Baltimore is the setting of the first episodes that make Rhoda Penmark’s conduct difficult to explain as ordinary childhood misbehavior. During the family’s earlier residence there, Rhoda was expelled from a progressive school, a pet terrier fell from a window, and Clara Post died after falling on the stairs of the apartment building. These events do not initially appear as one continuous account. Christine Penmark remembers them while considering the later death of Claude Daigle, and their accumulated similarities change the meaning of Baltimore: it becomes the place where she first encountered evidence of a pattern she had tried not to face.

Family Residence and School

Christine and Kenneth Penmark had lived in Baltimore when Rhoda was six and seven. Her parents had noticed that she was different from other children, but had hoped she would grow out of her peculiarities. A year after enrolling her in a well-recommended progressive school, they were asked to remove her. The principal described Rhoda as self-sufficient, difficult, governed by her own rules, and unusually convincing when she lied. She seemed advanced in some respects and immature in others, but those traits were not the principal reason for the school’s decision.

The decisive issue was theft. The school had set a trap and caught Rhoda red-handed, and the principal maintained that there was no doubt about her responsibility. Christine challenged the principal’s judgment, asking whether she might be wrong, but the principal distinguished the possibility of personal fallibility from what she regarded as established fact. Her response was sympathetic rather than condemnatory: she had seen similar problems before and had taken Rhoda to the school psychiatrist for an opinion. The account establishes both the family’s early awareness of Rhoda’s difficulties and their tendency to seek explanations and help before they understood the full reach of the problem.

The Terrrier in the Apartment Building

During the family’s Baltimore residence, Rhoda wanted a dog after seeing one belonging to another child in their apartment house. Her parents bought the wire-haired terrier she selected, pleased that she appeared interested in something beyond herself. At first she took the dog everywhere and showed it to people in the lobby, boasting about its cost and pedigree. The arrangement changed when caring for it became her responsibility. Feeding and taking it outside interfered with her reading, jigsaw puzzles, and piano practice; afterward, the dog fell from a window ledge into the courtyard.

Christine heard the dog’s distressed sounds and found Rhoda at the window, looking down without apparent concern. The terrier lay in the courtyard three stories below, badly injured. When Christine asked what had happened, Rhoda walked away and offered the explanation that it had fallen out of the window. The passage does not present a direct account of how the dog came to fall. Instead, it places Rhoda’s earlier eagerness to possess the pet beside her indifference after its fall, leaving Christine with a memory that later troubles her as part of a larger series.

Clara Post and the Apartment-House Fall

More than a year before the later events Christine is trying to understand, seven-year-old Rhoda was close to Clara Post, an elderly resident of the same Baltimore apartment building. Clara was attached to the child and often welcomed her after school. She enjoyed showing Rhoda her possessions, especially a crystal pendant containing floating opal fragments. A black ribbon threaded through a small gold ring allowed Clara to wear it around her neck. The pendant was among the trinkets she valued most, and she liked to look at the changing opals when she could not sleep. Her daughter, Edna Post, humored these habits, aware that her mother found pleasure in them.

One afternoon, while Edna was shopping, Clara and Rhoda were alone together. Clara fell down the building’s spiral back stairs and died. Rhoda met Edna at the door and supplied a plausible account: Clara had heard a kitten on the landing, gone out to look for it, and missed a step. Edna immediately identified a contradiction. Her mother had been afraid of cats all her life and would not have gone near a kitten, however insistently it mewed. Rhoda nevertheless repeated that Clara had gone to look for one. The gap between the composed explanation and Edna’s knowledge makes the death an unresolved memory for Christine, not a settled accident.

Baltimore in Christine’s Recollections

The Baltimore episodes return to Christine’s mind as she listens to the account of Claude Daigle’s death. She remembers that Rhoda’s presence near the wharf had not been positively established: a guard saw a girl in a red dress, and the adults inferred that it was Rhoda because she was the only girl wearing one that day. The uncertainty of that identification does not remove Christine’s older memories. Rather, the story brings the dog’s fall and Clara’s death alongside the new case, making separate questions harder to dismiss one by one.

Christine eventually names the Baltimore death as one of the pieces in a pattern that also includes Clara Post and Claude. Once Rhoda admits that she pushed Clara, Christine’s uncertainty gives way to knowledge, though not to a simple course of action. She considers the secret something she must keep, recognizes that Kenneth must eventually share responsibility for deciding what to do, and resolves to protect Rhoda while watching to ensure she harms no one else. Baltimore therefore marks both an earlier history of unexplained events and the beginning of Christine’s moral crisis: the place where her memories become evidence, but where knowing what happened does not tell her how to respond.