Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  He had danced clumsy tangos with Sarah at Miss Ellinghausen’s last two classes of the year, but when he had asked her if Ralph Redwing picked her up after every class she had sulked and denied that he ever picked her up. “Sometimes he sends the carriage,” she finally said. “They’re possessive people, you know. Don’t make a big deal out of it.” She had smiled when he told her that he would be coming to Eagle Lake, but after that she had seemed nervous and quiet, not nearly as talkative as during their first day together; after class she had excused herself quickly and walked to Calle Berghofstrasse by herself—she still looked beautiful to Tom, but almost forlorn, a secret he would never know.

  When Tom had come to the commencement exercises held behind Brooks-Lowood’s main building in an atmosphere of striped tents and summery dresses, Sarah turned around to smile at him from her place in the front row with the other graduating seniors. Ralph Redwing, the speaker at one of every three Brooks-Lowood commencements, addressed the topic “Civic Responsibilities of Civic Leaders” by announcing that he was overseeing the publication of a book entitled Historic Island Domiciles which would feature full-page plates and floor plans of every house on Mill Walk in which members of the Redwing family had lived (gasps, rustles of anticipation from the Brooks-Lowood mothers). And after the diplomas had been handed out and the awards distributed, Tom had wandered out of the tea tent, stepped onto the soccer field, and looked across at the visitors’ parking lot, where Sarah Spence and her parents were just climbing into Ralph Redwing’s gleaming carriage.

  Tom reached the corner of An Die Blumen and stood for a moment looking between the houses at the blue dazzle of the bay. The night before the commencement he had visited Lamont von Heilitz and felt as if he were returning to his true home—he loved both the vast eccentric crowded room and its extraordinary inhabitant—but the evening had felt tentative and inconclusive. The Shadow had seemed upset at the news of Tom’s visit to Eagle Lake, and what had been more distressing to Tom was that for most of the evening the old man had denied his reluctance to have Tom make the trip.

  “You don’t think I should go to Eagle Lake,” Tom had said. “I know you don’t. Do you want me to stay here and work with you?”

  “I suppose you’ll do what you want to do,” von Heilitz said. “It’s a matter of timing, really.”

  “You mean you don’t want me to go now?”

  The Shadow answered him with another question. “Are you planning to go alone? Glen didn’t include your mother in the invitation?”

  Tom shook his head.

  For the first time, the reclusive detective struck Tom as intensely lonely, in a way that illuminated Tom’s own loneliness. If Tom spent six weeks away from Mill Walk, he would be depriving the old man of his only companionship. But Tom could not speak of this, and von Heilitz merely continued to look distressed and uncomfortable and as if he had things to do that Tom could not witness. So Tom felt excluded, as uncomfortable as his friend—it was the first real coolness between them. Tom had thought of asking von Heilitz if he knew of any trouble at Shady Mount Hospital, but the old man had moved across the room and put on a record. “Mahler,” he said, and an instant later sounds like pistol shots and battlefield moans filled the room. The old man collapsed into a chair, put his feet up on his table, and closed his eyes. Tom let himself out. It was like his grandfather, he supposed—you couldn’t expect a man like that to behave like an ordinary person.

  Now he looked up from the sidewalk and saw the front door of an enormous Spanish mansion on The Sevens swing open. He immediately wished that he were invisible, then that he were right in front of the house. A small brown and white dog appeared first, tugging at a leash and bouncing on his forefeet. Tom gave in to his desire for invisibility, and moved to the side of the red booth. In a blue shirt with rolled sleeves, white shorts, and white tennis shoes, Sarah Spence appeared at the other end of the leash. Laughing, she said something to the dog and closed the door behind her.

  Sarah followed the eager dog down the red brick steps, her hair swinging, and began moving down the wide stone walk to the sidewalk. Her free arm swung, her tanned slender legs swung, even her neat white feet swung. Her back was very straight, and her hair gathered and released with every step. The dog trotted out on the sidewalk and pulled Sarah down the block.

  He stepped away from the telephone booth and watched her moving away from him. Then he crossed An Die Blumen and began walking down The Sevens, half a block behind her. The day, which he had hardly noticed earlier, now seemed astonishingly clean and fresh: limpid sunlight fell directly on Sarah’s glowing hair and the straight line of her shoulders. He realized that he took pleasure simply in the eloquent way she walked, her golden legs almost striding and her feet skimming above the sidewalk as if they were winged.

  Tom quickened his pace. He could not imagine why he had wanted to hide from Sarah Spence, nor what he would say to her when he finally caught up.

  At that moment Sarah turned her head and saw him. “Tom!” she all but cried out, and stopped moving so abruptly that the dog’s front legs rose up off the ground. She turned around to face him, transferred the leash to her other hand, and yielded one step to the dog, who began to sniff a tree. “Why are you grinning at me? Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I was going to catch up to you,” he said, answering the second question.

  “Good,” she said. “You can help me walk Bingo. I don’t think you ever met him, did you?”

  He shook his head and looked down at the suddenly attentive dog, who looked back at him, pointed ears and thin rope of a tail perked up.

  She bent down to pat the dog, who continued to look at Tom with very alert, intelligent eyes. “Tell Tom your name is Bingo, he’s such a stranger he doesn’t even know you.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Seven. I told you about him—but I’m not surprised you didn’t remember. It was that day I visited you in the hospital. When I covered myself with embarrassment.”

  Tom shook his head. His mouth open and tongue lolling, Bingo stopped looking at him and waited for his mistress to resume walking.

  “It’s okay—I got him the day I heard about your accident.”

  “So he’s as old as I am,” Tom said, not thinking at all about what he was saying. Then he took in Sarah’s expression, and said, “Sorry, that must have sounded funny. I mean, ah, I guess I don’t know what I meant.” He took a step forward, and Sarah smiled at him, still with a trace of puzzled amusement clear in her face, and began walking beside him.

  “I don’t even know where you’re going to college,” he said after a few moments of silence.

  “Oh, I was accepted at Hollins and Goucher, but I’m going to go to Mount Holyoke—it sounded interesting, and Moonie Firestone got accepted there too, so …” She glanced sideways up at him, and closed, then opened her mouth. She said, “Tom—” and then stopped. She looked down at the dog straining ahead, and then spoke again. “My parents really wanted me to go to a girls’ school. I guess it’s okay for a year or so, but I’m already thinking about transferring. Isn’t that ridiculous? I’m not even there yet. Buddy thinks I ought to switch to Arizona. Do you know where you’re going to go?”

  “I guess I’ll probably go to Tulane. If I get in.”

  “Maybe I’ll transfer to Tulane, then.” She looked up at him as she had before, and he suddenly remembered exactly how she had looked when she had come to the hospital—how the face she had now, which was the face of her young womanhood, had just formed itself out of her childhood, and how badly he had wanted her to touch him. He wanted to put his arm around her, but she spoke before he could decide to do it.

  “Are you really going to come to Eagle Lake this summer?” He nodded. “Listen, I didn’t even think when I was talking to you—at Miss Ellinghausen’s. It’s like, every time I talk to you I say something so dumb I want to curl up and die when I think about it later.”

  “What?”

  “Bu
t if you’re really coming, I guess it must be all right. It is, isn’t it?”

  “What must be all right?”

  “Well, Eagle Lake isn’t just an ordinary place for you, is it?”

  He just looked down at her.

  “And I understand that you couldn’t think of it the way we do, so I just wondered …” When he still said nothing, Sarah stopped walking and lightly grasped his arm. “I know your mother drowned, um, died.…”

  For a moment both of them looked utterly confused: Tom remembered headlines from Lamont von Heilitz’s journal and saw a photograph of Jeanine Thielman extending a beautiful leg down from a carriage.

  “Oh, my God,” Sarah said. “I did it again. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Please forgive me.”

  Sarah now looked distressed to the point of tears. “It wasn’t my mother,” he said. “That was my—”

  “I know, I know,” Sarah said. “I can’t imagine what—I know it was your grandmother, but in my head it got—I guess because I never see your mother, and I started thinking that—” She threw out her hands, and Bingo growled. Both Tom and Sarah looked down at Bingo, then toward the empty corner at which Bingo fixedly stared. The dog was leaning forward against the leash, and kept up a low growl.

  “It’s easy to get mixed up,” Tom said, feeling as if he were speaking from experience.

  “I was so sure.” She began to turn red. “How did I get into any college? How did I ever get out of grade school? I’m starting to sound like a Redwing!”

  “It was just a mistake,” Tom said. Bingo was still making angry, theatening noises and tugging at the leash.

  “Bingo! He hates to be held up, he’s so impatient.…” Stricken by what she had said, Sarah let the dog pull her forward. “I’m so sorry, I can’t—” She shrugged, and made an elaborately apologetic gesture with her free hand.

  Tom realized that he could walk down to the hospital and see for himself what had happened to Nancy Vetiver—then it seemed to him that he had been planning to go to Shady Mount ever since leaving his house.

  “I have to go somewhere,” Tom said, moving ahead of her and the straining dog, who cast him a wild-eyed, impatient look. “It’s okay! I’ll see you soon!”

  She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Please!” she shouted.

  Tom looked back from the far corner of Sarah’s street and saw her gazing toward him. The little terrier was still tugging at the leash, and she stepped forward and waved tentatively. He returned the wave, and crossed the intersection of Yorkminster Place. Houses he had seen and known all his life presented blank, lifeless façades; sprinklers whirred above grass that seemed to be made of spun sugar. Through windows left open to the breezes he saw immaculate empty rooms with grand pianos and looming portraits.

  He walked past Salisbury Road, past Ely Place and Stonehenge Circle, past Victoria Terrace and Omdurman Road. Between Omdurman Road and Balaclava Lane the houses became slightly smaller and closer together, and by Waterloo Parade they were ordinary three-story frame and red brick houses. Here a few children rode tricycles up and down driveways, and thick low hedges were the only separation between the houses. A man reading a newspaper on his front porch looked up at him suspiciously but went back to the Eyewitness when he saw only a fairly ordinary Eastern Shore Road teenager.

  Cars, bicycles, and pony traps streamed up and down Calle Berlinstrasse. An ambulance went by, then a second ambulance. After another step Tom realized that four police cars had pulled into a circular drive across the street. Lights whirled and flashed. Above the turmoil of ambulances and police cars before which a crowd had begun to gather stood the red brick building in which he had spent nearly three months of his tenth year.

  When the light changed, he ran across the street and began to weave through the people peering over the tops of the police cars.

  A policeman stood in front of the revolving door that led to the hospital’s waiting room and front desk. He was in his mid-twenties, his uniform was pressed and spotless, and his face looked very white beneath his visor. His buttons, belt, and boots gleamed. He kept his eyes a careful foot or so above the heads of the crowd.

  “What happened?” Tom asked a stout woman carrying a white plastic shopping bag.

  She leaned over and looked up at him. “I’m just lucky, I was right here when all the cops pulled up—way it looks, somebody got killed in there.”

  Tom walked forward into the empty space between the spectators and the lone officer at the top of the hospital steps. The young cop gave him a hard glance, and then looked back out at nothing. When Tom started coming up the steps, he took his hand off his gun butt and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Officer, could you tell me what’s happening?” He was half a foot taller than the policeman, who tilted his neck and glared at Tom.

  “Are you going in or not? If not, get back down.”

  Tom pushed his way through the revolving door, took two steps toward the desk, and stopped short.

  His past had been rewritten. The tiny waiting room with two or three rickety chairs and a low wooden partition before an equally tiny office with a switchboard and receptionist was now the size of a train station. Wooden benches and molded plastic chairs lined the walls on either side. Patients in bathrobes, most of them staring fixedly at their laps, occupied a few of these chairs. A whiskery old man in a wheelchair looked up sharply at Tom’s entrance, and a strand of drool wobbled from his lower lip. At the far end of the great lobby a new partition of thick translucent glass or plastic divided the office from the lobby. Behind the partition women moved between file cases, sat at desks with telephones propped to their ears, and consulted papers at their desks.

  On the wide marble floor between the revolving door and the partition stood two groups of policemen that reminded Tom of the huddles of opposing football teams. The lobby was much darker than the street.

  “Natchez! What are you doing over there?” called an officer in the larger of the two groups. “We’re here to do a job.”

  Tom had been trying to sidle past the old men in chairs. He looked up when he heard the name. A sturdy policeman in a business suit whispered a few words to his cohort and began moving toward the others. He looked like an athlete, muscular and self-contained. An angry flush covered his cheeks. In the way the other officers parted to admit him, then crowded a little too closely around him, Tom had an impression of barely concealed hostility. Then he remembered the name: Natchez was one of the two detectives who had searched the Shadow’s house.

  He backed away toward the wall and sat down to wait until the policemen left the lobby. Detective Natchez strode across the floor and punched an elevator button. Some of the other policemen continued to stare at him. The men to whom Natchez had been talking dispersed.

  “My daughter is coming today,” said the old man beside Tom.

  “Do you know why all these policemen are here?” Tom asked him.

  The old man’s lower lip sagged, and his eyes were pink. “Do you know my daughter?”

  “No,” Tom said.

  The old man gripped his upper arm and leaned very close. “Someone died,” he uttered. “Murdered. It’s my daughter’s birthday.”

  Tom pulled his arm free of the old man’s grip. A hole had opened in the surface of the earth, and he had just fallen through it.

  “They want to shoot her full of lead,” the man said, “but I won’t let them.”

  Another old man a few chairs away hitched toward them, obviously wishing to join this interesting conversation, and Tom hastily stood up. One of the officers in the original group cast him a look of impersonal hostility. Tom looked down and turned away, and saw the bottoms of neatly pressed, dark blue trousers and polished black boots with buttons protruding from the bottom of the robe worn by the second old man. The first man, and nearly all of the other patients sitting in the lobby, wore limp pajamas and slippers. He looked at the man’s face, and saw him looking back at him.

 
The second old man was at first indistinguishable from all the others—his grey hair fell about his face, his lip drooped, his head trembled. The man clutched his robe close about his neck, and bent forward to mumble something. Tom stepped away, but the man’s eyes still held him. They were alert and intelligent, not at all the eyes of senility. A recognition jogged the boy. And then—with a shock that almost made him cry out—Tom realized that he was looking at Lamont von Heilitz.

  Tom looked over his shoulder at the police. The hostile officer was sauntering up toward Natchez, the intention of saying something unpleasant clear upon his face. He slid onto the seat beside von Heilitz, glanced at him for a second, and looked away. The Shadow had whitened his face with makeup and pasted straggling thorny eyebrows over his own. His whole face looked gaunt and stupid and hopeless. “Look away.” The words seemed to speak themselves.

  Tom gazed across the vast emptying lobby. The officer in charge of the first group had begun moving toward a corridor to the right of the new desk. The others went toward the doors and the elevators: there was the same sense of inactivity Tom had felt when he first came in. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

  “My house, tonight,” von Heilitz said in the same ventriloquial fashion.

  “Somebody died?”

  “Go,” von Heilitz ordered, and Tom stood up as if he had been jabbed with a pin.

  He wandered out into the great empty lobby. The elevator into which Detective Natchez had disappeared returned to the lobby, and when Tom reached the desk its doors opened. Detective Natchez and two uniformed policemen emerged on either side of a kind of wheeled sheet-covered cart, which obviously held a corpse. Tom again fell through the hole in the earth’s surface. I did that, he thought. I wrote a letter, and that man died.