Mystery

An unpleasant thrill went through Tom’s body. “Who was it?”

“He was probably the only person to have heard the shots that night, because his was the next lodge in line. And there was a Redwing family party at the club that night, celebrating Jonathan Redwing’s engagement to Kate Duffield. They had a band in from Chicago—Ben Pollack. Made a lot of noise.”

In a quiet voice, Tom asked, “Was he building a hospital in Miami?”

“One of Mill Walk Construction’s first big contracts. You saw the clipping in my book, did you? He had set up a separate office in Miami even then. I gather it still does a great deal of business.”

“So my grandfather heard the shots. He must have thought …”

“That Arthur had killed Jeanine?” The Shadow crossed one leg over the other and interlaced his fingers over his nonexistent stomach. “I stopped off to see him in Miami after I made sure that Minor Truehart was out of jail. I wanted him to know what had happened up in Eagle Lake after he left. In fact, I brought him copies of all the Eagle Lake papers that covered the murder.”

Some message was being passed to him, but Tom could not read it in either von Heilitz’s words or his manner—it could not be that Glendenning Upshaw had witnessed a murder and calmly left the scene.

“The balcony of your grandfather’s lodge overlooked the lake. He used to spend his evenings out there, thinking about how he could get a better discount on cement than Arthur Thielman, or whatever it was he thought about. From his balcony, Glen could see the Thielmans’ dock as well as his own.”

“He ran away the next morning?”

Von Heilitz snorted. “Glen Upshaw never ran away from anything in his life. I think he just never considered altering arrangements he had already made. In any case, that was the last summer he spent at Eagle Lake—the last time any member of your family was at the lake.”

“No, no,” Tom said. “It was grief. He stopped going to the lodge because of grief. My grandmother drowned that summer. He couldn’t stand to see the place again.”

“Your grandmother lost her life in 1924, the year before all this. It wasn’t grief that made your grandfather leave Eagle Lake. It was business—the hospital was a lot more important to him than a marital dispute between a competitor and his wife.”

“He would have let the guide be executed?”

“Well, all he told me was that he saw a long-barreled Colt lying on the table. The shots could have been anything—on a lake, it can be next to impossible to know where sounds are coming from. You do hear shots up there; people have guns. It’s possible that he didn’t know that Jeanine was dead.”

“It’s possible he did, you mean.”

“How often do you see your grandfather?”

“Maybe once or twice a year.”

“You’re his only grandchild. He lives about fifteen miles from your house. Has he ever thrown a ball to you? Taken you riding or sailing? To a movie?”

Any such suggestion would have been ridiculous, and Tom’s response must have shown in his face.

“No,” said the old man. “I didn’t think so. Glen is an aloof man—preposterously aloof. There’s something missing in him, you know.”

“Do you know how my grandmother happened to drown? Did she go out by herself at night? Was she drunk?”

The old man shrugged, and again looked as if he were thinking a thousand thoughts at once. “She went out at night,” he finally said. “Everybody at Eagle Lake drank a lot in those days.” He looked down at the hem of his suit jacket, lifted it, and crossed his left hand over his waist to flick away a blemish invisible to Tom. Then he looked up. “I’m worn out. You’d better be getting home.”

The two of them stood up together. It seemed to Tom that Mr. von Heilitz communicated in two separate ways, and the way in which he said the important things was silently. If you didn’t get it, you missed it.

Von Heilitz walked him through the files and past the lamps like stars and moons in the night sky. He opened his front door. “You’re better than I was at your age.”

Tom felt the old man’s nearly weightless arm on his shoulders.

Across the street, one light burned in a downstairs window of his house. Down the block in the Langenheim house, every light blazed. Long cars and horse-drawn carriages stood at the curb. Uniformed drivers leaned and smoked against their cars, set apart from the carriage drivers who would not look at or speak to them.

“Ah, the night is so beautiful,” the old man said. He stepped outside.

Tom said goodbye, and the Shadow waved a dark blue glove, nearly invisible in the crystalline moonlight.

For the next few weeks, the Friedrich Hasselgard scandal and a series of revelations about the Treasury filled the nightly broadcasts and the headlines of the Eyewitness. The Finance Minister had misappropriated funds, misdirected funds, buried funds, misplaced funds in transfers from one account to another and from ledger to ledger. Through a combination of criminality and incompetence he had lost or stolen an amount of money that multiplied with each new investigation until it appeared to add up to the almost unthinkable sum of ten million dollars. “Criminal associates,” not terrorists, were now supposed to have shot the Minister’s sister. By the time Dennis Handley told Katinka Redwing at a dinner party that he had not been following the stories about the scandal and was not at all interested in that kind of thing, few other adults on the island of Mill Walk would have been able to utter such a statement.

One day, Dennis Handley asked Tom to see him after the end of school.

As soon as Tom walked into his room, Dennis said, “I suppose I know the answer to this question, but I have to ask it anyway.” He looked down at his desk, then out of the classroom window, which gave him a fine view of narrow, treelined School Road and the headmaster’s house, opposite the school. Tom waited for the question.

“That car you wanted to find—the Corvette in Weasel Hollow. Did that car belong to the person I think it belonged to?”

Tom sighed. “It belonged to the person it obviously belonged to.”

Dennis groaned and pressed his palms against his forehead.

“Why don’t you want me to say his name? Do you think you might get in trouble?”

“A couple of weeks ago,” Dennis said, “I wanted to have a friendly talk with you—your mother asked me to bring something up with you, a minor thing, but it was my idea to invite you to my apartment in order to see that manuscript, which I thought you might enjoy. Instead, you pretended to be sick and made me drive you all the way back across the island to a crime scene. The next day, the gentleman who owned that car disappears. Another man is gunned down. Blood is shed. Two lives are lost.”

Dennis raised his hands in theatrical horror.

“Did you write that letter the policeman mentioned at his press conference?”

Tom frowned, but did not speak.

“I feel sick,” Dennis said. “This whole situation is unhealthy, and my stomach knows it. Can’t you see that you had no business meddling in that kind of thing?”

“A man got away with murder,” Tom said. “Sooner or later they would have executed some innocent man and declared the whole thing solved.”

“And what happened instead? Do you call that a tea party?” Dennis shook his head and gazed out the window again, rather than look at Tom. “I am sick. You were my hope—you have gift enough for two.”

“For you and me both, you mean.”

“I want you to concentrate on the things that matter,” Dennis said in a slow, furious voice. “Don’t throw yourself away on garbage. You have a treasure within you. Don’t you see?” Dennis’s broad, fleshy face, suited to jokes and confidences and ruminations about novelists, strained to express all he felt. “There is the real world and the false world. The real world is internal. If you’re lucky, and you could be, you sustain it by the right work, by your responses to works of art, by loyalty to your friends, by a refusal to be caught up in public or private falsehoods. Think of E. M. Forster—two cheers for democracy.”