Mystery

pure satisfaction.

“I don’t think we’ll go to the bar tonight,” Ralph Redwing told Marcello, “it’s a little crowded, just take us to our table.”

Sarah was placed next to Buddy with her back to Tom.

In a loud voice from the head of the table, Ralph Redwing said, “Let’s have two bottles of the Roederer Cristal to begin with tonight, Marcello, we have something to celebrate. These children have just become engaged to be engaged, and we’re all tremendously happy with their decision.”

Mrs. Spence looked at Tom with narrowed eyes and a gloating smile. He raised his glass to her in a mock toast, and her smile tightened.

When the old waiter came around to take his order, Tom asked if he could take his meal home and eat it there—despite his bravado, he could not ignore what was going on at the long table, and did not have the stomach to watch it.

He carried his meal home in a brown paper bag, set it out on the table, looked at it, then scraped it into the garbage and ate the pie that Barbara Deane had given him.

The next day, Tom heard voices coming from down the avenue of trees in front of the lodges, and went outside to see who it was. He walked down the track, and the voices got louder. Jerry Hasek was unloading trunks and suitcases from the back of the Cadillac, and shambling from side to side as he passed into the compound behind his parents, his white hair blazing in the sunlight. Behind him was the answer to Tom’s problem, Fritz Redwing, come to Eagle Lake for another endless party with his cousin.

Tom paced around the sitting room, fidgeted with pens and papers at the desk, stared out of every window on the ground floor of the lodge, reread Sarah’s letters, looked at his watch. Every minute that went by increased the likelihood that Fritz would not call him. Tom imagined Fritz in his family’s lodge, his suitcases opened on the bed, jeans and chinos and shorts strewn across the floor, interrupting a conversation between his parents and his aunt and uncle about the jet and Ted Mornay with the comment that he sort of thought, you know, that he’d see what good old Tom Pasmore was up to. Uncle Ralph would make sure that he didn’t see what good old Tom Pasmore was up to, and when Fritz saw Tom in the dining room he would shrug and shake his head and generally try to communicate that all conversation would have to wait until their senior year started, tough luck, and what did you do anyway, man?

When the telephone rang, Tom scrambled for it from the sitting room, and picked it up on the third ring.

Fritz’s first words told him that all his worry had been pointless. “Tom! We’re both here! Isn’t that great?”

It sure was, Tom said, genuinely happy to hear Fritz’s voice.

“Boy, I never thought this would really happen,” Fritz said. “We’re going to have such a great time. I guess Buddy had some real wild friends up here, I bet they got outrageous and outa sight, so tell me what you were doing—but please please don’t tell me you just moped around reading books and acting like Mr. Handley. I’m fed up with Mr. Handley, he never makes any sense!”

Fritz had spent the past three weeks in a remedial reading tutorial with Dennis Handley.

“Come on over,” Tom said. “Right away.”

“Next year we’re going to be seniors!” Fritz said. “This is going to be the best summer we ever had.”

“Don’t tell anybody where you’re going, just get over here,” Tom said.

In less than five minutes, Fritz was on the doorstep, wearing a polo shirt over bathing trunks and carrying a towel on his arm. “Good tan,” he said when Tom opened the door. “I was afraid you’d be all white—I was afraid you’d have book scars all over your face.

“Book scars?”

“You know, those little lines you get under your eyes from reading too much. With Mr. Handley, I had to read a whole book out loud, and every time I read a sentence wrong, he read it back to me, it was like watching a guy play with himself, I got those lines all over under my eyes, I had to squint so I wouldn’t have to see his face. So let’s go swimming right away, okay, I want to catch up with your tan, I want some rays—”

They had walked into the living room, and Fritz suddenly stopped talking and gazed in horror at the heavily written-upon sheets of yellow paper lying in rows and stacks on the floor by the couch and fanned across its cushions.

“What is THIS?” He turned to look up at Tom with pale blue eyes like pinwheels. “You’re doing next year’s homework!”

“I’m thinking about something, it has nothing to do with homework.”

“So?” Fritz said, meaning: so if it isn’t homework, what is it?

“It’s about a murder.” Fritz looked at him with deep puzzlement. “I’ll put on my swimsuit and be right down,” Tom said.

“All right,” Fritz said when Tom came back downstairs. He had been holding a sheaf of Tom’s notes in his hands, and he dropped them on the floor with evident relief. “Let’s get in the water. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you have got to get away from it, fast.”

They walked through the study, and Fritz shook his head at the sight of yet more piles of paper. “It’s a good thing I got here in time. I don’t know how you got such a good tan, messing around with this crazy stuff. You even got Mrs. Thielman’s name wrong, you dope.”

“That was the first Mrs. Thielman,” Tom said. “Just out of curiosity, what was the name of the book you had to read out loud to Mr. Handley?”

“Are you kidding? You think I remember?”

“What was it about?”

“This guy.”

“What did he do?”

“We went after this fish. It didn’t make any sense. Mr. Handley let me skip the hard parts.”

“Mr. Handley made you read Moby Dick? Out loud?”

“It was terrible. It was lousy and terrible. What do you mean, the first Mrs. Thielman? There is only one Mrs. Thielman.”

“The first Mrs. Thielman was killed right up here by a man named Anton Goetz, and Lamont von Heilitz solved it.”

“The creep who owns that empty lodge?” They were now walking down Tom’s pier, and Fritz pointed diagonally across the lake. “That guy everybody hates? I wish you owned that lodge.”

“He’s not a creep,” Tom said. “He used to be incredibly famous, and he’s old now, but he’s an amazing man. I met him because he lives across the street from us, and he’s solved hundreds of murders, and he really knows how our island works.”

“Oh, everybody knows that,” Fritz said. He whooped and jumped off the edge of the dock, drew in his knees and wrapped his arms around them, and hit the water in a noisy cannonball.

Everybody knows that?

Tom dove in after him.

“God, this is great,” Fritz yelled, and for a time both he and Tom swam aimlessly and energetically in the wide part of the lake.

“Have you seen Buddy yet?” Tom asked.

“Buddy’s still in bed. I guess they had some kind of celebration at the club last night. Weren’t you there?”

“I left early. Buddy and I aren’t exactly friendly, Fritz.”

“Buddy’s friendly with everybody,” Fritz said. “Buddy’s friendly with Jerry. He and Jerry are going out shooting this afternoon. Maybe we could go too. That’d be pretty cool.”

“I don’t think they’d want me along, unless …” Unless they could use me as a