Mystery

“I see it,” Fritz grumbled, and turned into another two-lane blacktop road. Another sequence of muddy fields, these enclosed by collapsing wooden fences, rolled past them. They passed a large white sign reading 2 MILES TO AUTHENTIC INDIAN SETTLEMENT.

“So what?” Fritz asked.

“Two years ago, the Redwing Holding Company rented a machine shop on Summers Street. I saw it in a column in the Eagle Lake Gazette on my first day here.”

“A machine shop?” Fritz said.

“It was an empty building—they probably rented it for a hundred dollars a month, or something like that.”

“Oh,” Sarah said.

Fritz groaned. He put his forehead against the top of the steering wheel. “What am I—what are you trying —”

“It’s Jerry,” Sarah said, once again arriving instantly at an insight.

“Jerry and his Mends probably didn’t know that the paper listed things like that, but they wouldn’t have cared even if they did. They knew no Redwing would ever see it. And on the other side, the name protected them. The police would never suspect the Redwing company of being involved in a bunch of crummy burglaries.”

A lonely set of train tracks crossed the road, coming from nowhere, going nowhere. The Lincoln bumped over them.

Five hundred yards farther on in an empty field, shabby tepees circled a low windowless building of split logs with a sod roof. The hides of the tepees had split and fallen in, and tall yellow weeds grew in all the open places. No one said anything as they drove past.

After another hundred yards, a road intersected theirs. A green metal street sign, almost surreal in the emptiness, said SUMMERS STREET. The road past the abandoned tourist stop was not identified in any way.

“So where is it?” Fritz asked.

Sarah pointed—far down to the right, almost invisible against a thick wall of trees, a building of concrete blocks painted brown stood at the far end of an empty parking lot.

Fritz turned into Summers Street, and drove reluctantly toward the building. “But why would they do burglaries?”

“They’re bored,” Tom said. “They like the feeling of having a little edge.”

The big car drove into the parking lot. Close up, the machine shop looked like the police station that clung to the side of Eagle Lake’s town hall—it needed another building to complete it. Fritz said, “I’m not getting out of the car. In fact, I think we ought to leave right now and go swimming in the lake.” He looked at Tom. “I don’t like this at all. We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“They shouldn’t be doing it,” Tom said.

“Hurry up,” Sarah said.

Tom patted her knee, got out of the car, and walked to the front of the machine shop. Above the door was a stenciled sign that said PRYZGODA BROS. TOOL & DIE CO. He leaned forward and peered into a window beside the door. A green chair with padded arms was pushed against one of the walls of an otherwise empty office. A few pieces of paper lay on the floor.

Tom turned around and shrugged. Fritz waved him back to the car, but Tom walked around to the side of the building, where a row of reinforced windows sat high in the wall. Some of the brown paint had separated cleanly from the concrete, and leaned out away from the wall, as stiff as a dried sail. The windows came down to the level of his chin. Tom looked in the first of them and saw only geometrical shadows. Most of the interior was filled with boxes and unidentifiable things stacked on top of the boxes.

Tom put his hands to the sides of his head and bent closer to the window. One of the objects stacked on top of the first row of boxes was faced with brown cloth framed by an inch of dark wood. On top of it, half lost in the darkness at the top of the room, sat another object like like it. Then he recognized them: stereo speakers. Tom turned his head and grinned at Fritz and Sarah, and Fritz swept his hand back toward himself again: Come on!

Tom moved down to the next window in line, blocked his face with his hands, and leaned forward. Propped against the row of boxes, the faces of Roddy Deepdale and Buzz Laing looked up at him from the chairs in which they had been painted by a man named Don Bachardy. Tom lowered his hands and stepped back from the window, and in that moment, an overweight figure in a grey suit too small to contain a watermelon belly walked around the back of the tall boxes, shaking something in an open cardboard box and peering down into it like a man panning for gold. Tom jumped back from the window, and a row of white rectangles reflected in Nappy’s sunglasses as he looked up.

Tom bent beneath the windows and ran toward the car. He threw himself into the open door, and Fritz scattered dirt and stones with the back tires, yelling “They saw you! Dammit!” The car jolted forward. Tom reached for the open door and pulled it shut as they shot out on Summers Street. “Duck,” Tom said to Sarah, and she bent forward beneath the dashboard. Tom slid down on the seat and looked out of the back window. Fritz stamped on the accelerator, and the Lincoln’s tires squealed on the blacktop. Nappy LaBarre threw open the front door of the building and ran heavily into the parking lot on his short legs. He waved his short thick arms and yelled something. In a second the wall of trees cut him off.

“He saw us,” Fritz wailed. “He saw the car! You think he doesn’t know who we are? He knows who we are.”

“He’s alone,” Tom said, helping Sarah sit up straight again. “There wasn’t any phone in there, I don’t think.”

“You mean he can’t call Jerry,” Sarah said.

“I think he was putting some of the stuff in boxes for their next trip,” Tom said. “Unless he walks back, he has to wait until Jerry comes by to pick him up.”

Fritz turned left on another unmarked road, trying to find his way back to the village and the highway.

“The further adventures of Tom Pasmore,” Sarah said.

“I want to say something,” Fritz said. “I had nothing to do with this. All I wanted to do was go back to the lake, okay? I never looked in the windows, and I never saw any stolen stuff—I don’t even think I saw Nappy.”

“Oh, come on,” Tom said.

“All I saw was a fat guy.”

“Have it your way,” Tom said.

“My Uncle Ralph is not just an ordinary guy,” said Fritz. “Remember I said that, okay? He is not an ordinary guy.”

Fritz drove along the bumpy road, gritting his teeth. He turned right on a three-lane road marked 41 and drove through a section of forest. Thick trees, neither oaks nor maples, but some gnarly black variety Tom did not know, stood at the border of the road, so close together their trunks nearly touched. Fritz ground his teeth, making a sound like a file grating across iron. They burst out into emptiness again.

“I didn’t see Nappy,” he said.

There was another long term of silence. Fritz came to a crossroads, looked both ways, and turned left again. On both sides muddy-looking fields stretched off to rotting wooden fences like match sticks against the dense forest.

The road went up over a rise and came down on a glossy black four-lane highway across from a sign that said LAKE DEEP-DALE—DEEPDALE ESTATES. Fritz ground his teeth again, cramped the wheel, and turned in the direction of Eagle Lake.

“I don’t know what you’re so upset about,” Tom said.

“You’re right, you don’t. You don’t have the slightest idea.” He turned into the narrow track between the trees that led to the lake, and when they reached the bench, he stopped the car. “This is where we picked you up, and this is where we’re dropping you off.”

“Are you going to call the police?” Sarah asked Tom.

“Get out of the car if you want to talk like that,” Fritz said.

“Don’t be a baby,” Sarah snapped at him.

“You don’t know either, Sarah.”

Tom opened the door and got out. He did not close the door. “Of course I’m going to call them,” he said to