The Chatham School Affair

by Thomas H. Cook

  “No. He’s at the funeral parlor,” my mother told him. “Making arrangements for Sarah.”

  Mr. Parsons nodded. “Well, would you tell him to call me when he returns?”

  My mother said she would, but added nothing else.

  Mr. Parsons smiled politely and turned to leave. I thought my mother was going to let him go, that she had decided to hold her tongue. But abruptly, the door still open, Mr. Parsons halfway through it, she said, “Such a terrible thing, what happened to Sarah … and, of course … Mrs. Reed.”

  Mr. Parsons nodded. “Yes, terrible,” he said, though with little emphasis, heading out the door, other matters clearly on his mind.

  “She came to see me, you know,” my mother added. “Mrs. Reed did.”

  Mr. Parsons stopped and turned to face her. “When was that, Mrs. Griswald?” he asked.

  “Only a short time ago,” my mother answered. She paused a moment, then added with a grim significance, “She seemed quite troubled.”

  “About what?”

  “Family matters. Troubles in the family.”

  Mr. Parsons eased himself back into the foyer. “Would you be willing to talk about that conversation, Mrs. Griswald?” he asked.

  I saw my mother nod, then lead him into the parlor and close the door.

  My father returned home an hour or so later. Mr. Parsons had left by then, but my mother made no attempt to conceal his visit, nor what she had told him during it. From the top of the stairs, crouched there like a court spy, I listened to her tell my father exactly what had transpired.

  “I wasn’t making accusations,” my mother said. “Just speaking the plain truth, that’s all.”

  “What truth is that, Mildred?”

  “Just what Mrs. Reed said.”

  “About Mr. Reed?”

  “Him and that woman.”

  “You mentioned Miss Channing? You mentioned her to Mr. Parsons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mrs. Reed said she saw her picture in the boathouse. She knew it was her that Mr. Reed was involved with.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That she suspected something. Between the two of them. That it frightened her.”

  “Frightened her?”

  “That she was afraid of them, the two of them. What they might do. Run off together. Or worse.”

  “Or worse?”

  “What she found in the boathouse. The knife she saw, and the …”

  “You told Mr. Parsons that?”

  “I told him what Mrs. Reed said. That’s all.”

  I waited for something more, but there was only silence. From my place at the top of the stairs I saw my father walk out the door, my mother behind him, then both of them in the car, pulling out of the driveway, no doubt headed for the funeral parlor where Sarah now lay in a room decked with flowers sent by the teachers of Chatham School.

  When they returned home sometime later, the air grown dark by then, the same silence enveloped them. They sat silently in the parlor, and silently through dinner. Nor did they ever speak to each other with any real tenderness again.

  I spent the rest of the next day in my room, lying on my bed. Downstairs, I could hear my mother doing the chores that had once been Sarah’s. I suppose from time to time I drifted into sleep, but if so, I don’t remember it.

  By noon the summer heat had begun to make the room unbearable, and so I walked out onto the porch and sat down in the swing, drifting slowly back and forth, recalling Sarah in random pieces of memory, words and glances 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 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 fo
r 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.”

  “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.”