Quicksand Pond

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Julia bit into her sandwich thoughtfully and added: “I guess her mind totally slipped over the years. I guess when something like that happens, right before your eyes, you lose all sense of reality.”

  Jessie said, “Who told you this?”

  “Ripley Schute.” Julia glanced down the beach. “He should be here any minute. He’s going to Princeton in the fall. I met him a couple of days ago, and listen to this: He told me that he was one of the people the old lady pointed at one time and called a murderer. Just out of the blue. ‘Murderer!’ He said it made his blood go cold as ice.”

  TEN

  Do you know anything about a murder that happened once in that big house down from us on the pond?” Jessie asked her father that evening.

  He shook his head. “Never heard of it.”

  “How about the Peckham boys? Did you ever hear of them?”

  “No.”

  Dinner was long over. The day’s terrific heat had yet to wear off. The Kettels, all four of them, were lying limply on various chairs and couches around their decrepit living room. Most of the lamps were off to save the fuses. From outside came the noises of the pond, a chaotic symphony of buzzes and chirps, rattles and slurps. A sudden, unidentifiable shriek had brought both stories splashing into Jessie’s mind.

  “Who are the Peckham brothers?” Jonathan asked sleepily.

  The Kettels were now more than two weeks into their Rhode Island vacation. They’d grown familiar with the pond sounds. More than that, they’d come to like them, to feel at home with them and with this creaky old cottage and its endless difficulties.

  Richard Kettel was sleeping through the night as he hadn’t for many months in Pittsburgh. (“It’s so uncomplicated here,” he said.)

  Jonathan still woke in the dark, but hearing the pond through the window, he knew where he was. He’d glance over at Jessie and fall back asleep without bothering anyone.

  In their separate rooms, Julia and Jessie let the pond’s sound track wash over them while they read or reviewed the day’s events and waited for sleep. (“It really is a kind of music. I’m writing a poem about it,” Julia said airily.)

  “The Peckham boys,” Jessie corrected Jonathan in the living room. “I think they were cousins. Or maybe they just came from families that had the same name.”

  “Or maybe they were pecked,” Jonathan said.

  “What?”

  “Peck-ham,” Jonathan explained. “Julia’s boyfriend looks pecked all over his face.”

  “That’s acne,” Jessie said, suppressing a laugh.

  Julia did not smile. “When Jonathan grows up, he’s going to be one of those pathetic stand-up comics who aren’t even funny,” she said sourly. She put on her earphones and curled away.

  “No, I’m not. I’m going to be a mologist.”

  “A what?” Jessie asked.

  “Entomologist,” her father said. “Jonathan and I were talking about it today. The study of insects, right, Jonathan?”

  “But first you have to go to college,” Jonathan said. “Then you can get in a lab and wear a special coat and do your own speriments. That’s what I want to do.”

  “You have to get through graduate school too,” his father said, “which costs a royal fortune. Are you prepared to pay for it yourself?”

  “No!” Jonathan said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do!”

  The room fell into silence after this remark, which cut a bit close to the family bone.

  Richard Kettel’s parents, both teachers, had not been well-off. They weren’t as poor as some in their neighborhood, but there was never quite enough for luxuries. Like this seaside vacation, he might have said. Or college. Jessie and Julia knew their father had had to raise a large part of the money to go. Once there, he’d worked his way through, dropping out some semesters to make enough for the next.

  Their mother’s life had been different. She came from a family that was able to support her, even through law school. She’d inherited a trust fund too and now drew a hefty income from her law firm, much more than their father’s high school teaching brought in.

  The result was that money was a touchy subject in the Kettel house. There was plenty to go around; the issue lay elsewhere. Their mother spent freely and comfortably for whatever the family needed: clothing, electronics, bedroom furniture, new books. Their father, from long habit, questioned every item and dug in his heels. “Need” was a slippery slope to him.

  “What’s wrong with the library?” he’d ask. “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” he’d growl. “Waste not, want not,” he repeated endlessly. “A fool and his money are soon parted,” he warned them all.

  In the living room Julia and Jessie tensed, ready to hear him spout off to Jonathan on this score. But tonight he let it pass. Maybe Jonathan was still too young to get the full treatment.

  “A lot of people are related in this town,” he said instead, changing the subject. “The old farms are mostly gone, but some descendants of the big families that used to run them have stuck around, gone into other lines of work. You can still see family resemblances if you look. Among the locals, I mean. Noses, cheekbones, hair color. Rugged New England looks from way back. Gives you a real sense of place.”

  “If you ask me, the summer people are the ones who look alike,” Jessie said. “Everybody’s wearing dark glasses and polo shirts and driving around in SUVs.”

  This was actually something Terri had said.

  “Good point.” Her father nodded. “We must look like outsiders to them.”

  “We’re more than outsiders. We’re clueless,” Jessie said. “We don’t know anything about what’s really going on in this town. There’s a whole level of stuff we never hear about.”

  “Well, I’ve heard about the Peckham boys.” Julia had taken off her earphones to be part of the conversation. “Didn’t they drown or something?”

  “In this pond, a long time ago.” Jessie looked out the window into the dark, toward where the pond would be if she could see it “They got sucked down in quicksand and were never found. Terri says they’ve been haunting the place ever since. That’s just a story, of course. I think the boys were real.”

  “Oh, Terri!” Julia turned on Jessie in disgust. “Why are you even bothering with her? She comes from a terrible family.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Rip told me.”

  “Who?”

  “Ripley Schute. He said her father is a drunk who can’t hold down a job and her mother isn’t even there anymore. She left. There are a couple of brothers who got arrested for burning down a barn. Their house is at the end of the pond, and the police are always over there for something. Rip said it’s a total dump. They don’t even have decent plumbing.”

  Jessie sat up. “So? What does that have to do with Terri? You’re such a snob, Julia. You don’t even know her.”

  “I’ve seen her.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, she looks creepy. I hate the way she sits outside our house in the morning. I bet she’s planning to steal something. Rip said it was a member of their family that murdered the people in that big house, in a robbery. A great-grandfather or something. He spent his whole life in prison. You should watch out, Jessie. Terri’s not like us at all.”

  “You should watch what you say about people you don’t know. In fact, you should just shut up,” Jessie said. Except she didn’t say it, she screamed it.

  “Hey, Jessie, cool down.” Her father put his hand on her arm. “Julia, that’s pretty nasty. Terri seems like a perfectly nice person. I’ve talked to her. She and Jessie are just cruising around the pond on a raft they found. I think that’s great.”

  “I found,” Jessie said. “My raft.”

  “Sure.”

  “I invited Terri to be on it. It’s waterlogged, though. Terri knows the right tools we need to fix it.”

  Her father looked at her.

  Jonathan, who had dozed off, came suddenly awake. “A raft? Can I go on
it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s private. And we’re still working on it.”

  “Where?” her father asked. “Where are you working on it? At Terri’s house?”

  “No.”

  He looked as if he didn’t believe her. “Because it sounds like you might want to steer clear of Terri’s house. It sounds like her family is a little . . . well, that there are some problems. You aren’t fixing the raft over there, are you, Jessie?”

  “No!”

  “Where are you working on it, then?”

  With this, Jessie boiled over. “What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?” she yelled. “You all have a really bad attitude. Terri and I are fixing up the raft, and she’s great. She’s amazing. Wherever we’re doing it, it’s none of your business.”

  A long silence took over in the living room, a much worse silence than the one about money. After a while her father carried the sleeping Jonathan up to bed and retired to his own room without saying good night. A little later Julia headed upstairs to her room and closed the door. Jessie sat rigid on the couch.

  An unsettled feeling had entered the Kettel household, something ugly and shadowy. Outside the windows the pond was whooping it up with birdish cries and froggy croaks. Late at night was when the pond came most alive, Jessie knew. In deep darkness it dropped the innocent tweets and poetic murmurs of evening and opened up with its real voice, the predatory gulping, swallowing, throttling sounds of the raw, natural world. Listening to them now, Jessie heard a kind of savagery out there that rose to a new level. She was glad she had the four walls of their cottage around her.

  An hour went by. Gradually the noise altered, softened, became a low, monotonous drone announcing the onset of a deeper region of night. Even Jessie, sitting tense and angry on the couch, was soothed. Finally she yawned, gave in, and went upstairs to brush her teeth and crawl into bed, where she fell asleep with impressive ease, considering the violent wave of fury that had just passed through her.

  ELEVEN

  Terri was waiting outside when Jessie checked early the next morning. She was sitting in the same place as usual but hunched over, as if she was looking for something in the grass. Jessie got out there fast.

  “Hey. Are you okay?”

  Terri nodded without looking up.

  Jessie said, “I’m really glad you’re here. My dad got jelly doughnuts for breakfast. Want one? Nobody else is up. I’ll go get a couple and be right back.”

  Something was wrong with Terri. Before Jessie asked what, she wanted to get her away from the house. She didn’t want her father to come out and talk to Terri again, and she especially didn’t want Julia to see her. Terri had a mark the color of Jonathan’s blueberry tongue on one side of her face. She turned away and tried to hide it when Jessie came back with the doughnuts.

  “How long have you been out here?”

  “Not that long,” Terri said. Her lips were swollen.

  They walked in silence all the way to the Cuttings’ field. The raft was there just the way they’d left it. But the crowbar was in a different place. It was leaned neatly up against a rock over to one side.

  “Somebody’s been here,” Terri exclaimed. “Somebody’s been poking around.”

  “Might’ve been Miss Cutting,” Jessie said. “She might’ve come down to see us again.”

  “You think?” Terri looked up toward the house.

  “She’s the only one who knows we’re here.”

  “I guess.” Terri stared suspiciously at the house, then shrugged. “I guess if she was going to turn us in, she would’ve done it by now.”

  “So where were you yesterday?” Jessie asked. “Why didn’t you come?”

  Terri laughed sarcastically. “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I got clobbered. Don’t worry about it. I’m just a little sore right now.”

  “Did Mitch do it?”

  “Yeah, but it was my fault. I should’ve known to stay out of his way. Don’t even think about it, okay? Stuff like this happens at my house. Everybody’s used to it. When I go home tonight, he’ll be fine again. I cleared out early this morning so he wouldn’t have to see.”

  “See what?” Jessie didn’t understand.

  “You know, what he did. He feels so bad afterwards. And he has to be at work today.”

  They sat quietly and ate the doughnuts, Terri chewing as best she could. The sun was coming across the field, lighting everything up. The pond lay in front of them, a cool mirror of the early-morning sky. Terri sat half-turned away from Jessie so that only the good side of her face showed.

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” She cupped her hand over the bruise. “Because I’m okay, really. It’s already better today. And because of this raft.” She brightened. “I can fix it, I know! Then we can go all over this pond. There’s an old dam up at the far end, and a beautiful little pool that’s fed by a spring. Indians used to go there to drink. It was their well. When you’re there, you can feel them still around, like before the English came and took their land. It’s like they’re watching from the shadows, and you feel sad for them.”

  She went on. “We can go and look at that stone chimney where the Coopers’ house was. You know what my dad told me once? When the Coopers came back after the hurricane to see what happened, they had the shock of their lives. The whole place was gone, smashed into the pond, except for one teacup sitting up on a rock. One fragile little teacup, balanced there, all alone. The water had gone down and left it there, I guess. I can’t believe it, can you? I can’t believe it survived.”

  * * *

  They took the crowbar up to the Cuttings’ workshop and exchanged it for a hammer and a saw. No one was around, which seemed a good sign. The garage was still hot inside from the high temperatures of the day before. The air had a scorched smell, unpleasant to breathe. Terri pocketed some long nails and wiped off her forehead.

  “Whew. It must be over a hundred in here.”

  When she saw a beam of sunlight from outside sparking off an old hand mirror that had come unwrapped from its newspaper covering, she went over and quickly wrapped the mirror back up.

  “That’s how fires start,” she told Jessie. “All this stuff in here, all this furniture, could go up in a flash. I’ve seen it happen. My great-grandfather’s barn was the biggest one in town, and it all burned down to nothing. An old kerosene lamp caused it. The glass heated up in the sun and sparked some hay.”

  “Your family owned a barn?”

  “Down the road a little. We didn’t own it when it burned. We’d already had to sell out. The Carr family was big around here at one time. We were in the dairy business and owned land all over town. We owned the land around this pond.”

  “Why did you have to sell it?”

  “Some bad stuff happened that started things going down for us.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well . . .” Terri licked her swollen lips. She dabbed at her lower lip with a finger. The bruise on her face had turned a bright cherry color in the heat. “I’ll tell you sometime. Let’s get out of here now. I’m sweating like a pig.”

  They took the tools and also three thick planks of wood that were leaning up against the wall by the door.

  “These babies are just begging to come with us,” Terri said. She stopped and looked at them again. “Hey, they weren’t here before. They were over in that corner.”

  “They were?”

  “Yeah, remember how I told you about them? Someone has been in here! They unwrapped that hand mirror too. It wasn’t that way before.”

  “Must’ve been her. Miss Cutting,” Jessie said. “Who else would come in here? She was looking at her stuff.”

  This time Terri took longer to convince. All the way back down the hill she worried out loud.

  “I don’t know about this. Was it really her? Even if it was, who knows what she might do! She scared the liver out of me when she came out of the bushes at the pond. She’s totally
mental. She could be calling the cops on us right now.”

  Jessie kept assuring her and shaking her head.

  “Terri, I think it’s okay. Really, I do. You know, I’ve been thinking about her a lot. She might be crazy some of the time, but she wants something from us. That’s why she came down to see us in the first place. I think she was out yesterday trying to find us again.”

  * * *

  It hadn’t been easy getting away from the house the second time, but Henrietta managed to accomplish it by midafternoon. Sally Parks was off for the day. Her replacement was a timid girl from the agency who didn’t know the first thing about what she was supposed to do.

  “Are you sure you’re allowed downstairs? No one said you did that. Walked around here, I mean. Well, okay, if you think it’s all right.”

  She edged Henrietta at a snail’s pace down the front staircase, over the worn places in the carpet, into the dingy, plantless solarium. The house was not so well kept as it had once been. Henrietta seated herself in a sagging padded chair.

  “Are you all right there, Mrs. Cutting?”

  “Miss Cutting,” Henrietta corrected her. “I never married.”

  “Oh! Sorry! They didn’t tell me. Well, are you okay by yourself for a while?”

  Henrietta nodded. She drooped her head against the cushion to indicate that a nap was probably not far off.

  “I shall be fine here for quite some time,” she said with a fake tremble in her voice. Overdramatic, but it worked.

  The incompetent replacement went off to the kitchen to talk to someone on the telephone. Henrietta’s hearing had stayed reliable, even in these latter years. From the kitchen pantry she heard:

  “Yeah, no problem. She’s out cold. The poor thing can hardly walk. It took us about an hour to come downstairs. I hope I never get that way.”

  So, up, up, and away. Five minutes later Henrietta was out the solarium door and around the side of the house. She headed downhill to the raft first, hopeful that the girls would be there again. But they were not. A crowbar was lying askew between muddy tufts of grass. Her father, ever careful of his tools, would never have stood for such a thing! She picked up the crowbar and leaned it against a nearby rock, out of the damp. Then she headed uphill to the garage, puffing with anticipation.