The Callender Papers (9 page)

“I'd like that,” I said. “Is the river swollen?”

“It's starting. By tomorrow it might flood a little, if it keeps up like this.”

We went to work on the Latin. He was not hopeless, but he was woefully confused. We went over and over the early forms. Mac had a poor memory, that was true. He was also easily discouraged. So I encouraged him and helped him, just as if I were teaching one of Aunt Constance's youngest pupils to read.

Later Mrs. Bywall came in with a pot of cocoa and a plate of warm cookies. Both Mac and I were glad to be interrupted. We closed up the book and threw the crumpled exercise papers onto the fire.

“You seemed to be chattering away with Mr. Callender,” Mac said. He devoured a cookie with one bite and reached out for two more. “Yesterday,” he reminded me.

“Is there anything wrong with that?”

“What did you talk about?”

“Were you spying again? I don't like being spied on.”

“I wasn't spying, I was fishing. Remember?” he
said angrily. “You saw me. I saw him run into you on purpose.”

“He didn't,” I said. “It was an accident.”

Mac shrugged. “I saw it. You didn't. What did you talk about?”

“Nothing that would interest you,” I said. “You don't like him, do you?”

“Not a bit.”

“Why?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Well I do,” I said. “He's a civilized person.”

“He's a snake,” Mac said.

“You're jealous,” I said, feeling I had gained great insight.

“Jealous of him?” Mac was surprised. “Why should I be jealous of him?”

I could think of a number of reasons, but didn't feel right about stating them.

“If he's so great, why did he do what he did to Mrs. Bywall?” Mac continued.

“You didn't even live here then, so how do you know?” I retorted quickly.

“I just don't trust him.”

“That is none of my concern,” I said. We sat sulkily silent for a long time. I was sorry I'd quarreled with
Mac about Mr. Callender because, when I took time to think about it, I realized that Mac might have been able to tell me more about that past history. I was not satisfied with what I had learned from Mr. Thiel the evening before.

At that time Mr. Thiel entered the room, fortunately, because I could not think of any way to end the quarrel and I wanted to end it.

Mr. Thiel's boots were muddy. He handed me a letter from Aunt Constance. “Hello Mac,” he said. “Mrs. Bywall is bringing me a cup,” he said, apparently to declare his intention of joining us. It was his house, so I couldn't object. “Did you learn Latin?” he asked, looking at my worktable as if to be sure I was earning my pay.

I let Mac talk to Mr. Thiel while I quickly read over Aunt Constance's letter. Then I rejoined them and listened to their conversation about the fishing, the crops, the weather, the possibility of floods.

Mac left soon after that, but he returned the next afternoon. After we had worked on the Latin, he took me to see the falls as he had promised. We were bundled up in macintoshes and huge hats, and we had to lean against the force of the wind as we ascended the steep hillside. We spoke little, because you had to yell
to be heard. Every now and then Mac would turn and smile at me. His smile was contagious. It was obvious how much he enjoyed splashing through the puddles and the wet grasses. The rain came down hard. Branches on the trees swayed in the wind. It was not dangerous, but exciting. I was enjoying myself.

When we came to the edge of the ravine, Mac got down on all fours and motioned that I was to do the same. I hesitated—a dress is not the most convenient article of clothing in which to crawl over wet, muddy ground—but followed his example. We crawled to the edge and looked over.

The water tumbled, poured, roared over the top of the falls. It thundered around the boulders, turbulent. The descending sheets of water crashed into the boulder-strewn pool at the foot, and the stream dashed away, swollen and impatient. Mac and I knelt there, silent, side by side.

A large branch, the size of a hoe handle, swept by us over the top of the falls. Fallng, it was smashed and broken. The pieces reached the pool and swirled there among the foamy currents for a few seconds before they were seized by the water and carried down the stream.

I had not imagined the power of the falls in flood. It was exhilarating, but also frightening. We watched
it for a long time. I knew that this place would never seem so innocently safe to me again, but I also knew this was another form of its beauty. After a time, Mac motioned me back under the shelter of the big beech trees, where the leaves and branches gave some protection from rain and wind.

“Well?” he asked.

“It reminds me of Mr. Thiel's picture,” I told him. “Show me where you hide.”

He pointed up into a beech set behind the first of them. “Up there,” he said. “Mr. Thiel's picture?”

“He has a painting of the falls and the glade in his sitting room. There were shadows that were threatening, somehow. I can't explain it. I could show it to you.”

“No,” Mac said. “Mr. Thiel doesn't let people see his paintings. My father has seen one or two in New Haven, but I've never. Tell me about it.”

I tried to describe it, while the rain dripped down from the leaves, tried to explain the way it had given me two feelings at once. Part of it was the place I knew, but there was something behind the light, some darkness . . . I couldn't express it satisfactorily. Mac didn't seem to notice that.

“I'm surprised he would paint it at all,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. “It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen.”

Mac looked at me, his eyes serious: “Don't you know? This is where his wife died. They found her at the bottom of the ravine, in the pool. They figured she'd gone over the falls. Nobody knows how she got there. She was in a coma until she died.”

“What!” I exclaimed.

His words roared in my brain the way the wind was roaring across the sky. Everything was confusing, everything was moving about, nothing could be seen clearly because of the motion. The noise of the rain and the falls added to my confusion. It was as if, by his words, he had introduced the storm into my head itself. “Wait. Wait,” I said, putting my hands over my ears.

“You didn't know,” he said, when I had gathered myself together.

“I knew he was a widower,” I said. “I looked at the tombstones in the cemetery. She died in '84, a few days after her father, I knew that.” I felt my eyes fill with tears.

Mac looked sympathetically at me. “Did you know her?”

“How could I? I'm too young. My aunt did, they were friends. What happened?”

He shook his head. “I don't know. Nobody knows. The boys told me, at school here, and my father forbade me to gossip about it. We're outsiders here too, you know. But you must have noticed how peculiar people act about Mr. Thiel and the Callenders.”

“I don't see people,” I said. “Mr. Wiley at the store, but we didn't talk. Mrs. Bywall, you, you seem friendly. You don't like Mr. Callender but you like Mr. Thiel. What happened?”

Mac's face was serious. “I'll tell you what I know for facts. My father told me those so I would be clear, because some of the stories people tell—they'll say about anything, people. After old Mr. Callender moved up here and built the second house for Enoch and his family, his daughter—”

“Irene,” I interrupted.

“Yes, Irene, met Mr. Thiel, somehow. I think she walked around the countryside a lot. She must have seen him painting and met him. They were married, some years later. People say he married her for her money, but that doesn't sound like something he'd do, does it?”

“I don't know. I know very little about him.”

“I think he must have loved her, and she must
have loved him. Because she was pretty old by then, in her thirties, and didn't believe in marriage, I bet.”

“Aunt Constance never married. She says it is convenient for men, but distinctly inconvenient for women of her sort. Maybe Irene was a woman of her sort. They were friends.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Thiel lived in the big house with old Mr. Callender,” Mac said. “I got the feeling people liked the big house family, to an extent, even though they were strangers. Then, of course, shortly after that, Mrs. Bywall went to prison. And everybody—”

“Yes,” I said. I could understand that, I could understand how local people would resent the prosecution of someone they saw as innocent because her motives were good.

“Even the big house family,” Mac said. “Even though old Mr. Callender tried as hard as he could to stop his son, and everybody got to know it. Even though he hired the lawyer. There was a feeling that the Callenders had brought trouble to the town.”

He thought for a minute, then went on. “Irene and Mr. Thiel had a child, and a couple of years after that—something happened, but nobody knows what—but Irene went out of the house one evening and didn't return. They searched, but in the dark, and
not knowing what direction she'd gone in . . . Mr. Callender even got Enoch out to help, and they hadn't spoken for years. It was fall. The nights were long and cold. When they found her the next morning, she was unconscious. They took her home but she never regained consciousness. Old Mr. Callender had heart failure—it was the day they found her—and died. She died several days later.”

There was so much I didn't understand. “Why did Irene fall? How did it happen?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Was it like this? Raining? Stormy?”

“No. People wondered if she had been murdered.”

“
Murdered
? Who would murder her?”

“Nobody knew, for sure. Mr. Thiel might have.”

“Why?”

“He was a Hider, did you know that? And an artist. People don't trust him, he's too different. If he had married her for her money. . . .”

“Did he?”

“I don't know. How should I know? Or Enoch Callender—it's the kind of thing he'd do, I bet. But he had no motive, he was bound to inherit.”

“But she was like a mother to him, she's the one who raised him really. He sounded like he really loved her.”

“Or a vagrant. They scoured the country, but it would be easy to get away. If somebody tried to take her rings or her pin and she ran away. Some tramp.”

“She might have just gone too near the edge and fallen.”

“That's what the coroner decided,” Mac said.

“What about the child?” I asked.

“Well, it was about six months later, so it was getting pretty old I guess. The nurse had quit, of course, all the local servants quit when Mrs. Thiel died. Nobody would work for Mr. Thiel. He hired a nurse, an outsider, to take care of it. They say she never left the house, they say she was a bent, wild-eyed woman in a long cape. They say she seldom spoke and had a foreign accent. They say she looked like a witch and you'd see her sometimes at night, gathering herbs, muttering to herself. “They'll say anything,” he told me. Then one night, they both disappeared. The nurse and the child, both gone.”

“What!” I said again. It was all incredible, there was too much of it.

“That's all anybody knows. One day, they just weren't there. Nobody has ever found out what happened. Murder? At that time it didn't seem impossible. Kidnapping?”

“What did Mr. Thiel do?”

“That's just it,” Mac said, and his eyes looked away from mine, clouded briefly. “He didn't do anything. He didn't say anything. He acted as if neither Irene nor the child had ever existed. Or the nurse. If anyone said anything to him about them, he either pretended he hadn't heard or just walked away.”

“What about Mr. Callender? The child would have been related to him too. Didn't he care?”

“Enoch Callender? Perhaps he did, but the villagers wouldn't speak to his family, so nobody knows.”

“Because of Mrs. Bywall,” I said.

Mac nodded.

“Mr. Thiel might have murdered three people,” I said slowly.

“Do you think so?” Mac asked.

“It seems like a reasonable explanation,” I said. “If you think carefully about it.”

“Well, I don't think so,” Mac said. He was reassuring me. “Your aunt has known him for a long time, hasn't she? Would she let you stay here if she thought he was a murderer?”

“Of course not,” I said, smiling at the idea. “And you're right, she
would
know about it, because she would have known about his wife's death.”

“You're so sensible,” Mac said. “Most girls would be screaming.”

“Why?” I asked, flattered. “I don't think I've taken it all in yet, that's all. I can't imagine a murderer, can you? What would make somebody so cruel? Or what might somebody want so badly that would make him take the life from another person to get it?”

Mac shook his head. “We ought to get back,” he said, then added, “Or her. It could have been a woman too. Both men and women can do awful things.”

“I know,” I said. But I only knew from reading about it in books. I had never met anyone like that. I would not have known how to recognize evil in a person. This was something I'd never realized before. People had always been kind to me, or at least reasonably polite. Aunt Constance, for example, and the girls at school. Even Mr. Thiel, in his dark, abrupt way. I thought then how little I knew of the world and how limited my experience was. How did I know about anybody? Even, perhaps, Aunt Constance. Although I did not seriously doubt her, it was an uneasy feeling that thought brought, and I shivered.

“We'd better go,” Mac said again. “The rain's letting up. It'll be clear by tomorrow afternoon.”

I felt as if it would never be clear again.