blackmailing Barbara Deane. Maybe he had even seen her shoot Jeanine Thielman, and helped her hide the body in the lake. His mother had seen him moving through the woods, sneaking back to his lodge for the old curtains. After von Heilitz accused him of the murder, he had gone back to confront her, and she had killed him too. And ever since, she had lived quietly in the village of Eagle Lake. She had even gone on delivering babies.
He told himself to calm down when it occurred to him that Barbara Deane might have shot at him through the window, imagining that he had seen the notes at the bottom of the box.
But he knew one more thing Lamont von Heilitz did not, and it was the crucial fact in Jeanine Thielman’s murder: she had died because she had written those notes.
He was still trying to figure out what to do about the notes three hours later when someone began battering on his door. He jumped up from the couch and opened the door. Fritz Redwing nearly fell into the room. Sarah Spence gave him another push to move him out of the doorway. “Get inside, get out of the way,” she said. “We walked all the way around the lake to avoid being seen, let’s not blow it at the last minute.” She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, smiling at Tom. “I make all these clever plans for meetings in out of the way places at night, and when Tom Pasmore, who writes a letter a day to Lamont von Heilitz but never—checks—his— mailbox—finally works things out, he has me come to his house in broad daylight.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said.
“Don’t you put those precious letters in the mailbox?”
“I just hand them to the mailman,” Tom said. “How do you know I write to him?”
“He’s your hero, isn’t he? The one who started you off playing detective? I saw how you looked when Hattie Bascombe talked about him.”
“Von Heilitz, von Heilitz,” Fritz said. “Why is everybody talking about him all of a sudden?”
Neither Tom nor Sarah bothered to look at him.
“I read your letters a million times,” Tom said.
“What letters?” Sarah asked. “I never wrote you any letters. I don’t have to write letters to boys. I can’t even imagine doing such a stupid thing.”
“Oh, great,” Fritz said.
“Didn’t I used to know you once? A long time ago? So much has happened in the meantime, it’s kind of vague.”
“ ‘In the meantime’—is that the period when you wrote me every day, and arranged meetings in out of the way places?”
“No, it’s the period in which I became
“Should I just get out of here?” Fritz asked.
“Betrothed to be betrothed,” Tom said. “That’s kind of an interesting condition.”
“I thought of it as a delaying action. Or do I mean withholding action?” She pushed herself away from the door. “Aren’t you going to hug me, or something?”
“Me?” Tom put his hand on his chest. “I’m just someone you sort of used to know.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said. “I’m very particular about who I used to know.”
“Your standards have slipped lately,” Tom said, but before he could say any more, Sarah uttered a low growl and crossed the ground between them and wrapped her arms around him.
“You idiot,” she said. “You moron. You think I’d write anything to you?”
“I should have known better,” he said, hugging her for all he was worth. He lowered his head to her vibrant hair.
“Look,” Fritz said, “is my part done now?”
Sarah raised her face to Tom’s, asking to be kissed. Tom met her lips with his, and the shock of their softness echoed through his whole body.
“I’ll see you guys later,” Fritz said, and stood up.
“No,” Tom and Sarah said, almost simultaneously, and broke apart. “We’re supposed to be having a nice long walk together,” Sarah said. She twined her fingers through Tom’s.
“We could all go someplace,” Tom said.
“An excursion,” Sarah said. “That’s it. You’ve probably never gone on an excursion with Tom Pasmore. All sorts of brilliant things happen. Is there any way we could go out for a drive?”
“Sure,” Fritz said. “I could get the keys to one of the cars.”
“Better yet, you and I will get the keys, so everybody will see we’re still enjoying ourselves, and Tom will walk around the lake and go up the hill to the mailboxes, and we’ll meet him there.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be alone and stuff?”
“Oh, Tom has something else on his mind,” Sarah said.
Tom’s insides froze.
“You worked out a way to get me here, but …” Her forehead wrinkled. “You look terrible. You look like someone else took a shot at you about half an hour ago. What have you been doing for two weeks?”
“I don’t know if I can talk about it now,” he said. “I found something out, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Well, meet us up by the mailboxes in half an hour. That’ll give you time to think about it.”
She took Fritz by the hand and led him toward the door. “Someone
“I’ll see you in half an hour,” Tom said.
“If you don’t, I’m calling Nancy Vetiver and asking for a consultation.”
He waved, and she blew him a kiss before hurrying Fritz off the porch and down on the track. Tom heard them talking, Fritz asking baffled questions and Sarah returning elliptical responses like tennis smashes, as they moved away toward the compound. When they were out of earshot, he went upstairs to his bedroom and got his notes down from the closet shelf.
Tom sat at the chessboard table and read everything all over again. Now he saw Barbara Deane hiding behind the trees near the Thielman lodge, Barbara Deane throwing pebbles at a window and snatching up the gun careless Arthur Thielman had left lying on a table.… He had eaten at her table! Ridden in her car! Said she could sleep in the lodge!
When he had ten minutes to get up the hill to the mailboxes, Tom folded the wad of notes in half, and tried to jam them into a back pocket of his jeans. They would not fit. Some contradiction still clamored to be seen, and he pushed the notes back up on the closet shelf with the feeling that it would leap out at him if he scanned the papers one more time.
Tom walked the long way around the lake, chewing on his preoccupations, and reached the top of the hill panting but with no memory of having walked up the long winding track.
He sat on the bench and waited for Sarah and Fritz, who drove up in the Lincoln a few minutes later. Fritz was driving, and Sarah sat beside him in the front seat. “Come on in here,” she said. “This is our reunion, and you’re not allowed to look so gloomy.”
He climbed in beside Sarah, who put an arm around him. “Now we are not going to do anything to embarrass or offend Fritz, but you need to be cheered up. So we are going to drive around and forget about this horrendous mess we’re in. We will not once mention that I am supposed to marry Buddy Redwing.”
“Okay,” Tom said.
“Though someone ought to acknowledge that it was pretty good of me to come up with the idea of being engaged to be engaged.”
“Why did you even do that?” Tom asked.
“Yeah, why?” said Fritz.
“Because it calmed everybody down right away. And Buddy stopped scheming about how he was going to
