by Peter Straub
The elder Redwings would very likely have been more comfortable with the thought of their son actually performing some of the acts depicted on the page before them than with the fact of his reading about them. In a boy, sexual experimentation could be put down to high spirits, but reading about such things smacked of perversion. They were shocked, and though they did not quite perceive this, they felt their values betrayed. Fritz quickly confessed that Tom Pasmore had told him about the dreadful book. And because the Redwings were the richest, most powerful, and most respected family on Mill Walk, Tom’s reputation underwent a subtle darkening. He was perhaps not—perhaps not entirely reliable.
Tom’s response was that he preferred being not perhaps entirely reliable. Certainly he had no interest in being an imitation Redwing, though that was the goal of most of what passed for society on Mill Walk. Redwing reliability consisted of thoughtless, comfortable adherence to a set of habits and traits that were generally accepted more as the only possible manners than as simple good manners.
One arrived at business appointments five minutes late, and half an hour late for social functions. One played tennis, polo, and golf as well as possible. One drank whiskey, gin, beer, and champagne—one did not really know much about other wines—and wore wool in the winter, cotton in summer. (Only certain brands and labels were acceptable, all others being either comically inappropriate or more or less invisible.) One smiled and told the latest jokes; one never publicly disapproved of anything, ever, nor too enthusiastically gave public approval, ever. One made money (or in the Redwings’ case, conserved it) but did not vulgarly discuss it. One owned art, but did not attach an unseemly importance to it: paintings, chiefly landscapes or portraits, were intended to decorate walls, increase in value, and testify to the splendor of their owners. (When the Redwings and members of their circle decided to donate their “art” to Mill Walk’s Museo del Kunst, they generally stipulated that the Museo construct facsimiles of their living rooms, so that the paintings could be seen in their proper context.) Similarly, novels told stories designed to be the summer entertainment of women; poetry was either prettily rhymed stuff for children or absurdly obscure and self-important; and “classical” music obligingly provided a set of familiar melodies as a background for being seen in public in one’s best clothes. One ignored as far as was possible any distasteful, uncomfortable, or irritating realities. One spent the summers in Europe, buying things, at South American resorts, buying other things, or “up north,” ideally at Eagle Lake, drinking, fishing, organizing lavish parties, and committing adultery. One spoke no foreign language, the idea was ridiculous, but a faulty and rudimentary knowledge of German, if assimilated at the knee of a grandparent who had once owned a great deal of eastern shore property and made a very good thing of it, was acceptable. One attended Brooks-Lowood and played in as many sports as possible, ignored and ridiculed the unattractive and unpopular, despised the poor and the natives, thought of any other part of the Western Hemisphere except Eagle Lake and its environs as unfortunate in exact relation to its dissimilarity to Mill Walk, went away to college to be polished but not corrupted by exposure to interesting but irrelevant points of view, and returned to marry and propagate oneself, to consolidate or create wealth. One never really looked worried, and one never said anything that had not been heard being said before. One belonged to the Mill Walk Founders Club, the Beach & Yacht Club, one or both of two country clubs, the alumni club of one’s college, the Episcopal Church, and in the case of young businessmen, the Kiwanis Club, so as not to appear snobbish.
Generally, one was taller than average, blond, blue-eyed. Generally one had perfect teeth. (The Redwings themselves, however, tended to be short, dark, and rather heavyset, and to have wide spaces between their teeth.)
One branch of the Redwing family attempted to install fox hunting—“riding to hounds”—as a regular part of island life, but due to the absence of native foxes and the unfailing ability of the native cats and ferrets to evade the panting, heat-stricken imported hounds, the custom swiftly degenerated to regular annual participation at the Hunt Ball, with the local males dressed in black boots and pink hacking jackets. As the nature of this attempt at an instant tradition might indicate, Mill Walk society was reflexively Anglophile in its tastes, drawn to chintz and floral patterns, conservative clothing, leather furniture, wood paneling, small dogs, formal dinners, the consumption of game birds, “eloquent” portraits of family pets, indifference to intellectual matters, cheerful philistinism, habitual assumption of moral superiority, and the like. Also Anglophile, perhaps, was the assumption that the civilized world—the world that mattered—by no means included all of Mill Walk, but only the far east end where the Redwings, their relatives, friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on lived, and, though this was debatable, Elm Cove, which lay to the western end of Glen Hollow Golf Club. Other outposts of the civilized world were: Bermuda, Mustique, Charleston, particular sections of Brazil and Venezuela—especially “Tranquility,” the Redwing hideaway there—certain areas of Richmond, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and London, Eagle Lake, the Scottish highlands, and the Redwing hunting lodge in Alaska. One might go anywhere in the world, certainly, but there was surely no real need to go anywhere but to these places, which between them made up the map of all that was desirable to a right-minded person.
To a reliable person, one could say.
Tom became interested in Mill Walk’s few murders, and kept a scrapbook of clippings from the Eyewitness that concerned them. He did not know why he was interested in these murders, but every one of them left behind, on a hillside or in a room, a prematurely dispossessed body, a body that would otherwise be filled with life.
Gloria was distressed when she discovered this scrapbook, which was of ordinary, even mundane appearance, with its dark board covers that resembled leather and large stiff yellow pages—part of her distress was the contrast between the homely scrapbook, suggestive of matchbook collections and photographs from summer camp, and the headlines that jumped from its pages: BODY DISCOVERED IN TRUNK. SISTER OF FINANCE MINISTER MURDERED IN ROBBERY ATTEMPT. She considered removing the scrapbook from his room and confronting him with it, but almost immediately decided to pretend that she had not seen it. The scrapbook was merely one of a thousand things that distressed, alarmed, or upset Gloria.
Most of Mill Walk’s murders were as ordinary as the scrapbook into which Tom glued their newspaper renderings. A pig farmer was hit in the head with a brick and dumped, to be trampled and half-devoured by his livestock, into a pen beside his barn. BRUTAL MURDER OF CENTRAL PLAINS FARMER, said the Eyewitness. Two days later, the newspaper reported SISTER OF FARMER CONFESSES: Says He Told Me He Would Marry, I Had To Leave Family Farm. A bartender in the old slave quarter was killed during a robbery. One brother killed another on Christmas Eve: SANTA CLAUS DISPUTE LEADS TO DEATH. After a native woman was found stabbed to death in a Mogrom Street hovel, SON MURDERED MOTHER FOR MONEY IN MATTRESS—MORE THAN $300,000!
Gloria eventually decided to seek reassurance from a sympathetic source.
Tom’s English teacher at Brooks-Lowood, Dennis Handley, Mr. Handley, or “Handles” to the boys, had come to Mill Walk from Brown University, looking for sun, enough money to live reasonably well, a picturesque apartment overlooking the water, and a life reasonably free of stress. Since he enjoyed teaching, had spent the happiest years of his life at a draconian prep school in New Hampshire, was of an even-tempered, friendly nature, and had virtually no sexual desires whatsoever, Dennis Handley had enjoyed his life on Mill Walk from the first. He had found that apartments on the water were beyond his price range, but almost everything else about his life in the tropics suited him.
When Gloria Pasmore told him about the scrapbook, he agreed to have a talk with the boy. He did not know exactly why, but the scrapbook sounded wrong. He thought it might be a sourcebook for future stories, but the whole tone of the thing disturbed him—too morbid, too twisted and obsessive. Surely Tom P
asmore was not thinking of writing crime novels? Detective novels? Not good enough, he said to himself, and told Gloria, who seemed to have gone perhaps two drinks over her limit, that he would find out what he could.
Some time ago Dennis Handley had mentioned to Tom that he had begun collecting rare editions of certain authors while at Brown—Graham Greene, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, primarily—and that Tom might come to look at these books any time he liked. On the Friday after his conversation with Gloria Pasmore, Dennis asked Tom if he would be free after school to look over his books and see if he’d like to borrow anything. He offered to drive him to his apartment and bring him back home afterward. Tom happily agreed.
They met outside Dennis’s classroom after the end of school and in a crowd of rushing boys walked down the wide wooden stairs past a window with a stained glass replica of the school’s circular seal. Because he was a popular teacher, many of the boys stopped to speak to Dennis or to wish him a good weekend, but few even said as much as hello to Tom. They scarcely looked at him. Except for the healthy glow of his skin, Tom was not a particularly handsome boy, but he was six-four. His hair was the same rough silky-looking blond as his mother’s, and his shoulders stuck out impressively, a real rack of muscle and bone under his rumpled tweed jacket. (At this stage of his life, Tom Pasmore never gave the impression of caring about, or even much noticing, what clothes he had happened to put on that morning.) At first glance, he looked like an unusually youthful college professor. The other boys acted as though he were invisible, a neutral space. They stood suspended on the stairs for a moment as the departing boys swirled about them, and as Dennis Handley talked to Will Thielman about the weekend’s homework, he glanced at Tom, slouched in the murky green-and-red light streaming through the colored glass. The teacher saw how thoroughly Tom allowed himself to be effaced, as if he had learned how to melt away into the crowd—all the students poured downstairs through the dim light and the shadows, but Tom Pasmore alone seemed on the verge of disappearance. This notion gave Dennis Handley, above all a creature of sociability, of good humor and gossip, an unpleasant twinge.
Soon they were outside in the faculty parking lot, where the English teacher’s black Corvette convertible looked superbly out of place among the battered Ford station wagons, ancient bicycles, and boatlike sedans that were the conventional faculty vehicles. Tom opened the passenger door, folded himself in half to get in, and sat with his knees floating up near the vicinity of his nose. He was smiling at his discomfort, and the smile dispelled the odd atmosphere of secrecy and shadows, which Handley had surely only imagined about the boy. He was the tallest person who had ever been in the Corvette, and Dennis told him this as they left the lot.
It was like sitting next to a large, amiable sheep dog, Dennis thought, as he picked up speed on School Road and the wind ruffled the boy’s hair and fluttered his tie. “Sorry the space is so tight,” he said. “But you can push the seat back.”
“I already did push the seat back,” Tom said, grinning through the uprights of his thighs. He looked like a circus contortionist.
“Well, it won’t be long,” Dennis said, piloting the sleek little car south on School Road to Calle Berghofstrasse, then west past rows of shops selling expensive soaps and perfumes to the four lanes of Calle Drosselmeyer, where they drove south again for a long time, past the new Dos de Mayo shopping center and the statue of David Redwing, Mill Walk’s first Prime Minister, past rows of blacksmiths and the impromptu booths of sidewalk fortune-tellers, past auto repair shops and shops dealing in pythons and rattlesnakes. They moved along in the usual bustle of cars and bikes and horse carts. Past the tin can factory and the sugarcane refinery, and further south through the little area of hovels, shops, and native houses called Weasel Hollow, where the woman who slept on “a king’s ransom” (the Eyewitness) had been murdered by her son. Dennis swerved expertly onto Market Street, weaved through and around a series of vans delivering produce to Ostend’s Market, and zipped through the last seconds of a yellow light onto Calle Burleigh, where at last he turned west for good.
Tom spoke for the first time since they had left the school. “Where do you live?”
“Out near the park.”
Tom nodded, thinking that he meant Shore Park, and that he must be planning on doing some shopping before he went home. Then he said, “I bet my mother asked you to talk to me.”
Dennis snapped his head sideways.
“Why do you think she’d want me to talk to you?”
“You know why.”
Dennis found himself in a predicament. Either he confessed that Gloria Pasmore had described Tom’s scrapbook to him, thereby admitting to the boy that his mother had looked through it, or he denied any knowledge of Gloria’s concern. If he denied everything, he could hardly bring up the matter of the scrapbook. He also realized that denial would chiefly serve to make him look stupid, which went against his instincts. It would also set him subtly against Tom and “on the side of” his parents, also counter to all his instincts.
Tom’s next statement increased his discomfort. “I’m sorry you’re worried about my scrapbook. You’re concerned, and you really shouldn’t be.”
“Well, I—” Handley stopped, not knowing how to proceed. He realized that he felt guilty, and that Tom was perceptive enough to see that too.
“Tell me about your books,” Tom said. “I like the whole idea of rare books and first editions, and things like that.”
So with evident relief, Dennis began describing his greatest bookfinding coup, the discovery of a typed manuscript of The Spoils of Poynton in an antiques shop in Bloomsbury. “As soon as I walked into that shop I had a feeling, a real feeling, stronger than anything I’d ever known,” he said, and Tom’s attention was once again completely focused on him. “I’m no mystic, and I do not believe in psychic phenomena, not even a little bit, but when I walked into that shop it was like something took possession of me. I was thinking about Henry James anyhow, because of the scene in the little antiques shop in The Golden Bowl, where Charlotte and the Prince buy Maggie’s wedding present—do you know the book?”
Tom nodded, extraordinary boy, and listened intently to the catalogue of goods in the antiques shop, the slightly enhanced depiction of the shop’s proprietor, the grip of the mysterious “feeling” that increased as Handley wandered through the shabby goods, the excitement with which he had come across a case of worn books at the very back of the shop, and at last the discovery of a box of typed papers wedged between an atlas and a dictionary on the bottom shelf. Dennis had opened the box, almost knowing what he would find within it. At last he had dared to look. “They began in the middle of a scene. I recognized that it was The Spoils of Poynton after a few sentences—that’s how keyed up I was. Now. That book was the first one James ever dictated—and he didn’t dictate the whole thing. He had begun to have wrist trouble, and he hired a typist named William McAlpine after he began work on it. I knew I’d found McAlpine’s dictation copy of the book, which he had later retyped, including James’s handwritten chapters, to prepare a correct copy to send to James’s publisher. I could never prove it, probably, but I didn’t have to prove it. I knew what I had. I took it up to the little man, trembling like a leaf, and he sold it to me for five pounds, clearly thinking that I was a lunatic who’d buy anything at all. He thought I was buying it for the box, actually.”
Dennis paused, in part because his listeners usually laughed at this point and in part because he had not described this moment for several years and his retelling had brought back to him its sensations of triumph and nearly uncontainable jubilation.
Tom’s response brought him thumping to earth.
“Have you been reading about the murder of Marita Hasselgard, the sister of the Finance Minister?”
They were back to the scrapbook—Tom had whipsawed him. “Of course I have. I haven’t had my head in a bag during the past month.” He looked across at the passenger seat with real irritatio
n. Tom had propped his legs on the dashboard, and was rolling a ballpoint pen in his mouth as if it were a cigar. “I thought you were interested in what I was saying.”
“I’m very interested in what you were saying. What do you think happened to her?”
Dennis sighed. “What do I think happened to Marita Hasselgard? She was killed by mistake. An assassin mistook her for her brother because she was in his car. It was late at night. When he discovered his mistake, he pushed her body into the trunk and left the island in a hurry.”
“So you think that the newspaper is right?”
The theory that Dennis Handley had just expressed, held by most citizens of Mill Walk, had first been outlined in the editorial columns of the Eyewitness.
“Basically, yes. I suppose I do. I hadn’t quite remembered that the paper put it like that, but if they did, then I think they are right, yes. Would you mind telling me how this relates to The Spoils of Poynton?”
“Where do you think the assassin came from?”
“I think he was hired by some political enemy of Hasselgard—by someone who opposed his policies.”
“Any policy in particular?”
“It could have been anything.”
“Don’t you think Hasselgard ought to be careful now? Shouldn’t he be heavily guarded?”
“Well, the attempt failed. The assassin took off. The police are looking for him, and when they find him, he’ll tell them who hired him. If anybody ought to be afraid, it’s the man who hired the killer.”
All this, too, was conventional wisdom.
“Why do you think he put the sister’s body in the trunk?”
“Oh, I don’t really care where he put Marita,” Dennis said. “I don’t see what bearing that can possibly have on anything. The man looked into the car. He saw that he’d killed his intended victim’s sister. He hid the body in the trunk. Why are we talking about this sordid business, anyway?”