I was still seething nearly an hour later, Mr. Reed’s words echoing in my mind—Do you want her dead?—when Sarah found me on the front steps of the house on Myrtle Street.
“Your father sent me to get you,” she told me as she lowered herself onto the step just beneath me. “He’s at the school. He has something he wants you to do.”
“Tell him you couldn’t find me,” I replied sullenly.
I felt her hand touch mine.
“What’s the matter, Henry?”
I shook my head, unable to answer her.
For a moment she watched me silently, then she said, “Why are you so unhappy, Henry?”
I gave her the only answer I had at the time. “Because no one’s free, Sarah. None of us.”
Her question sprang from an ancient source. “What would happen if we were? Free, I mean.”
My answer signaled the dawning of a self-indulgent age. “We’d be happy,” I said angrily. “If we were free to do what we want, don’t you think we’d be happy?”
She had no answer for me, of course. Nor should I have expected one, since she was young, as I was, the hard fact that our lives cannot accommodate the very passions they inspire still a lesson waiting to be learned.
Sarah got to her feet again. “You’d better go to your father, Henry. He’s expecting you.”
I didn’t move. “In a minute,” I told her.
“I’ll go tell him that you’re on your way,” Sarah said.
With that, she walked away, leaving me to sit alone, watching as she reached Myrtle Street, then swung left and headed for the school, my mind by then already returning to its lethal imaginings, thoughts so malicious and ruthless that several weeks later, as Mr. Parsons and I made our way around that playing field, he could ask his question in a tone of stark certainty, So it was murder, wasn’t it, Henry? and to my silence he could add nothing more than How long have you known?
CHAPTER 22
I never answered Mr. Parsons’ question, but even as he asked it I recalled the very moment when I first thought of murder.
It was late on a Saturday afternoon, the first week of May. I was alone in the boathouse, Mr. Reed having gone to Mayflower’s for a bag of nails. The boat was nearing completion by then, its sleek sides gleaming with a new coat of varnish, the mast now fitted with ropes, its broad sail wrapped tightly and tied in place.
The lights were on inside the boathouse, but Mr. Reed had covered its windows with burlap sacks, the whole room shrouded, so that it resembled something gloomy and in hiding rather than the bright departure point of the great adventure it had once seemed to me.
I was standing near the stove, gathering the last few nails from the bottom of a toolbox, when the door suddenly opened. I turned toward it, expecting to see Mr. Reed, then felt my breath catch in my throat.
“You’re Henry,” she said.
She stood in the doorway, a bright noon light behind her, facing me, one hand on the door, the other at her side, the sun behind her turning the red tint of her hair into a fiery aurora.
“Mildred Griswald’s son,” she added.
Leveled upon me as they were, her green eyes shone out of the spectral light, wide and unblinking, like fish eyes from a murky tank.
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
She stepped through the door, her gaze upon me with a piercing keenness, alert and wolfish. “You’re helping him,” she said. “Helping him build the boat.”
“Yes, I am.”
Her eyes drifted from me over to the gleaming side of the boat. Then, in a quick, nearly savage movement, they shot back to me.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“Gone to buy nails.”
She came toward me, and I felt my body tense. For there was something in her manner, a sense of having been slowly devoured over many weeks, fed upon by thousands of tiny, gnawing doubts, that gave her a strangely cadaverous appearance, as if the bones were already beginning to appear beneath the pale, nearly translucent film that had become her skin.
“Your mother and I were friends when we were girls,” she said with a faint, oddly painful smile.
She continued to come forward, and seconds later, when she spoke to me again, I could feel her breath on my face. “The boat’s nearly finished.”
“Yes, it is,” I said hollowly.
She glanced about the room, her eyes moving randomly until, with a terrible suddenness, they fixed on the drawing I’d made of Miss Channing, which now hung over the desk in the far corner. Her face became instantly expressionless and void, as if an invisible acid were being poured over her features, melting her identity away.
“Does she come here?” she asked, her gaze still concentrated upon the drawing.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She lifted her head and twisted it sharply to the left, her attention now focused on the cardboard box that rested on the desk, just below the portrait. Like someone lifted on a cushion of smoky air, she drifted toward it effortlessly, soundlessly, the world held in a motionless suspension until she reached it, dropped her head forward, and peered inside.
I knew what she was looking at. A map. A knife. A coil of gray rope. And in the corner, a small brown bottle, the letters printed boldly in black ink: ARSENIC.
She stared into the box for what seemed a long time, like someone recording everything she saw. Then she raised her head in what I will always remember as a slow, steady movement, as if drawing it from the dark, airless water in which it had been submerged, and turned to face me once again. “Is it just me?” she asked.
“Just you?”
“Is it just me? Or is it Mary too?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mrs. Reed.”
During all the years that have passed since that moment, I have seen my share of fear and uncertainty and sorrow, but I don’t think I ever saw it in the same combination again, terror so delicately blended with pain, pain so inseparably mingled with confusion, that the final effect was of a shivering, anguished bafflement.
That was what I saw in Mrs. Reed’s face. It is what I still see when I remember her. It was clear and vivid, all her misery in her eyes. Anyone might have seen it. It could hardly have been more obvious. The only mystery is why her plight, so dark and terrible, did not move me in the least.
It was my mother that it moved.
It was late in the afternoon when I returned home that same day. Sarah was in the dining room, setting places for the evening meal, but she stopped when she saw me enter the house, and rushed into the foyer. I could tell that she was alarmed. “Henry, I have to talk to you,” she said urgently. “Mrs. Reed came here today. To talk to your mother.”
As Mrs. Reed had turned up at our door only a short time after she’d appeared in the boathouse, I had little doubt as to the purpose of her visit. Still, I kept that earlier encounter to myself, allowing Sarah to go on with her story as if I had no hint of where it might be headed.
“She looked odd, Henry,” Sarah said. “Mrs. Reed did. An odd look in her eye.” She shivered slightly. “It gave me a … a creepy feeling, the way she looked.”
“What did she want?”
“She asked to speak with your mother.”
“Did they speak?”
“Oh, yes, they spoke, all right. Your mother called for tea, and I brought it to them. Right in the parlor. With the door closed, of course.”