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 Elizabeth bobbing gently in the quiet water. “Somebody has to pay for all this, Henry,” he said without looking back toward me. “There’re just too many deaths to let it go.”
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.”
And so, before leaving that morning, I ran up to my room and got an old kite I hadn’t flown in years. At the beach I taught Mary Reed how to string it, then to run against the wind so that it would be taken up. For a long time we watched it soar beneath the blue, and I will always remember the small, thin smiles that sometimes rose precariously to her lips, then vanished without a trace, her face darkening suddenly, so that I knew the darkness came from deep within.
“It was because they suspected that Mr. Reed might have been plotting to kill his wife, that’s why they took Mary,” my father told me many years later when I was a grown man, and he an old one, the two of us sitting in the tiny, cluttered room he used as his private chamber. “To make sure she was safe, that’s what Mr. Parsons told me when he drove me over to Mr. Reed’s house that morning.”
What my father witnessed on Black Pond a few minutes later stayed with him forever, the anguish in Mr. Reed’s face so pure, so unalloyed by any other feeling, that it seemed, he told me, “like something elemental.”
At first Mr. Reed had appeared puzzled to find so many men at his door, my father told me. Not only himself, Mr. Parsons, and Captain Hamilton, but two uniformed officers of the Massachusetts State Police as well.
It was Mr. Parsons who spoke first. “We’d like to talk to you for a moment, Mr. Reed.”
Mr. Reed nodded, then walked outside, closing the door behind him.
“We’ve been looking into a few things,” Mr. Parsons said. He glanced inside the house and saw Mary’s face pressed against the screen of an otherwise open window. “Let’s go into the yard,” he said, taking Mr. Reed by the elbow and guiding him down the stairs and out into the yard, where he stood by the pond, encircled by the other men.
“Mr. Reed,” Mr. Parsons began. “We’ve become concerned about the welfare of your daughter.”
It was then, my father said, that Mr. Reed appeared to understand that something serious was upon him, though he may well not have grasped exactly what it was. “Concerned about Mary?” he asked. “Why are you concerned about Mary?”
“We’ve heard some suggestions,” Mr. Parsons told him. “Having to do with your relationship with Mrs. Reed.”
“What suggestions?”
“There’s no need to go into them at this time,” Mr. Parsons said. “But they nave caused the commonwealth to feel some concern about your daughter.”