Free The Chatham School Affair by Thomas H. Cook

people having breakfast at Dalmatian’s Cafe. Driving along Main Street, it seemed to me that the village had changed very little since the days of Miss Channing’s trial, when the crowds had swirled around the courthouse or milled about in front of Quilty’s and Mayflower’s, muttering of murder and betrayal.
    Once outside the village, I followed the road that led along the seashore. There were bogs and marshes on either side, just as there’d always been, and from time to time I spotted a gull circling overhead, a crow skirting just over a distant line of trees.
    A mile out of the village I turned onto Plymouth Road, taking the same route my father had taken the afternoon we’d first driven down it together, Miss Channing in the front seat, I in the back with her two valises. The forest thickness pressed in upon me no less thickly than it had that day, the green vines slapping once again against both sides of the car.
    As I rounded the last curve, Milford Cottage swept into view.
    It looked much smaller than it had the last time I’d seen it. But that wasn’t the only change time had wrought. For the cottage had gone completely to ruin during the intervening years, the tar roof now ripped and curled, the screen door torn from its rusty hinges, the yard a field of weed and bramble, the whole structure so weathered and dilapidated that it seemed hardly able to hold its own against the changeless waters of Black Pond.
    I stared at it, reviewing the story of its abandonment. I knew that no one would ever live there again, no young woman would ever rearrange the lanterns inside it orhang her father’s picture on its walls. From the trial transcripts so generously quoted in Mr. Parsons’ book, I knew what had been said in its small rooms, what had been felt as well. But I also knew that there’d been other voices, too, other feelings, things Mr. Parsons, for all his effort, had been unable to unearth. As if her lips were at my ear, I heard Miss Channing say, I can’t go on . Then my reply, What can I do to help?
    For a time I peered at the front door that had barred my father’s way that first afternoon, remembering how Miss Channing had stood behind him, waiting silently in the rain as he’d struggled to unlock it. Then I walked up to it, gave a gentle push, and watched as it drifted back, revealing the emptiness inside.
    I stepped into the cottage, my eyes moving along the leaf-strewn floor, settling for a moment on the old fireplace with its heap of gray ash. I heard Miss Channing say, Get rid of this , and closed my eyes abruptly, as if against a vision I expected to appear before them at any moment, Miss Channing standing at the hearth, staring into it with a steely glare, feeding letters into its leaping flames.
    When I opened them again, the cottage was as empty as before, with nothing to give it sound or movement but the drama playing in my mind.
    I glanced into the vacant bedroom, to where a little wooden bookshelf had once rested beside her bed. I could remember the books I’d seen collected there, the words of her father’s heroes bound in dark vellum: Byron, Shelley, Keats.
    A gust of wind slammed against the cottage, rattling what remained of its few dusty windowpanes. I saw a bare limb rake across the glass, a bony finger motioning me outside. And so I nodded silently, like someone agreeing to be led into another chamber, then walked to the back of the cottage, out the rear door, and across the yard to the water’s edge.
    The great willow still rose above the pond, the one Miss Channing had so often painted, its long, brown tendrils drooping toward the surface of the water. I wondered how many times during her first weeks in Chatham she’d stood beneath it, remembering the poems her father had so often read to her, sometimes in the very places where they’d been written, odes to nightingales and Grecian urns, pleasure domes and crystal seas, women who walk in beauty like the night. But there’d