Lake Matatonic was a great blank clockface of water among low hills. From one to five o’clock was the town center—Leroy’s Provisions, the Civil War monument, the public library, the post office, the bank, the white Episcopalian church, Woolworth’s, and two or three stores that sold expensive trifles to summer people: bathing suits, candy, and clothes that came from Fifth Avenue and from France. There were a few streets of houses and the town’s modem hotel, the Lakeside, with its pier that jutted into the lake. The best houses were tucked into the woods around the lake. Violet Pelham explained all this to Gilbert Knight in a loud voice, and Gilbert murmured at the number of floats, piers, and moored sailboats that he could see, each one marking someone’s summer house.
The railroad station was at six o’clock, a pretty little building with a view of the lake. William Knight’s railroad car was uncoupled on the siding. The Clinic children poured out on the platform and scattered uncontrollably, some of them clustering around Reisden’s black automobile and swarming over it like ants, some running down to the water. Nursemaids ran after them, the ribbons on their caps streaming. Charlie Adair tipped his funny hat to Violet Pelham and rescued Gilbert from her.
Reisden walked to the edge of the lake and looked north toward the later hours of the clock. Surprisingly far away, a great white cube of a house faced the water.
That had to be William Knight’s house, Island Hill; it was in the right location. Reisden didn’t recognize it, and something unacknowledged unknotted inside him.
Island Hill. It was a muggy hot day and the haze from the water haloed the house. From here one could see only the largest details, long windows blinded by drawn shades, a dark, top-heavy roof. Bushes came down to the edge of the water and stopped abruptly as if someone had cut them with a knife.
“Yup, that’s it,” Daugherty said under his breath. “And there’s your nearest neighbor’s house, Anna Fen’s.”
He could see only the pier, an Italianate gingerbready thing painted in violently artistic shades of yellow and green. A motorboat with a yellow-and-green sun awning was moored to it. The effect was meant to be springlike, Reisden supposed, but it was overdone, theater trees in a real garden, theater makeup on the street. Gilbert Knight and Charlie Adair came down the path to the dock.
“Michael Fen lived there, I think,” Gilbert said to Charlie Adair, pointing out the Italianate monstrosity.
“His widow still does,” Charlie replied. “She puts on a benefit play for us every year, Anna Fen does. It’s Scenes from Shakespeare this year. It would do your heart good to see the children playing fairies.”
“Why, Richard, you might like that.”
Scenes from Shakespeare. Perdita Halley had mentioned it earlier. Children playing fairies, directed by a woman who put an awning on a motorboat. “Perhaps,” Reisden demurred gently.
“You must want to get settled in your house,” Charlie said to Gilbert. “Come over to the Clinic for dinner.”
Perdita was staying at the Clinic. Harry had her trunk on a handcart, bringing it there for her. Roy Daugherty and the servants they had brought—Mrs. Martin the housekeeper, Mrs. Stelling the cook, the head kitchenmaid, and two housemaids—went off to find the luggage.
Two fat ponies were cropping the grass in the fields by the Clinic; they looked up edgily as the black auto started up with a roar. Gilbert climbed into the passenger seat, settling himself nervously. Down Island Hill Road, past the station and away from town, Reisden drove the automobile slowly by the Clinic and the fields and playground. On the other side of the road, the lake side, was a short side road leading to Mrs. Fen’s green-and-yellow house. A substantial fence, reinforced with fieldstone, walled the Clinic fields and Mrs. Fen’s green lawns off from the race of the Little Spruce River. Gilbert peered over the edge down into the Spruce.
The bed of the Spruce ran deep but narrow and twisting, jammed with rocks. Even in the somnolent summer, the river water slammed so hard against the boulders that spray rose up in rainbows of mist. You could walk one bank of it to the Devil’s Kettle miles upstream, but you couldn’t fish it, boat it, or float logs down it. The Spruce was good for one thing only. It was a barrier.
William Knight had built an iron bridge over the Spruce, raising it high and humped to keep it above the spring runoff. The bridge was narrow, with a low rail, and had granite pillars at either end. Gilbert looked at the bridge nervously.
“I never liked those gates.”
Reisden geared the black car down and drove over slowly. The bridge groaned solidly, a long, eerie sigh of iron. The river rushed and splashed below, and the spray rose up and sharpened every smell, but dampened sound. They had driven through some invisible wall, changing every sense but the eyes. They drove into woods. The cool air smelled of pines and mold. Branches were tangled overhead, confused, and in the narrow roadway it was so dusky that the songbirds were quite silent. Long pines had fallen at the side of the road, fallen and rotted and rooted again.
“Why are these woods so thick?” Reisden asked Gilbert.
“Father never had them logged. He wanted his privacy.”
The road bumped under the wheels, never having been graded or dragged; it was a carriage road, not for autos, rutted by wagons long gone to scrap, hummocked by time, and so long disused that moss had grown over it. Gilbert pointed out a great black cherry, dead and uprooted at the side of the road. New shoots from it had taken root just at the verge, and the tree spilled late blossoms and bumpy black twigs into the road itself.
“That tree fell the last summer he was alive, Richard.”
“A long time ago.”
They turned a last comer and came out, abruptly, onto the lawns of the house itself.
The house was wrong.
It had been meant to be something like the Federal houses of William Knight’s early years, a proportional cube. Reisden had seen houses like that in Cambridge, clean and balanced as a chemical formula. But this roof was too tall, the windows were gaunt, blank sheets of glass, and the doorway had been pushed to one side, marring all balance. Reisden felt instinctively uneasy at it, tight and nerve-ridden at the back of the neck, the way he did in the lab when he knew something was wrong but didn’t know what.
Across the lawn was William Knight's rose garden, a close-packed acre of bushes. The service road wound around the back of the house past the summer kitchen to the outbuildings and the Knight barn, behind a screen of elms. The barn was four stories tall, as if it had been built for the hugest of working farms.
Reisden parked the car by the comer of the house, under a maple tree that must have been young in the American Revolution. As the motor died the silence swooped in on them.
They both hung back for a moment, looking at the grey walls and the unbalanced door. Reisden felt as if he should take something inside the house with him: a flashlight though it was hot noon, a weapon. How appropriate, a gun. The auto had demountable acetylene headlamps; Reisden unclipped one and gave it unlit to Gilbert and took the other one himself, feeling a fool.
I am not Richard Knight, he reminded himself.
Reisden climbed the granite steps and tried the knob. Gilbert handed him the keys silently. The keys turned, scraping in the lock, and the thick black door swung open.
Amazed and appalled, Reisden gazed back twenty years.
It was as if the air itself had not moved in all the time since William Knight had lived here. William Knight’s door opened onto a vast funereal hall smelling of carpet mold, old fires, old food, old damp wallpaper. After the sunlight outside it was green-tinged and dark. They could see shadows of a wide staircase, doors into rooms on either side. All the doors were closed, and the only light in the hall came from a meager window on the second-floor landing. Reisden felt along the wall, then swore when he saw the hall lights.
“Of course there’s no electricity. ”
He had forgot the rituals of gaslight, how fragile light was. Raising the glass shade, he jostled the fragile Welsbach burner, which fell to bits against his sleeve. Gilbert lit his acetylene lamp. Dust danced in the burning cone of light. Underfoot, the carpet was patterned in small diamonds, optically the wrong size so that in the uncertain light the carpet seemed to be moving.
The door to the murder room was the first on the right; Reisden had learned the layout from Daugherty. He turned the knob and pushed, and nothing happened. It was locked.
“Richard! We don’t really need to see inside.”
“There’s an office behind that room, yes? We’ll go in through there.”
The office was farther down the right-hand side of the hall. These shades were pulled down too. In the dimness it smelled like old papers and the same tarry cigar smoke from the train. The door to the murder room was toward the front, beside a black marble fireplace. Reisden twisted its knob. Locked too.
“That room was cleared out,” Gilbert said desperately. “There’s nothing there.”
“Later, then.” He was half willing to give up seeing the room, half unnerved because he couldn’t see it now.
“It was a room very like this,” Gilbert said.
Reisden pushed back the window curtains and carefully raised the rolled shades. Flat light sliced into the room. Two desks dominated the office, one enormous, simple, stark as a pyramid, the other exactly matching it but much smaller. “Jay French’s?” Reisden asked, surprised.
“No, Richard. That desk was yours.” The desks had matching uncomfortable chairs, wooden-seated.
“Mr. Pelham said it was habitable,” Gilbert said doubtfully. “I suppose it is. He said nothing had been changed.”
Every room had a fireplace, all in black marble. The pictures over the mantels ran to Biblical subjects. The Presentation in the Temple in the library, The Sacrifice of Isaac in the dining room. All over the walls, like some skin disease, were little dead-white china plaques painted with Biblical quotations. work for the night is coming. THOU GOD SEEST ME.
Upstairs the hall was angled to avoid the chimneys. William Knight’s bedroom took up the front of the house, a huge shadowed bedroom with another black marble fireplace and a bed like a sarcophagus. Jay French’s bedroom, adjoining, had the impersonal look of a servant’s. On the other side, guest bedrooms looked as if they had never been used: pompous, heavy, comfortless, with more Bible-leprosy on the wall, NO MAN KNOWETH THE HOUR OF HIS DEATH. I DEPEND ON THY MERCY ALONE. White marble fireplaces here, looking as though they had been carved out of old ice.
Richard Knight’s bedroom was at the back of the house, past the uncomfortable turn of the hall. Reisden paused with his hand on the doorknob; he didn’t want to go in, as if this would be something bad.
FEAR GOD AND KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS. A BROKEN AND A CONTRITE HEART. A small, narrow bed, cheap white iron, with a shelf of books by it. A single gas jet, fixed to the wall. No fireplace or stove. No toys, not so much as a rubber ball. Reisden opened the closet door. There was still a boy’s jacket hanging there, black serge alone in the closet, and a pair of scuffed black boots on the floor. Reisden closed the door and on an impulse went over and opened Richard Knight’s window as if he could let the child out of the house. Outside the window, pine boughs brushed the house and filled the room with a bitter resinous smell.
Reisden looked down Richard Knight’s pathetic row of books. American history. An algebra text, an atlas, and language texts in French and German. Hast du denn Deutsch gehabt, Richard? Poor Richard Knight, if he had been anything but the small-sized articled clerk William Knight had been training. World geography, with the principal trading routes drawn in by hand. A hand-written, sewn book on the essentials of accounting, “Written by William Knight for his Grandson Richard.” For fiction, edifying stories of repentance.
They went upstairs to the servants’ quarters. Tiny featureless cubicles: one bed, one dresser, one hook on the back of the door, one dead-white motto. It would be cold here in winter; there were no fireplaces at all. Gilbert tried to open one of the windows.
They didn’t open; they were only panes of glass.
“We will board Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Stelling and the maids in town,” Gilbert said with un-Gilbertish determination. “They cannot possibly stay here; I would be ashamed.”
“Yes,” Reisden said. “Come outside.”
Outside the house, Reisden breathed the outdoors smell of the hot grass, conscious again of the chill and moldiness inside. Gilbert looked around as if he had forgot something. “It is all so very strange. Not a nice house. Richard, how does it seem to you?”
Reisden shook his head. “I’ve never been here.”
Gilbert took a few steps away from the house and looked back at it. Outside, in the heat, he took off his coat, folded it, and draped it across his arm as though he had no closet to call his own. He looked back at the house doubtfully. The corners of his mouth turned down and he shook his head, as if to himself. “Father is not here anymore, of course,” he said half aloud. “That makes a great difference.”
“Gilbert, he is dead.” Underneath the locked window of the front room, the murder room, was a spill of stones across the dirt where water from the gutter had washed away the soil. The long windows reached almost to the ground. Reisden picked up two hand-sized stones. Deliberately, he tossed the first through the windowpane above the lock. With the second stone he chipped away the jagged edges of glass, then turned the window catch.
The room was empty. White walls stripped of all paper. A few lighter patches in the plaster. White ceiling. Plain whitened board floor, boards washed and scraped and holystoned. The black marble fireplace had a single long score across it where a bullet had ricocheted.
“Look,” Reisden said. “There’s nothing.”
Gilbert pushed the window up and awkwardly stepped through, still holding his jacket. He laid it down on the floor, still folded. The rock was on the floor in the middle of the room; Gilbert picked it up as if absently and stood in the middle of the room, hefting the rock, staring all around him as if he were trying to take in all that emptiness. It was a good-sized granite rock, like a weapon or a talisman.