Mystery

Gloria coughed into her fist, and when he looked at her she pointed fiercely at an overstuffed chair at right angles to the brocaded couch. She wanted him to sit so that he could stand up when her father walked into the room. He sat down on the overstuffed chair and looked at the hands folded in his lap. They were reassuringly solid.

His recurring dream had begun the night after the dancing class, and he supposed that the dream must be related to what had happened to him on the Academy steps. He could not see any connection, but … In the dream smoke and the smell of gunpowder filled the air. Off to his right, random small fires burned into the choking air, to his left was an ice-blue lake. The lake steamed or smoked, he could not tell which. It was a world of pure loss—loss and death. Some terrible thing had happened, and Tom wandered through its reverberating aftermath. The landscape looked like hell, but was not—the real hell was inside him. He experienced emptiness and despair so great that he realized it was himself he was looking at—this dead, ruined place was Tom Pasmore. He stumbled a few paces before noticing a corpse of a woman with tangled blond hair lying on the shore. Her blue dress had been shredded against the rocks, and lay about her in a shapeless puddle. In the dream Tom sank down and pulled the cold heavy body into his arms. The thought came to him that he knew who the dead woman was, but under another name, and this thought rocketed through his body and jolted him awake, groaning.

The world was half night, Hattie Bascombe said.

“What’s wrong with you?” his mother whispered.

Tom shook his head.

“He’s coming.” They both straightened up and smiled as the door opened.

Kingsley entered and held the door. A moment later Tom’s grandfather stumped into the room in his black suit. He brought with him, as always, the aura of secret decisions and secret powers, of Cuban cigars and midnight meetings. Tom and his mother stood up. “Gloria,” he said, and, “Tom.” He did not smile back at them. Dr. Milton came in just behind him, talking from the moment he came through the door as if to fill up the silence.

“What a treat, two of my favorite people.” Dr. Milton beamed at Gloria as he advanced toward her, but Gloria kept her eyes on her father, who drifted ponderously around past the bookcases. Then the doctor was directly in front of her.

“Doctor.” She leaned forward for a kiss.

“My dear.” He looked at her professionally for a moment, then turned to shake Tom’s hand. “Young man. I remember delivering you. Doesn’t seem it could have been seventeen years ago.”

Tom had heard variations of this speech many times and said nothing as he shook the doctor’s plump hand.

“Hello, Daddy,” Gloria said, and kissed her father, who had now come all the way around the room to bend down to kiss her.

Dr. Milton patted Tom’s head and moved sideways. Glendenning Upshaw broke away from Gloria to stand before him. Tom leaned forward to kiss his grandfather’s deeply lined, leathery cheek. It felt oddly cold to his lips, and his grandfather instantly broke away. “Boy,” the old man said, and bothered to look directly at him. As always when this happened, Tom felt that his grandfather was looking straight into him and did not care for what he saw. This time, however, he noticed nearly with disbelief that he was looking down at the old man’s broad, powerful face—he was an inch or two taller than his grandfather.

Dr. Milton noticed this too. “Glen, the boy’s taller than you! An unaccustomed experience for you to look up to anyone, isn’t it?”

“That’s enough of that,” said Tom’s grandfather. “We all shrink with age, you included.”

“Of course, no doubt about it,” the doctor said.

“How does Gloria look to you?”

“Well, let’s see.” Smiling, the doctor moved once again up to Gloria.

“I didn’t come here for a medical examination—I came for lunch!”

“Yes, yes,” said her father. “Take a look at the girl, Boney.”

Dr. Milton winked at Gloria. “All she needs is a little more rest than she’s been getting.”

“If she needs rest, give her something.” Upshaw removed a fat cigar from a humidor on the drum table. He snapped off the end, rolled it in his fingers, and fired it up with a match.

Tom watched his grandfather going through the cigar ritual. His white hair was vigorous enough to be disorderly, like Tom’s. He still looked strong enough to hoist the grand piano up on his back. He was as wide as two men, and part of the aura that had always surrounded him was crude physical power. It would be too much, Tom supposed, to expect someone like that to act like a normal grandfather.

Dr. Milton had written out a prescription, and snapped it off his pad. “That’s the reason your father wanted me to wait until you came.” He handed the sheet to Gloria. “Wanted a free consultation out of me.”

The doctor looked at his watch. “Well, I have to be on my way back down-island. I wish I could stay for lunch, but a little something is going on at the hospital.”

“Trouble?”

“Nothing serious. Not yet, anyhow.”

“Anything I should know about?”

“Just something that needs looking into. A situation regarding one of the nurses.” Dr. Milton turned to Tom with an expectant look. “Someone you might remember from your own stay there. You knew Nancy Vetiver, didn’t you?”

Tom felt a small explosion deep in his chest, and remembered his nightmare. “Sure I do.”

“Always a problem with that young woman’s attitude, you may remember.”

“She was hard,” Gloria said. “I remember her. Very hard.”

“And insubordinate,” the doctor said. “I’ll keep in touch, Glen.”

Tom’s grandfather blew out cigar smoke and nodded his head.

“Give me a call if you still have trouble sleeping, Gloria. Tom, you’re a fine boy. Looking more like your grandfather every day.”

“Nancy Vetiver was one of the best people at the hospital,” Tom said. The doctor frowned, and Glen Upshaw tilted his massive head and squinted at Tom through cigar smoke.

“Well,” the doctor said. “We shall see.” He forced himself to smile at Tom, made another short round of goodbyes, and left the room.

They heard Kingsley walking the doctor to the entry and opening the door to the terrace. Tom’s grandfather was still squinting at him, moving the cigar in and out of his mouth like a nipple.

“Boney’ll straighten everything out. You liked the girl, eh?”

“She was a great nurse. She knew more about medicine than Dr. Milton.”

“Ridiculous,” his mother said.

“Boney is more of an administrator—could be,” said his grandfather with dangerous mildness. “But he’s always done well by me and my family.”

Tom saw a thought move visibly through his mother’s face like lightning, but all she said was, “That’s right.”

“Loyal man.”

Gloria nodded grimly, then looked up at her father. “You’re loyal to him, Daddy.”

“Well, he takes care of my daughter, doesn’t he?” The old man smiled, then looked speculatively at Tom. “Don’t worry about your little nurse, boy. Boney will do the right thing, whatever it is. A little flap at the hospital is nothing to get excited about. Mrs. Kingsley is making us a nice lunch, and after I smoke some more of this cigar, we’ll go out and enjoy it.”

“I’m still worried about Nancy Vetiver,” Tom said. “Dr. Milton doesn’t like her. It would be awful if he let that influence his judgment, no matter what’s going on—”

“Be hard not to let it influence your judgment,” his grandfather said. “Girl ought to know better, in the first place. Boney’s a doctor, no matter what you think of his medical skills, he did go to medical school and he does take care of us and most of our friends. He is also the top man at Shady Mount—been there from the beginning. And he’s one of our people, after all.”