The Chatham School Affair Read Online Free PDF Page A

held the office of commonwealth attorney. A short, stocky man with wire-rimmed glasses, I often saw him making his way along the wooden sidewalk to his office, puffing his briar pipe and doffing his gray homburg to passersby. He’d appeared perfectly self-assured back then, confident in his own abilities, a man who expected to live out his life in a world whose rides were clear to him, a paradise, as he must have considered Chatham, poised on the rim of heaven.
    I remember seeing Mr. Parsons in old age, when he would sit on the wooden bench in front of the town hall, tossing broken pieces of soda cracker to the pigeons gathered at his feet, his eyes watching them with a curious lack of focus. But before that, in the first years of his retirement, he’d built a workroom in his backyard, furnishedit with metal bookshelves, a wooden desk, a brass reading lamp, and an old black typewriter. It was there that he’d written his account of the Chatham School Affair, utterly convinced that he had unearthed the darkest of its secrets.
    Down through the years I’ve often thought of him, the pride he took in having discovered the cause of so much death, then the way he later strode the streets of Chatham, boldly, proudly, as if he were now the exclusive guardian of its health, Miss Channing no more than a dark malignancy he’d successfully cut out.
    It was a Saturday, clear and sunny, the last one before school was scheduled to begin, when I next saw Miss Channing.
    My rather had already left for Osterville, as my mother told me that morning, but he’d left instructions for me to look in on Milford Cottage, see if Miss Channing needed anything, then run whatever errands she required.
    Milford Cottage was almost two miles from the center of Chatham, so it took me quite some time to walk there. I arrived at around ten, knocked lightly at the door, and waited for Miss Channing to open it. When there was no answer, I knocked again, this time more loudly. There was still no answer, so I rapped against the door a third time.
    That’s when I saw her. Not as I’d expected, a figure inside the cottage, or poised beside its open door, but strolling toward me from the edge of the woods, no longer dressed formally as she’d been before, but in a pale blue summer dress, billowy and loose-fitting, her black hair falling in a wild tangle to her shoulders.
    She didn’t see me at first, and so continued to walk in the woods, edging around trees and shrubs, her eyes trained on the ground, as if following the trail of something or someone who’d approached the cottage fromthe surrounding forest, lingered a moment, then retreated back into its concealing depths. At the very edge of the forest she stopped, plucked a leaf from a shrub, lifted it to the sun, and turned it slowly in a narrow shaft of light, staring at it with a kind of childlike awe.
    When she finally glanced away from the leaf and saw me, I could tell she was surprised to find me at her door.
    “Good morning, Miss Channing,” I called.
    She smiled and began to walk toward me, the hem of her skirt trailing lightly over the still-moist ground.
    “I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said.
    She appeared amused by such a notion. “Scare me? You didn’t scare me, Henry. Why would you think that?”
    I shrugged, finding her gaze so penetrating that I began to sputter. “Anyway, my father sent me to make sure that everything is all right. Particularly with the cottage. He wanted to know if anything else needed fixing. The roof, I mean. How it held up. Against the rain, that is. Leaks.”
    “No, everything’s fine,” Miss Channing said, watching me intently, as if memorizing my features, carefully noting their smallest dips and curves, the set of my jaw, the shape of my eyes.
    It gave me an uncomfortable feeling of being exposed, my skin peeled away layer by layer, revealing what lay beneath, the bony tower, the circuitry of arteries and veins, the resentment I so carefully