Mystery

“What should I look for, up north?” he asked. “What should I do?”

“Ask around about Jeanine Thielman. See if anyone else saw that man running into the woods.” Von Heilitz opened the door. “I want you to stir things up a little. See if you can make things happen, without actually putting yourself in danger. Be careful, Tom. Please.”

Tom held out his hand, but von Heilitz surprised him again, and hugged him.

PART SEVEN

EAGLE LAKE

At seven-thirty in the morning, two days later, an unshaven Victor Pasmore set down one of Tom’s suitcases just outside the main entrance of David Redwing Field. Victor’s rumpled clothes smelled of perspiration, tobacco, and bourbon. Even his eyebrows were rumpled.

“Thanks for getting up to drive me here.” Tom wished that he could hug his father, or say something affectionate to him, but Victor was irritated and hung over.

His father took a step away, and glanced anxiously at his car, parked across the sidewalk in a no-parking zone. Beyond the airport’s access road, the nearly empty lot already radiated heat in the morning sun.

“You got everything you need? Everything okay?”

“Sure,” Tom said.

“I, ah, I better get my car outa here. They move you along, at airports.” Victor squinted at him. His eyes looked rumpled too. “Better not say anything to anybody about, you know, what I told you. It’s still top secret. Details and that.”

“Okay.”

Victor nodded. A sour odor washed toward Tom. “So. Take it easy.”

“Okay.”

Victor got into his car and closed the door. He waved at Tom through the passenger window. Tom waved back, and his father jerked the car forward into the access road. Tom saw him peering from side to side, looking for other drivers to get angry with. When the car was out of sight, he picked up his bags and went into the terminal.

This was a long concrete block building with two airline counters, a car rental desk, a souvenir stand, and a magazine rack stocked with The Lady, Harpers Queen, Vogue, Life, and the American news magazines. At one end was the baggage area—a moving belt and twenty square yards of stained linoleum with a permanent pool of watery yellow liquid against the far wall—and at the other end, a bar called Hurricane Harry’s with wicker stools, a thatched roof, and a vending machine that dispensed sandwiches.

Tom had tried to call Lamont von Heilitz three times on Saturday, but the Shadow had not answered his telephone. Curious about Barbara Deane, he had taken the grey metal box where his parents kept their important papers from its shelf in the study, and looked through the title to the house and the car, their marriage license, many legal documents and stock certificates, until he found his birth certificate. Dr. Bonaventure Milton had signed his birth certificate, Barbara Deane and Glendenning Upshaw had witnessed it, and a man named Winston Shaw, Registrar of the Island of Mill Walk, had testified to the correctness of the proceedings.

Tom flipped back to the marriage license and removed it from the box. This, too, had been witnessed by Glendenning Upshaw and Barbara Deane. Winston Shaw had again performed his office. Gloria Ross Upshaw of Mill Walk had married Victor Laurence Pasmore of Miami, Florida, United States of America, on February fifteenth, 1946.

First Tom noticed the oddity of his midwife having witnessed his parents’ marriage; then something about the date made him wrinkle his forehead. His parents had been married in February: he had been born on October twentieth. He counted on his fingers, and saw that February and October were exactly nine months apart.

And that, Tom thought, was how an employee of Mill Walk Construction married the boss’s daughter. There had been a romance: and when Glendenning Upshaw learned his daughter was pregnant, he flew her and her boyfriend back home to Mill Walk and ordered up a civil ceremony in the way he would order up room service in a hotel.

He had placed the metal box back on the shelf and gone into the kitchen, where his mother sat at the table in front of the lunch dishes, holding the brown plastic pill bottle in one hand and looking dully at the refrigerator. When she saw him she smiled like someone remembering how to do it, and slowly put his plate on top of hers. “I’ll do it,” he said, and took the plates from her and put them in the dishwasher. She handed him the glasses. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I guess I’m a little weak,” she said.

“Can I help you upstairs? Or do you want to go into another room?”

She shook her head. “Don’t worry about me.”

He sat down beside her. He knew that if he put his arm around her, she would push it off. “I was wondering about this Barbara Deane,” he said.

Her eyes flicked toward him, then away, and a vertical line appeared between her eyebrows.

“She’s taking care of your old lodge, or something like that. Do you know her?”

“She’s a friend of Daddy’s.”

“Was she his girlfriend, or anything like that?”

The vertical line disappeared, and she smiled. “She was never anybody’s girlfriend. Especially not Daddy’s!” And added, “Barbara Deane worked at the hospital,” as if that were all that had to be said. Then she looked straight at him. “Stay out of her way. She’s funny.”

“What makes her funny?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gloria sighed. “I don’t want to talk about Barbara Deane.”

But when he went up to pack, she came into his room and made sure he was bringing a bathing suit, boat shoes, sweaters, ties, a jacket. He was taking his place in the world, and he had to be dressed for the cold nights.

At eight o’clock a big potbellied man in sunglasses and a cowboy hat carried an enormous suitcase through the revolving doors, followed by a blond woman with a Jackie Kennedy hairdo who wore huge sunglasses and a black miniskirt. She pulled a middle-sized suitcase behind her on rollers. The potbellied man squinted at the darkened bar, frowned at Tom, and shook his head at the women at the airline desks, who wilted back on their stools. Then Sarah Spence came through the electronic door, carrying a small suitcase like Baby Bear. She was dressed in a blue button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves and khaki shorts. “Tom!” she cried. “Bingo was so unhappy! I think his heart broke! I wish we could give him Percy’s—” Here she sketched a large apron before her with her free hand.

“Percy’s what?” her mother said, lowering her sunglasses on her nose and giving Tom a clinical look.

Mr. Spence dropped his suitcase and examined Tom through his sunglasses. “So you’re hitching a ride up north with us, are you?”

“Yes, sir,” Tom said.

“Who’s this Percy?” her mother said. “Give Bingo what?”

“Special dog food,” Sarah said. “A friend of a friend of Tom’s.”

Mrs. Spence shoved her sunglasses back up her nose. She was a good-looking woman who obviously knew the names of every member of the Founders Club, and her legs were almost young enough for her miniskirt. “Are both those suitcases yours?”

Tom nodded, and Mrs. Spence looked at his suitcases through her dark glasses.