Rhoda Penmark—Clara Post

Rhoda Penmark—Clara Post is a relationship shaped by an elderly woman’s affection for a child and made ominous by the circumstances in which that affection ends. Clara Post welcomed Rhoda into her apartment and promised her a cherished opal pendant; after Clara’s fatal fall, Rhoda immediately claimed the promised gift. Christine Penmark later recalls the episode alongside the unexplained death of Claude Daigle, recognizing that both deaths occurred in circumstances involving Rhoda as the only witness. The account does not establish how Clara fell, but it makes the pendant, Rhoda’s explanation, and her response to the death inseparable in Christine’s mind.

An Unusual Attachment

More than a year before the events surrounding Claude Daigle, when Rhoda was seven, Clara Post lived in the same Baltimore apartment house as the Penmarks with her widowed daughter, Edna Post. Clara, already in her middle eighties, had become especially attached to Rhoda. The girl often visited her after school, and Clara enjoyed showing her possessions. Christine later reflects on the contrast: older people admired Rhoda, while children her own age could not abide her. The visits thus offered a warm, sustained intimacy between the child and an adult neighbor, but one that also stood apart from Rhoda’s relations with other children.

Clara’s most treasured possession was a small crystal ball filled with transparent fluid, in which fragments of opal shifted and formed bright patterns when the ball moved. A small gold ring set into its top held the black ribbon by which Clara wore it as a pendant. She liked to look into the changing opals when she could not sleep. Edna explained to neighbors that her mother imagined seeing her childhood in them, and that she humored her because Clara had little else to enjoy. The pendant was therefore more than an attractive trinket: it belonged to Clara’s private pleasure and to a daughter’s understanding of her mother’s aging and habits.

A Promise and a Fatal Fall

Rhoda admired the opal ball. When Clara showed it to her, Clara remarked that Rhoda would like to have it. Rhoda eagerly agreed, and Clara promised to leave it to her in her will when she died, asking Edna to confirm that she had heard the promise. Edna did. Clara then joked that Rhoda should not expect to receive it soon, since her family was long-lived. The exchange makes the later transfer appear, on its surface, to fulfill a clear promise made in front of a witness.

The circumstances changed abruptly one afternoon when Edna was shopping at the supermarket and Clara and Rhoda were alone. Clara fell down the spiral back stairs, broke her neck, and landed in the small cement courtyard five flights below. When Edna returned, Rhoda met her at the door and gave an innocent, plausible account: Clara had heard a kitten mewing on the landing, gone out to look, missed a step, and fallen. Rhoda pointed out where the body lay, and Christine joined the neighbors in time to hear her daughter repeat the explanation.

Edna challenged one detail. She said Clara had hated and feared cats all her life, making it unlikely that the sound of kittens would have drawn her onto the stairs. Rhoda opened her eyes wide in apparent surprise and insisted that Clara had gone to look. Asked where the kitten was, Rhoda said it had run away, describing it as gray with white feet. The exchange leaves the account unresolved: Rhoda supplies a coherent explanation, but Edna’s knowledge of her mother makes its central detail difficult to accept. The narrative offers no independent confirmation of the kitten or a definitive explanation of Clara’s fall.

The Pendant After Clara’s Death

Rhoda’s next concern was the promised object. She tugged at Edna’s sleeve and asked whether the glass ball was hers now that Clara had died. Christine rebuked her for asking at that moment. Rhoda answered patiently that Clara had promised it and that Edna had heard. Edna acknowledged the promise and went to fetch the pendant for her. The transfer follows Clara’s stated wish, yet the child’s immediate turn from the body to the inheritance gives the scene a chill that the formal fulfillment of the promise cannot dispel.

Christine later remembers that neither she nor her husband was asked to Clara’s funeral, although the other neighbors attended. On a subsequent encounter in the elevator, Edna, who had previously been pleasant and friendly, turned her back and pretended not to hear Christine speak. The narration does not explain Edna’s conduct or state what she believed had happened. In Christine’s recollection, however, those gestures sharpen the sense that the death had damaged the neighbors’ former relations and left something unspoken between the households.

For a time, Rhoda wore the opal pendant to bed each night. She would rest against her pillow, purse her lips, narrow her eyes in an expression Christine associated with Clara, and peer into the shifting opals. Christine recalls the image as if Rhoda had taken not only Clara’s pendant but something of Clara’s personality. Later, Christine finds the ornament looped over a post of Rhoda’s bed, like a charm. She lifts it, then lets it fall as though it were evil or had burned her hand. The object has passed from a beloved older neighbor to the child who was present at her death, and then into the mother’s fearful scrutiny.

Retrospective Significance

Christine’s memory of Clara’s death returns when she considers Claude Daigle’s unexplained death. She recognizes a disturbing resemblance: each death had been unexplained, and Rhoda had been the only witness. The parallel does not prove that Rhoda caused Clara’s fall, and the episode remains a remembered, unresolved event rather than a disclosed certainty. Its force lies in how accumulated details alter Christine’s reading of what once seemed an accident: the implausible kitten, Edna’s immediate contradiction, Rhoda’s urgent claim to the pendant, and Edna’s later withdrawal.

The relationship consequently changes in retrospect. Clara’s affection and promised inheritance initially frame Rhoda as a cherished visitor receiving a gift; the fatal fall turns that intimacy into a source of suspicion, while the pendant carries the past into Rhoda’s bedroom and Christine’s present anxiety. The contrast between Rhoda’s composed, plausible account and the unsettling timing of her claim makes the episode an early pattern Christine cannot comfortably explain away. What had appeared to be a private bond between a child and an elderly neighbor becomes part of the mother’s accumulating fear that Rhoda’s presence at these deaths is not incidental.