by Peter Straub
He turned around and saw his dusty footprints on the wooden floor, stamped as clearly as Fritz’s on the track.
Tom yanked his handkerchief from his pocket and walked backward, erasing his tracks all the way to the door. Drops of sweat fell on the dull wood. They left shiny traces when he wiped them. He reached the threshold and backed out of the room and closed the door.
He went down the hall to his bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He wanted to get out of the lodge—to run away. He looked up at his dripping face in the mirror and said, “Jeanine Thielman wrote those notes.” He dried his face and remembered tense Barbara Deane opening the door to the lodge on his first day in Eagle Lake; and remembered the relaxed, friendly Barbara Deane who had lied and lied when she served him dinner.
I know what it is to be unjustly accused.
I wasn’t his type, for one thing.
He walked slowly down the stairs, still afraid that she was going to walk in the front door. She would know in an instant what he had done, if she saw his face.
Tom collapsed on the couch. Barbara had not been unjustly accused, she had killed the policeman in the hospital by giving him the wrong medication; probably Maxwell Redwing had ordered her to kill him. Shady Mount Hospital was where the people who ran Mill Walk put its embarrassments when they wanted them to die. It was the most respectable hospital on the island, the safest place on Mill Walk for a discreet little murder: the Redwings went there themselves, didn’t they?
Tom’s grandfather believed in her innocence and saved her skin, got her out of Mill Walk, and parked her in the village of Eagle Lake. When Jeanine Thielman accused and threatened her, Barbara Deane had killed her.
Which meant that she had killed Anton Goetz too. Tom did not know how this had happened, but a strong young woman like Barbara Deane could have knocked down a cripple … maybe, Tom thought, Goetz had been blackmailing Barbara Deane. Maybe he had even seen her shoot Jeanine Thielman, and helped her hide the body in the lake. His mother had seen him moving through the woods, sneaking back to his lodge for the old curtains. After von Heilitz accused him of the murder, he had gone back to confront her, and she had killed him too. And ever since, she had lived quietly in the village of Eagle Lake. She had even gone on delivering babies.
He told himself to calm down when it occurred to him that Barbara Deane might have shot at him through the window, imagining that he had seen the notes at the bottom of the box.
But he knew one more thing Lamont von Heilitz did not, and it was the crucial fact in Jeanine Thielman’s murder: she had died because she had written those notes.
He was still trying to figure out what to do about the notes three hours later when someone began battering on his door. He jumped up from the couch and opened the door. Fritz Redwing nearly fell into the room. Sarah Spence gave him another push to move him out of the doorway. “Get inside, get out of the way,” she said. “We walked all the way around the lake to avoid being seen, let’s not blow it at the last minute.” She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, smiling at Tom. “I make all these clever plans for meetings in out of the way places at night, and when Tom Pasmore, who writes a letter a day to Lamont von Heilitz but never—checks—his—mailbox—finally works things out, he has me come to his house in broad daylight.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said.
“Don’t you put those precious letters in the mailbox?”
“I just hand them to the mailman,” Tom said. “How do you know I write to him?”
“He’s your hero, isn’t he? The one who started you off playing detective? I saw how you looked when Hattie Bascombe talked about him.”
“Von Heilitz, von Heilitz,” Fritz said. “Why is everybody talking about him all of a sudden?”
Neither Tom nor Sarah bothered to look at him.
“I read your letters a million times,” Tom said.
“What letters?” Sarah asked. “I never wrote you any letters. I don’t have to write letters to boys. I can’t even imagine doing such a stupid thing.”
“Oh, great,” Fritz said.
“Didn’t I used to know you once? A long time ago? So much has happened in the meantime, it’s kind of vague.”
“ ‘In the meantime’—is that the period when you wrote me every day, and arranged meetings in out of the way places?”
“No, it’s the period in which I became betrothed,” she said. “Or was it betrothed to be betrothed? Meeting people in out of the way places is far, far behind me.”
“Should I just get out of here?” Fritz asked.
“Betrothed to be betrothed,” Tom said. “That’s kind of an interesting condition.”
“I thought of it as a delaying action. Or do I mean withholding action?” She pushed herself away from the door. “Aren’t you going to hug me, or something?”
“Me?” Tom put his hand on his chest. “I’m just someone you sort of used to know.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said. “I’m very particular about who I used to know.”
“Your standards have slipped lately,” Tom said, but before he could say any more, Sarah uttered a low growl and crossed the ground between them and wrapped her arms around him.
“You idiot,” she said. “You moron. You think I’d write anything to you?”
“I should have known better,” he said, hugging her for all he was worth. He lowered his head to her vibrant hair.
“Look,” Fritz said, “is my part done now?”
Sarah raised her face to Tom’s, asking to be kissed. Tom met her lips with his, and the shock of their softness echoed through his whole body.
“I’ll see you guys later,” Fritz said, and stood up.
“No,” Tom and Sarah said, almost simultaneously, and broke apart. “We’re supposed to be having a nice long walk together,” Sarah said. She twined her fingers through Tom’s.
“We could all go someplace,” Tom said.
“An excursion,” Sarah said. “That’s it. You’ve probably never gone on an excursion with Tom Pasmore. All sorts of brilliant things happen. Is there any way we could go out for a drive?”
“Sure,” Fritz said. “I could get the keys to one of the cars.”
“Better yet, you and I will get the keys, so everybody will see we’re still enjoying ourselves, and Tom will walk around the lake and go up the hill to the mailboxes, and we’ll meet him there.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be alone and stuff?”
“Oh, Tom has something else on his mind,” Sarah said.
Tom’s insides froze.
“You worked out a way to get me here, but …” Her forehead wrinkled. “You look terrible. You look like someone else took a shot at you about half an hour ago. What have you been doing for two weeks?”
“I don’t know if I can talk about it now,” he said. “I found something out, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Well, meet us up by the mailboxes in half an hour. That’ll give you time to think about it.”
She took Fritz by the hand and led him toward the door. “Someone else shot at you?” Fritz asked, trudging behind her. Tom shrugged. “He has a very exciting life,” Sarah said, and pulled Fritz toward the door. They went outside, and Sarah leaned back toward the screen, shielding her eyes to see in. “Should I be worried about you?”
“I’ll see you in half an hour,” Tom said.
“If you don’t, I’m calling Nancy Vetiver and asking for a consultation.”
He waved, and she blew him a kiss before hurrying Fritz off the porch and down on the track. Tom heard them talking, Fritz asking baffled questions and Sarah returning elliptical responses like tennis smashes, as they moved away toward the compound. When they were out of earshot, he went upstairs to his bedroom and got his notes down from the closet shelf.
Tom sat at the chessboard table and read everything all over again. Now he saw Barbara Deane hiding behind the trees near the Thielman lodge, Barbara Deane throwing pebbl
es at a window and snatching up the gun careless Arthur Thielman had left lying on a table.… He had eaten at her table! Ridden in her car! Said she could sleep in the lodge!
When he had ten minutes to get up the hill to the mailboxes, Tom folded the wad of notes in half, and tried to jam them into a back pocket of his jeans. They would not fit. Some contradiction still clamored to be seen, and he pushed the notes back up on the closet shelf with the feeling that it would leap out at him if he scanned the papers one more time.
Tom walked the long way around the lake, chewing on his preoccupations, and reached the top of the hill panting but with no memory of having walked up the long winding track.
He sat on the bench and waited for Sarah and Fritz, who drove up in the Lincoln a few minutes later. Fritz was driving, and Sarah sat beside him in the front seat. “Come on in here,” she said. “This is our reunion, and you’re not allowed to look so gloomy.”
He climbed in beside Sarah, who put an arm around him. “Now we are not going to do anything to embarrass or offend Fritz, but you need to be cheered up. So we are going to drive around and forget about this horrendous mess we’re in. We will not once mention that I am supposed to marry Buddy Redwing.”
“Okay,” Tom said.
“Though someone ought to acknowledge that it was pretty good of me to come up with the idea of being engaged to be engaged.”
“Why did you even do that?” Tom asked.
“Yeah, why?” said Fritz.
“Because it calmed everybody down right away. And Buddy stopped scheming about how he was going to manage to beat you to a pulp. Once you have the security of being engaged to be engaged, you forget all about your rivals and go back to your old pursuits. All I have to do is sit through lots of dinners, and listen to Buddy talk about how cool and far out everything is going to be when I transfer to Arizona. Our engagement is going to become official next summer, except that it isn’t. When I come home at Christmas, I’ll tell my mother I can’t go through with it. Everybody will blame it on the influence of Mount Holyoke, and it’ll be a lot easier to handle than it would be up here.”
Nobody said anything, and Sarah said, “I think.”
“Why do I feel so shitty?” Fritz said. “I should have stayed in summer school.”
“Well, I’m happy you didn’t,” Sarah said.
“I know why, too,” Fritz complained.
“Is it a horrendous mess?” Sarah asked. “Or is it maybe just a little one that we’re blowing up out of proportion?”
“Does she always talk like this?” Fritz asked, leaning forward to look at Tom.
“I don’t think so,” Tom said.
“I really think it’s just a little mess that looks like a big one,” Sarah said.
“I don’t think anyone ever decided not to get married to one of my relatives before,” Fritz said. “Usually, it’s the other way around.”
“That’s dandy, that’s just dandy,” Sarah said. She pulled her arm away from Tom, and was motionless and even silent for a moment. It took him a second to realize that she was crying.
Fritz leaned forward and looked at Tom again. His face had turned bright red. “Don’t cry, Sarah,” he said. “I know Buddy. I even like Buddy. But like I told Tom, I don’t think he’s gonna go crazy or anything.”
“I like him too,” Sarah said. “And believe me, I know what you’re talking about.”
She wiped her eyes, and Tom said, “You do?”
“How do you suppose I got into this in the first place? Of course I like him, at least when he isn’t drunk or taking those stupid pills. I just don’t like him as much as I like you.” She put her arm around him again, and said, “This isn’t much of an excursion.”
“We might as well take a look at Eagle Lake, I mean the town,” Fritz said, turning onto Main Street. “I’ve been coming up here all my life, and I never saw it before.”
“Of course not,” Sarah said. “ ‘Eagle Lake is a place apart from the family business. I had a thousand opportunities for investment up here, and I turned them all down.’ ”
“ ‘I never wanted to sully this place with money,’ ” Fritz said, speaking in an eerie imitation of his uncle’s voice.
“ ‘We could turn this part of Wisconsin right around,’ ” Sarah said. “ ‘But we don’t put a penny into Eagle Lake.’ ” She was smiling now. “The speech. Of course you’ve never seen the village. You might put a penny into it if you did, and Ralph Redwing would come awake like a vampire in his coffin, hearing someone creep up on him with a bottle of holy water and a wooden stake.”
Fritz giggled at this blasphemy.
“Wait a second,” Tom said. “I got it! I just got it!”
“Well, here we go,” Sarah said. “Something’s been bothering me too, but you didn’t react that way about it.”
“I know where they put the stuff. God, I really know where it is.”
“What stuff?”
“This sounds like an excursion, all right.”
“Oh, my God, I even knew this was going to happen—that’s why I wanted to bring all those notes.” He saw the expression of horror on Sarah’s face, and said, “Different notes. All I have to do is remember the name of the street!”
“What’s he talking about? All that crap he wrote?”
Tom began looking out of his window. The car was creeping up Main Street in heavy traffic, and sunburned people in T-shirts and visored caps filled the sidewalks. They passed Maple Street, which was wrong. Ahead he saw Tamarack Street, also wrong. “It started with an S. Think of street names that could start with the letter S.”
“Suspicious Street.”
“Shithole Street.”
“That sounded just like Buddy.”
“Street names!”
“Satyriasis Street. Scintillation Street. Sevens! Where I live!”
“I give up,” Fritz said.
“Season Street.”
“Ah,” Tom said, and kissed her.
“I got it?”
“Yes,” he said, and kissed her again. “You’re brilliant.”
“It was really Season Street?”
“It was Summers Street. Now all we have to do is find it.”
Fritz protested that he could not find a street in a town he had never seen before, and Tom said that it was a small town, all they had to do was drive around for a while and they would run right into it.
“What’s this about, anyhow?”
“I’ll tell you after we find the place. If I’m right, that is.”
“Don’t you get the feeling that he’s right?” Sarah said.
“No. I get the feeling I’m going to be sorry I’m doing this.”
“You’ll be a hero, Fritz,” Tom said. “Wait. Slow down.”
Tom had seen the newspaper editor walking up the sidewalk on his side of the street, and he put his head through the window. “Mr. Hamilton! Mr. Hamilton!”
Chet Hamilton looked over his shoulder, then looked across the street. Tom called his name again and waved, and the editor saw him and waved back. “How’s the research going? You having a good summer?”
“Fine,” Tom yelled. “Can you tell us how to find Summers Street?”
“Summers Street? Let’s see. It’s a little ways out of town. Just keep on going straight past town hall, take the first right, the second left, go over the railroad tracks, pass the Authentic Indian Settlement, and you’ll run right into it. It’s about four, five miles.” He looked at Tom curiously, as did a number of other people on the sidewalk. “There’s not much out there.”
Tom thanked him and pulled himself back into the car. “You got that?” he asked Fritz.
“First right past the town hall, second left, railroad tracks, Indians,” Sarah said. “What are we supposed to find, once we get there?”
“A whole lot of stolen property,” Tom said.
“What!” Fritz screamed.
“That’s my boy,” Sarah said.
“What stolen prop
erty?” Fritz demanded to know.
Tom told him about the burglaries that had been taking place around Eagle Lake and other resort towns over the past few years. “If you walk away from people’s houses with that much stuff, you need a place to store it until you get it to whoever you know who buys it from you. I think they must have to go a long way to get rid of it, and they can’t get away all that often, so they need a big place.”
They drove past the town hall and the police station, past the signs at the edge of town, and Sarah said, “Here’s the first right.”
Fritz hauled on the wheel, and turned into a two-lane blacktop road. At first they drove past tarpaper shacks on lawns littered with bald tires and junked cars. FREE PUPPIES, read rain-streaked lettering on a crude sign. The shacks grew more widely spaced, and the land stayed empty. Narrow trees stood at the edge of a muddy field. Far off, a stooped figure moved toward a farmhouse.
“Fritz, your uncle would never buy or rent anything up here—in fact, he enjoys turning down deals, even when they might be good for him, because of the way the local newspaper treated his family.”
“Well, here’s the first left,” Sarah said.
“I see it,” Fritz grumbled, and turned into another two-lane blacktop road. Another sequence of muddy fields, these enclosed by collapsing wooden fences, rolled past them. They passed a large white sign reading 2 MILES TO AUTHENTIC INDIAN SETTLEMENT.
“So what?” Fritz asked.
“Two years ago, the Redwing Holding Company rented a machine shop on Summers Street. I saw it in a column in the Eagle Lake Gazette on my first day here.”
“A machine shop?” Fritz said.
“It was an empty building—they probably rented it for a hundred dollars a month, or something like that.”
