Mystery

Kate smiled. “Oh, my goodness, run? He would have fallen splat on his face. He wasn’t the kind of man you could imagine running, anyhow.” She looked at him with a new understanding clear in her intelligent face. “Did someone tell you that they saw him running? They’re nothing but a liar, if they did.”

“No, it wasn’t that, exactly,” Tom said. “My mother saw a man running through the woods on the night Mrs. Thielman was killed, and I thought it had to be Goetz.”

“It could have been almost anybody but him.”

Out on the deck, Roddy Deepdale stood up and stretched. He picked up his books and disappeared from view for a moment before coming in the side door. Buzz followed him a moment later.

“Anybody for a drink before we get ready to go over to the club?” Roddy said. He smiled brilliantly, and went into his bedroom to put on a shirt.

“Don’t you wish we had Lamont von Heilitz here, so we could ask him to sort of explain everything?” Kate said. “I’m sure he could do it.”

“Did Roddy say something about a drink?” Buzz asked, coming in the side door.

“Maybe a little one,” Kate said. “Everybody over there watches me so carefully, I think they’re afraid I’m going to get maudlin.”

“I’ll get maudlin for you,” Buzz said. “I have only another week of lying around on decks and getting tan before I have to go back to St. Mary Nieves.”

Tom stayed another half hour. He learned that the Christopher who had said the wicked thing to Roddy Deepdale was Christopher Isherwood, and then had a surprisingly good time while they all talked about Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin and their author, whom Roddy and Buzz considered a cherished friend. It was the first time in his life he had had such a conversation with any adults, and the first proof he’d ever had that literate conversation was a possibility at Eagle Lake, but he left bothered by the feeling that he had missed something crucial, or failed to ask some important question, during his talk with Kate Redwing.

When he got back inside his grandfather’s lodge, he tried to write another letter to Lamont von Heilitz, but soon ran dry—he did not really have anything new to tell him, except that he wondered if he should not just go back to Mill Walk and start thinking seriously about becoming an engineer after all. He wondered how his mother was getting on, and if he could do anything to help her if he were at home. Home, just now, did not seem much more homelike than Glendenning Upshaw’s lodge.

He took a shower, wrapped a towel around himself, and instead of going immediately back into his bedroom to get dressed, walked past the staircase to Barbara Deane’s room. He opened her door and stepped inside the threshold.

It was a neat, almost stripped-down room, two or three times the size of his, with a double bed and a view of the lake through a large window. A half-open door revealed a tiled bathroom floor and the edge of a white tub with claw feet and a drawn shower curtain. The closet doors were shut. A bare desk stood against one wall, and a framed photograph hung above it like an icon. Tom took three steps closer and saw that it was an enlarged photograph of his grandfather, young, his hair slicked back, giving the camera a thousand-candlepower smile that the expression in his eyes made forced and unnatural. He was holding Gloria, four or five years old, in his arms—the chubby, ringleted Gloria Tom had seen in a newspaper photograph. She was smiling as if ordered to smile, and what Tom thought he saw in her face was fear. He stepped nearer and looked more closely, feeling his own vague sorrow tighten itself around him, and saw that it was not fear, but terror so habitual and familiar that even the photographer who had just shouted “Smile!” had not seen it.

Marcello led Tom to the table near the bandstand, dropped the menu in his lap as if he were radioactive, and spun around on his heel to inquire after the Redwings. Buddy scowled, Kip Carson blinked at him through a fog of Baby Dollies, and Ralph and Katinka never saw him at all. Aunt Kate’s back was to him, and Sarah Spence sat a mile away, at one of the tables closest to the bar. Mrs. Spence gave him one obsidian glance, then ostentatiously ignored him and spoke in a high-pitched voice that was supposed to show what a good time she was having. Occasional words floated to Tom: trout, water skis, relaxed. Sarah turned on her chair to send him a fellow-prisoner look, but her mother snapped her back with a sharp word. Neil Langenheim barely nodded at Tom—he sat upright on his chair, tucked in his chin, and despite the red raw skin on his nose and forehead, looked as rigid and contained as he did on Mill Walk. Only Roddy and Buzz were friendly, but they talked without a pause, in a way that suggested that this night’s conversation was one segment of a lifelong dialogue that both of them found amusing and engrossing. They were the best couple in the room. Tom sat at his table and read, wondering how he would get through the rest of the summer.

The Langenheims left; the Spences bustled Sarah away; Roddy and Buzz left. Ralph Redwing glanced sideways at Tom, frozen-faced. Tom closed the Agatha Christie book, signed the check the elderly waiter slid on a corner of the table, and walked out of the dining room with the back of his neck tingling.

Huge clouds scudded across the moon.

He had forgotten to leave lights on in the lodge, and he groped around the big sitting room, walking into furniture that seemed to have moved and changed places while he was gone. Then his hand found a lampshade, his fingers met the cord, and the room came into being again, just as it had been before. He fell onto a couch. After a moment he got up and turned on another light. Then he stretched out on the couch again and read a few more pages of The ABC Murders. He remembered being dissatisfied with it yesterday, but could not remember why—it was a perfect book. It made you feel better, like a fuzzy blanket and a glass of warm milk. A kind of simple clarity shone through everything and everybody, and the obstacles to that clarity were only screens that could be rolled away by the famous little grey cells. You never got the feeling that a real darkness surrounded anyone, not even murderers.

Tom realized that Lamont von Heilitz had begun talking about Eagle Lake the first night they had met—almost as soon as Tom had walked in the door, von Heilitz had brought out his old book of clippings and turned the pages, saying here and here and here.

Tom swung his legs off the couch and stood up. He tossed the book down and went into his grandfather’s study. Light from the big sitting room touched the hooked rug and the edge of the desk. Tom turned on the lamp beside the desk and sat behind it. He pulled the telephone closer to him. Then he lifted the receiver, dialed 0, and asked the operator if she could connect him to Lamont von Heilitz’s number on Mill Walk.

She told him to hold the line. Tom turned to the window and saw his face and his dark blue sweater printed on the glass. “Your party does not answer at this time, sir,” the operator told him. Tom placed the receiver back on the cradle.

He placed his hands on either side of the phone and stared at it. The telephone shrilled, and he knocked the receiver off the hook when he jumped. He fumbled for it, and finally put it to his ear.

“Hello,” he said.

“What’s going on up there?” his grandfather roared.

“Hello, Grand-Dad,” he said.

“Hello, nothing. I sent you up there to enjoy yourself and get to know the right people, not so you could seduce Buddy Redwing’s fiancee! And go around pumping people for information about some ancient business that doesn’t concern you, not in the least!”

“Grand-Dad—” Tom said.

“And break into the Redwing compound and go snooping around with your popsy! Don’t you know better than that?”

“I didn’t break in anywhere. Sarah thought I might like to see—”

“Is her last name Redwing? If it isn’t, she doesn’t have any right to take you into that compound, because she doesn’t have any right to go in there herself. You grew up on Eastern Shore Road, you went to the right school, you ought to know how to conduct yourself.” He paused for breath. “And on top of everything else, on your first day there, you go into town and strike up a relationship with Sam Hamilton’s son!”

“I was interested in—”

“I won’t even mention your consorting with that nauseating queer, Roddy Deepdale, who ruined the lot next