Mystery

“Maybe I’ll transfer to Tulane, then.” She looked up at him as she had before, and he suddenly remembered exactly how she had looked when she had come to the hospital—how the face she had now, which was the face of her young womanhood, had just formed itself out of her childhood, and how badly he had wanted her to touch him. He wanted to put his arm around her, but she spoke before he could decide to do it.

“Are you really going to come to Eagle Lake this summer?” He nodded. “Listen, I didn’t even think when I was talking to you—at Miss Ellinghausen’s. It’s like, every time I talk to you I say something so dumb I want to curl up and die when I think about it later.”

“What?”

“But if you’re really coming, I guess it must be all right. It is, isn’t it?”

“What must be all right?”

“Well, Eagle Lake isn’t just an ordinary place for you, is it?”

He just looked down at her.

“And I understand that you couldn’t think of it the way we do, so I just wondered …” When he still said nothing, Sarah stopped walking and lightly grasped his arm. “I know your mother drowned, um, died.…”

For a moment both of them looked utterly confused: Tom remembered headlines from Lamont von Heilitz’s journal and saw a photograph of Jeanine Thielman extending a beautiful leg down from a carriage.

“Oh, my God,” Sarah said. “I did it again. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Please forgive me.”

Sarah now looked distressed to the point of tears. “It wasn’t my mother,” he said. “That was my—”

“I know, I know,” Sarah said. “I can’t imagine what—I know it was your grandmother, but in my head it got—I guess because I never see your mother, and I started thinking that—” She threw out her hands, and Bingo growled. Both Tom and Sarah looked down at Bingo, then toward the empty corner at which Bingo fixedly stared. The dog was leaning forward against the leash, and kept up a low growl.

“It’s easy to get mixed up,” Tom said, feeling as if he were speaking from experience.

“I was so sure.” She began to turn red. “How did I get into any college? How did I ever get out of grade school? I’m starting to sound like a Redwing!”

“It was just a mistake,” Tom said. Bingo was still making angry, theatening noises and tugging at the leash.

“Bingo! He hates to be held up, he’s so impatient.…” Stricken by what she had said, Sarah let the dog pull her forward. “I’m so sorry, I can’t—” She shrugged, and made an elaborately apologetic gesture with her free hand.

Tom realized that he could walk down to the hospital and see for himself what had happened to Nancy Vetiver—then it seemed to him that he had been planning to go to Shady Mount ever since leaving his house.

“I have to go somewhere,” Tom said, moving ahead of her and the straining dog, who cast him a wild-eyed, impatient look. “It’s okay! I’ll see you soon!”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Please!” she shouted.

Tom looked back from the far corner of Sarah’s street and saw her gazing toward him. The little terrier was still tugging at the leash, and she stepped forward and waved tentatively. He returned the wave, and crossed the intersection of Yorkminster Place. Houses he had seen and known all his life presented blank, lifeless façades; sprinklers whirred above grass that seemed to be made of spun sugar. Through windows left open to the breezes he saw immaculate empty rooms with grand pianos and looming portraits.

He walked past Salisbury Road, past Ely Place and Stonehenge Circle, past Victoria Terrace and Omdurman Road. Between Omdurman Road and Balaclava Lane the houses became slightly smaller and closer together, and by Waterloo Parade they were ordinary three-story frame and red brick houses. Here a few children rode tricycles up and down driveways, and thick low hedges were the only separation between the houses. A man reading a newspaper on his front porch looked up at him suspiciously but went back to the Eyewitness when he saw only a fairly ordinary Eastern Shore Road teenager.

Cars, bicycles, and pony traps streamed up and down Calle Berlinstrasse. An ambulance went by, then a second ambulance. After another step Tom realized that four police cars had pulled into a circular drive across the street. Lights whirled and flashed. Above the turmoil of ambulances and police cars before which a crowd had begun to gather stood the red brick building in which he had spent nearly three months of his tenth year.

When the light changed, he ran across the street and began to weave through the people peering over the tops of the police cars.

A policeman stood in front of the revolving door that led to the hospital’s waiting room and front desk. He was in his mid-twenties, his uniform was pressed and spotless, and his face looked very white beneath his visor. His buttons, belt, and boots gleamed. He kept his eyes a careful foot or so above the heads of the crowd.

“What happened?” Tom asked a stout woman carrying a white plastic shopping bag.