Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  “He never expected them to be found,” Tom said.

  “The lake is surprisingly deep up at that end, and there’s a big drop-off where the reeds end. It was just his bad luck that my line snagged, and Jonathan dove underwater and saw something that looked funny to him.”

  “You didn’t think Goetz was her type?”

  “Anton Goetz! He seemed so obvious. He wanted to project a sort of terribly romantic masculine toughness, you know, always smoking and squinting his eyes, that sort of thing. That war injury helped. He was an excellent shot, by the way. A real marksman. Under the circumstances, that’s a little ghoulish, isn’t it? And he was supposed to own a rather unsavory hotel. Twenty years after all this happened, I thought of Anton Goetz when I saw Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart and Rick’s Café Americain. Except that Goetz had one of those kind of buttery German accents.”

  “He doesn’t sound much like an accountant,” Tom said.

  “Oh, he couldn’t have been an accountant.” She looked to see if he were teasing. “That’s impossible. Do you remember when several people were killed in his hotel? The Alvin? The Albert?”

  “The St. Alwyn,” Tom said.

  “That’s it. There was a prostitute, and a musician, I think, and a group of other people? And there was something about the words ‘blue rose’? And a detective on Mill Walk killed himself? Being here with Roddy and Buzz is what reminds me of all that, I guess. Anyhow, when I heard about it from my relatives on Mill Walk, I thought it was like Anton Goetz to own a hotel where something like that could happen. He couldn’t have been an accountant. Could he?”

  “According to Sarah’s father, he was,” Tom said. “He saw Goetz’s name in the corporate ledgers. But it was actually my grandfather who owned the St. Alwyn.”

  She looked at him fixedly for a second, forgetting about the cup of tea she had lifted from its saucer. “Well now, that’s very interesting. That explains something. On the night that it turned out that Jeanine Thielman disappeared, Jonathan and I had dinner with all the Redwings, as we did most of those nights. I was supposed to get to know his uncle Maxwell and the rest and, of course, they were supposed to give me a good looking over, which is certainly what they did. Those dinners got to be a little nerve-wracking, but I soldiered through, which is what we did in those days. Anyhow, on that night, Jon and I stayed after everyone else went back to the compound. We wanted to be by ourselves, and I asked him if we had to stay the entire summer. Jonathan thought we should, though he was very sympathetic. We didn’t have an argument, but we went to and fro for a long time. At one point, I walked away from him and went to the balcony at the front of the club that overlooks the entrance. And I saw your grandfather talking with Anton Goetz.”

  She looked down and noticed the cup in her hand. She replaced it on the saucer and folded her hands on her lap. “Well, I was kind of startled, I suppose. I didn’t know they knew each other that well—they weren’t each other’s sort at all. Of course I didn’t think that Mr. Goetz and Mrs. Thielman were each other’s sorts either, and it turned out they were. During the day, I’d never seen Glen and Anton Goetz do more than nod to each other. And there they were, having this intense conversation. They were each leaning on something—Anton Goetz on his cane and your grandfather on that umbrella he always carried. I guess so he could hit somebody with it if he got mad.”

  “Did it look like they were arguing?”

  “I wouldn’t say so, no. What struck me at the time was that Glen had left Gloria alone in their lodge. At night. And Glen never left Gloria alone, especially at night. He was a very thoughtful father.”

  Tom nodded. “Goetz always carried a cane?”

  “He needed it to stand up. One of his legs was almost useless. He could walk, but only with a pronounced limp. The limp rather suited him—it went with his being such a good shot. It added to his aura.”

  “He couldn’t run?”

  Kate smiled. “Oh, my goodness, run? He would have fallen splat on his face. He wasn’t the kind of man you could imagine running, anyhow.” She looked at him with a new understanding clear in her intelligent face. “Did someone tell you that they saw him running? They’re nothing but a liar, if they did.”

  “No, it wasn’t that, exactly,” Tom said. “My mother saw a man running through the woods on the night Mrs. Thielman was killed, and I thought it had to be Goetz.”

  “It could have been almost anybody but him.”

  Out on the deck, Roddy Deepdale stood up and stretched. He picked up his books and disappeared from view for a moment before coming in the side door. Buzz followed him a moment later.

  “Anybody for a drink before we get ready to go over to the club?” Roddy said. He smiled brilliantly, and went into his bedroom to put on a shirt.

  “Don’t you wish we had Lamont von Heilitz here, so we could ask him to sort of explain everything?” Kate said. “I’m sure he could do it.”

  “Did Roddy say something about a drink?” Buzz asked, coming in the side door.

  “Maybe a little one,” Kate said. “Everybody over there watches me so carefully, I think they’re afraid I’m going to get maudlin.”

  “I’ll get maudlin for you,” Buzz said. “I have only another week of lying around on decks and getting tan before I have to go back to St. Mary Nieves.”

  Tom stayed another half hour. He learned that the Christopher who had said the wicked thing to Roddy Deepdale was Christopher Isherwood, and then had a surprisingly good time while they all talked about Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin and their author, whom Roddy and Buzz considered a cherished friend. It was the first time in his life he had had such a conversation with any adults, and the first proof he’d ever had that literate conversation was a possibility at Eagle Lake, but he left bothered by the feeling that he had missed something crucial, or failed to ask some important question, during his talk with Kate Redwing.

  When he got back inside his grandfather’s lodge, he tried to write another letter to Lamont von Heilitz, but soon ran dry—he did not really have anything new to tell him, except that he wondered if he should not just go back to Mill Walk and start thinking seriously about becoming an engineer after all. He wondered how his mother was getting on, and if he could do anything to help her if he were at home. Home, just now, did not seem much more homelike than Glendenning Upshaw’s lodge.

  He took a shower, wrapped a towel around himself, and instead of going immediately back into his bedroom to get dressed, walked past the staircase to Barbara Deane’s room. He opened her door and stepped inside the threshold.

  It was a neat, almost stripped-down room, two or three times the size of his, with a double bed and a view of the lake through a large window. A half-open door revealed a tiled bathroom floor and the edge of a white tub with claw feet and a drawn shower curtain. The closet doors were shut. A bare desk stood against one wall, and a framed photograph hung above it like an icon. Tom took three steps closer and saw that it was an enlarged photograph of his grandfather, young, his hair slicked back, giving the camera a thousand-candlepower smile that the expression in his eyes made forced and unnatural. He was holding Gloria, four or five years old, in his arms—the chubby, ringleted Gloria Tom had seen in a newspaper photograph. She was smiling as if ordered to smile, and what Tom thought he saw in her face was fear. He stepped nearer and looked more closely, feeling his own vague sorrow tighten itself around him, and saw that it was not fear, but terror so habitual and familiar that even the photographer who had just shouted “Smile!” had not seen it.

  Marcello led Tom to the table near the bandstand, dropped the menu in his lap as if he were radioactive, and spun around on his heel to inquire after the Redwings. Buddy scowled, Kip Carson blinked at him through a fog of Baby Dollies, and Ralph and Katinka never saw him at all. Aunt Kate’s back was to him, and Sarah Spence sat a mile away, at one of the tables closest to the bar. Mrs. Spence gave him one obsidian glance, then ostentatiously ignored him and spoke in a high
-pitched voice that was supposed to show what a good time she was having. Occasional words floated to Tom: trout, water skis, relaxed. Sarah turned on her chair to send him a fellow-prisoner look, but her mother snapped her back with a sharp word. Neil Langenheim barely nodded at Tom—he sat upright on his chair, tucked in his chin, and despite the red raw skin on his nose and forehead, looked as rigid and contained as he did on Mill Walk. Only Roddy and Buzz were friendly, but they talked without a pause, in a way that suggested that this night’s conversation was one segment of a lifelong dialogue that both of them found amusing and engrossing. They were the best couple in the room. Tom sat at his table and read, wondering how he would get through the rest of the summer.

  The Langenheims left; the Spences bustled Sarah away; Roddy and Buzz left. Ralph Redwing glanced sideways at Tom, frozen-faced. Tom closed the Agatha Christie book, signed the check the elderly waiter slid on a corner of the table, and walked out of the dining room with the back of his neck tingling.

  Huge clouds scudded across the moon.

  He had forgotten to leave lights on in the lodge, and he groped around the big sitting room, walking into furniture that seemed to have moved and changed places while he was gone. Then his hand found a lampshade, his fingers met the cord, and the room came into being again, just as it had been before. He fell onto a couch. After a moment he got up and turned on another light. Then he stretched out on the couch again and read a few more pages of The ABC Murders. He remembered being dissatisfied with it yesterday, but could not remember why—it was a perfect book. It made you feel better, like a fuzzy blanket and a glass of warm milk. A kind of simple clarity shone through everything and everybody, and the obstacles to that clarity were only screens that could be rolled away by the famous little grey cells. You never got the feeling that a real darkness surrounded anyone, not even murderers.

  Tom realized that Lamont von Heilitz had begun talking about Eagle Lake the first night they had met—almost as soon as Tom had walked in the door, von Heilitz had brought out his old book of clippings and turned the pages, saying here and here and here.

  Tom swung his legs off the couch and stood up. He tossed the book down and went into his grandfather’s study. Light from the big sitting room touched the hooked rug and the edge of the desk. Tom turned on the lamp beside the desk and sat behind it. He pulled the telephone closer to him. Then he lifted the receiver, dialed 0, and asked the operator if she could connect him to Lamont von Heilitz’s number on Mill Walk.

  She told him to hold the line. Tom turned to the window and saw his face and his dark blue sweater printed on the glass. “Your party does not answer at this time, sir,” the operator told him. Tom placed the receiver back on the cradle.

  He placed his hands on either side of the phone and stared at it. The telephone shrilled, and he knocked the receiver off the hook when he jumped. He fumbled for it, and finally put it to his ear.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “What’s going on up there?” his grandfather roared.

  “Hello, Grand-Dad,” he said.

  “Hello, nothing. I sent you up there to enjoy yourself and get to know the right people, not so you could seduce Buddy Redwing’s fiancée! And go around pumping people for information about some ancient business that doesn’t concern you, not in the least!”

  “Grand-Dad—” Tom said.

  “And break into the Redwing compound and go snooping around with your popsy! Don’t you know better than that?”

  “I didn’t break in anywhere. Sarah thought I might like to see—”

  “Is her last name Redwing? If it isn’t, she doesn’t have any right to take you into that compound, because she doesn’t have any right to go in there herself. You grew up on Eastern Shore Road, you went to the right school, you ought to know how to conduct yourself.” He paused for breath. “And on top of everything else, on your first day there, you go into town and strike up a relationship with Sam Hamilton’s son!”

  “I was interested in—”

  “I won’t even mention your consorting with that nauseating queer, Roddy Deepdale, who ruined the lot next to mine, but I wonder what you thought you’d accomplish by physically assaulting a member of the Redwing family.”

  “I didn’t assault him,” Tom said.

  “You hit him, didn’t you? Frankly, once you got to Eagle Lake you set about destroying most of what I’ve been building up during my lifetime.”

  “So do you want me to come home?”

  His grandfather did not speak.

  Tom repeated the question. All he heard was his grandfather’s breathing.

  “Sarah Spence isn’t going to marry Buddy Redwing,” he said. “Nobody can make her do that—she isn’t going to let herself be bought.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” his grandfather said. His voice was surprisingly mild. “Tell me, what do you see when you look out the window, this time of night? I always liked nights up at Eagle Lake.”

  Tom leaned forward to try to see through his reflection. “It’s pretty dark right now, and—”

  The lamp beside the desk exploded, and something slammed into the wall or the floor with a sound like a brick falling on concrete. The chair shot out from beneath him, and he landed hard on the floor in the dark. His feet were tangled up in the legs of the chair, and small pieces of glass glinted up from the floor all around him. Other shreds of glass had fallen into his hair. His breath sounded as loud as a freight train chugging up a grade, and for a moment he could not move. He heard his grandfather’s tinny voice coming through the phone, saying “Tom? Are you there? Are you there?”

  He untangled his feet from the chair and raised his head above the top of the desk. One light burned in the Langenheim lodge. Cool air streamed through an empty hole that had once been an upper pane.

  “Can you hear me?” came the shrunken, metallic sound of his grandfather’s voice.

  Tom snatched at the phone and pressed it to his face. A sliver of glass fell from his hair onto his wrist. “Hey,” he said.

  “Are you all right? Did something happen?”

  “I guess I’m all right.” He brushed the sparkling shred of glass off his wrist, then looked out at the still lake and the light in the Langenheims’ lodge.

  “Tell me what happened,” his grandfather said.

  “Somebody shot through the window,” Tom said.

  “Are you hit?”

  “No. I don’t think so. No. I’m just, ah, I’m just—I don’t know.”

  “Did you see anybody?”

  “No. There’s nobody out there.”

  “Are you sure about what happened?”

  “I’m not sure about anything,” Tom said. “Somebody almost shot me. The lamp blew up. Part of the window’s broken.”

  “I’ll tell you what happened. Men from the town sometimes prowl through the woods, seeing if they can get an out of season deer. I remember hearing a lot of gunshots, up there. Hunters.”

  Tom remembered Lamont von Heilitz saying something similar, that first night in his house.

  “Hunters,” he said.

  “One of them got off a wild shot. They’ll be long gone by now. How do you feel now?”

  “Kind of shaky.”

  “But you’re okay.”

  “Yeah. Yes.”

  “I don’t think there’s any reason to call the police, unless you think you have to. After all, not much damage was done. The hunters will be halfway to the village by now. And the police up there never were much good.”

  “Somebody shot at me!” Tom said. “You don’t think I should call the police?”

  “I’m just trying to protect you. There’s a whole history you don’t know about, Tom.” His grandfather was breathing heavily, and his voice was slow and heavy. “As you proved by going to see Sam Hamilton.”

  “Chet Hamilton,” Tom said. “His son.”

  “Chet Hamilton! I don’t care! You’re not listening to me!” His grandfather’s voice had turned ragged. �
�It’s not like Mill Walk—the police are not on your side up there.”

  Tom almost laughed. Everything was upside down.

  “Did you hear me?” his grandfather asked.

  “I’m going to call the police now.”

  “Call me back when they leave,” his grandfather said, and hung up.

  Tom replaced the receiver and stood up by inches, looking out of the window as he did so. His bottom ached from the fall. He rubbed the sore place, and then righted the chair and sat on it. The head of the lamp lolled toward him, and a small ragged hole perforated the shade. He touched the hole, and then looked down sideways at the juncture of the floor and the wall. Without the light, he could see only shadows where the bullet must have stopped. He wanted to turn on the other lamp in the room, but his legs would not let him get out of the chair. His blood made a tidal sound in his ears. Tom tilted the chair and looked up into the lamp. The bulb had disappeared, and the twisted socket canted over like a broken neck.

  His grandfather had saved his life.

  Then he could stand again, and he pushed himself away from the desk and turned on the lamp across the room. One small windowpane was broken, and the top of the lamp beside the desk lolled like a broken flower. A glitter of broken glass lay across the desk. Tom turned on the deck lights with the switch inside the back door, and the window lit up and the lake disappeared. He went back to the desk and looked down—he thought he would find a smashed hole, broken boards, and shattered molding, but at first saw nothing at all, and then only something that looked like a shadow, and then at last a neat hole in the wooden wall, eight or nine inches above the molding.

  In ten minutes someone knocked at the front door. Tom peered out and saw the blond policeman who had arrested the drunk on Main Street. “Mr. Pasmore?” he said. His police car had been pulled up in front of the lodge, and all its lights were turned off—Tom had expected a siren and flashing lights. “You’re the person who called? I’m Officer Spychalla.”