manage to beat you to a pulp. Once you have the security of being engaged to be engaged, you forget all about your rivals and go back to your old pursuits. All I have to do is sit through lots of dinners, and listen to Buddy talk about how cool and far out everything is going to be when I transfer to Arizona. Our engagement is going to become official next summer, except that it isn’t. When I come home at Christmas, I’ll tell my mother I can’t go through with it. Everybody will blame it on the influence of Mount Holyoke, and it’ll be a lot easier to handle than it would be up here.”
Nobody said anything, and Sarah said, “I think.”
“Why do I feel so shitty?” Fritz said. “I should have stayed in summer school.”
“Well, I’m happy you didn’t,” Sarah said.
“I know why, too,” Fritz complained.
“Does she always talk like this?” Fritz asked, leaning forward to look at Tom.
“I don’t think so,” Tom said.
“I really think it’s just a little mess that looks like a big one,” Sarah said.
“I don’t think anyone ever decided not to get married to one of my relatives before,” Fritz said. “Usually, it’s the other way around.”
“That’s dandy, that’s just dandy,” Sarah said. She pulled her arm away from Tom, and was motionless and even silent for a moment. It took him a second to realize that she was crying.
Fritz leaned forward and looked at Tom again. His face had turned bright red. “Don’t cry, Sarah,” he said. “I know Buddy. I even
“I like him too,” Sarah said. “And believe me, I know what you’re talking about.”
She wiped her eyes, and Tom said, “You do?”
“How do you suppose I got into this in the first place? Of course I like him, at least when he isn’t drunk or taking those stupid pills. I just don’t like him as much as I like you.” She put her arm around him again, and said, “This isn’t much of an excursion.”
“We might as well take a look at Eagle Lake, I mean the town,” Fritz said, turning onto Main Street. “I’ve been coming up here all my life, and I never saw it before.”
“Of course not,” Sarah said. “ ‘Eagle Lake is a place apart from the family business. I had a thousand opportunities for investment up here, and I turned them all down.’ ”
“ ‘I never wanted to sully this place with money,’ ” Fritz said, speaking in an eerie imitation of his uncle’s voice.
“ ‘We could turn this part of Wisconsin right around,’ ” Sarah said. “ ‘But we don’t put a penny into Eagle Lake.’ ” She was smiling now. “The speech. Of course you’ve never seen the village. You might put a penny into it if you did, and Ralph Redwing would come awake like a vampire in his coffin, hearing someone creep up on him with a bottle of holy water and a wooden stake.”
Fritz giggled at this blasphemy.
“Wait a second,” Tom said. “I got it! I just got it!”
“Well, here we go,” Sarah said. “Something’s been bothering me too, but you didn’t react that way about it.”
“I know where they put the stuff. God, I really know where it is.”
“What stuff?”
“This sounds like an excursion, all right.”
“Oh, my God, I even knew this was going to happen—that’s why I wanted to bring all those notes.” He saw the expression of horror on Sarah’s face, and said, “Different notes. All I have to do is remember the name of the street!”
“What’s he talking about? All that crap he wrote?”
Tom began looking out of his window. The car was creeping up Main Street in heavy traffic, and sunburned people in T-shirts and visored caps filled the sidewalks. They passed Maple Street, which was wrong. Ahead he saw Tamarack Street, also wrong. “It started with an S. Think of street names that could start with the letter S.”
“Suspicious Street.”
“Shithole Street.”
“That sounded just like Buddy.”
“Street names!”
“Satyriasis Street. Scintillation Street. Sevens! Where I live!”
“I give up,” Fritz said.
“Season Street.”
“Ah,” Tom said, and kissed her.
“I got it?”
“Yes,” he said, and kissed her again. “You’re brilliant.”
“It was really Season Street?”
“It was Summers Street. Now all we have to do is find it.”
Fritz protested that he could not find a street in a town he had never seen before, and Tom said that it was a small town, all they had to do was drive around for a while and they would run right into it.
“What’s this about, anyhow?”
“I’ll tell you after we find the place. If I’m right, that is.”
“Don’t you get the feeling that he’s right?” Sarah said.
“No. I get the feeling I’m going to be sorry I’m doing this.”
“You’ll be a hero, Fritz,” Tom said. “Wait. Slow down.”
Tom had seen the newspaper editor walking up the sidewalk on his side of the street, and he put his head through the window. “Mr. Hamilton! Mr. Hamilton!”
Chet Hamilton looked over his shoulder, then looked across the street. Tom called his name again and waved, and the editor saw him and waved back. “How’s the research going? You having a good summer?”
“Fine,” Tom yelled. “Can you tell us how to find Summers Street?”
“Summers Street? Let’s see. It’s a little ways out of town. Just keep on going straight past town hall, take the first right, the second left, go over the railroad tracks, pass the Authentic Indian Settlement, and you’ll run right into it. It’s about four, five miles.” He looked at Tom curiously, as did a number of other people on the sidewalk. “There’s not much out there.”
Tom thanked him and pulled himself back into the car. “You got that?” he asked Fritz.
“First right past the town hall, second left, railroad tracks, Indians,” Sarah said. “What are we supposed to find, once we get there?”
“A whole lot of stolen property,” Tom said.
“That’s my boy,” Sarah said.
“What stolen property?” Fritz demanded to know.
Tom told him about the burglaries that had been taking place around Eagle Lake and other resort towns over the past few years. “If you walk away from people’s houses with that much stuff, you need a place to store it until you get it to whoever you know who buys it from you. I think they must have to go a long way to get rid of it, and they can’t get away all that often, so they need a big place.”
They drove past the town hall and the police station, past the signs at the edge of town, and Sarah said, “Here’s the first right.”
Fritz hauled on the wheel, and turned into a two-lane blacktop road. At first they drove past tarpaper shacks on lawns littered with bald tires and junked cars. FREE PUPPIES, read rain-streaked lettering on a crude sign. The shacks grew more widely spaced, and the land stayed empty. Narrow trees stood at the edge of a muddy field. Far off, a stooped figure moved toward a farmhouse.
“Fritz, your uncle would never buy or rent anything up here—in fact, he enjoys turning down deals, even when they might be good for him, because of the way the local newspaper treated his family.”
“Well, here’s the first left,” Sarah said.
