Mystery

At that moment Sarah turned her head and saw him. “Tom!” she all but cried out, and stopped moving so abruptly that the dog’s front legs rose up off the ground. She turned around to face him, transferred the leash to her other hand, and yielded one step to the dog, who began to sniff a tree. “Why are you grinning at me? Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was going to catch up to you,” he said, answering the second question.

“Good,” she said. “You can help me walk Bingo. I don’t think you ever met him, did you?”

He shook his head and looked down at the suddenly attentive dog, who looked back at him, pointed ears and thin rope of a tail perked up.

She bent down to pat the dog, who continued to look at Tom with very alert, intelligent eyes. “Tell Tom your name is Bingo, he’s such a stranger he doesn’t even know you.”

“How old is he?”

“Seven. I told you about him—but I’m not surprised you didn’t remember. It was that day I visited you in the hospital. When I covered myself with embarrassment.”

Tom shook his head. His mouth open and tongue lolling, Bingo stopped looking at him and waited for his mistress to resume walking.

“It’s okay—I got him the day I heard about your accident.”

“So he’s as old as I am,” Tom said, not thinking at all about what he was saying. Then he took in Sarah’s expression, and said, “Sorry, that must have sounded funny. I mean, ah, I guess I don’t know what I meant.” He took a step forward, and Sarah smiled at him, still with a trace of puzzled amusement clear in her face, and began walking beside him.

“I don’t even know where you’re going to college,” he said after a few moments of silence.

“Oh, I was accepted at Hollins and Goucher, but I’m going to go to Mount Holyoke—it sounded interesting, and Moonie Firestone got accepted there too, so …” She glanced sideways up at him, and closed, then opened her mouth. She said, “Tom—” and then stopped. She looked down at the dog straining ahead, and then spoke again. “My parents really wanted me to go to a girls’ school. I guess it’s okay for a year or so, but I’m already thinking about transferring. Isn’t that ridiculous? I’m not even there yet. Buddy thinks I ought to switch to Arizona. Do you know where you’re going to go?”

“I guess I’ll probably go to Tulane. If I get in.”

“Maybe I’ll transfer to Tulane, then.” She looked up at him as she had before, and he suddenly remembered exactly how she had looked when she had come to the hospital—how the face she had now, which was the face of her young womanhood, had just formed itself out of her childhood, and how badly he had wanted her to touch him. He wanted to put his arm around her, but she spoke before he could decide to do it.

“Are you really going to come to Eagle Lake this summer?” He nodded. “Listen, I didn’t even think when I was talking to you—at Miss Ellinghausen’s. It’s like, every time I talk to you I say something so dumb I want to curl up and die when I think about it later.”

“What?”

“But if you’re really coming, I guess it must be all right. It is, isn’t it?”

“What must be all right?”

“Well, Eagle Lake isn’t just an ordinary place for you, is it?”

He just looked down at her.

“And I understand that you couldn’t think of it the way we do, so I just wondered …” When he still said nothing, Sarah stopped walking and lightly grasped his arm. “I know your mother drowned, um, died.…”

For a moment both of them looked utterly confused: Tom remembered headlines from Lamont von Heilitz’s journal and saw a photograph of Jeanine Thielman extending a beautiful leg down from a carriage.

“Oh, my God,” Sarah said. “I did it again. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Please forgive me.”

Sarah now looked distressed to the point of tears. “It wasn’t my mother,” he said. “That was my—”

“I know, I know,” Sarah said. “I can’t imagine what—I know it was your grandmother, but in my head it got—I guess because I never see your mother, and I started thinking that—” She threw out her hands, and Bingo growled. Both Tom and Sarah looked down at Bingo, then toward the empty corner at which Bingo fixedly stared. The dog was leaning forward against the leash, and kept up a low growl.

“It’s easy to get mixed up,” Tom said, feeling as if he were speaking from experience.

“I was so sure.” She began to turn red. “How did I get into any college? How did I ever get out of grade school? I’m starting to sound like a Redwing!”

“It was just a mistake,” Tom said. Bingo was still making angry, theatening noises and tugging at the leash.

“Bingo! He hates to be held up, he’s so impatient.…” Stricken by what she had said, Sarah let the dog pull her forward. “I’m so sorry, I can’t—” She shrugged, and made an elaborately apologetic gesture with her free hand.

Tom realized that he could walk down to the hospital and see for himself what had happened to Nancy Vetiver—then it seemed to him that he had been planning to go to Shady Mount ever since leaving his house.

“I have to go somewhere,” Tom said, moving ahead of her and the straining dog, who cast him a wild-eyed, impatient look. “It’s okay! I’ll see you soon!”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Please!” she shouted.

Tom looked back from the far corner of Sarah’s street and saw her gazing toward him. The little terrier was still tugging at the leash, and she stepped forward and waved tentatively. He returned the wave, and crossed the intersection of Yorkminster Place. Houses he had seen and known all his life presented blank, lifeless facades; sprinklers whirred above grass that seemed to be made of spun sugar. Through windows left open to the breezes he saw immaculate empty rooms with grand pianos and looming portraits.

He walked past Salisbury Road, past Ely Place and Stonehenge Circle, past Victoria Terrace and Omdurman Road. Between Omdurman Road and Balaclava Lane the houses became slightly smaller and closer together, and by Waterloo Parade they were ordinary three-story frame and red brick houses. Here a few children rode tricycles up and down driveways, and thick low hedges were the only separation between the houses. A man reading a newspaper on his front porch looked up at him suspiciously but went back to the Eyewitness when he saw only a fairly ordinary Eastern Shore Road teenager.

Cars, bicycles, and pony traps streamed up and down Calle Berlinstrasse. An ambulance went by, then a second ambulance. After another step Tom realized that four police cars had pulled into a circular drive across the street. Lights whirled and flashed. Above the turmoil of ambulances and police cars before which a crowd had begun to gather stood the red brick building in which he had spent nearly three months of his tenth year.

When the light changed, he ran across the street and began to weave through the people peering over the tops of the police cars.

A policeman stood in front of the revolving door that led to the hospital’s waiting room and front desk. He was in his mid-twenties, his uniform was pressed and spotless, and his face looked very white beneath his visor. His buttons, belt, and boots gleamed. He kept his eyes a careful foot or so above the heads of the crowd.

“What happened?” Tom asked a stout woman carrying a white plastic shopping bag.

She leaned over and looked up at him. “I’m just lucky, I was right here when all the cops pulled up—way it looks, somebody got killed in there.”

Tom walked forward into the empty space between the spectators and the lone officer at the top of the hospital steps. The young cop gave him a hard glance, and then looked back out at nothing. When Tom started coming up the steps, he took his hand off his gun butt and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Officer, could you tell me what’s happening?” He was half a foot taller than the policeman, who tilted his neck and glared at Tom.

“Are you going in or not? If not, get back down.”

Tom pushed his way through the revolving door, took two steps toward the desk, and stopped short.

His past had been rewritten. The tiny waiting room with two or three rickety chairs and a low wooden