by Peter Straub
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.
Two cars were parked beside the gate into the compound, and five or six older, smaller cars had been pulled into spaces on the far side of the dusty parking lot in front of the clubhouse. “Who’s that? Ahoy there!” called a voice from overhead, and Tom looked up to see Neil Langenheim leaning over a veranda railing and beaming down at him from beneath a green-and-white-striped canvas awning. His red forehead had begun to peel, and his jowls and double chin lapped over the collar of an unbuttoned peach-colored shirt. Neil Langenheim, the Pasmores’ next-door neighbor, was a lawyer for the Redwings, and before this Tom had never seen him wearing anything but dark suits.
“It’s Tom Pasmore, Mr. Langenheim.”
“Tom Pasmore? Well! You staying at your grandfather’s lodge?”
Tom said yes.
“Well, where are you going, boy? Come up here, and I’ll buy you a beer. Hell, I’ll buy you whatever you like.”
“I’m going into Eagle Lake to mail a letter,” Tom said. “I want to see the town too.”
“Oh, nobody goes there,” Mr. Langenheim protested. “Talk sense. And you can’t write letters up here—nothing ever happens! And even if it did, all the people you’d write to are up here with you!”
Tom waved to him and set off again, and Mr. Langenheim shouted, “See you at dinner!”
Main Street was lined with gift shops, lunch counters, drugstores, liquor stores, cafés with names like The Red Tomahawk and The Wampum Belt, a shop that sold flyrods and hand-tied flies, a bijou little shop that sold Swiss watches and gold jewelry, an ice cream and candy store, shops that sold post cards and calendars with pictures of kittens in pine trees, a photographer’s studio, an art gallery with paintings of ducks in formation and Indians around campfires, and two gun shops. Three small interconnected stores sold T-shirts with tourist slogans, wooden I Pine Fir Yew ashtrays, and kachina dolls. Cars parked on the bias. Jeeps and station wagons crowded with children rolled up and down the street, and families in short pants, fingernail polish, Indian headdresses, and Greek shepherd shirts carried plastic shopping bags printed with images of pine trees and leaping fish down plank sidewalks with hitching posts.
The two-story fieldstone building that housed the Eagle Lake Gazette stood between a wooden post office and the bow-fronted library at the top end of Main Street, where the tourists generally turned back to see if they had missed anything. A little fortresslike police station clung like a granite limpet to the side of the Victorian town hall across the street, and at the end of town hall was a large white sign reading EAGLE LAKE THANKS YOU FOR VISITING, and a smaller one that said MOOSE LAKE 6 MILES, LOST LOON LAKE 12 MILES, NORTH POLE 2,546 MILES. VISIT THE AUTHENTIC INDIAN SETTLEMENT.
Tom entered the newspaper office and went up to a wooden counter. A man with a bow tie and thinning brown hair fiddled with a pen and a stack of galleys at an overflowing desk; behind him, a tall skinny man in a plaid shirt and an eyeshade played a linotype machine like a pipe organ. The man in the bow tie crossed out a sentence on a length of galley, looked up and saw Tom. He pushed himself away from the desk and came up to the counter.
“Do you want to place an ad? You can write it out on one of these forms, if I can find them under here somewhere.…”
He bent to look under the counter, and Tom said, “I was hoping I could look through some old copies of your paper.”
“How old? Last week’s are on the rack beside the davenport there, but anything older gets put into binders and shelved in the morgue upstairs. You just want to see the paper, or are you looking for something in particular?” He looked back at his desk and the stack of galleys. “The morgue isn’t really one of our tourist attractions.”
“I wanted to see recent copies that would have stories about the local burglaries, especially the one at Barbara Deane’s house, but as many of them as I could read about, and I also wanted to look at papers from the summer of 1925 that would deal with the Jeanine Thielman murder.”
“What are you?” The man reared back from the counter, whipped a pair of round tortoiseshell glasses from his pocket, and peered up at Tom.
If I say I’m an amateur of crime, this guy is going to throw me out of here, Tom thought. And he’d be right.
“I’m a junior at Tulane,” he said. “In sociology. I have to do a thesis next year, and since I’m spending the summer at Eagle Lake, I thought I’d do some of my research here.”
“Crime in a resort area, that kind of thing?”
Tom said that was the general idea.
“Past and present, something like that?”
“Get any closer, you’ll be writing it for me.”
“All right,” the man said. “In a couple of weeks, I’d have to say no, but things are still relatively calm around here. As crazy as things look out on the street now, by the middle of summer there are twice as many people around here. I’m Chet Hamilton, by the way. The proprietor and editor of this hole-in-the-wall operation.”
The man at the linotype machine snickered.
Tom said his name, and they shook hands.
“I guess I can take you up there now and get you started, but I can’t stick around and hold your hand. You’ll have to put everything back and turn off the lights when you’re done. Just tell me when you’re through for the day.”
“Great. Thanks.”
Hamilton pushed up a hinged flap and came through to Tom’s side of the counter. “I did a series on those burglaries, you might be able to use some of my stuff.” He opened the front door and led Tom outside.
A man with knobby knees and a woman with frizzy hair and fat thighs were peering in the Gazette’s windows. “Hey, is this real or is it an exhibit?” the man asked Hamilton.
“I’m not too sure myself,” the editor said.
“See?” the woman said. “I told you. But would you listen to me? No, every word I say is stupid.”
Hamilton led Tom around the side of the building and pulled a crowded key ring from his pocket. “Consider this,” he said, searching through the keys. “Back home, those two people are sensible, responsible individuals. They pay taxes and they hold down jobs. They come fiv
e hundred miles north to a resort, and suddenly they turn into drooling babies who can’t see what’s in front of their noses.” He found the right key, and slotted it into the door. “Crime is different in a resort area, and that’s the reason why. People change when they get away from home.” He opened the door to a worn flight of stairs. “I’ll go up and switch on the lights.”
Tom followed him up the stairs.
“People who’ve never stolen anything in their lives turn into kleptomaniacs.”
At the top of the stairs, he flicked a switch. Bound volumes of the Gazette stood in rows on metal shelves. At the far end of the room were a wooden desk and an office chair. “I suppose you’re from Mill Walk?”
“Yes,” Tom said.
“You’d have to be, you’re up at Eagle Lake and that’s been a hundred percent Mill Walk since before I was born. David Redwing bought all that land and parceled it out among his friends, and it stayed that way ever since.” He took two volumes from a shelf and put them on the desk. “Besides that, you mentioned Jeanine Thielman. You’d have to be from Mill Walk to know that name. She was the first summer person to be killed up here, at least the first one that was ever proved.” Hamilton strode back into the rows of metal shelves and put his hand on the two most recent volumes. “I think you’ll find nearly everything on those break-ins in here.” He slid them off the shelves and came back to the desk.
“It sounds like you think there was another murder of a summer resident before Mrs. Thielman,” Tom said.
Hamilton grinned, and set down the new volumes on top of the old ones. “Well, my father certainly did. He was the editor of the Gazette in those days. A woman drowned in Eagle Lake the year before the Thielman murder. The coroner called it accidental death, and most people thought it was really suicide. My father was pretty sure that the coroner had been bought and paid for—see, in those days, we didn’t have a real full-time coroner in Eagle Lake, we had three undertakers and they took the job in rotation, month by month.”
Tom felt a chill in the hot, airless upstairs room. “Do you remember this woman’s name?”
“I think it was Magda something.”
Tom realized that he had never heard his grandmother’s first name until this moment—so successfully had his grandfather erased her memory. “Magda Upshaw?”
“You got it.” Hamilton leaned on the stack of bound newspapers and frowned down at Tom. “Are you sure you’re as old as you say you are? You don’t look like a junior in college to me.”
“Magda Upshaw was my grandmother.” He swallowed, and his Adam’s apple felt as big as a baseball.
“Huh!” The editor straightened up. His hands flew to his bow tie and tugged at its ends. “Well, I guess I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—” He moved a step back from the table.
“Why did your father think she was murdered?”
“You can read about it, if you like. He had to be careful about the way he said things, but if you read between the lines you’ll catch his drift.” Hamilton dodged into the stacks again and came back with another old volume. “The Chief of Police in those days wasn’t much—it was Prohibition, remember, and a lot of booze went through Eagle Lake. Some people made a lot of money out of it.” He slid the bound volume on top of the others. “It could be the Chief didn’t pay much attention to ordinary law enforcement, especially when it came to rich summer people who did a lot to keep the bootleggers in business.”
“We have police like that in Mill Walk,” Tom said.
“So I hear. You might notice that people here take a certain attitude toward folks from your island. Truth is, they don’t even spend any money in Eagle Lake.”
He slapped his hand on the stack of bound newspapers. “You’ll probably be coming back tomorrow, so you can just leave these on the desk. But remember about the lights and the door, will you?”
Tom nodded.
Chet Hamilton removed his glasses and slid them back into his shirt pocket. He gave Tom a sober, questioning look: he was a decent man, and he was embarrassed and interested in about equal measure. “Even if I hadn’t opened my big fat mouth, don’t you think you would have realized that by going back a year from the Thielman case you could find out what we printed about your grandmother’s death? It must have had a tremendous impact on your family.”
“I think I had a lot of reasons for coming to Eagle Lake,” Tom said.
“Well, maybe some of them are in this room.” Hamilton thrust his hands into his pockets and shifted from side to side. “I’m kind of sorry I brought the whole thing up!” He backed toward the stairs. “I led you a long way from those break-ins you were interested in.”
“Maybe not so far after all,” Tom said.
“Seeing you up here reminds me of a kind of detective my father had to dinner a couple times, way back when. He was from Mill Walk too. People used to call him the Shadow—ever hear of him?”
“Did the Shadow read the files about my grandmother?” Tom asked.
“No—he was still interested in the Thielman case. I guess it meant a lot to him. It made him a hero around here, I can tell you that.” Hamilton gave a half-hearted little wave, and went down the stairs. Tom heard the door close.
The linotype machine rattled beneath him. Traffic sounds came dimly through the windows at the front of the room. Tom opened the topmost volume, propped it on his lap, and began turning the pages.
S.L.H., Samuel Larabee Hamilton, the founder of the Eagle Lake Gazette, had seen his newspaper as an expression of his aggressively opinionated personality, and during the three hours he spent in the upstairs morgue, Tom learned as much about him as he did about Eagle Lake. Samuel Larabee Hamilton had considered Prohibition and income tax prime examples of governmental meddling. He had detested anti-vivisectionists, advocates of racial equality, female liberationists, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, social security, gun control, the University of Wisconsin, free trade laws, and Robert LaFollette. He loathed criminals and corrupt law-enforcement officials, and had not hesitated to give names.
Twice in the 1920s, some person or persons had fired bullets through the windows of the Gazette office, hoping to kill, wound, or scare off its editor. He had responded with 18-point headlines trumpeting THE COWARDS MISSED! and THEY MISSED AGAIN!
From the first, S.L.H. had opposed the Redwing interest in Eagle Lake as a “foreign invasion.” Mill Walk was a “Caribbean police state” that depended on “every indecent practice known to those who rule by fear.” One editorial was entitled THUGS IN OUR BACKYARD.
When a thirty-six-year-old woman was found dead in Eagle Lake with the pockets of her nightdress filled with rocks and was declared a victim of accidental death and cremated within two days, Hamilton had cried foul at the top of his lungs.
The first picture of his grandmother that Tom had ever seen showed a child’s uncertain square face, hesitant eyes, and what looked like straw-gold hair tied back in a bun. Magda Upshaw was leaning against a railing at the Eagle Lake clubhouse, holding a fat little girl with sausage curls as if she were trying to shield her from something nobody else could see.
The Gazette told him that his grandmother was the daughter of Hungarian refugees who owned a small restaurant in Miami Beach. She had left school in the tenth grade, and had worked in her parents’ restaurant until her marriage to a man eight years her junior.
Glendenning Upshaw had married an uneducated foreign woman much older than himself, pushed her into class-conscious, snobbish, Anglophile Mill Walk, and almost immediately began being unfaithful to her.
The whiff of a conviction came to Tom from the old newspapers: that his grandfather had been just as comfortable after his wife’s death as before it. He had everything the way he wanted it: his business—his quasi-secret partnership with Maxwell Redwing, his first building contracts—his daughter, his privacy, the house on Eastern Shore Road.
Samuel Larabee Hamilton had turned up at Eagle Lake shortly after the discovery of Magda’s body. The body had been
pulled up with a drag after five days in the water, and the metal hooks of the drag, the rocks on the bottom of the lake, and the fish had all left their marks. The editor had thought that not all the wounds visible on the body had been due to these causes. What outraged him was that the body had been cremated after a perfunctory autopsy, and what looked at the least like a suicide had been whitewashed as an accidental death. Island justice; thugs in the backyard.
A week after Magda Upshaw’s ashes had been returned to her parents, the management of the Eagle Lake clubhouse had replaced every waiter, busboy, cook, and bartender in the building with men from Chicago. No clubhouse employee would telephone the fractious local editor if another member should die under circumstances that might be misunderstood.
Not long after, Hamilton learned that gangsters were buying cabins and hunting lodges in the county, and he was off on another crusade.
In the next volume, Tom reread the accounts of Jeanine Thielman’s death he had already seen at Lamont von Heilitz’s house. MILLIONAIRE SUMMER RESIDENT DISAPPEARS FROM HOME. JEANINE THIELMAN FOUND IN LAKE. LOCAL MAN CHARGED WITH THIELMAN MURDER. MYSTERY RESOLVED IN TRAGEDY. Pictures of Mrs. Thielman, Minor Truehart, Lamont von Heilitz, Anton Goetz. What Tom had not understood, reading over his neighbor’s shoulder, was how rapturously S.L.H. had greeted the appearance of Lamont von Heilitz. The Shadow was not only a celebrity, he was a hero. His investigation had saved an innocent local man, and rescued the reputation of the town of Eagle Lake in a way that might have been calculated to sell the maximum number of newspapers. He was the top: he was the Louvre Museum, the Coliseum, he was Mickey Mouse. He was just what S.L.H. had been waiting for.
Hamilton had sponsored a Lamont von Heilitz day; he had published the Shadow’s opinions on great unsolved mysteries of the past; he had run a column that invited people to ask the famous detective whatever they most wanted to know about him; and the reclusive detective had submitted to both the Ionization and the assault on his privacy. He had shaken hundreds of hands, had volunteered his favorite color (cobalt blue), music (a dead heat between Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Haydn’s The Creation), tailor (Huntsman’s of Savile Row), novel (The Golden Bowl), and city (New York). He felt that good detectives were not born, like good artists, nor made, like good soldiers, but were produced by a combination of the two.