Mystery

They dropped Tom off at his lodge and promised to invite him for dinner when they were back on the island—“as soon as things settle down.”

Tom called Lamont von Heilitz later that night, but again was told that his party did not answer. He stayed up late reading, and went to bed feeling desolate.

The next morning curtains covered the big lakeside windows in the Deepdale lodge. A glazier came from the village to replace the broken pane in his grandfather’s study and said, “A kid like you must have a lot of fun in a place like this by himself.”

Tom swam in the mornings, walked around and around the lake, finished The ABC Murders

and read Iris Murdoch’s Under The Net and Flight from the Enchanter. He ate alone. Sarah’s parents did not join the Redwings at the bar before dinners, and Sarah did no more than give him a regretful, chastened glance before her mother snapped her back with a sharp word. He swam for hours every afternoon, and twice Buddy Redwing took out his motorboat and wheeled back and forth in figure eights up at the north end while Tom breast-stroked and sidestroked between the docks on the south end. Kip Carson sat open-mouthed beside Buddy the first time, Kip and Sarah Spence together on one of the rear seats the second. Tom walked to the village and found a rack of paperbacks beside the I Pine Fir Yew ashtrays in the Indian Trading Post. He carried home a stack of books and called his mother, who said she wasn’t getting out much, but Dr. Milton was taking care of her. Victor had been offered a job with the Redwings—she wasn’t too sure what the job involved, but he would have to travel a lot, and he was very excited. She hoped Tom was meeting people and enjoying himself, and he said yes, he was.

Certain rules governed his conversations with his mother—he suddenly saw this. The truth could never be spoken: kindly, murderous hypocrisy was the law of life. It was a cage.

The days went by. Lamont von Heilitz never answered his telephone. Barbara Deane came and went, in too much of a hurry and too self-absorbed to talk to him. Tom could not get Sarah Spence out of his mind, and some of the things Buddy had said came back to torture him. He swam so much that night he dropped instantly into dreamless sleep, forgetting even the ache in his muscles.

On the fifth day after the bullet had exploded through the window, he was sitting on a rock at the edge of the woods where the private road to the lake came out to the highway and saw Kip Carson walking toward him, strapped into a backpack and dragging a duffel bag behind him. “Hey, man,” Kip Carson said. “I’m on my way, man, it was really fun and everything, but I’m gone.”

“Where?”

“Airport. I have to hitch. Ralph wouldn’t let me get a ride, and Buddy didn’t give a shit. Buddy’s an asshole, man.”

Tom asked him if he were going back to Tucson.

“Tucson? No way, no fuckin’ way. Schenectady—my old lady mailed me a ticket. Do you think there’s a barbershop at the airport? I gotta get a haircut before I get back home.”

“I didn’t see one,” Tom said.

“Well, it’s been grins.” Kip flashed him a V with two fingers, hoisted his duffel, and went out to stand by the side of the highway. The second car that passed picked him up.

Tom walked back to the lodge.

On Saturday, the pain over Sarah Spence’s absence still so constant as to feel like mourning, rejection, and humiliation joined together, he realized that he had been waiting for Tim Truehart to come back to tell him about whatever Spychalla had found in the woods. He had liked Truehart, and thought about calling him up as he swam back and forth between the empty docks. Of course Spychalla found nothing, and of course Truehart had other things to do. Then he realized that the reason he was thinking about Eagle Lake’s police chief was that he missed Lamont von Heilitz. He climbed up on his dock, went inside the lodge, dressed, and sat down on the couch in the study to write out everything he knew about Jeanine Thielman’s murder. He read what he had written, remembered more, and wrote it all over again in a different way.

His mind seemed to awaken.

And then the events of forty summers past became his occupation, his obsession, his salvation. He still swam in the mornings and afternoons, but while he swam he saw Jeanine Thielman standing in pale cold moonlight on her dock, and Anton Goetz in a white dinner jacket—looking like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca—limping toward her, bowing in a parody of gallantry when he leaned on his cane and swung his useless leg. Tom still walked around and around the lake, but saw a cloud of Redwings in tennis sweaters and white dresses, chattering about the young woman from Atlanta Jonathan had decided to marry. He sat on his dock, seeing the bulllike figure of the young widower who was his grandfather walk slowly back and forth across the planks, his hand gripping the much smaller hand of a little girl in ringlets and a sailor dress.