Mystery

—”

“Our flight has been canceled, I’m afraid,” von Heilitz said. “Anyhow, Tim will have to stick around here for a day, trying to work out how the fire was started.”

“Want to see her,” Tom said with his croaking voice, and the razor blades and knives moved another inch or two into the flesh of his throat.

An oak tree on the lake side of the burning lodge began to incinerate in a rattle of leaves.

“She told—she talked about—”

Von Heilitz stroked his arm through the rough blanket.

A black-haired man wearing a brilliant red silk robe over yellow silk pajamas and sucking on a long pipe stood at the end of the row of people watching the fire. He said something to a young man wearing only a tight pair of faded jeans, and the young man, who was Marcello, swept his arm from the fire to the trees between it and the Spence lodge. Somewhere distant, a horse whinnied in terror. Tom was going to ask von Heilitz what Hugh Hefner was doing here, when the irrelevant thought came to him that the publisher of Playboy would probably have the same kind of private jet as Ralph Redwing. Then he saw that the man in the robe was Ralph Redwing, and that Ralph’s black little eye had just flicked toward him and von Heilitz before it flicked away again. On his smooth, firelit face sat an expression of worried concern as abstracted as Jerry Hasek’s.

“Everybody saw you,” he croaked to von Heilitz.

The Shadow patted his shoulder.

“No, they saw you,” he croaked again, realizing that this was terrible, it must be undone.

The fire took another oak tree.

PART EIGHT

THE SECOND DEATH

OF TOM PASMORE

His room was not white, like his old room at Shady Mount, but painted in bright primary colors, lake water blue and sunlight yellow and maple leaf red. These colors were intended to induce cheerfulness and healthy high spirits. When Tom opened his eyes in the morning, he remembered sitting at a long table in Mrs. Whistler’s kindergarten class, awkwardly trying to cut something supposed to resemble an elephant out of stiff blue construction paper with a pair of scissors too big for him. His stomach, his throat, and his head all hurt, and a thick white bandage swaddled his right hand. A twelve-inch television set on a moveable clamp angled toward the head of his bed—the first time he had switched this off with the remote control device on his bed, a nurse had switched it back on as soon as she came into the room, saying, “You want to watch something, don’t you?” and the second time she had said, “I can’t imagine what’s wrong with this darn set.” He just let it run now, moving by itself from game shows to soap operas to news flashes as he slept.

When Lamont von Heilitz came into the room, Tom turned off the set again. Every part of his body felt abnormally heavy, as if weights had been sewn into his skin, and most of them hurt in ways that seemed brand new. A transparent grease that smelled like room deodorizer shone on his arms and legs.

“You can get out of here in a couple of hours,” von Heilitz said, even before he took the chair beside Tom’s bed. “That’s how hospitals do it now—no lollygagging. They just told me, so when we’re done I’ll pack and get some clothes for you, and then come back and pick you up. Tim will fly us to Minneapolis, and we’ll get a ten o’clock flight and land in Mill Walk about seven in the morning.”

“A nine-hour flight?”

“It’s not exactly direct,” von Heilitz said, smiling. “How do you like the Grand Forks hospital?”

“I won’t mind leaving.”

“What sort of treatment did you get?”

“In the morning, they gave me an oxygen mask for a little while. After that, I guess I got some antibiotics. Every couple of hours, a woman comes around and makes me drink orange juice. They rub this goo all over me.”

“Do you feel ready to leave?”

“I’d do anything to get out of here,” Tom said. “I feel like I’m living my whole life over again. I get pushed in front of a car, and a little while later, I wind up in the hospital. Pretty soon, I’m going to figure out a murder and a whole bunch of people will get killed.”

“Have you seen any of the news broadcasts?” the old man asked, and the edge in his voice made Tom slide up straighter on his pillows. He shook his head.

“I have to tell you a couple of things.” The old man leaned closer, and rested his arms on the bed. “Your grandfather’s lodge burned down, of course. So did the Spence lodge. There’s nobody left at the lake now—the Redwings flew everybody back on their jet this morning.”

“Sarah?”

“She was released around seven this morning—she was in better shape than you were, thanks to that blanket you wrapped around her. Ralph and Katinka dropped the Spences and the Langenheims on Mill Walk, and flew straight to Venezuela.”

“Venezuela?”

“They have a vacation house there too. They didn’t want to stick around Eagle Lake, with all the mess and stink. Not to mention the crime investigation.”

“Crime?” Tom said. “Oh, arson.”

“Not just arson. Around two o’clock this afternoon, when the ashes finally got cool enough to sift through, Spychalla and a part-time deputy found a body in what was left of your lodge. It was much too badly burned to be identified.”

“A body?” Tom said. “There couldn’t be—” Then he felt a wave of nausea and horror as he realized what had happened.

“It was your body,” von Heilitz said.

“No, it was—”

“Chet Hamilton was there when they found it, and all three men knew it had to be you. There wasn’t anybody around to tell them different, and they even had a beautiful motive. Which was that Jerry Hasek—well, you know. Hamilton wrote his story as soon as he got back to his office, and it will run in tomorrow’s paper. As far as anybody knows, you’re dead.”

“It was Barbara Deane!” Tom burst out. “I forgot—she told me she was going to come over late at night.… Oh, God. She died—she was killed.” He closed his eyes, and a tremor of shock and sorrow nearly lifted him off the bed. His body seemed to grow hot, then cold, and he tasted smoke deep in his throat. “I heard her screaming,” he said, and started to cry. “When I got out—when you were with me outside—I thought it was her horse. The horse heard the fire, and …” He panted, hearing the screams inside his head.

He put his hands over his ears; then he saw her, Barbara Deane opening the door to the lodge in her silk blouse and her pearls, worried about what he had heard about her; Barbara Deane saying, I’m not sure any woman could have been what people think of as a good wife to your grandfather; saying, I’ve always thought that your grandfather saved my life. He put his hands over his eyes.

“I agree with you,” the old man said. “Murder is an obscenity.”