Mystery

lodges.”

“I usually go riding early in the mornings,” she said. “But there was a lot to be done in here, so I had to put it off. In fact, I just finished changing when you knocked on the door.” She gave the ghostly sketch of a smile, and smoothed her skirt down over her thighs. “We will be here together at least part of every week, and I want you to know that my privacy is important to me. My room is out of bounds to you—”

“Of course,” Tom said.

“I stay out of the way of people from Mill Walk, and I expect them to return the favor.”

“Well, can we talk, at least?”

Her face softened for a moment. “Of course we can talk. We will talk. I didn’t intend to be short with you, but …” She tossed her head, a gesture that looked feminine and petulant at once. She intended to tell him something she had thought to keep hidden. “My house was robbed last week. It upset me very much. I’m the kind of person—well, I don’t even like most people to know where I live. And when I came back to the town from here and found my house ransacked …”

“I see,” Tom said. It explained a great deal, he thought: but it did not explain why she was the kind of person who wanted to keep even her address a secret. “Did they find who did it?”

Barbara Deane shook her head. “Tim Truehart, the chief of police in Eagle Lake, thinks it was a gang from out of town—maybe as far away as Superior. There’ve been a number of burglaries around here in the past few summers. They hit the summer people’s lodges, usually, and grab their stereo systems and TV sets. But you never think it’s going to be you. Most people in Eagle Lake don’t even lock their doors. I’ll tell you the worst part.”

She looked at him directly now, and twisted on the bed to face him. “They killed my dog. I suppose I got him partly as a watchdog, but I didn’t think of him that way anymore. He was just a big sweet animal—a Chow. They cut his throat and left his body in the kitchen like a—like a calling card.” She was struggling to control herself. “Anyhow, after that I moved some of my things over here, where they seemed safer. I’m still—jumpy. And angry. It’s so personal.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

And that broke the spell. Barbara Deane jumped up from his bed and frowned. “I didn’t mean to bore you with all of that. Don’t mention this at the compound, will you? Eagle Lake people detest any kind of unpleasantness. I’m sure you’d like to get out and acquaint yourself with this place. They’ll start serving dinner at the club at seven, unless you want me to cook something for you.”

“I’ll try the club,” Tom said. “But could we talk later?”

“If you like,” she said, and left him alone in the bedroom.

Tom listened to her footsteps moving down the hall. Her bedroom door clicked shut. He went to the bed and unzipped his suitcases, took out his books and clothes, and hung the clothes in a closet that looked like a coffin with a lightbulb. He pushed the bags under the narrow bed. When he stood up he looked around at the bare little room with its narrow planking. Without Barbara Deane in it, the whole room reminded him of a coffin. He picked up a book and went out into the hallway.

On the other side of the staircase, Barbara Deane’s door remained closed. What do you know about me? He pictured her sitting in a chair, looking out at the lake.

A speedboat barked.

Tom went downstairs, imagining that Barbara Deane listened to every footfall and creak of the stairs. He walked through the big room, passed under the arch, and went into the kitchen. This was like Lamont von Heilitz’s kitchen, with open shelves, broad counters, and a long black stove. The walls were of the same narrow board as his mother’s old bedroom, once a pale brown and now a dim grey flaking with old varnish. Grey dust and ancient dirt had packed the gaps between the wide floorboards. The only modern appliance was a small white Kenmore refrigerator. A wrapped loaf of brown bread sat on the counter beside the refrigerator. Tom turned on the taps over the square brass sink and washed his hands and face with an old yellow bar of coal tar soap. He dried himself on a threadbare dishtowel. Barbara Deane had stocked the refrigerator with milk, eggs, cheese, bacon, bread, ground beef, and sandwich meat. He blew into a dusty glass and filled it with milk. Then he carried the glass through the other room and opened a handmade wooden door and let himself into the study.

Dim bookshelves filled with unjacketed books faced a long desk with a black Bakelite telephone and a green felt pad with a leather border and an empty penholder. An oval pink and green hooked rug lay on the floor, and a hooked rug in two shades of brown lay folded on a tan sofa with unfinished arms and metal-wrapped joints. An old standard lamp stood at the far end of the sofa, and another stood beside the desk. The room was almost hot. It evoked his grandfather more than any other part of the lodge: Tom understood instinctively that this little room overlooking the lake had been his grandfather’s favorite part of the house. Streaky sunlight from two big windows partitioned into panes fell halfway into the room. The barking growl of the speedboat grew louder. Tom drank some of the milk and sat down behind the desk. He pulled open the drawers and found a few old paperclips, a stack of thick paper headed Glendenning Upshaw, Eagle Lake, Wisconsin, and a slim telephone book for the towns of Eagle Lake and Grand Forks. Tom turned to the pages for Eagle Lake and found the names beginning with D. Barbara Deane’s telephone number was unlisted. He finished the milk, put the glass on top of the telephone book, and went outside.

Buddy Redwing was turning the boat in tight, repetitive figure eights in front of the compound and the clubhouse, at the top of the 8 ripping through the reeds. Two blond heads the size of ping-pong balls tilted from side to side as the boat heeled over. Kip Carson’s hair was longer than Sarah’s. Tom sat down at a scarred redwood picnic table on the broad deck and watched them go around and around. When the boat heeled over at the bottom of the 8, the two blond people threw up their hands like passengers on a roller coaster, and Buddy cawed. Sarah waved at him, and he waved back. Buddy bawled out something hoarse and unintelligible. Tom stood up, and Buddy wheeled the boat back up toward the reeds. Sarah raised her arms to him again. Buddy cut the boat deeper into the marshy water, and the motor growled and whined and abruptly cut out, leaving a great silence spreading over the lake. A bird cried out, and another answered it. Buddy moved heavily to the back end of the boat and began yanking on the cord. Sarah pointed toward the clubhouse.

Tom stood up and walked out on the massive dock. A hundred feet away on their own dock, Mr. and Mrs. Spence took the air in new resort clothes. Mr. Spence’s back was to Tom, and his hands rested on his fat hips. He was shaking his head over Buddy’s mishandling of the boat. Mrs. Spence leaned self-consciously against a mooring, saw Tom, and turned away.

In the middle of the lake a fish broke the water and flashed blue-grey above the darker blue water before splashing back down. Ripples spread and melted back into the glassy surface.

To Tom’s right, the Deepdale dock left the treeless shore and protruded into the water. Beyond it lay the Thielman dock. Tom walked out to the end of his own dock to be able to see the Thielman lodge, and found himself looking at a shoreline thickly covered with trees through which only a grey door, a shuttered window, and a scattered backdrop of grey wall was visible. The motor coughed twice, and fell silent. Tom turned to look past the Spences, and saw Kip Carson pushing on the front of the boat in waist-high water. His chest and arms were pale and skinny, and he looked weary. Buddy shouted “Jerry! Jerry!” again and again in the flat, demanding tone of a spoiled child. Finally Jerry Hasek appeared through the door in the compound fence. He had changed from his jeans and sweatshirt into a shiny grey suit. He looked at the boat and then disappeared back through the door into the compound.

Tom went back inside and took a handful of the stationery from the drawer. He crossed out his grandfather’s name and printed his own beneath it. He thought for a moment, then began writing to Lamont von Heilitz. When he had covered a page, he heard Barbara Deane coming quickly down the stairs. Her footsteps crossed the larger sitting room. The door closed. Tom began on a second page. He heard a car starting up in the woods behind the house. About the time the car reached the wide stony path in front of the lodge, the motorboat started up again. Tom finished his long letter and looked at his watch. It was two-thirty. He folded the letter into thirds, and made another search of the desk drawers until he found a stack of envelopes. He scratched out his grandfather’s name on the first one, wrote Tom above it and printed Lamont von Heilitz’s address, and sealed the letter into the envelope. Then he left the lodge and began walking down the path.

Two cars were parked beside the gate into the compound, and five or six older, smaller cars had been pulled into spaces on the far side of the dusty parking lot in front of the clubhouse. “Who’s that? Ahoy there!” called a voice from overhead, and Tom looked up to see Neil Langenheim leaning over a veranda railing and beaming down at him from beneath a green-and-white-striped canvas awning. His red forehead had begun to peel, and his jowls