“Our house is straight across from that.”
“I know where it is.”
They came up on the haystack-shaped rock dusted with bird droppings.
“That’s not a nest. It’s an old duck blind,” Terri said, as if she knew Jessie’s question. “Duck hunters used to come here.”
“But they don’t anymore?”
“The reeds have gotten too thick to drag a boat through. Anyway, you know, this pond is haunted.”
“Haunted by who?”
It was then that Terri Carr told about the Peckham boys. She grinned her toothy grin and told about the drowned cows, and the terrible murder of the young girl’s parents while she slept upstairs so long ago.
Jessie listened (“She still lives here”) and gazed with uneasy interest at the roof of the big house that rose through the bushes on shore.
“Want to come in for breakfast?” she asked when they arrived at the landing place near the Kettel cottage. “My dad is making blueberry pancakes.”
Terri shook her head. “Thanks for the ride.” She stepped ashore and turned to leave.
“Wait!” Jessie said. “I thought you were going to hang out here for a while. I thought you were going to help fix this raft.”
“I never said that.”
“Yes, you did. You said we could use a crowbar.”
“So? It’s going to take a lot more than a crowbar to get this old thing floating again.”
“Okay, then tell me. What should I do?”
“I can’t tell you stuff like that. I bet you wouldn’t even know enough to use galvanized nails.”
“I wouldn’t,” Jessie agreed. “What are galvanized nails?”
Terri’s eyes flicked over her.
“Listen, you don’t have to make up some reason to invite me over. It’s not like I need to be here or anything. Whatever you saw, it’s not really like that.”
“I know.”
Terri shrugged. “Well, I’ll think about it. I have a lot going on right now. I don’t know if I can fit this in.”
She strode away, batting the reeds aside.
But she was back the next day.
SIX
In the olden times of farms and duck hunting, before city vacationers began to crowd the shore, the Cuttings had owned the only real summer home in town. It was a house with three porches looking off in three directions. Verandas, Henrietta Cutting’s mother had called them. She was a Lee from the South. One veranda was for the sea view, one was for the pond view, and one looked up the road toward the village center, where a white church steeple rose above the trees like a ship’s mast.
Some days Henrietta awoke remembering these views as they had been: long, unimpeded vistas across green fields to the sea; the gray ribs of stone walls dividing up the land; cows, sheep, and haycocks dotting pastures far-off and near.
Then, when she went to her bedroom window and looked out, she got a shock. Everything was changed! It was unimaginably transformed. A whole countryside had been uprooted and turned about, subtracted and added, so that she might as well have been in China as in the seaside corner of the world she’d lived in most of her life. Which was what she said to Sally Parks, who was drawing water in the bathtub, changing the towels, locating clean underwear, and attempting to get an orderly start on the day.
“Might as well be in China!”
“Come along, Miss Cutting. Time to wash up.”
Might as well be but was not. Henrietta knew this a second later because she saw the pond. It seemed to have filled in around the edges during the night. She didn’t recall there being so many reeds yesterday. It was the same pond, though, with the same little haystack-shaped island in the middle. And being the same, it anchored the land around it. Whatever strange vegetal mutations had erupted during the night, whatever herds of cattle had been swallowed up or pastures or barns erased, the pond was still there, holding its own.
Holding on to Henrietta Cutting, too. She knew where she was most of the time. After breakfast she looked around for her binoculars. Sally Parks handed them over pleasantly enough. She could get through the morning newspaper while Henrietta spent a happy hour spying out the window.
“What’s happening out there today?” Sally asked, flipping a page with a licked finger. “Any murders, muggings, governmental hanky-panky?”
“Nothing like that,” Henrietta said.
“That cousin of yours called last night after you were in bed,” Sally said. “She can’t come up in mid-August like she thought. Her boys start school then. When I was a girl, in Maine, we didn’t start school till late September. That was left over from the old farming days, when kids were needed for the harvest. Probably changed by now.”
Henrietta was leaning forward in her narrow wing chair, binoculars raised, panning the countryside. She’d largely forgotten her family, who didn’t appear often enough to be of consequence. Their offspring had dropped off the screen entirely. Henrietta would have been very surprised to hear they were ever born.
“There are two children out on my raft this morning,” she informed Sally presently.
“Two! Heavens to Betsy!” Sally exclaimed without looking up.
“That’s good,” Henrietta said. “I’ll need two to do what I want them to do.”
“And what is that?” Sally asked.
“Never you mind,” Henrietta said craftily.
She hadn’t always lived in this big house with the wraparound porches. This was the house she’d come to in the summer with her parents before . . . well, before. And had come back to later, after she got out of custody. Prison: That was how she thought of it, the time when the family court got its hands on her. She was signed away to some cousins in Philadelphia. To shut her up, Henrietta believed now. To silence her. But they hadn’t wanted her. They had a family of their own. So she was hustled off to a London boarding school at the age of twelve, sent away without anyone even asking her if she wanted to go. Imagine. All the way to England.
“That’s what happens when you’re a child,” Henrietta told Sally Parks. “You’re ignored. Nobody listens to you, even when you’re trying to tell them the truth.”
“And what truth is that?” Sally inquired.
“That I know who did it,” Henrietta said.
“Who did what?”
“Never you mind. It wasn’t who they said, that I know.”
Sally shook her head and went back to the newspaper. She’d heard this tiresome line of talk before. The old lady’s thoughts got stuck in the past. She couldn’t see how time had moved on, though you had to feel sorry for her, losing her parents in that terrible way. But that was years ago, more than seventy years!
“Would you like a cushion, Miss Cutting? If you lean forward any farther in that chair, you’ll fall out of it.”
Henrietta, panning the pond, gave a sudden gasp. She’d come across the lonesome form of a stone chimney on the opposite bank. Something had happened to the hunting cabin that used to be there. That had been there just yesterday. Had it been swept out to sea?
“Was there a big storm last night?” she inquired over her shoulder.
“Last night? No, nothing to speak of,” Sally said.
“There’s been a good bit of destruction outside since I last looked. A whole house has gone missing.”
Henrietta knew who’d stayed there. The Cooper family. The mother had brought her children, a girl and a boy, down from Providence to rough it in the summer. The father turned up occasionally to hunt with his low-life pals. Whatever he did for a living—restaurants?—it wasn’t in the same league as her father, Mr. George C. Cutting, prominent lawyer and owner of the Providence Evening News.
She’d come to know the Cooper children at the beach, however. Anyone who came down in the summer, whoever they were, you got to know them. Except for the townsfolk, there weren’t many others around. There wasn’t as much swimming in those days. Women guarded their complexions and people were afraid of currents. Many couldn
’t even swim. Henrietta’s father taught her to swim off their private pier on the pond when she was quite young, five or six. That was the advantage of living on the pond, and of having a father who really cared to pay attention.
“I don’t think the Cooper children ever learned to swim. Not either of them,” Henrietta said to Sally. The thought had just occurred to her after all these years that this was why they’d been afraid to come out on her raft. “I could swim like a fish,” she added with pride.
“A fish?” Sally murmured, lost in the news. “Where?”
Henrietta didn’t attempt to explain. Sally Parks was not privy to the silent springs and underwater currents by which Henrietta’s mind moved these days. She imagined Henrietta’s thoughts spinning aimlessly in space, unconnected. In Sally’s view, whatever was not visible, hearable, touchable, provable, did not exist on the face of the earth.
Henrietta, navigating the deep waters of old age, had found a broader perspective. To her, past and present were often one and the same, or so well interlaced as to be interchangeable.
Present was the morning news, yesterday’s news, and the news of many years of mornings gone by, all rolled into one: a clanking caravan of events punctuated by gunshots, plane crashes, war in desperate lands. Meanwhile, the past was happening now. Or was about to happen. It had nothing to do with the official baloney called “history.” The past was personal, as close as your own shadow. You felt it sliding along behind you wherever you went: a face, an atmosphere, a shape in the dark. A memory sunk long ago in time’s brackish water, but alive, still pulsing, always waiting to come up.
“No, I haven’t forgotten,” Henrietta murmured. She lowered her eyes to the surface of the pond and experienced a glow of awareness. She would make her escape in good time. She would tell her story.
The two on the raft were girls of about the age of twelve or thirteen. Their unselfconscious, boyish movements gave them away. One was the pond girl, Henrietta was almost sure: the one who lived at the end of the pond with her “shameful family,” as Sally called them. Henrietta recognized her wild little figure. The other girl was the child she’d seen the other day.
They’d found the poling stick but had not yet gotten the raft to float properly. It trailed along under the water, one side listing precariously. What the girls needed to do was take the big top plank off. It was waterlogged and was dragging down the rest.
The reason the top plank had become waterlogged, Henrietta understood with the shrewdness of one who had dealt with such problems in the past, was that this plank used to be on the raft’s bottom. The raft was upside down. It had been flipped over by a windstorm or some tempestuous whirl of waves. The sodden bottom plank had become an oppressive top plank, overweighting the entire structure.
So: Remove the waterlogged plank. Find some solid pieces of lumber to put in its place. Hammer them on. (Use galvanized nails or they’d rust through in a year.) Turn the raft over so the good lumber was on the bottom again. Presto! The raft would be ready for action.
Sally Parks heard Henrietta murmuring to herself in a deranged-sounding undertone. She heard the words “Presto!” and “Action!” but assumed she’d misunderstood. Old ladies were slow and dense as molasses and never spoke in such terms.
“Can I get you some cranberry juice, Miss Cutting? And a cookie?”
Henrietta ignored this ridiculous question. She’d told the girls what to do and now she was wondering where to get the new lumber. Such things were not easy to come by. She’d have to hunt around and see what she could come up with. One time she’d found a good pine plank out in back of the Coopers’ cottage. She was just dragging it off when the boy, Albert, showed up. He must have been watching her from the house.
“What d’you think you’re doing?”
“Just getting this plank. Nobody wants it, do they?”
“Who says?”
“Well, it’s just laying here as if nobody wanted it.”
“What do you want it for?”
“I just need it.” She didn’t want to tell him about the raft. It was her prize possession. Her secret means of transport.
“If you tell me what it’s for, we might let you have it,” Albert said, not unreasonably. He was older.
She took him down to the edge of the pond and showed him the raft. It was aging by then, needing new wood in places. He asked if her parents knew what she was up to, going out on the pond by herself. How old was she, anyway?
She’d just turned twelve but didn’t say.
“Of course my parents know! My father helped me build this raft. We made this poling stick too.”
They’d built all kinds of things together. A doghouse for their basset, Gypsy. A bench to sit out on during warm summer evenings. A pretty cedar box for her mother’s jewelry, to protect it from the salt air. They’d lined the box with special felt that made it airtight. They’d put a seal on it, and a lock. The way they’d built that box, nothing was ever going to bother those jewels. Her father had said that.
Albert thought it was funny, a father teaching a daughter how to build things.
“He doesn’t have a son. I’m the only child, so he has to teach me,” Henrietta remembered explaining, covering for him. That was not the reason, though. Her father had taught her because she’d wanted to learn, and because he’d believed she could.
Albert gave her the plank in the end. She took it home, cut it to the right size, and hammered it onto her raft. She used pike nails, over a foot long. By that time she’d gotten quite handy with tools. Her father’s tools, they were. He had a fine set he kept in his workshop off the garage. Hammers, saws, chisels, planes, braces and drills, clamps and calipers, drawknives, slicks, even a boring machine with a whole set of different-size bits.
Afterward, after the shock of everything, she forgot the workshop. She never tried to build anything again. She knew how but kept it a secret. Girls weren’t supposed to know about that anyway. In London they taught her to sew. Embroidery, crochet, hemstitch. She did it with mutiny in her heart. All the silly knotting and stitching; stuck for hours in a chair while her head buzzed like an angry fly. She came out of that school and was sent to another. And another. Nobody wanted her at home. Nobody wanted her anywhere. She lost touch with her childhood and was never allowed back.
“Have we got any lumber in the garage?” Henrietta asked Sally Parks when she came bringing lunch on a tray.
“Lumber!” Sally hooted. “What do you want that for?”
“Never you mind,” Henrietta said. She looked back out the window, but by then the girls on the raft had passed on down the pond and gone out of sight.
SEVEN
When you were out on the pond back then, what were you in? A boat?” Jessie asked her father the morning of her first meeting with Terri Carr.
She was eating the wild-blueberry pancakes Terri had turned down. Her father had kept them warm for her in the oven. The others had finished breakfast and moved on: Julia to the beach with her silent chauffeur; Jonathan to the downstairs lavatory, where he stood on a stool, closely examining his tongue in the mirror over the sink.
“Purple!” he was yelling. “It’s completely purple!”
“A skiff,” her father answered.
“Why were you even here? Come on, tell. I know it wasn’t for writing.”
“Why was I here?” She saw he was embarrassed. “Well, I was hired, that’s why. By a trash collection company. That was the summer I picked up people’s garbage.”
He sent a challenging glance across the table, as if he was afraid his daughter might find this laughable.
“Sounds like a good job,” Jessie said. “Where did you live?”
“I had a room over the general store in town. I loved it, actually. No car, but that was okay. I went everywhere on a bike. It was the first time I’d been away from home on my own.”
Jonathan came out of the bathroom. “I think my tonsils are purple too, but I can’t see down that far. Can you
look?” He stopped in front of Jessie and opened wide.
“That is so disgusting. Go away!”
When he’d retreated to the living room, Jessie said, “It must’ve been before you married Mom.”
“Long before. I was Julia’s age. No, a couple of years older.”
“And you went out rowing?”
“There was a guy I worked with. We got to be friends. He lived on the pond and had a skiff. A little rowboat. We’d take it out and fish sometimes on Sundays, our day off. We never caught much.”
“Who was he?” Jessie asked.
“Just a kid like me who needed a summer job. I was building up a bank account for college that fall. We lived in Boston then, and I’d answered a newspaper ad. With Mitch, this was home and the job was more like survival. The family was in rough shape. His dad had taken off when he was little. Left his mother with a bunch of kids. There was a grandfather who was in prison for some terrible crime. I remember they drove to Pennsylvania to visit him one time.”
“So his name was Mitch?”
“Short for Mitchell. I’ve forgotten his last name. His family had owned a dairy that had long since closed down. A lot of the farms around here had gone bust by the time I got here. People were struggling to get by. I remember Mitch wore the same pair of pants all summer. A nice guy, though. Good natured. I felt sorry for him. His mother cleaned houses for the summer people. I don’t know what they did in the winter when everybody went home.”
“Is he still here, do you think?”
“Probably not. It was over thirty years ago.” Her father paused. “I guess I could check.”
“That’s okay,” Jessie said quickly. “I just kind of wondered.”
* * *
There seemed at first to be no way to fix the raft. They had no tools, for one thing. For another, they needed new wood if they were going to replace the waterlogged plank. And the right kind of nails. And a dry place on shore to drag the raft up onto that was clear of bushes and still hidden from outside eyes. Terri was all about staying out of sight. Whether this was because of her father or some other reason, Jessie didn’t know. There was a lot she didn’t know about Terri in the beginning, but that didn’t matter. Jessie liked her. She liked that she wasn’t part of some crowd.
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