by Peter Straub
“Who owns it?” Sarah said. “I’ve never seen anyone there.”
Mr. Spence said, “I tried to buy that place, but the owner wouldn’t even return my calls. Guy named—”
“Von Heilitz,” Tom said, suddenly realizing. “Lamont von Heilitz. He lives across the street from us.”
“Oh, look, Buddy sees us.” Mrs. Spence jumped up and down and waved. The motorboat was noisily tearing up the length of the lake and, standing up behind the wheel, squat, black-haired Buddy Redwing made violent, meaningless gestures with his arms. He sounded a klaxon, and birds fled the trees. He gave a Nazi salute, sounded the klaxon again, then cut the wheel sharply and heeled the boat over, nearly shipping water, and pointed at the walls of the compound. His companion, whose shoulder-length blond hair streamed out behind him, did not move or respond to Buddy’s antics in any way.
“Why, that’s a girl in that boat with Buddy.” Mrs. Spence put her hands on her hips, having undergone another sudden mood swing.
“Nah, that’s Kip,” Jerry said. “Good old Kip Carson, Buddy’s buddy.”
Buddy drew the speedboat up to the central Redwing dock, and Mrs. Spence avidly watched him jump out of the boat and lash a rope around a post. Buddy’s soft belly hung out over his baggy black bathing trunks. His legs were short, thick, and bowed. Buddy leaned out over the rocking boat, extended a thick arm, and pulled his friend up on the dock. Kip Carson was naked and sunburned a bright red on his narrow shoulders. He tossed back his hair and reeled up the dock toward a stockade door. Buddy made drinking motions with his right hand, then trotted after his friend.
“Kip is a hippie, I guess they call it,” Jerry said.
Mrs. Spence announced that Buddy had invited Sarah for a drink at the compound, so they would drop her off first. Jerry could leave the rest of them at the Spences’ lodge, and Tom could carry his bags to his grandfather’s place. She got back in the car, and pulled the short skirt firmly down as far as it would go. “I’m sure it doesn’t matter what high-spirited boys do when they’re alone together,” Mrs. Spence said. “Buddy and his friend are practically stranded up here. That young man must be the only company the Redwings have in that big compound.”
“Nah, there’s an old lady,” Jerry said. “But Buddy and Kip pretty much run by themselves. They shot a hole in the bar mirror at the White Bear two nights ago.” He drove onto the road circling around the west side of the lake, and soon they were passing the empty parking lot of the clubhouse.
“I wonder who their other guest could be. We must know her.”
“Ralph and Mrs. Redwing call her Aunt Kate,” Jerry said. “She’s a Redwing, but she lives in Atlanta.”
“Oh, of course,” said Mrs. Spence. “We know her, dear.”
“I don’t,” said Mr. Spence.
The Lincoln drew up beside the front gates of the Redwing compound, and Mr. Spence labored out of the car to let Sarah out. “Come back to our place when you and Buddy have said your hellos,” Sarah’s mother called. “We’ll all have dinner with Ralph and Katinka tonight, I’m sure.”
“Tom, too,” Sarah said.
“Tom has things to do. We won’t impose invitations on him.”
Jerry pulled away as Sarah waved, and the car wound through the trees to the Spences’ lodge.
“Of course we know Aunt Kate,” Mrs. Spence said to her husband. “She’s the one who was married to Jonathan. They lived in Atlanta. She’s—she’d be—somewhere in her seventies now, and her maiden name—see, I even know that—her maiden name was—it was—”
“Duffield,” Tom said.
“See!” she cried. “Even he knows it was Duffield!”
Jerry dropped them in front of the porch of the Spence lodge and turned around on the seat to back down the narrow lake road to the compound. The Spences fumbled with bags and keys and moved up on their dusty porch with perfunctory good-byes to Tom, and he carried his two cases down through the trees to his grandfather’s lodge.
Four twenty-foot-long steps of big mortared fieldstones capped with a layer of concrete led up to Glendenning Upshaw’s covered porch. Tom carried his heavy bags through wicker furniture and rapped on the screen door. To his right, he could see the point at which the trees abruptly stopped and gave way to Roddy Deepdale’s shaved lawn. Light bounced off one of the windows in the long, angular Deepdale lodge.
The door opened to a vast dim space shot with cloudy streaks of light. “So you’re here,” said a tall young woman in black who stepped backwards immediately. “You’re Glen’s grandson? Tom Pasmore?”
Tom nodded. The woman shifted to look behind him, and the impression of her youthfulness vanished. There were grey streaks in her smooth hair and deep vertical lines in her cheeks. She was startlingly good-looking, despite her age. “I’m Barbara Deane,” she said, and stood up straight to face him—for an instant, Tom felt that she was trying to see how he responded to her name. She wore a black silk blouse with a double strand of pearls and a close-fitting black skirt. These clothes neither called attention to nor disguised the natural curves of her body, which seemed to match some other, younger face. “Why don’t you get your bags inside, and I’ll show you your room. This is your first time here, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Tom said, and carried his suitcases inside.
“We have two rooms on this level, this sitting room, and the study that leads out to the deck and the pier. The kitchen is back through the arch, and everything is in working order. Florrie Truehart came in to clean this morning, and it’s all shipshape.”
The walls and floor were of hardwood gone grey and dim with age. Antlers and mounted fish hung on the walls. Large colorless cushions softened the handmade furniture. A round walnut table and six round-back chairs took up a separate area near the kitchen. Big windows, streaky with dust, overlooking the lake admitted dim shafts of light. Two other windows looked out on the porch. Tom was sure that sheets had been taken off the furniture only that morning. “Well,” said the woman beside him, “we did our best. The place will get to look a little livelier after you’ve been here a while.”
“Mrs. Truehart is still the cleaning woman? I thought she’d be—”
“Miss Truehart. Florrie. Her brother is the mailman for this district.” She began to move toward a wide wooden staircase covered with a dull red Indian carpet, and once again seemed like two people to Tom, a strong vital young woman and an autocratic older one.
“When does the mail come, by the way?” Tom had picked up his bags and followed her up the stairs.
She looked at him over her shoulder. “I think it’s put in the boxes sometime around four o’clock. Why? Are you expecting something?”
“I thought I’d write some people while I was here.”
She nodded as if she thought this point was worth remembering, and led him the rest of the way up the stairs. “The bedrooms are on this floor. I’m keeping some things in the front bedroom, so I’ve given you the larger of the other two. There’s a bathroom right outside the door. Would you like help with those bags? I should have asked before.”
Sweating, Tom set them both down and shook his head.
“Men,” Barbara Deane said, and came near to him and lifted the larger of his two bags without any sign of effort.
His bedroom was at the back of the house and smelled like wax and lemon oil. The dark narrow planking of the walls and floor glistened. Barbara Deane lifted the big case onto the single bed covered with a faded Indian blanket, and Tom grimaced and put his beside it. He went to a windowed door in the exterior wall and looked out on a narrow wooden balcony nearly overgrown by a massive oak. “Your mother used this room,” she said.
Forty years before, his mother had looked out this window and seen Anton Goetz running toward his lodge through the woods. Now he could not even see the ground.
He turned from the window. Barbara Deane was sitting on the bed beside his suitcases, looking at him. The black skirt came just to her knees, suggesting legs that
would have looked better beneath a miniskirt than Mrs. Spence’s. She pulled the edge of the skirt over the tops of her knees, and Tom blushed. “The lake’s very quiet now. I prefer it like this, but it might be dull for you.”
Tom sat on a spindly chair next to a small square table with an inlaid chessboard on its surface.
“Are you a friend of Buddy Redwing’s?”
“I don’t really know him. He’s four or five years older than me.”
“It’s disconcerting—you look much older than you really are.”
“Hard life,” he said, but she did not answer his smile. “Do you live here all year-round?”
“I come to the lodge three or four days a week. The rest of the time I spend in a house I own in the town.” She looked around the room as if she were inspecting it for dust. “What do you know about me?” She kept her eyes on the bare shining planks of the wall opposite the bed.
“Well, I know you were my midwife, or my mother’s midwife, or however you say it.”
She glanced sideways at him, and brushed an elegant strand of hair away from her eye.
“And I know you were one of the witnesses at my parents’ wedding.”
“And?”
“And I guess I knew that you took care of this place for my grandfather.”
“And that’s all?”
“Well, I know you ride,” Tom said. “When we drove in this afternoon, we saw you riding between the lodges.”
“I usually go riding early in the mornings,” she said. “But there was a lot to be done in here, so I had to put it off. In fact, I just finished changing when you knocked on the door.” She gave the ghostly sketch of a smile, and smoothed her skirt down over her thighs. “We will be here together at least part of every week, and I want you to know that my privacy is important to me. My room is out of bounds to you—”
“Of course,” Tom said.
“I stay out of the way of people from Mill Walk, and I expect them to return the favor.”
“Well, can we talk, at least?”
Her face softened for a moment. “Of course we can talk. We will talk. I didn’t intend to be short with you, but …” She tossed her head, a gesture that looked feminine and petulant at once. She intended to tell him something she had thought to keep hidden. “My house was robbed last week. It upset me very much. I’m the kind of person—well, I don’t even like most people to know where I live. And when I came back to the town from here and found my house ransacked …”
“I see,” Tom said. It explained a great deal, he thought: but it did not explain why she was the kind of person who wanted to keep even her address a secret. “Did they find who did it?”
Barbara Deane shook her head. “Tim Truehart, the chief of police in Eagle Lake, thinks it was a gang from out of town—maybe as far away as Superior. There’ve been a number of burglaries around here in the past few summers. They hit the summer people’s lodges, usually, and grab their stereo systems and TV sets. But you never think it’s going to be you. Most people in Eagle Lake don’t even lock their doors. I’ll tell you the worst part.”
She looked at him directly now, and twisted on the bed to face him. “They killed my dog. I suppose I got him partly as a watchdog, but I didn’t think of him that way anymore. He was just a big sweet animal—a Chow. They cut his throat and left his body in the kitchen like a—like a calling card.” She was struggling to control herself. “Anyhow, after that I moved some of my things over here, where they seemed safer. I’m still—jumpy. And angry. It’s so personal.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
And that broke the spell. Barbara Deane jumped up from his bed and frowned. “I didn’t mean to bore you with all of that. Don’t mention this at the compound, will you? Eagle Lake people detest any kind of unpleasantness. I’m sure you’d like to get out and acquaint yourself with this place. They’ll start serving dinner at the club at seven, unless you want me to cook something for you.”
“I’ll try the club,” Tom said. “But could we talk later?”
“If you like,” she said, and left him alone in the bedroom.
Tom listened to her footsteps moving down the hall. Her bedroom door clicked shut. He went to the bed and unzipped his suitcases, took out his books and clothes, and hung the clothes in a closet that looked like a coffin with a lightbulb. He pushed the bags under the narrow bed. When he stood up he looked around at the bare little room with its narrow planking. Without Barbara Deane in it, the whole room reminded him of a coffin. He picked up a book and went out into the hallway.
On the other side of the staircase, Barbara Deane’s door remained closed. What do you know about me? He pictured her sitting in a chair, looking out at the lake.
A speedboat barked.
Tom went downstairs, imagining that Barbara Deane listened to every footfall and creak of the stairs. He walked through the big room, passed under the arch, and went into the kitchen. This was like Lamont von Heilitz’s kitchen, with open shelves, broad counters, and a long black stove. The walls were of the same narrow board as his mother’s old bedroom, once a pale brown and now a dim grey flaking with old varnish. Grey dust and ancient dirt had packed the gaps between the wide floorboards. The only modern appliance was a small white Kenmore refrigerator. A wrapped loaf of brown bread sat on the counter beside the refrigerator. Tom turned on the taps over the square brass sink and washed his hands and face with an old yellow bar of coal tar soap. He dried himself on a threadbare dishtowel. Barbara Deane had stocked the refrigerator with milk, eggs, cheese, bacon, bread, ground beef, and sandwich meat. He blew into a dusty glass and filled it with milk. Then he carried the glass through the other room and opened a handmade wooden door and let himself into the study.
Dim bookshelves filled with unjacketed books faced a long desk with a black Bakelite telephone and a green felt pad with a leather border and an empty penholder. An oval pink and green hooked rug lay on the floor, and a hooked rug in two shades of brown lay folded on a tan sofa with unfinished arms and metal-wrapped joints. An old standard lamp stood at the far end of the sofa, and another stood beside the desk. The room was almost hot. It evoked his grandfather more than any other part of the lodge: Tom understood instinctively that this little room overlooking the lake had been his grandfather’s favorite part of the house. Streaky sunlight from two big windows partitioned into panes fell halfway into the room. The barking growl of the speedboat grew louder. Tom drank some of the milk and sat down behind the desk. He pulled open the drawers and found a few old paperclips, a stack of thick paper headed Glendenning Upshaw, Eagle Lake, Wisconsin, and a slim telephone book for the towns of Eagle Lake and Grand Forks. Tom turned to the pages for Eagle Lake and found the names beginning with D. Barbara Deane’s telephone number was unlisted. He finished the milk, put the glass on top of the telephone book, and went outside.
Buddy Redwing was turning the boat in tight, repetitive figure eights in front of the compound and the clubhouse, at the top of the 8 ripping through the reeds. Two blond heads the size of ping-pong balls tilted from side to side as the boat heeled over. Kip Carson’s hair was longer than Sarah’s. Tom sat down at a scarred redwood picnic table on the broad deck and watched them go around and around. When the boat heeled over at the bottom of the 8, the two blond people threw up their hands like passengers on a roller coaster, and Buddy cawed. Sarah waved at him, and he waved back. Buddy bawled out something hoarse and unintelligible. Tom stood up, and Buddy wheeled the boat back up toward the reeds. Sarah raised her arms to him again. Buddy cut the boat deeper into the marshy water, and the motor growled and whined and abruptly cut out, leaving a great silence spreading over the lake. A bird cried out, and another answered it. Buddy moved heavily to the back end of the boat and began yanking on the cord. Sarah pointed toward the clubhouse.
Tom stood up and walked out on the massive dock. A hundred feet away on their own dock, Mr. and Mrs. Spence took the air in new resort clothes. Mr. Spence’s back was to Tom, and his
hands rested on his fat hips. He was shaking his head over Buddy’s mishandling of the boat. Mrs. Spence leaned self-consciously against a mooring, saw Tom, and turned away.
In the middle of the lake a fish broke the water and flashed blue-grey above the darker blue water before splashing back down. Ripples spread and melted back into the glassy surface.
To Tom’s right, the Deepdale dock left the treeless shore and protruded into the water. Beyond it lay the Thielman dock. Tom walked out to the end of his own dock to be able to see the Thielman lodge, and found himself looking at a shoreline thickly covered with trees through which only a grey door, a shuttered window, and a scattered backdrop of grey wall was visible. The motor coughed twice, and fell silent. Tom turned to look past the Spences, and saw Kip Carson pushing on the front of the boat in waist-high water. His chest and arms were pale and skinny, and he looked weary. Buddy shouted “Jerry! Jerry!” again and again in the flat, demanding tone of a spoiled child. Finally Jerry Hasek appeared through the door in the compound fence. He had changed from his jeans and sweatshirt into a shiny grey suit. He looked at the boat and then disappeared back through the door into the compound.
Tom went back inside and took a handful of the stationery from the drawer. He crossed out his grandfather’s name and printed his own beneath it. He thought for a moment, then began writing to Lamont von Heilitz. When he had covered a page, he heard Barbara Deane coming quickly down the stairs. Her footsteps crossed the larger sitting room. The door closed. Tom began on a second page. He heard a car starting up in the woods behind the house. About the time the car reached the wide stony path in front of the lodge, the motorboat started up again. Tom finished his long letter and looked at his watch. It was two-thirty. He folded the letter into thirds, and made another search of the desk drawers until he found a stack of envelopes. He scratched out his grandfather’s name on the first one, wrote Tom above it and printed Lamont von Heilitz’s address, and sealed the letter into the envelope. Then he left the lodge and began walking down the path.