Mystery

by Peter Straub

  Tom searched the more recent volumes for articles about burglaries and break-ins around Eagle Lake. He learned which houses had been burgled and what had been stolen—a Harmon Karden amplifier and a Technics turntable here, a jade ring and Kerman rug there, television sets, musical instruments, paintings, antique furniture, prescription drugs, clothes, cash, anything that might have a resale value. The break-ins began three years before, in July, and took place between June and September; two dogs besides Barbara Deane’s had been killed, both of them family pets. The burglars had begun with the houses of summer residents, but last year had struck several homes in Eagle Lake that belonged to full-time residents. Chet Hamilton’s series elaborately restated the ideas he had described to Tom, and implied that wealthy college-age children of summer residents were committing the crimes.

  Because he thought that Lamont von Heilitz would have done it, Tom scanned most of the articles and columns in the recent volumes, reading about property transfers, meetings of the town council, arrests for drunken driving and poaching and assault, new appointments to the Chamber of Commerce and the Epworth League, the 4-H Club trip to Madison, traffic accidents, hit and run accidents, bar brawls and knifings and gunshot wounds, applications for liquor licenses, and a squash of record size grown in the garden of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Vale. He made a few notes on a sheet of his grandfather’s old stationery he had folded into his shirt pocket, left the bound volumes on the desk, turned off the light, and went downstairs, thinking about Magda Upshaw, Barbara Deane’s Chow dog, and the premises of an out-of-business machine shop on Summers Street that had been leased to the Redwing Holding Company.

  On the other side of a thick hedge from the Gazette office, the post office looked like a frontier military post in an old John Ford Western. Tom stood on the sidewalk before it, wondering whether he should just put his letter to von Heilitz in the letterbox in front of the post office, or save it to give to the mailman the following day. It was a few minutes past five o’clock, and half of the tourists on Main Street had gone back to their resorts and fishing camps for the American Plan dinner. A powder blue Cadillac with pointed fins swung across the oncoming lanes to make a U-turn too narrow for its wheelbase. Stalled cars behind it honked, and drivers in the opposite lanes slammed on their brakes and skidded to stops. A man in a pink shirt and red shorts opened the door of the Cadillac and fell out into the street. He picked himself up, waved to the shouting people in the other cars, got uncertainly back behind the wheel and slowly backed up without closing his door. A blue mail van squirted around the front of the Cadillac, wove through the waiting cars, and rolled to a stop in front of the post office. A slim black-haired man in a blue postal service shirt and black jeans jumped out of the van and went around to the back to remove a half-filled mailbag.

  Tom took a step nearer, and the mailman glanced at him. “A drunk in a Caddy. I hate to say it, but that’s this town in the summer.” He shook his head, shouldered the bag, and began going up the path to the post office.

  “Excuse me,” Tom said, “but do you know a man named Joe Truehart?”

  The mailman stopped moving and stared at Tom. He looked neither friendly nor unfriendly. He did not even look expectant. After a beat, he lowered the bag from his shoulder. “Yeah, I know Joe Truehart. Pretty damn well. Who wants to know?”

  “My name is Tom Pasmore. I just got here from Mill Walk, and a man named Lamont von Heilitz asked me to say hello to him.”

  The mailman grinned. “All right. Why didn’t you say that in the first place? You found your man, Tom Pasmore. You tell him I said hello back.” He stuck out a firm brown hand, and Tom shook it.

  “Mr. von Heilitz asked me to write to him, and said that I should give my letters to you personally. He didn’t want anybody to see me doing it, but I don’t think anybody’s looking at us.”

  Truehart looked over his shoulder, and grinned another brilliant grin. “They’re all still gaping at the accident that didn’t happen. Mr. von Heilitz told me to look out for you. You got a letter already?”

  Tom handed it to him, and Truehart folded the letter into his back pocket. “I thought you’d show up near the mailboxes. I generally get out to Eagle Lake a little past four.”

  Tom explained that he had come into town before that, and said he would wait near the mailboxes whenever he had letters in the future.

  “Don’t wait out in the open,” the mailman said. “Stick yourself back in the woods until you hear my van. If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right.”

  They shook hands again, and Tom began to walk down Main Street toward the crowd of people watching the traffic disentangle itself.

  Inside the post office, Joe Truehart shouted hello to the postmaster, who was sorting mail at a long table out of sight behind the wall of boxes. He removed Tom’s letter from his hip pocket and reached up to slide it on top of the parcel shelves, where the postmaster, a peppery grey-haired woman named Corky Malleson who was four-foot eleven and a half, would be unable to see it. Then he carried his bag back to the table and began transferring its contents into other bags for the five-thirty pickup. He helped Corky sort the third-class mail and put it into the boxes, and said good-bye to her when she went home to fix dinner for her husband.

  Just before the truck arrived from the central district post office, he heard a knock at the side door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY which admitted himself and Corky into the back of the building. He jumped up from Corky’s desk, where he had been adding up figures and filling out forms, and opened the door. He exchanged a few words with the man on the threshold. Joe Truehart reached up for the letter on top of the parcel shelves and passed it to the man. He locked the door when the man left. Then he sat down again to wait for the arrival of the mail truck.

  Grinding noises and the screech of metal against metal came up the street. Two blocks down from the post office, the back half of the powder blue Cadillac jutted out into the traffic. People in bright vacation clothes covered the plank sidewalks on both sides of the street, looking as if they were watching a parade.

  Tom walked down the planks and saw that the Cadillac had ploughed into the back ends of several cars, crumpling in the first one so badly that it looked as if it had been hit by a truck. The driver had tried to get out of trouble by bulling through the obstructions, and when that had failed, had backed athwart the traffic halfway across the street, and killed his engine. Tom got to the edge of the growing crowd, and began working his way through. The man in the pink shirt got out of the Cadillac and looked around like a trapped bear. People began shouting. A policeman in a tight blue uniform ran down the middle of the street, yelling, “Break it up! Break it up!” He looked like a hero in a movie, with short blond hair and a square perfect jaw. A scrawny old party in a Hawaiian shirt popped out of the crowd around the wrecked cars and began yelling first at the drunk in the pink shirt, then at the policeman. The policeman strode toward him, put his hands on his hips, and spoke. The old man stopped yelling. The drunk drooped over the side of his car. “It’s all over,” the cop said in a loud voice that was not a shout. “Go back home.”

  The drunk in the pink shirt straightened up and tried to explain something to the cop. He pointed his finger at the cop’s wide chest. The cop batted his hand away. He stepped to the side and pushed the drunk into the side of his car and grabbed his wrists and handcuffed him. He opened the Cadillac’s rear door. Then he pulled the man backwards, put his right hand on the top of his head, and propelled him into the back of his car.

  A few cheers and one or two scattered boos came from the sidewalks. The policeman straightened his hat, tugged on his Sam Browne belt, and swaggered around the car to get in behind the wheel. Gears ground, and the Cadillac drifted backwards. The cop spun the wheel and pulled forward. The battered Cadillac moved down the street at the head of a row of cars and turned left.

  The crowd had turned cheerful and gossipy. It had no intention of leaving the scene. Tom stepped around a family of fo
ur that were chewing on sandwiches and staring at the cars beginning to pick up speed, and threaded his way between two couples who were arguing about whether to go into the Red Tomahawk for a beer or to buy a new shirt for someone named Teddy. He stepped into an empty space at the edge of the sidewalk and considered moving across the street, where the crowd looked thinner.

  Someone whispered, “Watch it, kid,” and before he could look around someone kicked him hard in his left ankle and someone else banged him in the back and shoved him into the traffic.

  His arms flew out before him, and he staggered a few steps before his ankle began to melt. Screams and shouts came from the sidewalk. Horns blew. His heart stopped beating. A man and a woman with wide eyes and open mouths appeared behind the smeared windshield of a station wagon piled with suitcases lashed to its roof with bright green netting. Tom took in the expressions on their faces and the color of the netting with great clarity, and then saw only the massive hood and the bugspattered grille of the station wagon. His ankle bent like a green twig. He struck the ground, and the air turned black and cacophonous.

  A roaring noise filled his ears, and then a dim music replaced it, and the memory of a piercing harmony encased him, and his ten-year-old self bent toward him and said: Music does explain everything. Then dust and gravel sprang up in front of his eyes, and each speck of gravel threw a speck-sized shadow.

  A high-pitched voice, the voice of a cartoon goose, called, “That boy’s drunk!”

  He pushed himself up. His ankle sang. In front of him, a startled man in a baseball cap stared out through the windshield of a Karmann Ghia. Tom looked over his shoulder and saw the rear end of a station wagon piled high with bags and cardboard boxes. Then a man with a crew cut and trembling arms was helping him stand. “That car just went right over you,” he said. “You’re one goddamned lucky son of a gun.” The man’s arms were trembling.

  “Somebody pushed me,” Tom said.

  He heard the crowd repeating his words like an echo with different voices.

  The man and woman got shakily out of the station wagon. Each of them took a step forward. The woman asked if he were all right.

  “Somebody pushed me,” Tom said.

  The couple took another step forward, and Tom said, “I’m all right.” They got back into the station wagon. The man in the crew cut helped Tom back to the sidewalk. The traffic began to whoosh past.

  “Do you want to see a cop?” the man asked. “Do you want to sit down?”

  “No, I’m okay,” Tom said. “Did you see who pushed me?”

  “All I saw was you, flyin’ out into the street,” said the man. He released Tom and stepped backwards. “If somebody pushed you, you oughta see a cop.” He looked around as if trying to find one.

  “Maybe it was an accident,” Tom said, and the man nodded vigorously.

  “You got dust all over your face,” the man said.

  Tom wiped his face and began brushing off his clothes, and when he looked up again the man was gone. The other people on the sidewalk stared at him, but did not come near. His head felt as light as a balloon, his body as weightless as a thistle—a breeze could have knocked him over. Tom slapped the worst of the dust off his knees and limped down the sidewalk toward the highway.

  Sarah Spence jumped up from the cast-iron bench near the mailboxes when Tom came limping down the track between the great pines and oaks. She had showered and changed into a sleeveless blue linen dress, and her hair glowed. “Where did you go?” And, a second later, after she had a better look at him: “What happened to you?”

  “It’s nothing serious. I went to Eagle Lake, and I fell down.” He limped toward her.

  “You fell down? Mr. Langenheim said you went into the town, but I thought he might have heard wrong.… Where did you fall down?”

  She had come right up to him, and for a moment put her hands on his arms and looked up at him with her serious, wide-set eyes.

  “Main Street,” he said. “I was quite a spectacle.”

  “Are you okay?” She had not taken her eyes off his face, and her pupils darted crazily from side to side. He nodded, and she wrapped her arms around him and pushed her head against his chest like a cat. “How did you happen to fall down in the middle of Main Street?”

  “Just lucky.” He stroked her head, and felt something like ordinary feelings return to him. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  “Didn’t you see me asking you to meet me at the club?”

  “I wanted to mail a letter.” She tilted her head and looked questioningly at him. “And I wanted to look up some old articles in the local paper.”

  They began moving down between the trees, their arms around each other. Tom forced himself not to limp.

  “I’ve had at least three lifetimes today,” she said. “The best one was on the plane. In our little compartment.”

  After a few more steps, she said, “Buddy’s angry with me. I’m not so enchanted with him this summer. It’s against the rules, not to be enchanted with Buddy Redwing.”

  “How angry is he?”

  She looked up at him. “Why? Are you afraid of him?”

  “Not exactly. But somebody pushed me off the sidewalk, right into the traffic. I fell down, and a car passed right over me.”

  “The next time you go on another excursion, I want you to bring me with you.”

  “You seemed pretty busy with Buddy and his friend.”

  “Oh sure, the great Kip Carson—you know what he does? You know why Buddy keeps him around? He carries this sack of pills around with him, and he gives them away like candy. Talking to him is like having a conversation with a druggist. Buddy loves these things called Baby Dollies. That’s another reason he got mad at me. I wouldn’t take any of them.”

  On the peak that descended to the lake, they looked down at the still blue water and the quiet lodges.

  “I don’t think Buddy is ever going to be a captain of industry, or whatever his father is,” Sarah said. “But he couldn’t have pushed you into the street. Around four he took two of those pills, and then he just sat on the dock with Kip and said Wow. Wow.”

  “How about Jerry Hasek?”

  “The driver? Buddy made him get into the lake and push our boat out. Kip tried, but Kip basically can’t do anything but dole out pills.”

  “What about afterwards? Did you see Jerry or his two friends around the compound?”

  The lodges looked deserted, and on a terrace of the clubhouse, a waiter in an unbuttoned white shirt leaned against a poolside bar and combed his hair with wide sweeping gestures.

  “I guess they were in and out. Do you think it might just have been an accident?”

  “Maybe. The whole town was a zoo.”

  Orange late afternoon light bounced off the water.

  They walked down the hill in a silence that was loud with unspoken sentences. When they reached the marshy end of the lake, she dropped his hand.

  “I thought you’d be safe up here,” she said. “Nobody does anything around here but eat, drink, and gossip. But you’re here one day, and somebody pushes you in front of a car!”

  “It was probably an accident.”

  She smiled almost shyly at him. “You can eat dinner with us tonight, if you want. Just don’t point your finger at somebody and accuse him of murder, like in the last chapter of a detective novel.”

  “I’ll be good,” Tom said.

  Sarah put her arms around him. “Buddy and Kip invited me to come to the White Bear with them after dinner, but I said I wanted to stay home. So if you’re going to stay home …”

  Tom took a shower in the bathroom beside his mother’s old room, wrapped a towel around himself, and went out into the hall. Barbara Deane slid something heavy off a shelf and put it down on a wooden surface. He hurried back into his room. He pulled back the soft old Indian blanket and stretched out beneath it. Beneath the odor of freshly laundered sheets, the bed smelled musty. Tom was asleep in seconds.

  He aw
oke an hour and a half later. Nothing around him looked familiar. For a moment he was not even himself, merely a stranger in a bare but pleasant room. He sat up, saw the towel hanging over a chair, and remembered where he was. The entire fantastic day came back to him. He went to the closet and dressed in chinos, a wash-and-wear white button-down shirt, a tie, and the lightweight blue blazer his mother had made him pack. He pushed his feet into loafers and went downstairs. The house was empty.

  Tom let himself out and walked quickly down the avenue of trees to the clubhouse.

  A deeply tanned young man in a tight white dress shirt with ruffles, tight black trousers with a satin stripe, and highly polished black shoes but no black tie or jacket, appeared beside him on the ground floor of the club. “Yes?” He had a headful of oily-looking black curls tight enough to stretch his forehead. On both sides of the floating staircase which rose from the middle of the room to the second floor were padded wicker chairs and blond tables that shone with wax. Tiffany lamps stood by each circle of chairs, and though light still came in the long side windows, every lamp had been turned on. The room was completely empty except for Tom and the suntanned young man, and the young man looked as though he wanted to keep it that way.

  Tom gave his name, and the young man lowered his chin a millimeter or two. “Oh, Mr. Pasmore. Mr. Upshaw informed us that you are to have full use of his membership and signing privileges for the length of your stay. Would you be dining alone tonight, and would you prefer to relax at the Mezzanine Bar before dining, or would you like to be shown directly to your table?” He looked straight at the middle of Tom’s forehead as he spoke.