The Woman in the Park

Beverly Hartley died on the second of July, in the narrow hall of her daughter's house, of a heart that had been failing for four years and had been told so only once.

It happened at eleven at night. Ruth was not there. She had gone back to the city for two days to be at her desk, because the hospital had begun to comment, and because Lindqvist had told her with characteristic bluntness that a witness who is exhausted is not a witness, so she had left Delia with the night rota the three men had built among themselves and had taken the last train that would still get her home before midnight.

What she would later piece together, from Vance's notes and from Grant's account, was this.

At about ten, something came up onto the porch and stood against the storm door. It was not a person — Grant was in the front room and saw it and would swear to the shape of it, a long pale animal taller than a dog, no collar, moving with the terrible patience of a thing that has read the house. It put its weight on the door twice. The third time, the outer pane of glass went, and Beverly, who had been standing in the hall with her hand on the telephone, went down between the coat rack and the stairs and was dead before Grant had her in his arms.

The police found nothing on the porch. The neighbors' cameras caught, on three separate frames, a bright smear at the edge of the drive, and on the fourth frame, nothing.

Delia did not wake during any of it. She was in her bed at the top of the house with the lamps burning and the curtains shut, and at some point in the hour between her mother's fall and the ambulance, in a room with a broken door downstairs, somebody took her, quietly, without waking the three men who were in the house, and left her in her own bed with her hands folded on the coverlet, and went away again.

She had eleven marks on her that morning.

She died on the fifth of July at twenty past six, with all of them in the room, because Vance had called Grant and Rico and Ruth had taken an early train and come straight from the station without stopping at her own door, and Lindqvist sat on the bed with her hand around Delia's wrist, and the count went down, and down, and stopped. The last thing Delia said was to Grant. It was not a farewell and she was not lucid and it made no sense and it stayed with him for the rest of his life: she said, "Tell him I kept my side of it."

Ruth closed the folder that night and did not open it for a week.

In the third week of July the children started talking about the woman in the park.

Salt Harbor had one proper park, four acres on the bluff with a bandstand and a monkey-puzzle tree and a fence the town had been promising to fix since 1994. It was the kind of park where the same eight mothers came every afternoon and the same two nannies from the big house on the point came every morning, and it was, in the memory of every adult in that town, unremarkable in every particular.

The children said the woman came at the end of the day.

They said she came to the fence, which was where the tree is, and she stood on the outside of the fence and called them over, and she was beautiful and her voice was lovely and she had something for them and she would not come inside the fence, and she could only take one at a time, and it was a secret.

Four children went with her. All four were found within the hour, in the same place, on the path at the bottom of the bluff where the woods come down to the water, and all four were fine, and all four had marks on their necks that nobody could call anything but what they were, and not one of the four had a mark on the front of the throat, which is the part a doctor examines, because every one of the four had been taken from behind.

The pediatrician at the clinic in town reported the marks. The state police interviewed the four children and got, out of three of them, nothing at all, and out of the fourth, who was six and had a memory that would make a stenographer weep, the following description, which was entered in the file and then read by Ruth Kessler eleven days later in a county records office with a requisition form in her hand.

"A lady. She had a coat on like my mom's coat but it was grey. She didn't have a bag. She had my chin and she turned it and it was like a shot but it was gentle. She said: don't tell, and then she said: tell her the brother is coming. I don't know who the brother is. Then I fell asleep and then I was on the path and there was police."

Ruth read it four times. Then she went out of the building, and stood on the steps, and called Adrian Vance, and what she said was not a question and not a theory and not any of the things she had been practicing saying for eleven days.

She said: "Delia is not in that ground."

Vance was quiet for a long time. Then he said: "No," in the voice of a man who had been standing over a grave three times a week for a month, doing the arithmetic on the grass, and had been waiting for somebody to ask him the question so that he could stop being a psychiatrist for an hour and be a man with an opinion.

"I want the three of you," Ruth said. "Grant, Rico, and you. And Lindqvist. And I want to go in at midnight, with tools, and I want to open it, and I want you to know now, before you say yes, that I have thought about every other way to read this and there isn't one."

"That's a felony."

"Then we'll be felons," Ruth said, "and we will have the record of why."