received for it to the old house where Alice still lived, wandering aimlessly through its many dusty rooms, a candle sometimes in her hand, so people said, despite the fact that all the lights were on.

At first I’d declined to do it, not wanting to face Alice up close, see what time had wrought, along with suicide and murder. But Clement, determined that his gift remain anonymous, had refused the task himself, and so it had fallen to me to do it for him. “It’s only right that it should be you who tells her about the money, Henry,” he said. “After all, you knew her father, and it was you at the pond when her mother died.”

It was an argument I had no defense against. And so, late on a clear December night, I drove to the house on the bay, the very one that had once housed Dr. Craddock’s clinic, and in which Sarah Doyle had died so many years before.

It was quite cold, but she was sitting on the large side porch when I arrived, wrapped in a thick blanket, her huge frame rocking softly in a high-backed chair.

She turned when she heard my footsteps on the stairs, squinting into the darkness, yet with a strange, expectant air, as if she had been waiting for some important guest.

“Hello, Alice,” I said as I came up the stairs, moving slowly, closing the space between us. “You remember me, don’t you?”

She watched me silently, her eyes moving up and down.

“I’m Henry,” I told her. “Henry Griswald.”

She stared at me, uncomprehending.

“I knew you when you were Mary Reed,” I said. “Back when you lived on Black Pond.”

Her face brightened instantly. “With Mama,” she said.

“Yes.”

She smiled suddenly, a little girl’s smile, then stood, lumbered heavily to a wide bench that rested, facing the sea, at the far end of the porch. She sat down and patted the space beside her, offering another slender smile. “You can sit here,” she said.

I did as she told me, lowering myself unsteadily onto the bench, my eyes averted from her briefly before I forced myself to look at her again.

“I have something for you,” I told her, drawing the envelope from the pocket of my overcoat. “It’s a gift. From a friend. A check. I’m going to deposit it in your account tomorrow. Mr. Jamison, at the bank, he’ll handle it for you.”

She glanced at the envelope but did not take it from my hand. “Okay,” she said, then returned her gaze to the sea. “Boats go by,” she said. “Sailboats.”

I nodded. “Yes, they do.”

I saw her as a little girl again, heard her laughter as she’d darted up the stairs, answering her mother’s call,
Mary, come inside
, then later, on the beach, her eyes so still as she’d watched the red striped kite dip and weave in the empty sky.

“We flew a kite once,” I told her. “Do you remember that?”

She did not look at me, nor give an answer.

I looked away, out toward the nightbound sea, and suddenly it shattered, all of it around me, the great shell I had lived in all my life. I felt the air warm up around me, a green water spread out before me, my body plunging into it from off the wooden pier, the world instantly transformed into a dense, suffocating green as I surged
forward, first toward the rear end of the car, then along its side, my eyes open, searching, everything held in a deathly stillness as I peered inside, staring frantically into what seemed an impenetrable wall of green. Then I saw her face swim out of the murky darkness, her red hair waving behind her, her eyes open, staring at me helplessly, her mouth agape, a wave of blood pouring from it as she gasped for breath. I grabbed the handle of the door, started to jerk it open, free her from a watery grave, then heard a voice pierce the depths, cold and cruel, as if the dark mouth of Black Pond were whispering in my ear:
Sometimes I wish that she were dead
. I felt my fingers wrap more tightly around the metal handle, Mrs. Reed now staring at me desperately, her face pressed against the glass, her green eyes blinking through the swirl of blood that had gathered around her head, her mouth moving wordlessly, unable to cry or scream, her eyes growing large, bulging, gaping at me with a strange incomprehension as I faced her through the glass, my hand on the handle, poised to pull open the door, but pressing against it instead, holding it in place. For a moment she saw it in my face, knew exactly what was happening. Her lips parted with her last words,
Please, no
. Then a wave of bloody water came from her mouth, and I saw her hands lift with an immense heaviness, her fingers claw almost gently at the glass as the seconds fell upon her like heavy weights, and her eyes dimmed, and the last bubbles rose, and her body began to drift backward, rising slowly as the weight of life deserted her, so that the last thing I saw was her body as it made a slow roll, then began to descend again, curling finally over the jutting wheel, her eyes lifted upward in the final moment, searching for the surface of the pond, its distant glimmer of bright summer air.

I closed my eyes and felt winter gather around me once again, the faintly sweet odor of Alice Craddock’s blanket wafting over me. I could feel my fingers trembling as I returned the envelope to my jacket pocket,
listening first to my father’s voice as it rang over the boys of Chatham School,
Evil on itself doth back recoil
, then to the last stanza of a song I’d heard repeated all my life and whose every word had served to prove him wrong:

For the fear and slaughter
In the dark green water
Miss Channing pays alone.

I started to rise, now wanting only to rush away, back to my house, my books, retreat once again behind the shield of my isolation, but I felt Alice’s soft, fleshy hand grab my coat, draw me back down onto the place beside her.

“You can stay with me awhile,” she said in a voice that sounded like a child’s command.

I eased myself back down upon the bench. “All right,” I said. “I’ll stay awhile.”

She smiled softly, unwrapped her blanket, and draped it over both of us.

We sat very still for a long time, then I felt her fingers reach for my hand and close around it. “Pretty night,” she said.

I nodded, waited a moment, then, because I couldn’t stop them, let the words fall from my lips. “I’m sorry, Mary,” I told her.

Her fingers tightened around mine. “Oh, that’s all right,” she said almost lightly, a child’s forgiveness for some small slight, but her gaze lifting toward the sky, a curious gravity gathering in them, so that for a moment she seemed to take on the greater burden, a whole world of broken bodies, mangled hearts, her eyes searching through the vastness for some reason that would explain their ruin, past stars and worlds of stars, the boundless depths, the last dim light, where still there was no answer to her
Why?

I put my arm around her shoulders, and drew her close against my side. It seemed so little, all I had.

“You’re right,” I told her. “It is a pretty night.”

About the Author

THOMAS H. COOK is the author of fifteen novels, including
The Chatham School Affair
, winner of Edgar Award for Best Novel;
Instruments of Night; Breakheart Hill; Mortal Memory; Sacrificial Ground
and
Blood Innocents
, both Edgar Award nominees; and two early works about true crimes,
Early Graves
and
Blood Echoes
, which was also nominated for an Edgar Award. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod, where he is at work on his next novel.

If you enjoyed Thomas Cook’s Edgar-Award-winning THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR, you will want to read all of his mesmerizing novels of psychological suspense.

Look for EVIDENCE OF BLOOD in paperback at your favorite bookstore now.

And turn the page for an exciting preview of EVIDENCE OF BLOOD.

EVIDENCE
OF
BLOOD

by

Thomas Cook

He’d seen shadows of his own. Hers did not surprise him. It was only surprising how often they recurred, as if something in the mind still insisted that it had never really happened. Daphne Moore had seen one pass her bedroom window with something large and bulky in its hand. It had been tall and slender when Ellen Ferry had seen it glide swiftly across her closet door. Wyndham Knight had only glimpsed a head and shoulders as they skirted along the bright blue surface of her lighted, nightbound pool. Try as he had, he’d never been able to imagine what little Billy Flynn had seen.

“So you saw his shadow first?”

She nodded slowly, ponderously, as if underwater. “It came up from behind me. He was real close. Then he opened the door on the driver’s side. He said, ‘Get in. Get in, or you’re dead.’ Something like that. Then he came in after me, sort of pushing me in, you know?”

“Did he speed away?”

“No. He was going slow, like he didn’t want to attract attention, and he was doing everything like he’d really studied about it, very, very …” She searched for the word. He did his job, found it for her.