Mystery

asked Tom if he would be free after school to look over his books and see if he’d like to borrow anything. He offered to drive him to his apartment and bring him back home afterward. Tom happily agreed.

They met outside Dennis’s classroom after the end of school and in a crowd of rushing boys walked down the wide wooden stairs past a window with a stained glass replica of the school’s circular seal. Because he was a popular teacher, many of the boys stopped to speak to Dennis or to wish him a good weekend, but few even said as much as hello to Tom. They scarcely looked at him. Except for the healthy glow of his skin, Tom was not a particularly handsome boy, but he was six-four. His hair was the same rough silky-looking blond as his mother’s, and his shoulders stuck out impressively, a real rack of muscle and bone under his rumpled tweed jacket. (At this stage of his life, Tom Pasmore never gave the impression of caring about, or even much noticing, what clothes he had happened to put on that morning.) At first glance, he looked like an unusually youthful college professor. The other boys acted as though he were invisible, a neutral space. They stood suspended on the stairs for a moment as the departing boys swirled about them, and as Dennis Handley talked to Will Thielman about the weekend’s homework, he glanced at Tom, slouched in the murky green-and-red light streaming through the colored glass. The teacher saw how thoroughly Tom allowed himself to be effaced, as if he had learned how to melt away into the crowd—all the students poured downstairs through the dim light and the shadows, but Tom Pasmore alone seemed on the verge of disappearance. This notion gave Dennis Handley, above all a creature of sociability, of good humor and gossip, an unpleasant twinge.

Soon they were outside in the faculty parking lot, where the English teacher’s black Corvette convertible looked superbly out of place among the battered Ford station wagons, ancient bicycles, and boatlike sedans that were the conventional faculty vehicles. Tom opened the passenger door, folded himself in half to get in, and sat with his knees floating up near the vicinity of his nose. He was smiling at his discomfort, and the smile dispelled the odd atmosphere of secrecy and shadows, which Handley had surely only imagined about the boy. He was the tallest person who had ever been in the Corvette, and Dennis told him this as they left the lot.

It was like sitting next to a large, amiable sheep dog, Dennis thought, as he picked up speed on School Road and the wind ruffled the boy’s hair and fluttered his tie. “Sorry the space is so tight,” he said. “But you can push the seat back.”

“I already did push the seat back,” Tom said, grinning through the uprights of his thighs. He looked like a circus contortionist.

“Well, it won’t be long,” Dennis said, piloting the sleek little car south on School Road to Calle Berghofstrasse, then west past rows of shops selling expensive soaps and perfumes to the four lanes of Calle Drosselmeyer, where they drove south again for a long time, past the new Dos de Mayo shopping center and the statue of David Redwing, Mill Walk’s first Prime Minister, past rows of blacksmiths and the impromptu booths of sidewalk fortune-tellers, past auto repair shops and shops dealing in pythons and rattlesnakes. They moved along in the usual bustle of cars and bikes and horse carts. Past the tin can factory and the sugarcane refinery, and further south through the little area of hovels, shops, and native houses called Weasel Hollow, where the woman who slept on “a king’s ransom” (the Eyewitness) had been murdered by her son. Dennis swerved expertly onto Market Street, weaved through and around a series of vans delivering produce to Ostend’s Market, and zipped through the last seconds of a yellow light onto Calle Burleigh, where at last he turned west for good.

Tom spoke for the first time since they had left the school. “Where do you live?”

“Out near the park.”

Tom nodded, thinking that he meant Shore Park, and that he must be planning on doing some shopping before he went home. Then he said, “I bet my mother asked you to talk to me.”

Dennis snapped his head sideways.

“Why do you think she’d want me to talk to you?”

“You know why.”

Dennis found himself in a predicament. Either he confessed that Gloria Pasmore had described Tom’s scrapbook to him, thereby admitting to the boy that his mother had looked through it, or he denied any knowledge of Gloria’s concern. If he denied everything, he could hardly bring up the matter of the scrapbook. He also realized that denial would chiefly serve to make him look stupid, which went against his instincts. It would also set him subtly against Tom and “on the side of” his parents, also counter to all his instincts.

Tom’s next statement increased his discomfort. “I’m sorry you’re worried about my scrapbook. You’re concerned, and you really shouldn’t be.”

“Well, I—” Handley stopped, not knowing how to proceed. He realized that he felt guilty, and that Tom was perceptive enough to see that too.

“Tell me about your books,” Tom said. “I like the whole idea of rare books and first editions, and things like that.”

So with evident relief, Dennis began describing his greatest bookfinding coup, the discovery of a typed manuscript of The Spoils of Poynton in an antiques shop in Bloomsbury. “As soon as I walked into that shop I had a feeling, a real feeling, stronger than anything I’d ever known,” he said, and Tom’s attention was once again completely focused on him. “I’m no mystic, and I do not believe in psychic phenomena, not even a little bit, but when I walked into that shop it was like something took possession of me. I was thinking about Henry James anyhow, because of the scene in the little antiques shop in The Golden Bowl, where Charlotte and the Prince buy Maggie’s wedding present—do you know the book?”

Tom nodded, extraordinary boy, and listened intently to the catalogue of goods in the antiques shop, the slightly enhanced depiction of the shop’s proprietor, the grip of the mysterious “feeling” that increased as Handley wandered through the shabby goods, the excitement with which he had come across a case of worn books at the very back of the shop, and at last the discovery of a box of typed papers wedged between an atlas and a dictionary on the bottom shelf. Dennis had opened the box, almost knowing what he would find within it. At last he had dared to look. “They began in the middle of a scene. I recognized that it was The Spoils of Poynton after a few sentences—that’s how keyed up I was. Now. That book was the first one James ever dictated—and he didn’t dictate the whole thing. He had begun to have wrist trouble, and he hired a typist named William McAlpine after he began work on it. I knew I’d found McAlpine’s dictation copy of the book, which he had later retyped, including James’s handwritten chapters, to prepare a correct copy to send to James’s publisher. I could never prove it, probably, but I didn’t have to prove it. I knew what I had. I took it up to the little man, trembling like a leaf, and he sold it to me for five pounds, clearly thinking that I was a lunatic who’d buy anything at all. He thought I was buying it for the box, actually.”

Dennis paused, in part because his listeners usually laughed at this point and in part because he had not described this moment for several years and his retelling had brought back to him its sensations of triumph and nearly uncontainable jubilation.

Tom’s response brought him thumping to earth.

“Have you been reading about the murder of Marita Hasselgard, the sister of the Finance Minister?”

They were back to the scrapbook—Tom had whipsawed him. “Of course I have. I haven’t had my head in a bag during the past month.” He looked across at the passenger seat with real irritation. Tom had propped his legs on the dashboard, and was rolling a ballpoint pen in his mouth as if it were a cigar. “I thought you were interested in what I was saying.”

“I’m very interested in what you were saying. What do you think happened to her?”

Dennis sighed. “What do I think happened to Marita Hasselgard? She was killed by mistake. An assassin mistook her for her brother because she was in his car. It was late at night. When he discovered his mistake, he pushed her body into the trunk and left the island in a hurry.”

“So you think that the newspaper is right?”

The theory that Dennis Handley had just expressed, held by most citizens of Mill Walk, had first been outlined in the editorial columns of the Eyewitness.

“Basically, yes. I suppose I do. I hadn’t quite remembered that the paper put it like that, but if they did, then I think they are right, yes. Would you mind telling me how this relates to The Spoils of Poynton?”

“Where do you think the assassin came from?”

“I think he was hired by some political enemy of Hasselgard—by someone who opposed his policies.”