Mystery

wanted the stench of his memory to go away, and then I sold them to Bill Spence.”

“So he really was an accountant,” Tom said.

“Not a very good one. Come to think of it, Bill Spence wasn’t brilliant either, which was why I let Ralph hire him away from me. And now Bill Spence is aiming for the same social success Anton Goetz wanted, but he’s using his daughter to get it, not his prick. I hope my language doesn’t shock you.”

Tom said that he was grateful for his frankness.

“These men want what you had handed to you on a plate,” said his grandfather. “Now get some sleep and tomorrow try to act like you know how to behave. Let’s get everything sorted out by the end of summer.”

Tom asked about his mother, and his grandfather said that she was doing better—almost off medication. He promised to give her Tom’s love, and Tom promised to write to her.

The light in Neil Langenheim’s bedroom went out, and a thin yellow trace disappeared from the lake. The big lodges across the lake had retreated into the overhanging trees, and uncanny light from the black and silver sky touched the ends of the docks, the tops of railings, and sifting leaves.

Through the broken window, the smells of pine and fresh water came to him wrapped in cool air, along with some other, deeper odor from the marshy end of the lake and the pilings beneath the docks, from the soft earth and the wet reeds and the fish that moved or slept deep in the water.

Tom felt a tremor deep within him that was like a tremor in the silvery, sleeping world beyond the window. He got up and walked through the ground floor of the lodge, turning off the lights. He undressed, went to bed, and lay awake most of the night.

Someone knocked on the door soon after Tom got up the next morning, and when he peered around it, hoping that Sarah Spence had managed to slip away from her parents, he saw a police car and another blue uniform. A man in his early thirties with straight shiny black hair that seemed too long for a policeman looked at him through the screen and said, “Mr. Pasmore? Tom Pasmore?” He looked both friendly and slightly familiar. Tom let him in, and realized that he looked a great deal like the Eagle Lake mailman. He was at least ten years older than he had looked at first—close up, Tom saw deep crow’s feet, and a little grey swept back beneath the hair that fell past his temples.

“I’m Tim Truehart, the Chief of Police,” he said, and shook Tom’s hand. “I read the report about the shot that came in here last night, and I thought I’d better come out here and take a look for myself. Despite whatever impression you may have gotten from Officer Spychalla, we don’t like it when people shoot at our summer residents.”

“He was pretty casual about it,” Tom said.

“My deputy has his good points, but investigations may not be one of them. He’s very good at handling drunks and shoplifters, and he’s hell on speeders.” Truehart was looking around the sitting room as he spoke, smiling easily, taking everything in. “I’d have come myself, but I was out of town for most of the night. They don’t pay the Chief much money up here, and I fly a little on the side.”

Then Tom remembered. “I saw you at the airport when I came in—you were sitting against the wall in the customs shed, and you were wearing a brown leather jacket.”

“You’d make a good witness,” Truehart said, and smiled at him. “Were you alone in the lodge when the shot entered?”

Tom said he was.

“It’s a good thing Barbara Deane wasn’t here—Barbara had an unpleasant experience a couple of weeks ago, and getting shot at wouldn’t help her recovery. How do you feel?”

“I’m okay.”

“You had my deputy to reckon with, as well as everything else. You must be made of tough stuff.” He laughed. “Would you show me where it happened?”

Tom took him into the study, and Truehart looked carefully at the broken window, the lamp, and the hole in the wall where his deputy had dug out the bullet. He went outside and looked across the lake at the wooded hill above the empty Harbinger lodge. Then he came back inside.

“Show me where you were sitting.”

Tom sat behind the desk.

“Tell me about it,” Truehart said. “Were you writing something, or reading, or looking out at the lake, or what?”

Tom said that he had been talking on the telephone to his grandfather, and that the shot had come just after he bent over to look out to see the lake, so that he could describe it.

“You didn’t move anything?”

“Just swept up some broken glass.”

“Was the lamp the only light showing in the room?”

“It was probably the only light showing on the whole lake.”

Truehart nodded, and walked to the side of the desk and again looked carefully at the window, the lamp, and the place where the bullet struck the wall. “Show me how you bent to look out of the window.” He walked backwards away from the desk as Tom showed him what he had done, and sat down on the couch against the wall. He joined his fingers and leaned forward on his elbows. “And you did that right when it happened?”

“The lamp exploded as soon as I bent over.”

“It’s a good thing you leaned down like that.” Tom’s stomach felt as if he had swallowed soap. “I don’t like this much.” Truehart was looking at him somberly, almost meditatively, as if he were listening to something Tom could not hear. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen any high-powered rifles around here in the past few days.”

Tom shook his head.

“And I don’t suppose you know of anybody who’d have a reason to try to kill you.”

Startled, Tom said, “I thought hunters shot stray bullets toward the lodges once or twice a year.”

“Well, maybe not quite that often, but it happens. Last year, someone shot out a window in the club from up on that hillside. And two years before that, a bullet hit the back of the Jacobs lodge in the middle of a nice June night. People around here got excited, and I don’t blame them, but nobody even came close to getting hit. And here you are, framed in this window like a target. I don’t want to make you nervous, but I can’t say I like it, not a bit.”

“Buddy Redwing is pissed off at me because his girlfriend turns out to like me better,” Tom said. “He was planning to get married to her. In fact, his family is pissed off at me too, and so is hers. But I don’t think any of them would try to kill me. Buddy tried to beat me up yesterday, and I hit him in the stomach, and that was the end of that. I don’t think he’d climb a hillside with a rifle and try to shoot me through a window.”

“You have to be sober to do that,” Truehart said. “Which more or less lets Buddy out.” He pursed his lips and looked down at his hands. “Spychalla is up in the woods now, looking for anything he can find, shell casings, cigarette butts, anything that would be around where the shooter had to be. But realistically, the most we can hope for is some idea about what kind of rifle he had. You don’t find footprints up there, not with that kind of ground cover.”

“You don’t think it was a stray shot from a hunter?” Tom asked.

“The odds are, that’s what it was. But a lot of stuff has been happening on Eagle Lake lately.” He let this sink in. “And you’re not just an ordinary summer visitor.”

These men wanted what you had handed to you on a plate, Tom remembered.

Truehart said, “I can’t pretend to understand what’s going on there, but something sure as hell is getting stirred up. And I have to consider that somebody might be getting at your grandfather through you.”

“My grandfather and I aren’t very close.”

“That might not make any difference. I can’t offer you any extra protection, but I think you ought to be careful about staying away from windows. In fact, you ought to be careful in general—Spychalla told me that you claim to have been pushed into the traffic on Main Street last Friday. Maybe you shouldn’t go too many places alone for the