by Peter Straub
Fritz’s first words told him that all his worry had been pointless. “Tom! We’re both here! Isn’t that great?”
It sure was, Tom said, genuinely happy to hear Fritz’s voice.
“Boy, I never thought this would really happen,” Fritz said. “We’re going to have such a great time. I guess Buddy had some real wild friends up here, I bet they got outrageous and outa sight, so tell me what you were doing—but please please don’t tell me you just moped around reading books and acting like Mr. Handley. I’m fed up with Mr. Handley, he never makes any sense!”
Fritz had spent the past three weeks in a remedial reading tutorial with Dennis Handley.
“Come on over,” Tom said. “Right away.”
“Next year we’re going to be seniors!” Fritz said. “This is going to be the best summer we ever had.”
“Don’t tell anybody where you’re going, just get over here,” Tom said.
In less than five minutes, Fritz was on the doorstep, wearing a polo shirt over bathing trunks and carrying a towel on his arm. “Good tan,” he said when Tom opened the door. “I was afraid you’d be all white—I was afraid you’d have book scars all over your face.
“Book scars?”
“You know, those little lines you get under your eyes from reading too much. With Mr. Handley, I had to read a whole book out loud, and every time I read a sentence wrong, he read it back to me, it was like watching a guy play with himself, I got those lines all over under my eyes, I had to squint so I wouldn’t have to see his face. So let’s go swimming right away, okay, I want to catch up with your tan, I want some rays—”
They had walked into the living room, and Fritz suddenly stopped talking and gazed in horror at the heavily written-upon sheets of yellow paper lying in rows and stacks on the floor by the couch and fanned across its cushions.
“What is THIS?” He turned to look up at Tom with pale blue eyes like pinwheels. “You’re doing next year’s homework!”
“I’m thinking about something, it has nothing to do with homework.”
“So?” Fritz said, meaning: so if it isn’t homework, what is it?
“It’s about a murder.” Fritz looked at him with deep puzzlement. “I’ll put on my swimsuit and be right down,” Tom said.
“All right,” Fritz said when Tom came back downstairs. He had been holding a sheaf of Tom’s notes in his hands, and he dropped them on the floor with evident relief. “Let’s get in the water. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you have got to get away from it, fast.”
They walked through the study, and Fritz shook his head at the sight of yet more piles of paper. “It’s a good thing I got here in time. I don’t know how you got such a good tan, messing around with this crazy stuff. You even got Mrs. Thielman’s name wrong, you dope.”
“That was the first Mrs. Thielman,” Tom said. “Just out of curiosity, what was the name of the book you had to read out loud to Mr. Handley?”
“Are you kidding? You think I remember?”
“What was it about?”
“This guy.”
“What did he do?”
“We went after this fish. It didn’t make any sense. Mr. Handley let me skip the hard parts.”
“Mr. Handley made you read Moby Dick? Out loud?”
“It was terrible. It was lousy and terrible. What do you mean, the first Mrs. Thielman? There is only one Mrs. Thielman.”
“The first Mrs. Thielman was killed right up here by a man named Anton Goetz, and Lamont von Heilitz solved it.”
“The creep who owns that empty lodge?” They were now walking down Tom’s pier, and Fritz pointed diagonally across the lake. “That guy everybody hates? I wish you owned that lodge.”
“He’s not a creep,” Tom said. “He used to be incredibly famous, and he’s old now, but he’s an amazing man. I met him because he lives across the street from us, and he’s solved hundreds of murders, and he really knows how our island works.”
“Oh, everybody knows that,” Fritz said. He whooped and jumped off the edge of the dock, drew in his knees and wrapped his arms around them, and hit the water in a noisy cannonball.
Everybody knows that?
Tom dove in after him.
“God, this is great,” Fritz yelled, and for a time both he and Tom swam aimlessly and energetically in the wide part of the lake.
“Have you seen Buddy yet?” Tom asked.
“Buddy’s still in bed. I guess they had some kind of celebration at the club last night. Weren’t you there?”
“I left early. Buddy and I aren’t exactly friendly, Fritz.”
“Buddy’s friendly with everybody,” Fritz said. “Buddy’s friendly with Jerry. He and Jerry are going out shooting this afternoon. Maybe we could go too. That’d be pretty cool.”
“I don’t think they’d want me along, unless …” Unless they could use me as a target, Tom thought. “There are some things you have to know,” he said, and Fritz swam closer to him, his wide forehead wrinkled.
“Do you know what the celebration was about, last night?” Fritz shook his head. “Buddy is supposed to get married to Sarah Spence.”
“Well, sure. What’s the big deal?”
“He can’t marry her,” Tom said.
“How come?”
“She’s too young. She’s too smart. She doesn’t even like him.”
“Then how come she’s going to marry him?”
“Because her parents want her to, because your Uncle Ralph picked her out for him, and because she hasn’t been able to see me for a couple of weeks.”
Fritz stopped paddling around and stared at him. His mouth was underwater.
“I’ve sort of been seeing her. We got close, Fritz.”
Fritz lifted his mouth out of the water. “How close?”
“Pretty close,” Tom said. “Buddy tried to tell me to stay away from her, and when I wouldn’t agree, he tried to fight me, and I punched him in the gut. He went down.”
“Oh, shit,” Fritz said.
“Fritz, the truth is—”
Fritz clamped his eyes shut.
“Come on, Fritz. The truth is, Sarah was never going to marry him in the first place. She’s going to college in the fall, and she’ll write him a letter or something, and that’ll be that. They’re not even engaged, it’s just some kind of understanding.”
“Did you screw her?” Fritz asked.
“None of your business.”
“Oh, shit,” Fritz said. “How many times?”
“I have to see her,” Tom said, and Fritz dove underwater and began swimming back toward the dock. Tom swam after him. Fritz scrambled up on the dock and sat with his head on his knees. His hair glowed in the sun. When Tom pulled himself up on the dock, Fritz stood up and stepped away from him.
“Well?” Tom said.
Fritz glared at him. He looked almost ready to cry. He punched Tom in the shoulder. “Tell me you did,” he said. “Tell me you did, shithead.” He hit Tom in the chest, and knocked him backwards a step.
“I did,” Tom said.
Fritz whirled around, so that he faced Roddy Deepdale’s lodge. “I knew it,” he said.
“If you knew it, why did you hit me?”
“I knew this was going to happen.”
“What?”
Fritz turned around slowly. “I knew you were going to do something crazy like this.” There was a gleam of pure naughtiness in his eyes. He jumped forward and shoved Tom’s biceps with both of his hands. “Where’d you do it? In the woods? In your lodge? Inside or outside?”
Tom stepped backwards. “Never mind.”
Fritz shoved him again. “If you don’t tell me, I won’t do anything for you.” His eyes seemed to be all gleam now. “If you don’t tell me something, I won’t even ever talk to you again.” He backed Tom down the deck, pushing at him like a little blond bear playing with its trainer. “Where was the first time?”
“On your uncle’s airplane,” Tom said.
> Fritz’s arms dropped. “On …” He blinked, three times, rapidly. He choked on a laugh, got the laugh out of his throat, and fell on his knees, bawling with laughter. “On … on … my uncle’s …” He fell on his back, still laughing too hard to speak.
“Are you going to help me?” Tom said.
Fritz’s laughter gradually subsided into a series of sighs. “Sure. You’re my friend, aren’t you?” He looked up, eyes gleaming again, from the deck. “Moby Dick,” he said, and sputtered with laughter again. Then his face turned serious, and he squinted into the sun. “Is there a real old guy in Moby Dick?”
“Sure,” Tom said.
“And does the fish get all eaten up?”
“Eaten up?”
“You fart, you got the wrong book. Even I know Ernest whatzisname didn’t write Moby Dick. Her parents were on that plane, right? They were right there, right?”
“There aren’t any hard parts in The Old Man and the Sea,” Tom said.
“Don’t change the subject,” Fritz said, and began giggling. “Oh, God. Oh, God. How can this be happening to me?”
“It isn’t happening to you,” Tom said. “It’s happening to me.”
“Well, what does Sarah Spence have to do with Lamont von Heilitz?”
“Nothing.”
Fritz sat up and jiggled a finger in his ear. He cocked his head and looked at Tom. “But I heard my uncle and Jerry talking about him—right after I changed. They were on my uncle’s porch. I told you.”
“When was this?”
“When you said this old guy who used to be famous lived across the street from you, and I said, everybody knows that, that’s when. Because I heard my Uncle Ralph on the porch with Jerry, and my uncle said, da da da da da dum, Lamont von Heilitz, or whatever his name is, and Jerry said, he lives across the street from the Pasmores.”
“I wonder what that was about?”
“I’ll ask him,” Fritz said.
“No, don’t ask him about it. Did your uncle say anything after that?”
“He said, have a nice time, Fritzie. Which is what I thought I was going to do.” He picked himself up. “I suppose you want me to go get her and bring her here, and then go walk around the lake or something.”
“Maybe you could call her up this afternoon, or talk to her at lunch,” Tom said. “Say you’d like to go for a walk with her or something while Buddy’s out shooting with Jerry, and go around the lake so her parents won’t see you bringing her here. I just want to talk to her—I have to talk to her.”
After a second Fritz boffed his chest again, and said, “Let’s swim some more, huh? I’ll take care of things. If you’re in love with Sarah Spence, Buddy can always get married to Posy Tuttle. Buddy doesn’t care who he gets married to.”
They swam until Fritz’s mother came outside the compound to the middle Redwing dock and began calling, “Fritzie! Fritzie!”
As soon as Fritz had run back to the compound, his wet bare feet leaving footprints behind him on the track, Tom dried himself off, changed into chinos and a polo shirt, and went to the club. It was just past eleven forty-five. Lunch did not normally begin until twelve-thirty, but he was hungry—he’d eaten nothing besides half of the pie for dinner the night before, and had skipped breakfast that morning. Besides, he was too tense to wait: he suspected that the real reason he wanted to eat early was that he could be out of the club dining room before the Redwings showed up, pleased with themselves for having negotiated their way through the obstacles to their son’s engagement to be engaged. There would be one delicate hint to Fritz’s parents about trouble with the Pasmore boy, and Fritz would be unable to keep himself from sneaking shining glances across the room.
“Book scars,” Tom said to himself, and smiled.
The long table had been extended, and set for three more places. Fritz’s parents would be formally introduced, in the lowest of low-key styles, with the formality that conceals itself, to the Redwing Holding Company’s newest acquisition.
Oh, we’ve been expecting this for months.
Oh, I think the formal announcement can come whenever they’re ready, but after a year I imagine our young lady here will transfer out to Arizona. She’ll want to keep an eye on her boyfriend, won’t she?
Laughter, knowing and tolerant.
It’s so nice they didn’t make us wait until the end of the summer—you know, I was actually afraid they’d do that!
Oh, Sarah is going to love her new life.
Tom knew the real reason he was eating early.
He sat in the empty dining room with an unread, unopened book next to his ketchup-smeared plate. Two younger waiters lounged against the bar, and sunlight blazed on the terrace and fell over the first three rows of the thick red floor tiles. Tom looked down at his hands folding a heavy pink napkin, and saw the hands of Lamont von Heilitz encased in light blue gloves. He dropped the napkin on the table and left the dining room.
Back at his grandfather’s lodge, he leaned against the door. Then he began picking the papers up from the sitting room couch.
The telephone rang.
Tom hoped that Sarah had stayed behind in her lodge for a minute after her parents went to the club. “Oh, hello,” he said. He put the stack of papers on the desk.
“Tom?” He did not recognize the voice, which was that of a woman in her twenties or thirties.
“It’s Barbara Deane,” the voice said. “I’ve been thinking—if Tim Trueheart wants me to stay at the lodge, I’d better stay there. Otherwise, I’m going to be afraid of running into him every time I go to the Red Owl.”
“Okay,” Tom said.
“I’ll be along late tonight or tomorrow—don’t wait up for me or anything, I’ll just let myself in and go to my room.” She paused. “There was something I didn’t tell you the other night. Maybe you should know about it.”
She wants to tell me she was his mistress after all, Tom thought, and said that he would see her the next day. He looked at Sarah’s letters, a white stack of pages next to the much larger heap of yellow pages. He picked them up and folded them, then took all of his papers upstairs and slid them beneath his pillow.
A second later, he took them out and looked around the room. The drawer in the chessboard table seemed too obvious. At last he opened his closet and slid the papers on a shelf above his clothes.
Tom wandered out of the bedroom. He looked out the window at the end of the hallway into a tangle of rough green leaves and horizontal branches. Beyond them were more leaves and branches, and beyond these yet more, and then still more, until the clear empty air over the track. He turned around and walked to the staircase and looked down. If Fritz did manage to bring Sarah to him—if he could get her alone, if her parents allowed her out of their sight, and if she agreed to go—they would not arrive for hours. He walked down the hall to Barbara Deane’s door, hesitated, and pushed it open.
She had something hidden on a shelf too, something she had examined on his first day at the lake and once after that. He had heard it sliding out of its hiding place, and the heavy thunk as she put it on her desk. If he found letters from Glendenning Upshaw, he told himself, he would put them back unread.
Tom went quickly into her bedroom, walked around the bed, and opened the closet door. A neat row of dresses, skirts, and blouses, mainly in dark colors, hung from a wooden pole. Above the clothes was a white wooden shelf, and down at the far end of the shelf, barely visible in the darkness of the closet, a wooden box with inlaid flags of a lighter shade. Tom stepped into the closet and reached for the box. Barbara Deane would have had to wedge herself behind the sliding door and strain up on tiptoe to touch it. Tom pulled it toward him, got it off the shelf, and backed out of the closet.
It was heavy, highly ornamented with inlay, but the heaviness was of the wood itself; nothing rattled when he shook the box. He set it down on the desk, took a breath, and opened the hinged top.
She was going to tell me anyhow, he thought.
He
looked in and saw a small pile of newspaper clippings instead of the old letters he had expected. He reached in for the one on top and read the headline before he got it out of the box. NURSE SUSPECTED IN OFFICER’S DEATH. The article had been clipped from the front page of the Eyewitness. He took out the second: SHOULD THIS WOMAN BE CHARGED? Beneath the headline was a picture of twenty-year-old Barbara Deane, barely recognizable, in a white uniform and a starched cap. ONLY PERSON TO HAVE ACCESS WAS NURSE DEANE, said the next headline. Tom blushed—he felt as if he had walked into her room and found her naked. There were other articles below these, and all of them accused Barbara Deane of murder. He barely looked at them—maybe Lamont von Heilitz would have read them, but Tom felt that he had already gone far enough.
He leaned over to replace the articles and saw two sheets of yellowing notepaper folded at the bottom of the box, nearly the same shade as the wood. He touched them, afraid that they might crumble, and felt stiff creamy paper. He picked them up, put down the little heap of clippings, and unfolded the sheets of notepaper on top of them.
I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, AND YOU HAVE TO BE STOPPED, read the first. The ink had turned the brown of dried blood, but the large printed capitals shouted louder than the headlines on the old copies of the Eyewitness. He set it down and opened the second. His throat was dry, and his heart pounded. THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR SIN.
Tom dropped the yellowing piece of paper into the box as if it had stung him. He swallowed. He reached back in and picked it up again. The T’s had been crossed with a faintly curved line, and the S’s slanted. A woman had written the notes, and he knew who she was.
He felt absolutely afraid for a second, as if Barbara Deane were about to rush through the door, screaming at him. I know what you are. He slid the two notes together with shaking hands and placed them carefully on the bottom of the box. Then he laid the clippings on top of them and closed the box. He picked up the box and realized that he did not know if it had faced forward or backward. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He carried the box to the closet and stepped inside. Tom put it on the shelf and slid it far down. He thought he remembered that it had been all the way against the closet wall: which way had it faced? He wiped his forehead on his arm and turned the box around, then around again. The house creaked, and his heart tried to jump out of his chest. He slid the box snugly against the wall, facing forward, stepped away, and closed the closet door. Then he wondered if it really had been closed all the way. He opened it and closed it again, then opened it an inch. He groaned, and shut it.
