The Callender Papers (11 page)

I returned to the papers on the table, satisfied that I was doing all I could. Unbidden, I remembered those two tombstones and noticed something curious about Irene's. “Beloved wife of Daniel Thiel,” it said, then “beloved mother.”

I wondered who had ordered those tombstones, who had caused that odd and incomplete inscription. That information, too, might be among these papers.

At luncheon that day, Mr. Thiel asked me if I would like to accompany him to the village. I said I would not. I wanted to get back to the library, now that I knew what I was looking for. I felt hurried, as if there was some urgency to find out in time. Then, I also wanted to go back to the falls that afternoon, to
see the place again as I had first seen it, to lay the ghosts of my dream.

“Have you no letter to mail?” he asked sternly. I remembered the short note I had written before going to bed the evening before. He said he would mail it for me. “Your aunt,” he said, “will be concerned.”

“I'll address the envelope immediately after lunch,” I said. “You are kind to mail it for me.”

“Mrs. Bywall and I take our responsibility for you quite seriously,” he answered.

“I hadn't thought of it like that,” I said, answering as tonelessly as he. “Aunt Constance believes in accepting responsibility. She makes her students be responsible to her, as well as making herself responsible for them.”

“Perhaps that is one reason why her school is so successful,” Mr. Thiel remarked.

“Is it successful?” I asked. I had never heard an outsider's view of Wainwright Academy. I had heard the usual complaints and gratitude, from the girls and their parents. I had noticed that everyone respected Aunt Constance.

“Don't you know? I would think you'd know that. It has the reputation, which it deserves, of giving the best education to young ladies in the Boston area. It has also the reputation of producing suffragettes,
because it doesn't confine its curriculum to fine arts and domestic arts. For families who want their daughters to be educated as their sons are, it is the one place to send a female child.”

“Really?” If he had meant to please me, he had succeeded.

“Really. Your aunt is a remarkable woman.”

“I knew
that,
” I said. “I just didn't know this. It makes me more proud of her.”

He seemed willing to continue the conversation. “When I first met her the school was quite young,” he said. “She has worked hard and well.”

“That was before I came to her,” I said carefully.
When
exactly had he met Aunt Constance, I wondered; how well did she know him?

“Oh yes, I remember,” he said. As he did so, his eyes became glad, as if he had been a different kind of man in the past. “Your aunt had long been a friend of my wife's.” I just nodded my head. “She was an imposing woman, your aunt. I was quite frightened when I first met her.”

In my surprise I forgot that I was searching for information, and I entered into the conversation without thinking. “
You
were frightened?”

“Irene admired her. So I badly wanted her to
approve of me. I was younger then.” He smiled at my obvious disbelief. “And then, too, your aunt
is
such an imposing woman, so strong in her opinions, so clever in her arguments—she overwhelmed me. At first,” he added, “and not for so very long, after all. She seemed to like me. Not everybody does, as you have pointed out to me,” he said. “I felt sure she would be a success.”

“Yes, she gives you that confidence,” I agreed.

“Besides that, she introduced me to the art dealer in Boston who handles the sales of my pictures. Like many others, I am grateful to your Aunt Constance.”

“I will write her more frequently,” I said.

“You are very like her,” Mr. Thiel said. Before I could answer, he excused himself from the table, as if he were made uncomfortable by paying me a compliment. As soon as he had left the room, my suspicions resurfaced: why should he take the trouble to make himself agreeable to me? Unless—because the papers had been in his care all these years—he knew more of what was in the boxes than he had admitted to Aunt Constance. Unless he realized that his unfriendliness might cause me to leave the house and leave the job unfinished. But why should he care about that, unless he intended me to find something he already knew was there in the boxes? or, I thought carefully, slowly,
he wanted to see if I would find something that was there to be found, unless he wanted to test the effectiveness of its concealment.

I worked for another hour after luncheon, finding nothing of interest to my particular problem. I heard Mr. Thiel leave the house. Later, I changed into my new dress and set off with bare feet to the falls. I carried a book with me, as if I planned to read. When I got there I put the book down under a tree and stood silent, to hear the sounds, to examine my own feelings. The terror the place had held in my dreams was gone. I saw that the stream was still running fast from the rains, and I approached the edge of the ravine with caution, remembering Mac's care of the day before. I lay on my stomach and looked down into the pool.

She had lain there, helpless. If you fell down the sides of the ravine, either the undergrowth or the boulders would break your fall, I thought. The sides were steep, but not sheer. The drop down, rolling as a body would, would not end at the pool of water.

If, however, you fell somehow from the falls themselves, if you were carried over the steep cliff there and tumbled down, then you would probably have broken bones. You might well be knocked unconscious.

If someone strong held you, standing where I lay, and hurled you out over the edge, down the ravine, then too you might be too injured to pull yourself out of the water.

It was just when my thoughts had reached that point that someone touched my shoulders, two strong hands. I gasped. I clutched at the ground. I tried to bury my head in the grass.

“Jean. It's only me!” Mac's voice said.

I sat up. “It is I,” I said. “It must be nominative.”

Mac looked amused. “I didn't mean to scare you.”

“Where were you? Why didn't you call out that you were coming?”

“I thought you'd seen me. I've been here all along.”

That was even worse.

“You were looking right at me,” he protested, seeing the expression on my face. I had to believe him: his eyes were surely sincere.

“I didn't see you,” I admitted.

He grinned. “You were so quiet lying here. I got worried.”

“She must have either gone over the falls,” I said slowly, “or have been thrown into the water.”

“That's what I've thought,” he said. “Unless—” he stopped.

“Unless what?” I asked.

“I don't know if I should be telling you all these things,” he said. “My father got pretty mad at me last night. I told him we'd come up here. I told him I'd told you about Mr. Thiel and the nurse and all. You see,” he apologized, “I'd promised him not to gossip, and so I had to tell him. But it wasn't gossiping, was it?”

“What did he say?”

“He said he thought I'd shown poor judgment. He said you were young—”

“I'm not much younger than you,” I protested.

“And a girl—”

“What difference does that make!”

“He said a lot more. And then he asked me what I thought you would think of Mr. Thiel.”

I could not answer that.

“He was really angry,” Mac said. “And he's right.”

“But it's too late, isn't it?” I argued. “You've already told me. So you might as well tell me the rest, hadn't you?”

“I don't know,” Mac said. He pulled at the grass.

“Fear comes from ignorance,” I said, echoing Aunt Constance. “If you're worried about frightening me, you've already done that.”

“Father said that.”

“And all we can do now is try to figure out what happened.”

“Could we?” he asked. He looked eager. “Do you think we really could?”

“So you have to tell me. Whatever it was you thought that you weren't going to.” My grammar was atrocious, but Mac understood me.

“I thought that if she had been injured somewhere else, then somebody might have brought her body up here. Maybe thinking she was dead or something.”

“He'd have to be strong,” I said.

“So would anyone who threw her over the edge. Otherwise,” he said, “it doesn't make sense, does it? The bank is steep here, but not that steep.”

I agreed with him.

“What I can't figure out is
why
,” I said. “I mean, why in the first place. What difference would her death make?”

“It could have been an accident,” Mac said. “That's what the jury decided it was.”

“But people don't think so,” I argued, “and you don't think so, and Aunt Constance didn't say so. There is something wrong.”

“There was a lot of money,” Mac said. “Maybe somebody wanted the money?”

“It was her fathers,” I said, “and he was still alive.”

“It's the nurse and the child,” Mac said. “That's what makes it so very mysterious. That's what convinces me there was something wrong.”

“Something dangerous.”

“Something evil, I think.”

For a minute I was afraid I would cry. “I don't know anything about evil,” I said, feeling the helplessness I had felt in my dream take over again.

“I know some boys who would rather cheat on an exam than study for it. I know one who likes to make little kids cry, a bully. He wants them to be afraid.”

“Is that evil?” I asked. “Like this is?”

He shook his head, confused. “How are we going to figure it out?” he asked.

I was glad to return to a practical question and glad to have someone to confide in. “I'm looking through the papers. I'm looking for something there, I don't know what. It would be around our age now, the child, if it lived.”

He agreed. We were both, I think, thinking of what it would be like to be dead. Not even to have lived as much as we had. Or, at least, I was thinking of it.

Mac stood up, as if he couldn't sit thinking any longer. “Would you like to meet my family?” he
asked, holding out a hand to pull me up. I declined his help. “I was to ask you to dinner, you and Mr. Thiel,” he added. “All the rest are girls, younger than you.”

“I'll ask Mr. Thiel,” I said.

“I brought my Latin,” he said. So we sat beneath the trees, with the sound of the falls behind us, and reviewed Latin. I enjoyed working with the precise language, after thinking so much of dark and inexplicable things.

When we returned to the house, Mr. Thiel had returned and waited for us in the library. “You've had an invitation,” he said to me and gave me a letter. It had been opened, I noticed; but then I saw that it was in fact addressed to him.

“So have you,” I retorted, which surprised him. I left Mac to repeat his invitation and read the note. It was quite formal and requested the pleasure of my company for Sunday luncheon at the Callenders'. It was a woman's hand, flowing and rounded, the capitals ornate. The note had been written by Mrs. Callender. It was oddly apologetic: she excused the invitation by saying that her children did so lack companionship. Mr. Callender, his wife said, had been pleased by my cleverness and education and hoped
Mr. Thiel would allow me to spend an afternoon with his children.

When I had finished reading, I looked at Mr. Thiel and he looked at me. Neither of us spoke for a minute.

“You probably want to meet the McWilliams family,” he said. He was glaring at me as he said it, but I was in no mood to be cowed. Mr. Thiel added, “It is perhaps time that I begin to go out a little more.”

A surprised noise burst from Mac, which he tried to turn into a cough. It was a laugh, I think. “Mother will be most pleased,” he said. “She will fix a time with you.” I'd never heard him speak so formally.

“What do you think?” Mr. Thiel asked Mac as he walked him to the door. “She hasn't been here more than three weeks and already there have been more invitations come into the house than in the last ten years. It all goes to show.”

When he returned, however, he was not so pleasant. “So. Do you want to go there?”

I knew he did not mean the McWilliamses'. “I would like to,” I said, which was an understatement: I had determined to. “Unless you forbid me.”

“I don't have that right,” he said.

“I am in your charge,” I reminded him. He could
forbid me to go, and I would obey him. But I wanted to meet Mr. Callender's family, those graceful figures I had seen on the lawn that first day, the children of whom the father had spoken so frankly. Indeed, I wanted to see Mr. Callender again.

“Then I will accept for you, since the invitation was addressed to me. At least now Mrs. Bywall can have Sunday with her own family.”

This was his way of reminding me, of trying to make me change my mind, but I ignored him. In fact, I went directly into the kitchen where Mrs. Bywall was beating a pot of mashed potatoes over the stove. Some of her hair had escaped. Wisps fell onto her flushed face. There was a roast in the oven and the kitchen doors were open to cool the room off.

“Mr. Thiel asked me to tell you that you might like to spend Sunday with your family,” I said.

“I might indeed,” she wiped her face with the apron. “But what about you?”

“I have been invited to dine at the Callenders',” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and closed her lips. “I did not know you had met them.”

“I met Mr. Callender in the village that day I went down,” I told her.

“Have you something proper to wear?” she asked me, but her mind was elsewhere, I think. “They were more fancy down the hill, always so. You need a proper dress for the occasion.” This idea seemed to upset her more than the notion of my going.