“But I imagine that you have all sorts of friends out at the lake.”
“It hasn’t turned out that way,” he said, and gave her a general description of his difficulties with Sarah Spence and the Redwings. He told her about Buzz Laing and Roddy Deepdale and Kate Redwing, and then about the shot that had come through the window. “So after two police cars showed up at the lodge, my reputation is even worse than before, and I’ve been spending all my time by myself.” He hesitated, then said, “The police chief, Tim Truehart, told me that I should ask you to stay in the lodge, kind of as protection. In case the shooting was somebody trying to get back at my grandfather for something.”
“And you kept quiet about it for two weeks?”
“Well, nothing else has happened. And I got sort of busy.”
“Would you like me to spend the nights there?”
He said no, it was not necessary, thinking that she would see it as another duty owed to his grandfather.
“Well, I’ve been thinking of coming back there anyhow in a couple of days. You tell me if you begin to feel uneasy, staying there by yourself.”
“I will,” he said.
Their earlier unease had left them, and they talked in the rambling, anecdotal way of people learning to know and like each other. She wanted to know about Brooks-Lowood, and the books and movies he enjoyed, and he asked her about horses and Eagle Lake, and eventually Tom felt that they had known each other a long time. “You don’t have to answer this, of course, but you said you weren’t my grandfather’s type, and ever since you said that, I’ve been trying to figure out what that type was.”
“I suppose that’s an allowable subject,” she said. “After all, we’re talking about something back in the dark ages. I guess it’s safe to say that he liked very girlish, submissive women. Magda, poor soul, was like that. I only knew one other woman Glen saw, a very poor choice, I thought, a girl who worked as a nurse’s aide—that was how they met, back when Glen spent a lot of time getting the hospital to run the way he wanted it to. She was a pretty little thing, but underneath she was very hard. She came from a rough background, but she could make you believe that she was the soul of innocence.”
Remembering his mother’s judgment of Nancy Vetiver, he said, “Are you sure about her—that she was hard, I mean?”
“I’m sure she was calculating, if that’s what you’re asking. She and Glen got what they wanted or needed from each other, and I guess they finally became something like friends. In the end, I suppose he learned that he had to respect her. Carmen Bishop, that was her name—she was about seventeen or eighteen when she started at the hospital.”
The name meant nothing to Tom.
“I think I heard that she got him to help her brother—she probably cared for Glen, but she was certainly using him, too.”
“Seventeen or eighteen,” he said.
“She might have been older—anyhow, I gather she was a match for him. The funny thing was, I don’t think Glen ever did more than take her out to dinner a few times, so that he could be seen with her. That’s all he ever did with me, which is how some people got the idea we were—you know. I think it was important to Glen to be seen with attractive young women, but I don’t think it ever went any further than that, even with Carmen.”
She gave him a slice of apple pie she had baked herself, and then wrapped the rest of the pie for him to take back with him.
It was just past ten when she dropped him off at the lodge, and she told him to call her if he wanted her to begin staying at the lodge. “I know I’ll see Tim Truehart on the street one day,” she said, “and he’ll order me to start taking better care of you!”
“Oh, you do pretty well,” he said, and she drove away.
The next day, Tom wrote another long letter to Lamont von Heilitz and carried it up the hill to wait for Joe Truehart. When the mailman appeared, he came out of the trees and gave the letter to him.
Truehart said, “I hear you think my mom’s gone into the burglary business.”
“I hear she’s pretty good at it,” Tom said, and Truehart laughed and turned his van around and drove off.
Tom realized that he had never opened his grandfather’s mailbox—if Joe Truehart had anything for him, he would have given it to him when Tom gave him the thick envelopes for von Heilitz. He did not even know which aluminum box belonged to his grandfather, and had to go down the length of them, reading the names. Finally he came to Upshaw. He tugged at the catch and opened the box. It was jammed with folded pieces of white paper. There were dozens of messages inside the box. He scooped them out and unfolded the top sheet.
In large flowing black letters that virtually yelled with frustration, it read
Tom read through the stack of notes on the way back to his lodge. Then he read them all over again. He felt almost dizzy with joy.
Inside the lodge, he spread them all out on the desk and read them in order, from
One was a long extended metaphor comparing his penis to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Washington Monument, and the Eiffel Tower, all of which she had seen between the ages of eight and twelve.
He called her lodge, and Mrs. Spence hung up as soon as he gave his name. He called back, and said, “Mrs. Spence, I’m sorry, but this is very important. Would you please let me speak to Sarah?”
“No one in this family has anything at all to say to you,” she said, and hung up.
The third time he called, Mr. Spence answered, asked if he wanted a broken arm as bad as all that, and slammed down the phone.
He changed into his bathing suit and resolutely swam back and forth past their dock, but neither Sarah nor anyone else came through their back door.
For the rest of the afternoon, Tom tried to concentrate on the pages he had written about the murder, but his attention returned again and again to Sarah’s wonderful letters—she had suggested meetings, made assignations, waited for him on the highway behind Lamont von Heilitz’s lodge, tried to beam into his brain messages about looking at his mailbox.
He went to the club early that evening and waited at Roddy and Buzz’s end of the bar. He ordered a club soda and ate a handful of goldfish crackers. He nervously downed a second glass of club soda, and ordered a Kir Royale. The first sip made him feel dizzy and light-headed. The Langenheims came up the stairs, nodded at him glumly, and went straight to their table.
Then Marcello’s resonant voice came up the stairs, and Tom heard footsteps, and Ralph and Katinka Redwing appeared beside him—Ralph gave him a look of utter indifference, and Katinka did not see him at all. Behind them came the Spences. Mr. Spence looked happy and expansive, and Mrs. Spence was saying, “Oh, Ralph! Ralph!” Both Spences saw Tom at the same instant, and their faces went dead. Behind her parents came Sarah, walking upstairs with Buddy Redwing. Buddy said a sentence of which Tom heard only the word “toad,” and Sarah’s eyes flew to Tom’s face, and locked with his own eyes. He felt all of his inner gravity alter, and he nodded three, four, five times, vehemently. Sarah rolled her eyes upward, closed them, opened them, and gave him a small, tucked-in smile of
