“What kind of concern?”
“For her safety.”
“She’s perfectly safe,” Mr. Reed said firmly.
Mr. Parsons shook his head, then drew a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to Mr. Reed. “There’s been enough death. We can’t take the chance on there being any more.”
Mr. Reed stared at Mr. Parsons, still vaguely puzzled. “What are you talking about?” he asked. He glanced at the paper. “What is this?”
“We’re going to take custody of your daughter,” Mr. Parsons told him. “Mr. Griswald has agreed to look after her until certain things can be cleared up.”
Mr. Reed thrust the paper toward Mr. Parsons. “You’re not going to take Mary,” he said. “You’re not going to do that.
Mr. Parsons’ voice hardened. “I’m afraid we are, Mr. Reed.”
Mr. Reed began to back away, the men gathering around him as he did so. “No,” he said, “you can’t do that.”
Captain Hamilton stepped forward. “Mr. Reed, your daughter doesn’t need to see us use force, does she?”
Mr. Reed glanced toward the porch, where Mary now stood, a little girl in a pale blue dress, staring down at him. “Please, don’t do this,” he said in a desperate whisper, his attention now riveted on Mr. Parsons. “Not now. Not with her mother just—” He gazed imploringly at my father. “Please, Mr. Griswald, can’t you—”
“It’s only until we can clear things up,” Mr. Parsons said, interrupting him. “But for now we have to be sure that your daughter is safe.”
Suddenly, Mr. Reed shook his head and began to push his way out of the circle. The men closed in upon him, and as he thrashed about, he lost his grip on his cane, crumpled to the ground and lay sprawled before them, laboring to get up, but unable to do so. It was then, my father said, that a cry broke from him, one that seemed to offer up the last frail measure of his will.
“He looked like a different man when he got to his feet,” my father told me. “Like everything had been drained out of him. He didn’t say anything. He just looked over to the porch, where Mary was, and waved for her to come to him. At first she wouldn’t. She was so scared, of course. All those men she didn’t know. The way they’d surrounded her father.” He shook his head. “You can imagine how she felt, Henry.”
But at last the child came. Mr. Reed met her, lifted her into his arms, kissed her softly, then handed her to my father, his words oddly final as he did so: She’ll be better off this way. He reached out and touched her hair; he never said good-bye.
Only an hour or so after those harrowing events, Mary walked to the beach with me, the two of us flying my old red striped kite until the first line of thunderclouds appeared on the horizon, its jagged bolts of lightning still far away, so that we’d gotten home well in advance of the rain.
By nightfall the rain had subsided, but a few hours later it began again. It was still falling when Dr. Craddock’s car came to a halt in front of our house. The doctor was wearing a long raincoat and a gray hat which he drew from his head as he mounted the stairs to where my father sat in a wicker chair a few feet away, I in the swing nearby.
“I’ve come about the little girl,” he said. “Mary Reed.”
My father got to his feet, puzzled. “Mary Reed? What about her?”
Dr. Craddock hesitated a moment, and I could tell that something of vast importance lay in the balance for him. “I’m sure you know that my wife and I … that we’ve … that we have no children.”
My father nodded.
“Well, I wanted to let you know that we would be very interested in taking Mary in,” Dr. Craddock said. “My wife would be a good mother for her, I’m sure. And I believe that I would be a good father.”
“Mary has a father,” my father answered with an unexpected sternness, as if he were talking to one who wished to steal a child.
Dr. Craddock stared at him, surprised. “You’ve not heard?” he asked.
“Heard what?”
I remember rising slowly and drifting across the porch toward my father as Dr. Craddock told him that Mr. Reed’s boat had been found adrift in the bay, with nothing but his old wooden cane inside it, save for a note written on a piece of sail and tacked to the mast. Please see to it that Mary is treated well, and tell her that I do this out of love.
I think that over the years Mary Reed was well-treated, that, overall, despite the many problems that later arose, the howling phantoms that consumed her, the bleak silences into which she sometimes fell, that despite all that, Dr. Craddock and his wife continued to love her and strive to help her. At first it looked as though they had succeeded, that Mary had come to think of them as her parents, put her own dreadful legacy behind her. By the time she entered the local school, she’d come to be called by her middle name, which was Alice, as well as that of her adoptive parents, which was Craddock.
It was a deliverance my father had hoped for, and perhaps even believed to be possible. “In time, she’ll heal,” I heard him say as Dr. Craddock took her small white hand and led her down the stairs and out into the rain.
But she never did.
Mr. Reed’s death left only Miss Channing upon whom the law could now seek retribution, and so, after a few more days of investigation, and at Mr. Parsons’ direction, the grand jury charged her in a two-count indictment, the first count being the most serious, conspiracy to murder Abigail Reed, but the second also quite grave at that time, adultery.
It was my father who delivered the news of the indictment to Miss Channing, allowed to do so by Captain Hamilton, whose duty it otherwise would have been.
“Get in the car, Henry,” my father said the morning we made our final drive to Milford Cottage. “If she becomes … well … difficult … I might need your help.”
But Miss Channing did not become difficult that morning. Instead, she stood quite still, listening as my father told her that the two indictments had been handed down, that she would have to stand trial, then went on to recommend a local attorney who was willing to defend her.
“I don’t want a lawyer, Mr. Griswald,” Miss Channing said.
“But these are serious charges, Miss Channing,” my father said somberly. “There are witnesses against you. People who should be questioned as to whatever it is they’re claiming to have seen or heard.” I could feel the pain his next words caused him. “My wife will be one of those witnesses,” he told her. “Henry too.”
I’d expected her eyes to shoot toward me at that moment, freeze me in a hideous glare, but she did not shift her attention from my father’s face. “Even so” was all she said.
We left a few minutes later, and I didn’t say a single word to Miss Channing that morning, but only gazed at her stonily, my demeanor already forming into the hard shell it would assume on the day I testified against her, answering every question with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing all the while that there was one question Mr. Parsons would never ask me, nor even remotely suspect that I had the answer to: What really happened on Black Pond that day?
CHAPTER 30
Miss Channing came to trial that August. During that interval I never saw her, nor knew of anyone who did. My father was now more or less banned from any further contact with her by my mother’s abject fury.
As to the charges against her, the evidence was never very great. But bit by bit it was presented to the jury, tales of odd sightings and snatches of conversation, a portrait hung in a boathouse, an old primer curiously inscribed, a nautical map with what Mr. Parsons called an “escape route” already drawn, a boat named Elizabeth, a pile of letters hastily burned in an otherwise empty hearth, a knife, a piece of rope, a bottle of arsenic.