Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  “I could do it,” Tom said.

  “She likes her privacy, but right now she might want some company.”

  “There is one other thing,” Tom said. “It’s connected to her. I know there have been break-ins around this area in the past few years. I don’t know if you’ve thought about this or not, but Ralph Redwing’s bodyguards have a lot of nights and evenings free, and before they started working for Ralph, they called themselves the Cornerboys and did a lot of stealing. I think they did some burglaries on Mill Walk, and I think—” He decided not to mention Wendell Hasek, and instead said, “I think Jerry Hasek, the one who’s sort of the leader, enjoys killing animals. I know he killed a dog when he was a teenager, and Barbara Deane’s dog was killed, and the other day I saw him go nuts in the Lincoln when Robbie Wintergreen, one of the bodyguards, said the word dog in front of me.”

  “Well, well,” Truehart said. “Do these people live in the compound?”

  “In a house by themselves.”

  “I can’t go in there, of course, unless I’m invited or can persuade a judge to give me a search warrant. But do you think they’d take the risk of storing stolen goods in the compound, where they’d have to carry them in and out right under Ralph Redwing’s nose? Unless you think Ralph Redwing is getting a cut.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I think I know where they put the stuff.”

  “This is getting better and better. Where is it?”

  Tom told him about seeing the light moving around von Heilitz’s lodge, following it up the path in the woods, getting lost, and finding the path the next day. Tim Truehart leaned forward on his elbows and listened to Tom’s story with a bemused expression on his face. And when Tom described the house in the clearing and the skinny old woman who had come out carrying a rifle, he put his hands over his face and leaned back against the couch.

  “What’s wrong?” Tom asked.

  Truehart lowered his hands. “Well, I’ll have to ask my mother if she’s storing stolen goods for a guy named Jerry Hasek.” He was grinning. “But she’d probably hit me over the head with a frying pan if I did.”

  “Your mother,” Tom said. “Mrs. Truehart. Who used to clean the houses around here during the summers. Oh, my God.”

  “That’s her. She probably thought you were checking out her house for a robbery.”

  “Oh, my God,” Tom said again. “I apologize.”

  “No need.” Truehart laughed out loud—he seemed vastly amused. “If it was me, I’d probably have done the same thing. I’ll tell you one thing, though, I’m glad you didn’t say anything about this to Spychalla. He’d be talking about it until his jaw wore out.” He stood up. “Well, I guess we’re through for now.” He was still grinning. “If we find anything up in the woods, I’ll tell you about it. And I do want you to be careful. That’s serious.”

  They left the study, and walked across the sitting room to the front door.

  “Give me a call if you see this Hasek character do anything out of the ordinary. He might be a live one. And try to spend as much time as possible with other people.”

  Truehart held out his hand, and Tom shook it. The policeman pulled a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on as he trotted down the steps. He got into his car and backed down the track toward the club the way Spychalla had done. Tom stood on the steps and watched him drive away; he was grinning until his face was only a dark blob behind the windshield.

  Roddy and Buzz unexpectedly decided to spend Buzz’s last week of vacation with friends in the south of France, and the dinner Tom ate with them on the night before their departure seemed to him like the last friendly encounter he would be likely to have at Eagle Lake. The Redwings came late to the club and left early, and acknowledged no one but Marcello, who was a pet of Katinka’s. The Spences occupied their table near the bar, and kept Sarah’s back to Tom as they talked to each other in the loudest voices in the room, demonstrating that they were having a good time, the summer had just begun, and everything would turn out for the best. Neil and Bitsy Langenheim stared at Tom as he walked in with Roddy and Buzz, and whispered to each other like conspirators.

  “Everybody knows that the police paid a couple of social calls to your lodge,” Roddy said. “They’re all hoping you’ve landed yourself in desperate trouble, so they will have something to talk about the rest of the summer.”

  “A hunter fired a stray shot through one of my windows,” Tom said, and caught the sharp, questioning look that passed between his two new friends.

  “Is your whole life like this?” Roddy asked him, and Tom said he was beginning to wonder.

  So they talked for a time about other times hunters had come too near the lodges around the lake, and from there went on to the tension that had always existed between the village and the summer people from Mill Walk, and finally got to the subject most in their minds, their impulsive trip to France; but another, unspoken subject seemed to underlie everything they said.

  “Marc and Brigitte have a wonderful villa right on the Mediterranean near Antibes, and Paulo and Yves live only a few kilometers away, and some friends of ours from London are coming down because their children have suddenly decided to become followers of a guru at an ashram in Poona, so even though it’s a bit extravagant, we thought we should make a party of it for a week. Then I’ll fly back to Mill Walk with Buzz and take care of some business for another couple of weeks before I go to London to see Monserrat Caballé and Bergonzi in La Traviata at Covent Garden. I don’t think I’ll be able to get back here until August.”

  Buzz would miss Caballé and Bergonzi at Covent Garden, but he would get to Paris in time for the Carmelites, and in October there was Hector and Will and Nina and Guy and Samantha in Cadaques, and in March there was a chance of Arthur and whoever it was now in Formentera, and after that …

  After that there was, there would be, more. Roddy Deepdale and Buzz Laing (for that was Buzz’s name, he was Dr. Laing at St. Mary Nieves and to his patients, who knew nothing of his peripatetic, well-furnished life) had friends all over the world, they were always welcome, they were always informed, they had favorite seats at their favorite opera house, La Scala, from which they had seen every Verdi opera except Stiffelio and Aroldo, favorite meals in favorite restaurants in a dozen cities, they cherished the Vermeers and the Rembrandt self-portrait at the Frick, they knew a psychiatrist in London who was the second most intelligent person in the world and a poet in New York who was the third most intelligent person in the world, they loved and needed their friends and their friends loved and needed them. Tom felt provincial, narrow, raw, beside them: the whisper of judgment in the glance he had seen pass between Roddy and Buzz separated him from them as finally as he had been separated from the Redwings, who were pushing back their chairs and preparing to leave, encased in the bubble of their insular importance.

  But Kate Redwing came over to say hello and goodbye in the same breath: she, too, was leaving tomorrow; her allotted two weeks were up and she was going back to Atlanta and her grandchildren. All three at the table hugged her, and when she heard of their plans she said they ought to take Tom with them, and Roddy and Buzz smiled politely and said they wished they could, but they would make sure to see plenty of him on Mill Walk. Tom tried to imagine what these two men would say about Victor Pasmore, and what Victor Pasmore would say about them. Kate Redwing embraced him again, and whispered, “Don’t give up! Be strong!” She turned away to follow her family down the stairs, moving away past the Spences’ empty table with hesitant, old-lady steps in her print dress and flat black shoes. A few minutes later, Roddy signed for their meal, and they left too.

  They dropped Tom off at his lodge and promised to invite him for dinner when they were back on the island—“as soon as things settle down.”

  Tom called Lamont von Heilitz later that night, but again was told that his party did not answer. He stayed up late reading, and went to bed feeling desolate.

  The next morning
curtains covered the big lakeside windows in the Deepdale lodge. A glazier came from the village to replace the broken pane in his grandfather’s study and said, “A kid like you must have a lot of fun in a place like this by himself.”

  Tom swam in the mornings, walked around and around the lake, finished The ABC Murders and read Iris Murdoch’s Under The Net and Flight from the Enchanter. He ate alone. Sarah’s parents did not join the Redwings at the bar before dinners, and Sarah did no more than give him a regretful, chastened glance before her mother snapped her back with a sharp word. He swam for hours every afternoon, and twice Buddy Redwing took out his motorboat and wheeled back and forth in figure eights up at the north end while Tom breast-stroked and sidestroked between the docks on the south end. Kip Carson sat open-mouthed beside Buddy the first time, Kip and Sarah Spence together on one of the rear seats the second. Tom walked to the village and found a rack of paperbacks beside the I Pine Fir Yew ashtrays in the Indian Trading Post. He carried home a stack of books and called his mother, who said she wasn’t getting out much, but Dr. Milton was taking care of her. Victor had been offered a job with the Redwings—she wasn’t too sure what the job involved, but he would have to travel a lot, and he was very excited. She hoped Tom was meeting people and enjoying himself, and he said yes, he was.

  Certain rules governed his conversations with his mother—he suddenly saw this. The truth could never be spoken: kindly, murderous hypocrisy was the law of life. It was a cage.

  The days went by. Lamont von Heilitz never answered his telephone. Barbara Deane came and went, in too much of a hurry and too self-absorbed to talk to him. Tom could not get Sarah Spence out of his mind, and some of the things Buddy had said came back to torture him. He swam so much that night he dropped instantly into dreamless sleep, forgetting even the ache in his muscles.

  On the fifth day after the bullet had exploded through the window, he was sitting on a rock at the edge of the woods where the private road to the lake came out to the highway and saw Kip Carson walking toward him, strapped into a backpack and dragging a duffel bag behind him. “Hey, man,” Kip Carson said. “I’m on my way, man, it was really fun and everything, but I’m gone.”

  “Where?”

  “Airport. I have to hitch. Ralph wouldn’t let me get a ride, and Buddy didn’t give a shit. Buddy’s an asshole, man.”

  Tom asked him if he were going back to Tucson.

  “Tucson? No way, no fuckin’ way. Schenectady—my old lady mailed me a ticket. Do you think there’s a barbershop at the airport? I gotta get a haircut before I get back home.”

  “I didn’t see one,” Tom said.

  “Well, it’s been grins.” Kip flashed him a V with two fingers, hoisted his duffel, and went out to stand by the side of the highway. The second car that passed picked him up.

  Tom walked back to the lodge.

  On Saturday, the pain over Sarah Spence’s absence still so constant as to feel like mourning, rejection, and humiliation joined together, he realized that he had been waiting for Tim Truehart to come back to tell him about whatever Spychalla had found in the woods. He had liked Truehart, and thought about calling him up as he swam back and forth between the empty docks. Of course Spychalla found nothing, and of course Truehart had other things to do. Then he realized that the reason he was thinking about Eagle Lake’s police chief was that he missed Lamont von Heilitz. He climbed up on his dock, went inside the lodge, dressed, and sat down on the couch in the study to write out everything he knew about Jeanine Thielman’s murder. He read what he had written, remembered more, and wrote it all over again in a different way.

  His mind seemed to awaken.

  And then the events of forty summers past became his occupation, his obsession, his salvation. He still swam in the mornings and afternoons, but while he swam he saw Jeanine Thielman standing in pale cold moonlight on her dock, and Anton Goetz in a white dinner jacket—looking like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca—limping toward her, bowing in a parody of gallantry when he leaned on his cane and swung his useless leg. Tom still walked around and around the lake, but saw a cloud of Redwings in tennis sweaters and white dresses, chattering about the young woman from Atlanta Jonathan had decided to marry. He sat on his dock, seeing the bulllike figure of the young widower who was his grandfather walk slowly back and forth across the planks, his hand gripping the much smaller hand of a little girl in ringlets and a sailor dress.

  Any event is altered by the perspective from which it is seen, and for days Tom replayed the events and circumstances of Jeanine Thielman’s murder. He wrote about it in the third person and in the first, imagining that he were Arthur Thielman, Jeanine Thielman, Anton Goetz, his grandfather, even trying to see those events through the eyes on the anguished child who had been his mother. He played with dates and times; he decided to throw out everything he had been told about these people’s motives and experiment with new ones. He saw gaps and holes in what he had been told, and prowled through them, following his instincts and his imagination as he had followed Hattie Bascombe through the courts and passages of Maxwell’s Heaven. Here was his grandfather, just beginning to solidify his relationship with the Redwings and insure both his financial and social future; here was Anton Goetz, a “con man” who charmed women and men with stories about a romantic past and shielded Glendenning Upshaw’s connection to the St. Alwyn hotel and the secret, unseen parts of Mill Walk; here was Lamont von Heilitz, seeing the world begin to come to life around him again.

  He dreamed of bodies rising like smoke from the lake, raising their arms above their dripping heads and hovering in place with open eyes and mouths—he dreamed he walked through a forest to a clearing where a great hairy monster, of a size that made his own height a little child’s, bit the head off a woman’s white body and turned to him with a mouth full of bone and gore and said, “I am your father, Thomas. See what I am?”

  One night he awoke knowing that his mother had picked up the gun on the deckside table and shot Jeanine Thielman—that was why her father had hidden her in Barbara Deane’s house, that was why she screamed at night, that was why her father had sold her into marriage to a man paid to be her nursemaid. Another sleepless night: but in the morning, he could not believe this version, either.

  Or could he?

  If his mother had killed Jeanine Thielman, Glendenning Upshaw would not have hesitated to kill to protect her. I am your father. See what I am?

  For most of another week, he was alone without being lonely: he imagined himself into the men and women who had come to Eagle Lake in 1925, and felt their shades and shadows around him, each with his own, her own, plots and desires and fantasies. He began sitting at the desk again during the day and at night, forgetting Tim Truehart’s advice, and no bullets exploded through the glass; it had been a hunter’s bullet after all, and he was not a potential victim. He was—it came to him at last—Lamont von Heilitz.

  One night at dinner, he went up to the Spence table and ignored the glares to ask Mr. Spence how Jerry Hasek and the other two bodyguards were listed in the books. “Leave us alone,” Mrs. Spence ordered, and Sarah gave him an urgent, irritated look he could not fathom.

  “I don’t know what business it is of yours, but I can’t see any harm in telling you. They’re listed as public relations assistants.”

  Tom thanked him, heard Mrs. Spence say, “Why did you tell him anything?” and went back to his book and his dinner.

  On the Friday of the second week after Roddy and Buzz left the lake, Barbara Deane came in after her morning ride and found him lying on a sofa in the sitting room, holding a pen in his mouth like a cigar and squinting up at a sheet of paper covered with his own writing. “I hope you won’t mind,” she said, “but you’ll have to eat lunch at the club today. I forgot to buy sandwich things, and we’re all out.”

  “That’s okay,” he said.

  She went upstairs. He heard her door close. The lock on the inside of the door slid into its catch. After a minute or two, wat
er began drumming in her shower. Still later, her closet door creaked and something scraped along a shelf. Fifteen minutes later, she came downstairs changed into her black skirt and a dark red blouse he had not seen before. “Since I have to shop,” she said, “I could pick up some extra things for dinner.”

  “That’d be nice,” he said.

  “What I mean is, you could come to my house for dinner tonight, Tom.”

  “Oh!” He swung his legs over the side of the sofa and sat up, sending dozens of yellow legal-sized papers sliding to the floor. “Thanks! I’d like that.”

  “You’ll come?” He nodded, and she said, “I’m going to be busy today, so if you wouldn’t mind walking to town, I’ll drive you back after dinner.”

  “Great.”

  She smiled at him. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you look like you could use a break. I’m on Oak Street, the first right off Main Street as you come in, and it’s the fourth house down on the right—number fifteen. Come around six.”

  This reminder that other people met for dinner, had normal lives and saw their friends, made him impatient with his own loneliness. He swam for an hour in the morning, and saw Sarah’s father and Ralph Redwing walking slowly back and forth on the sandy ground in front of the club. Ralph Redwing did most of the talking, and now and then Mr. Spence took off his cowboy hat and wiped sweat off his forehead. Tom breast-stroked silently in the water near his dock, watching them pace and talk. At the club that noon, the Spences joined the Redwings at the big table near the terrace. Sarah looked at him hard, twice, knitting her brows together as if trying to send him a thought, and Buddy Redwing grabbed her hand and pressed it to his mouth with loud growls and smacking sounds. Mrs. Spence pretended to find this hilarious. Tom left unobserved, and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to see something fresh in his notes.

  He could see them, the tense, lean young Shadow standing on the edge of his dock, drawing on a cigarette—a Cubeb? a Murad?—and his grandfather in an open-necked white shirt leaning on his umbrella and Anton Goetz holding himself up on his cane, talking at the edge of the darkness outside the club. But he could hear their words no more than he could hear Ralph Redwing issuing orders to sweating Bill Spence.