“Nappy is still claiming he did all the burglaries himself. He’ll change his mind when it finally hits him that he’ll serve a lot less jail time if he turns in his friends. Spychalla is looking for Jerry Hasek and Robbie Wintergreen, but so far he hasn’t found them. This must be where you got lost the other night.”
The flashlight shone upon smooth grey-brown tree trunks. He moved the beam slightly to the left, and the narrow path reappeared, wandering deeper into the woods. “It looks like it,” Tom said.
“I was sorry to have to let that happen.” Von Heilitz followed the bend in the path.
“So why did you?”
“I told you. Because I wanted you to do just what you have done.”
“Find out that Barbara Deane killed Jeanine Thielman?”
The light stopped moving, and Tom nearly bumped into the old man. Von Heilitz let out a loud, explosive laugh that sounded like “WHA-HAH!” He whirled around and shone the light on the middle of Tom’s chest. Even in the darkness and with his face hidden behind the glare of the light, he looked as if he were suppressing more explosive laughter. “Excuse me, but what makes you think that?”
As irritated now as he had been relieved before, Tom said, “I looked into a box I found in her closet, and along with some old articles that almost accused her of murder, I found two anonymous notes. Jeanine Thielman wrote them.”
“My God,” von Heilitz said. “What did they say?”
“One said ‘I know what you are, and you have to be stopped.’ The other one said something like, ‘This has gone on too long—you will pay for your sins.’ ”
“Extraordinary.”
“I guess you don’t think she killed Jeanine Thielman.”
“Barbara Deane never killed anybody in her life,” von Heilitz said. “Did you think that Barbara Deane also killed Anton Goetz? Hanged him with his own fishing line?”
“She could have done it. He might have been blackmailing her.”
“And she just happened to be waiting in his lodge to make a payment when he arrived with the news that I had accused him of murder.”
“Well,” Tom said. “I guess that part was always a little shaky.” He did not feel angry anymore—he was relieved not to have to think of Barbara Deane as a murderer. “But if she didn’t do it, and Anton Goetz didn’t do it, then who did?”
“You told me who killed them both,” von Heilitz said.
“But you just said—”
“In your letters. Didn’t I say you accomplished just what I hoped you would?” Von Heilitz lowered the flashlight, and Tom saw him smiling at him.
The detective turned around and began moving quickly down the path through the woods.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“In time.”
Tom felt like screaming.
“There’s something else I have to tell you first,” von Heilitz said, still moving rapidly down the path.
Tom hurried after him.
Von Heilitz did not say another word until they had reached the clearing. Moonlight fell on the Truehart cabin, and washed the flowers of all their color. The old man turned off his flashlight as soon as Tom stepped off the path to the grass, and their shadows lay stark and elongated over the silvery ground. The whole world was black and grey and silver. Tom stepped toward him. Von Heilitz crossed his arms over his chest. All the fine lines in his face were deepened by the moonlight, and his forehead looked corrugated. He looked like a person Tom had never seen before, and Tom stopped moving, suddenly uncertain.
“I want so much to do this right,” von Heilitz said. “If I botch this, you’ll never forgive me, and neither will I.”
Tom opened his mouth, but could not speak—a sudden deep strangeness stopped his tongue.
Von Heilitz looked down, trying to begin, and his forehead contorted even more alarmingly. When he spoke, what he asked astonished Tom.
“How do you get on with Victor Pasmore?”
The boy almost laughed. “I don’t,” he said. “Not really.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know. He sort of hates me, I guess. We’re too different.”
“What would he say if he knew that you and I know each other?”
“He’d carry on, I guess—he warned me away from you.” Tom felt the old man’s mixture of tension and earnestness. “What is this all about?”
Von Heilitz looked at him, looked at the silvery grass, back up at Tom. “This is the part I have to do right.” He took a deep breath. “I met a young woman in 1945. I was much older than she was, but she appealed to me a great deal—enormously. Something happened to me that I had thought would never happen. I started by being touched by her, and as I got to know her better, I began to love her. I felt that she needed me. We had to meet secretly, because her father hated me—I was the most unsuitable man she could have chosen, but she
“Are you saying—”
He shook his head and walked a few steps away and looked at the forest. “She became pregnant, and didn’t tell me. I heard about a very exciting case, one that really intrigued me, and I took it. We decided to get married after I came back from the case, and to—to lessen the shock, we went out in public for a week. We attended a concert together, we went to a restaurant, we went to a party held by people who were not in our own circle, but who lived on another part of the island. It was such a relief to do things like that. When I left for my trip, I asked her to come with me, but she felt she had to stay at home to face her father. I thought she could do that. She had become much stronger, or so I thought. She wouldn’t let me deal with her father, you see—she said there would be time for that when I came back.”
He turned to face Tom again. “When I called her, her father wouldn’t let me speak to her. I gave up the case and flew back to Mill Walk the next day, but they were gone. She had told her father everything—even that she was pregnant. Her father kept her away from Mill Walk, and in effect bought her a fiance on the mainland. She—she had collapsed. They came back to Mill Walk, and the marriage took place in days. Her father threatened to put her in a mental hospital if I ever saw her again. Two months after the marriage, she gave birth to a son. I suppose her father bribed the Registrar to issue a false marriage certificate. From that time on, Tom, I never accepted another job that would take me off the island. She belonged to her father again—probably she always belonged to her father. But I watched that boy. Nobody would let me see him, but I watched him. I loved him.”
“That’s why you visited me in the hospital,” Tom said. Feelings too strong to be recognized froze him to the moonlit grass. He felt as if his body were being pulled in different directions, as though ice and fire had been poured into his head.
“I love you,” the old man said. “I’m very proud of you, and I love you, but I know I don’t deserve your love. I’m a rotten father.”
Tom stepped toward him, and von Heilitz somehow crossed the ground between them without seeming to move. The old man tentatively put his arms around Tom, and Tom stood rigid for a second. Then something broke inside him—a layer like a shelf of rock he had lived with all his life without ever recognizing—and he began to sob. The sob seemed to come from beneath the shelf of rock, from a place that had been untouched all his life. He put his arms around von Heilitz, and felt an unbelievable lightness and vividness of being, as if the world had come streaming into him.
“Well, at least I told you,” the old man said. “Did I botch it?”
“Yeah, you talked too much,” Tom said.
“I had a lot to say!”
Tom laughed, and tears ran down his face and dampened the shoulder of von Heilitz’s coat. “I guess you did.”
