Quicksand Pond

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “There were three men in gray coats,” she said in a trembling voice. “They came from the pond. I know because their boots were wet.”

  The policemen in the solarium leaned forward.

  “Men from the pond?” Sally Parks exclaimed. “Why did you never tell me?”

  “Did you see them, these three, go into the garage?” Sergeant Smith inquired.

  “These men are the ones you should look for,” Henrietta quavered. “They came to steal. They took my mother’s jewelry box. I was there. I heard two of them talking. They agreed not to tell the one who wasn’t there because then he’d never know. They wanted all the jewels for themselves.”

  “Miss Cutting, we’re a little lost now. Did you hear this conversation from your window?”

  Henrietta sighed. “I heard them and saw them. There were three! One man lit a cigarette just before . . .” She trailed off.

  “Just before going in?” Sergeant Smith suggested. He had his pad out now and was writing things down.

  “That would account for the cigarette butts we found near the garage door,” the second gun said to his partner.

  “Miss Cutting, what time would you say this was?” the sergeant asked. “Did you see anyone going into the garage before this? We believe the break-ins had been occurring over a period of time.”

  “I saw them before.” Henrietta nodded. “No one ever asked me that, but I saw all three. They were rowing their boat, as if they were hunters.”

  “You mean, out on the pond?”

  “Yes.”

  “It makes sense. You know what they’re saying now: that a cigarette might’ve been the cause of the fire,” the second gun said. “The place was a tinderbox. Old paint cans, newspapers, a load of dried-out antiques.”

  Both policemen glanced at Henrietta with new interest.

  “Well, that certainly changes things.”

  Sally Parks was shaking her head. “I had no idea!”

  “Miss Cutting, just a few more questions to clarify . . . ,” Sergeant Smith is saying when Henrietta finds she can no longer hold her head up straight. A fog of exhaustion is creeping over her. She looks desperately at Sally for rescue. Shortly, the men are being escorted to the front door, where they confer out of earshot. Henrietta leans her head back in the chair, closes her eyes, and falls into a strange torpor that may or may not be sleep.

  The snake uncoils and strikes.

  * * *

  It’s after the fat-barreled gun has been fired and her mother has fallen lifeless to the rug that Henrietta’s eyes are intercepted by the cold stare of the killer below. She knows him. He’s the hunter called Shootsy from the rowboat.

  “Hey, Cooper, we’ve got company,” he drawls. The other two look up at her, one stepping forward to get a better view.

  In that second Henrietta runs. She flies across the hall and back to her room, where she thinks briefly of hiding under the bed. Heavy footsteps are coming up the stairs, and she decides against this obvious place. She runs into her dressing room, which connects to her bathroom, which is itself connected to a sitting room on the other side. This is where she plays cards with her father on Sunday afternoons. There are cabinets there for storing games, the bridge table her mother uses when the ladies come, the Victrola (her mother’s old-fashioned word) and its racks of records.

  “Little girl, come back here. We’d like to speak to you.” Mr. Cooper’s scratchy voice. Henrietta recognizes it from the pond. He’s reached the top of the stairs. The full glare of the hall’s overhead light flicks on suddenly.

  “Where did the little princess go?” Shootsy’s slow voice says, heavy with sarcasm. He’s closer than Mr. Cooper. He’s already in her bedroom.

  The sitting room, where she is, also opens onto the hall and is now partly illuminated through the door by the hall light. The sofa is too close to the floor to fit under. The cabinets are full of stuff. The curtains are three-quarter length. Her feet would show.

  All three men are now upstairs, slamming around. Someone is in her dressing room, raking the wooden hangers aside. She hears the linen closet in her bathroom open and bang shut. Somebody stops to use the toilet.

  “Shootsy! For God’s sake.”

  “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” Shootsy drawls, and flushes.

  Henrietta uses this distraction to reenter the upstairs hall. While the hunters are tearing her bedroom apart, she slips away to her parents’ room down at the end. She’s begun to tremble all over, but there’s no time to think of it. She almost decides to hide under the covers of her parents’ big bed. She would like to be there, to curl into it and pull their blankets over her head. But she rushes past.

  Her mother’s dressing room is the darkest corner in the house, and smells of lavender. Her dressing table is on one side. On the other side is the door to her bathroom, where a night-light has been left on.

  One of the hunters is coming down the hall.

  “Little princess. Little princess,” he calls, as if it’s all a joke and they are playing a game of hide-and-seek. Shootsy.

  From the far end of the hall, possibly the sitting room, somebody is cursing. “Where has that brat got to?”

  Henrietta drops onto her knees and crawls under the flouncy fabric that skirts her mother’s dressing table. She draws the little padded stool close in behind herself, turns around, and sits with her legs drawn up, her arms tight around them. Her heart is thudding in her ears and she can hear herself breathing. She puts her hand over her mouth.

  Shootsy is in her parents’ bedroom. He crashes into something, or throws it. A menacing quiet descends, then the scratch of a match. Henrietta sees a tiny burst of flame through the lacy cloth. He is lighting a cigarette. After a minute she smells it. Then she hears him walking around, opening her father’s closets, opening drawers. He enters the dressing room, walks into the bathroom, knocks over some bottles, and comes out. The overhead light in her parents’ bedroom blazes on.

  “Anything here?” Mr. Cooper’s voice inquires. He comes to the door of the dressing room.

  “Look at this!” Shootsy says. He is standing directly in front of the dressing table. His big boots are disturbing the fabric six inches from Henrietta’s eyes. The smell of his cigarette fills her nose.

  “Nice jewel box. Take your pick.”

  “Want the ring? That is one big diamond.”

  “Here, let’s split it up. But don’t take it all. Leave some in there and take the box. We can use it.”

  “Right. Sure. Where’s Buster?”

  “He went back downstairs to look for the kid. Just put the stuff in your pocket. He’ll never know.”

  It’s while the hunters are having this conversation directly over her head, while they are pawing through the beautiful cedar jewelry box Henrietta and her father labored over for her mother, the one that nothing would ever get inside, that Henrietta half wakes into the real world. She lies still in rigid terror, unable to speak, hardly able to breathe.

  Part of her realizes that the police officers and their guns have departed from the front hall. Far away in the kitchen she hears someone speaking on the telephone of daily matters in a routine voice. The hunters stir again in her mind, searching and calling for her. Which world is she in?

  For a long time she balances, breathless, on the cusp.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Of course we’re free to leave anytime,” Richard Kettel was saying in the kitchen. “There’s no need to stick around if we don’t want to. Nothing’s keeping us here.”

  “Yes, but the weather’s so beautiful. It’s so nice to be away from the office,” Jessie heard her mother reply. “We can all go to the beach again. That was such fun the other day. And I was thinking, are there boats we could rent in the harbor? We might go for a sail.”

  “I think there are rentals available. Jonathan, would you like that?”

  “I would like it if Mom came,” Jonathan answered warily.

  “Well, of course I’d come. That�
��s what we’re talking about. We’d all go together.”

  “Julia? How about you? Are you in favor of staying the rest of the week? We’ve paid through the nose for it, that goes without saying.”

  “Sure.”

  “And sailing?”

  “Sure.”

  “You could bring along your friend,” Jessie heard her mother say. “What’s his name, Schute? He seems like a nice young man.”

  “I don’t know if Rip’d be up for it. He’s not really interested in harbor stuff.”

  “Is he the one who’s going to Princeton this fall?” her mother asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, invite him along. I’d like to get to know him.”

  “We should ask Jessie what she wants to do,” Julia said. “She’s the one who’s had to deal with everything. Maybe she just wants to get out of here.”

  “We’ve all been dealing with things,” her mother said. “Now that the problem’s been settled, I, for one, would like a bit of a rest. I thought it was very poor planning by the police to have that poor girl paraded in front of us just as we were going into the station yesterday. In handcuffs, too. It certainly upset Jessie to see her. She completely forgot to say all the things we rehearsed.”

  “They had to get Terri’s side of what happened,” her father said. “They brought her down from the correctional center for the interview.”

  “Any other time would’ve been better. We all feel sorry for her, heaven knows, but when a child like that starts setting fires, you can be sure she’s heading for serious trouble. Terri is following a well-trodden track. I hope she gets the help she needs before it’s too late.”

  “But they still don’t know for sure that she did it, do they?” Jessie’s father asked. “If what Jessie said is true, she wasn’t anywhere near the fire that afternoon. She was over feeding some foxes across the pond.”

  “I don’t know where that story came from,” her mother said. “Jessie never told me that. And then for her to say the fire wand was broken, that Terri couldn’t have used it, well, I was speechless. Luckily, in the end it didn’t matter. There was no way the police were going to charge Jessie with being involved. Anyone could see the kind of family we were the minute we walked in the room. I’m so relieved we’re clear of the whole thing.”

  “So it’s agreed, then. We’ll finish out the week,” her father said. “Jonathan, let’s you and me head down to the harbor and see if we can round up a boat. Be warned, though. Ocean sailing is a riskier enterprise than what we’re used to on the lake.”

  “Everything is riskier with you, Dad,” Julia teased. “We’ll probably capsize and end up calling the coast guard.”

  “Well, I’m up for some of your father’s good old-fashioned risk. Let the winds blow,” her mother said, a smile in her voice clearly directed at her husband.

  “Mom!” Julia exclaimed. “You shouldn’t encourage him.”

  “Oh, sweetie, we’re all so glad you came,” Jessie’s father declared with equal warmth. “You really pulled us out of a terrible mess. I don’t know what would’ve happened if you hadn’t been here.”

  Jessie, who’d been paused on the stairs listening to her family, turned silently and went back up. When her mother called up later to say that she and Julia were going for a swim, she told them to go ahead without her. When Jonathan and her father came back from the harbor and set out again for deli sandwiches in town, she said she’d stay home. When everyone came back and got ready after lunch to go sailing, she told them she needed to catch up on her summer reading.

  When, at last, they were gone for good—or at least for the rest of the afternoon—Jessie set off around the edge of the pond. She followed the well-trodden track she and Terri had taken together so often when they were fixing up the raft. She followed it to Terri’s camp, which was broken up now, though the stone table was still there. If anyone had been watching her then, they would have seen her stoop and feel around under the table. They’d have watched her bring out a slim, shiny object and throw it with some force far out into the pond.

  Afterward Jessie continued walking along the shore toward the Cuttings’ landing. When she got there, she went farther. She walked on toward the Carrs’.

  * * *

  The pond that afternoon was in the same state of pristine beauty as the first day of the Kettels’ arrival. The green scum from August’s earlier heat wave had cleared away, leaving the water a glittering blue. In a quiet cove a fleet of white swans was feeding again. The sun beamed warmth from on high, and cattails raised their curtains of privacy along the shore, so that Jessie felt again the wild enchantment of the place and its seclusion from all outside interference.

  Except that was not quite the whole picture, she knew now. For up ahead, hidden behind a reed-infested elbow of sand, lay the Carrs’ ruined home, an eyesore in the midst of loveliness, a place of menace and disorder.

  She was afraid to go there, afraid to set foot on their property or, worse, to run into the Carrs themselves. She was going anyway because whatever her mother said, she couldn’t end like this, by turning her back on Terri and forgetting they’d ever met.

  “Protect yourself,” Jessie’s parents had warned, and she’d almost done it. It shocked her how close she’d come to setting Terri up, to changing the story just enough to make Terri take the blame. Even now, as she slogged toward the Carrs’ house, Jessie saw how it might’ve been too late, how the policeman’s eyes had flicked over her in disbelief.

  “I know Terri didn’t set that fire,” she’d told him.

  “And why do you think so?” he’d asked.

  “Because she wouldn’t do that,” Jessie had answered. “When you get to know her, you know she wouldn’t.”

  Jessie had never come so far up the pond on land. She’d seen the shoreline from the raft, but walking here was different, a change of perspective that grew more uncomfortable the nearer she came to the Carrs’ property. The pond was shallower here, with fewer reeds along the edge. In some places the water shrank away from the bank, laying bare a gray and glutinous swamp. In the muck were mud-caked buoys and blackened ropes. There were empty soda cans and fast-food bags, a pink plastic doll, a rotting rowboat.

  Around a bend she came across the body of a swan sprawled in a pool of sludge. It had died at a strange angle, its head crooked down upon its matted chest, one bony wing lifted up like a human arm. The story of the Peckham boys leaped into her mind. She thought how they must have cried out for help as they went down in the quicksand, and how tragic it was that no one ever answered.

  She walked ahead, and soon, with no warning, the Carrs’ junk-strewn yard opened in front of her. The old farmhouse was slumped at its center. She saw with relief that Mitch Carr’s pickup was gone. No other vehicles were parked in the yard. It seemed at first that no one was home. But as she approached the front porch, a tiny orange kitten slid out between cinder blocks and ran mewing to meet her. Two others followed, both orange, stumbling over each other in their rush to get to her. She knelt and stroked their fuzzy heads.

  “Who are you? Is anybody here?” She stood and went on toward the house, called out “Terri!” while her heart pounded like a hammer. “Hello! Anybody home?”

  No answer and no movement came from inside. In an upstairs window a gray curtain flapped slowly back and forth in a breeze off the pond.

  “Hello! Terri?”

  She wasn’t there. Jessie had guessed she wouldn’t be. But now the emptiness of the house, its state of careless neglect, made a darker impression on her. Terri Carr had been taken away, sent to a place she might never come back from. Even if this was not quite true, a new dread rose inside Jessie that something very bad had happened, and that she was partly to blame.

  The kittens found her again. They mewed and tried to nestle around her ankles. She bent and put her arms around all of them at once. “You poor little things.” That was not what they wanted. They struggled to get loose. She let them go and began t
o walk around the yard.

  The chicken houses Terri had built with her father were set in a hollow on one side, seven little houses with tiny windows framed by blue shutters and red window boxes. They were abandoned now, and their paint had dulled, but anyone could see they were once a labor of love.

  The orange kittens caught up. They gathered around her, begging for attention.

  “Where is your mother?” Jessie asked. They looked too young to be left on their own. She walked back to the house, looked under the porch where the kittens had been hiding. Two bowls were there on a roll of carpet. Farther in she saw a low wooden crate. She reached and pulled it out. The box was lined with a pink baby blanket, as fuzzy and new as the kittens themselves.

  It was Terri’s doing. She knew it when the kittens arrived again on her heels and came mewing under the porch to the bowls. Who else in that house would have cared what happened to them? Terri had made them this home. But she hadn’t been back to feed them. The bowls were bone dry. Milk had been in one. A yellow scum was stuck to the bottom.

  The kittens swarmed around her, mewing desperately.

  “All right. All right!”

  Jessie took the bowls and went up on the porch. When no one answered her knock, she slipped inside to a dim kitchen where a single lightbulb hung from the ceiling. She drew water into one bowl at a rusty kitchen sink. She found a nearly empty milk carton sitting out on the counter and poured what was left of it into the second bowl. She carried both bowls outside, knelt, and put them back on the carpet under the porch.

  The kittens converged, falling over their own feet in their rush to drink. What would become of them if Terri didn’t come back? Jessie was half tempted to scoop them up and take them home. She was considering this (would they fit in the Kettels’ car?) when an engine roared in the distance. Wheels thundered toward her. Someone was coming down the dirt road that led to the Carrs’ house.

  Jessie ran. Whatever thoughts she’d had of making contact with Terri, or of saving the kittens, evaporated in fright. She fled toward the pond, the nearest place to hide. The driveway to the house cut directly across the path she’d walked in on. That way was fatal. She ran toward the water, out onto the dock. Mitch’s old skiff floated there, tied to a post. She jumped in and hunched over between a pair of oars.