Mystery

Tom began to think that his grandfather had been right about calling the police. Spychalla was giving him a hard little smile that was supposed to communicate a total understanding of the pleasures of being seventeen and alone for the summer. “Some of you kids get up to a pretty wild time, I guess.”

“I guess you could say that being shot at is pretty wild.”

Spychalla closed his notebook and put it back in his hip pocket. He still had the little smile on his face. “Shook you up a little.”

Tom sat down behind the desk. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

“I’m going to explain something to you.” Spychalla stepped nearer the desk. “You got a screwdriver or something like that? A long knife?”

Tom looked at him, trying to figure out what this request was about. Spychalla put his arms behind his back and did something with his arm and chest muscles that made his uniform creak.

Tom went into the kitchen and came back with a screwdriver. Spychalla went down on the toes of his boots and began to dig away the wood surrounding the shell. “People ain’t supposed to hunt deer in the summer, but they do. Same way as they ain’t supposed to get drunk and drive, but they do that too. Sometimes they go out at night and jacklight ’em.” He slammed the screwdriver into the wall and chipped out a jagged piece of wood. “We arrest ’em when we catch ’em, but you can’t always catch ’em. There’s only me and Chief Truehart on the force full time, and a part-time deputy in the summer. Now one of the places these people know they can find deer is the woods around this lake, and sometimes we get calls from you people saying you hear shots at night. We run over here, but we know we ain’t gonna find anybody, because all they have to do is turn off their lights.” He slammed the screwdriver into the wall. “If they drive, we can get ’em when they come back to their cars, but plenty of times they walk—hide their deer until the next day, sneak it back into town under a tarp on the back of a pickup. Here we go.” He twiddled the screwdriver in the enlarged hole, jerked it backwards, and a black lump of metal clattered to the floor. Spychalla buttoned it into one of his shirt pockets and stood up. His uniform shirt was so tight Tom could see his muscles move.

“So I could go out there and root through the woods, but I’d be wasting my time. There’s a village ordinance stating that hunters are not permitted to discharge weapons within two hundred and fifty feet of a dwelling. Now let’s think about where this came from.” He grinned, and looked like a handsome robot. He walked to the far end of the desk and pointed to the broken glass. “It came in here, busted this lamp, and hit the wall—slanting downwards. So the rifle was probably fired from way up above one of those lodges on the other side of the lake. The man who fired the rifle didn’t have no idea in hell where his bullet went. Every summer and fall, we get complaints from people whose lodges are hit by bullets—not a lot of ’em, but one or two. The funny thing is, this guy could have been a quarter mile away from you.”

“What if it wasn’t a hunter,” Tom said, “but someone who was trying to shoot me?”

“Look, I can’t blame you for getting excited,” the policeman said. “But if a guy with a high-powered rifle was trying to kill you, he’d a done it. Even if it was dark in here, he’d a put a couple more bullets through that window. I’m telling you, this happens about once every summer. You’re just the closest anybody came to getting hit.”

And you’re friendly Officer Spychalla, who doesn’t really mind that the Mill Walk people get an accidental bullet coming their way once a summer or so, Tom thought. “Somebody pushed me off the sidewalk into traffic the other day,” he said. “In town.”

“Did you file a complaint?”

Tom shook his head.

“Did you see anybody?”

“No.”

“Probably an accident, just like this. Some fat old tourist turned around and hit you with a hip the size of a front-loader.”

“Probably if I was dead, you’d investigate a little harder,” Tom said.

Spychalla gave him the robot smile. “What do you hunt down there on that island you live on, rum drinks?”

“It’s not that kind of island,” Tom said. “We mainly hunt policemen.”

Spychalla slapped his pockets and marched toward the door, boots and Sam Browne belt creaking magnificently, his service revolver riding massively on his hip. He looked like a huge blond horse. “I’ll file a report, sir. If you’re worried about a recurrence of this incident, stay away from your windows at night.”

He clumped down the steps to his patrol car.

A male voice came out of the dark. “Officer?” Sarah’s father stepped into the ring of light on Tom’s front steps, looking like someone used to being obeyed by policemen. He was wearing pajamas and a grey bathrobe. “Is this young man in any trouble?”

Spychalla said, “Go back to your lodge, sir. All the excitement is over.”

Mr. Spence glared exasperatedly at Tom, then back at Spychalla, whose face made it clear that he had seen a lot of exasperation. He got in his car and slammed the door.

Mr. Spence put his hands on his hips and watched the headlights moving down the track. Then he turned around and tried to kill Tom with a look. “You are not to bother my daughter anymore. From now on there will be no communication between you and Sarah. Is that understood?” His big belly moved up and down under his shirt as he yelled.

Tom went inside and closed the door. He walked across the sitting room and went into the study. He realized that he was framed in the window, and his stomach froze and his blood stopped moving. Then he began sweeping broken glass off the desk into the wastebasket. After that he searched around the kitchen for a whisk broom and a dustpan, found them in a closet, and took them into the study to sweep the rest of the glass up from the floor.

He was returning the broom and the dustpan when he heard the telephone ringing, and he set them down on the table and returned to the study. He moved out of the line of the window and pulled back the chair. Then he sat down and answered the phone.

“This is Tom,” he said.

“Are they still there?” his grandfather asked in a voice just below a bellow.

“He. There was one cop. He’s gone.”

“I told you to call me when they left!”

“Well, I had to do a few things,” Tom said. “He just left a minute ago. He said what you said. It was a stray bullet.”

“Of course it was. I told you that. Anyhow, thinking about it, I decided you were right to call the police. No question about it. Are you feeling better now?”

“Kind of.”

“Go to bed early. Get some rest. In the morning, you’ll see this in perspective. I won’t tell your mother about this, and I forbid you to write anything to her that might upset her.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Does that mean that you don’t want me to come back right away?”

“Come back? Of course you shouldn’t come back! You have some fence-mending to do, young man. I want you to stay up there until I tell you it’s time to come back.” Glendenning Upshaw went on to deliver a lengthy speech about respect and responsibility.

When he finished, Tom decided to see where one question would lead. “Grand-Dad, who was Anton Goetz? I’ve been hearing—”

“He was nothing. He did a bad thing once, and he was found out, and he killed himself. Committed a murder, if you want the specifics.”

“On the plane up here, Mr. Spence wanted to tell me that you had done him some big favors—”

Upshaw grunted.

“—and he happened to mention this Anton Goetz, who he said was an accountant—”

“You want to know about him? I’ll tell you about him, and then the subject is closed. You understand me?” Tom did not speak. “Anton Goetz was a little man with a bad leg who got in way over his head because he couldn’t control his fantasies. He told everybody a lot of lies, me included, because he wanted social success. I tried to help him out because like a lot of con men, Anton Goetz had a lot of charm. I gave him a job, and I even helped him look more important than he was. It was the last time in my life I ever made a mistake like that. He got up to something with Arthur Thielman’s first wife, and imagined it was much more than it was, and when she put him in his place he killed her. Then he killed himself, like the coward he really was. I held his properties for a long time because I