Mystery

by Peter Straub

  Tom’s throat went dry.

  A door slammed, and in an instant the man disappeared. He did not shift his body or move in any way, he just was not there anymore. A raspy voice screamed “Who are you?” Tom jumped. A little old man in jeans and an embroidered denim shirt stepped down on the grass in front of the wooden stoop. He had a hooked nose and a seamed face, and long white hair fell straight past his shoulders from a widow’s peak. He was pointing a rifle at Tom. “What do you think you’re doing around here?”

  Tom moved backwards. “I went out for a walk, and the path took me here.”

  The old man moved nearer, holding the rifle on Tom’s chest. “You get out of here, and don’t come back.” His eyes were flat and black. Tom stepped back and saw that the old man was a woman. “Too many thieving bastards around here,” she said in her raspy shrieking voice.

  Slowly, Tom turned around. Off to the side, the burly man in the plaid shirt emerged into visibility again.

  “Get out!” shrieked the old woman.

  Tom ran down the path.

  Bitsy Langenheim was stooping over the ground near her garbage can in a tired grey sweatsuit, throwing the cans and bottles back in. She gave him a sour, hungover look. She tossed a vodka bottle at the can and missed. “What are you staring at?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What were you doing back in those woods?”

  “Taking a walk.”

  “Stay out of there. The Indians don’t like it.”

  Tom wiped sweat off his forehead. “So I learned.”

  She grumbled at him and retrieved the bottle.

  “Some men came to see you,” Barbara Deane said. She stood up, gripping her purse in both hands. “About ten minutes ago. I told them I thought you were still in bed, but they wouldn’t leave until I looked into your room. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “Who were they? Did you recognize them?”

  “Ralph Redwing’s bodyguards.” She looked at the door, then back at him. “Is one of them named Hasek? He was the one who made me go up to your room.”

  “Did they say what they wanted?”

  She took a step toward the door. “Only to see you. They didn’t say any more.” She looked back at him. “I don’t have any idea what they wanted, but they looked awfully unpleasant.”

  “I think they want to warn me away from Buddy Redwing’s girlfriend.”

  She surprised him with a smile. All at once, she looked less anxious and not at all autocratic. She relaxed her hold on the bag and tilted very slightly back to give him the full benefit of her smile. “Buddy Redwing, of course, being too important to do that by himself.”

  “I don’t think Buddy does anything by himself,” Tom said. “He likes to have at least one actual person around him.”

  “I think I know what you mean.” She hesitated. “Did you have a decent sleep? The bed all right?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “I’m glad. I wanted things to be nice for you. You’ll eat at the club tonight? I thought I might spend the night in my house.”

  He said he would eat at the club, and asked if she were going into town.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Would you mind giving me a lift?”

  “Well, I guess it would be a pleasure,” she said. “Yes, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be a pleasure.”

  They went outside together, and Tom followed her across the track to a rutted double path slanting into the trees. It had been deliberately obscured by a leafy branch she tugged out of the way. A little way down a dark green Volkswagen beetle stood beside a wild azalea bush. Barbara Deane asked him to wait while she moved the car, and he walked far enough down the path to see a weathered barn at the end of a small field bordered by forest. She turned to look at him through the rear window when she had pulled the car out, and he ran back and got into the seat beside her.

  “I keep my horse in that barn,” she said. “I ought to take him out and ride him every morning, but ever since the robbery, I get anxious whenever I’m away from home for too long. I guess I’ll get up early tomorrow morning and take him out for a run.” She pulled out on the track and moved slowly past the lodges.

  Tom asked if she knew Jerry Hasek.

  “I never actually met him until today.” She drove past the club and onto the open stretch of land at the north end of the lake. “But he looks like his father.”

  “You knew Wendell Hasek?”

  “I knew who he was.” She turned up the hill. “He worked for Judge Backer, until the Judge fired him. I thought Wendell Hasek was a pretty unsavory character, but then I think his son seems unsavory too, and he works for the Redwings. So apparently I’m no judge.”

  “I think you’re right on both counts,” Tom said. “But why did Judge Backer hire this unsavory character? Was he unsavory too?”

  She laughed. “Hardly. Wendell was really only a boy when he went to work for the Judge. In those days, there were some honest judges on Mill Walk. Some honest policemen too.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t talk this way. I’m almost completely out of touch about what goes on on Mill Walk. And I suppose I’m a little bitter.”

  They did not speak again until she had turned off onto the highway. Then Tom said, “You must remember the summer of Jeanine Thielman’s death very clearly.”

  “I certainly do!” She turned her head to look at him. “That was the summer after your grandmother died. You probably don’t know anything about that.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I know Glen Upshaw. He wouldn’t even hear his wife’s name after her death. Cut everything about her right out of his life. I guess he thought it would be better for Gloria that way.”

  “Do you think Magda was a good wife for him?”

  She gave him a startled glance. “I don’t think I can answer that. I’m not sure any woman could have been what people think of as a good wife to your grandfather.”

  “I learned some things about my grandmother not long ago. She seemed like a surprising woman for him to have married.”

  Her mouth twitched.

  “Do you want to know what I really think?” She looked sideways at him, and he saw that this had been an important matter for her. “I don’t know what you know about Magda, but she was like a child. She had no more independence than a kitten. When Glen met her, Magda was working as a waitress in her parents’ restaurant—a pretty little blond thing who looked about nineteen even though she was in her thirties, and she was as quiet as a mouse. I think that’s what Glen liked, having absolute control over her life. He told her what to wear, he told her what to say—he ran her life. He was like a god, as far as she was concerned.”

  “Did she have any friends?”

  “Glen didn’t encourage her to have a separate social life. After Gloria was born, she stopped going out. Glen fired their servants—in the days when all their friends had maids and laundresses and cooks and gardeners and God knows what else—and Magda did everything, and took care of the baby too. Like a shy little girl who wanted to please her father.”

  “So he had two children,” Tom said.

  “He had what he wanted. Most of what he wanted.” She drove slowly down the empty highway.

  “Why would Magda have killed herself? It seems to me that she must have had everything she wanted too. She was finally alone with her husband and her baby.”

  “Glen left her alone a good deal of the time. He’d take Gloria out with him when he went places, and leave Magda at home. And after Gloria’s birth, Magda began to look her age. And that didn’t do for Glen. Not at all. I suppose he just lost interest in her.”

  “So you don’t think there was anything to the rumors about her death.”

  “You couldn’t have heard about all this from Glen,” she said.

  “I read some old newspapers.”

  “Old Eagle Lake papers?” Tom said nothing, and after a moment, “Well, that editor was crazy. He was so again
st Mill Walk people that when one of them drowned, he saw stab wounds where there were none. Glen probably did pay off the coroner and arrange for Magda’s cremation, but he wanted to hush up her suicide, not conceal a murder.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Even people who disliked Glen didn’t think he murdered Magda. That ridiculous editor should have been put out of business.”

  “You’re very loyal to him,” Tom said.

  “I used to be loyal to him, I guess. I cleaned up after his messes, and I took in your mother when he asked me to. He stuck up for me once, when I was in trouble. Now I just work for him. I watch out for his property and I take his money for doing it. I don’t talk about things he doesn’t want me to talk about, so if that’s what you—” She stopped talking and stared straight ahead. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, and she looked old and angry and confused.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She swerved to the side of the road, put the car into the parking gear, and flattened her hands on her thighs. Her hands looked as though they belonged to someone else, rough and knotted with veins.

  “He didn’t ask me to check up on you,” Tom said.

  “I know.” She slumped back in the seat.

  “I don’t suppose he even thought we’d ever talk, or get to know each other at all. That’s not the way he thinks.”

  “No,” she said. “It sure isn’t.” She looked over at him at last. “You’re not very much like him, are you?”

  “I don’t know enough about him to know if I am or not,” he said.

  “Well, you’re a lot more sympathetic. I suppose he just sent you up here the way he sent me up here.”

  “The way he sent my mother to your place after Jeanine Thielman disappeared.”

  “No, Gloria had formed some kind of attachment to Jeanine; Glen didn’t want his daughter to know she’d suffered another terrible loss. I think he was trying to spare her some pain, and he did it in his usual way, by trying to wipe out the cause of the pain.”

  She was looking at him now, not angrily but as if waiting for him to challenge the picture of Glendenning Upshaw as a concerned father.

  “My mother didn’t say anything to you about seeing a man running through the woods on the night Mrs. Thielman disappeared?”

  “No, but if she did, it’s all the more reason for Glen to want to get her away from everybody. Don’t you see? Gloria was a very disturbed little girl that summer. He certainly wouldn’t have wanted to involve her with the police.”

  Gloria was a very disturbed little girl long before that summer, Tom thought, but said nothing.

  “You’re very interested in what happened back then, aren’t you?” She put the car into gear again, and rolled back on the highway.

  “It seems to me that what happened back then has a lot to do with what’s still going on.”

  “But that was such a terrible time. There are things it might be better not to know.”

  “I don’t believe that,” he said.

  She turned into Main Street. At eight o’clock in the morning, most of the shops were closed and only a few people were on the sidewalks. None of them looked like tourists. Barbara Deane pulled up to the sidewalk at the first intersection. A black and white sign said OAK STREET. “My house is right up the street. Is it all right if I drop you off here?”

  She suddenly looked shy and uncertain. “I know you’re busy, but would you think about coming to my house for dinner some night? It would be nice to cook for someone else, and I enjoy your company, Tom.”

  “I’d like that very much,” he said.

  “I might be able to tell you some things about the summer Jeanine died without being disloyal to your grandfather. After all, the important thing to remember is that whatever he did, he did it to protect your mother.”

  “Just name the day,” Tom said.

  She touched his arm to say one more thing.

  “Your mother told you that she saw a man running through the woods on that night?”

  “It must have been Anton Goetz. It couldn’t have been anyone else.”

  “Well, it couldn’t have been Anton Goetz, either. Goetz walked with a cane, and he limped. It was a very romantic limp. Anton Goetz couldn’t move faster than a slow walk. Gloria might not have seen anything at all—she had a very active imagination, and she couldn’t always tell the difference between it and reality.”

  “I know that,” he said, and got out of the car.

  As he walked back along the highway an hour later, the black Lincoln coasted past him, drew ahead, and pulled onto the shoulder of the road. The Lincoln’s back doors opened, and two men in grey suits and sunglasses got out of the car. One of them was too fat to button his suit, and the other was as skinny as a hound. Both of them had long sideburns and swept-back Elvis hair. They looked at him with bored indifferent faces. The lean one put his hands in his pockets. Jerry Hasek, also in a grey suit but without the sunglasses, opened the driver’s door and got out and looked unhappily at Tom across the top of the car. “We’re going to give you a ride,” he said. “Come on, get in the car.”

  “I’d rather walk.” Tom looked sideways into the woods.

  “Oh, don’t do that,” Jerry said. “What good is that? Just get in the car.”

  The other two began coming toward him.

  “Nappy and Robbie,” Tom said. “The Cornerboys.”

  Robbie took his hands out of his pockets and glanced at his fat companion, who scowled at Tom. Nappy’s sideburns almost reached his jaw.

  “I remember you,” Nappy said.

  “Just get him in the car,” Jerry said. “We already took too long doing this. Tom, get sensible. We don’t want to hurt you, we’re just supposed to bring you back.”

  “Why?”

  “Somebody wants to talk to you.”

  “So get in the car,” Nappy said in a thick, constricted voice that sounded as if someone had once stepped on his throat.

  Tom walked past Nappy and Robbie and opened the front passenger door. All three bodyguards watched him get in, and then got in themselves.

  “Okay,” Nappy sighed. He looked like a bullfrog, seated in the back of the car.

  “Okay,” said Robbie. “Okay, okay, okay.”

  Jerry started the car and drove down the highway back toward the lake.

  Nappy leaned forward from the back seat. “What’s this Cornerboy stuff, huh? Where do you come off, with this Cornerboy stuff?”

  “Just keep quiet, will you?” asked Jerry. “And you too, Pasmore. I want to talk about some stuff before we get back.”

  “Good,” Tom said.

  Jerry rubbed his face and glanced at him. “A long time ago, you came to my house. My sister and me came out to talk to you. When my friends turned up, you ran away and you got hurt. Nobody meant for that to happen.”

  “I don’t think you were deliberately trying to kill me,” Tom said. “I got scared when I saw these two guys waving knives.”

  “Everybody should have handled things in another way,” Jerry said. “The main thing was, my father sent me out to see what you wanted.”

  “I realize that now,” Tom said.

  “I mean, there’s already enough excitement,” Jerry said.

  “Right,” Tom said.

  “So what was that about the dog?” Jerry asked.

  Robbie snickered.

  “I heard something scream.”

  Nappy said, “I guess we all make mistakes, huh?”

  “Nobody says another word about that,” Jerry said. “You hear me?”

  “Dog,” Robbie said, and Nappy made a little uh oh sound that ended almost as soon as it had begun.

  Jerry took his hands off the wheel and whirled around so fast that he seemed nearly not to have moved at all—Tom saw only a blur—and then Jerry was leaning over the back of the front seat, whacking Robbie with both hands.

  “ASSHOLE! SHITHEAD! FUCKING RETARD!”

  Robbie held his hands up before his face. “You hit my—yo
u got my—”

  “YOU THINK I CARE? GODDAMN YOU, I TOLD YOU—”

  The Lincoln drifted slowly into the oncoming lane. Tom grabbed the wheel and steered it back. The return of Vic Pasmore, he thought. Jerry smacked Robbie once more and turned around and grabbed the wheel away from Tom. His face was a deep red.

  “Okay? Okay? We got that straight?”

  “We got it straight,” Nappy said.

  “We damn well better have that straight,” Jerry said.

  “You busted my shades,” Robbie said.

  Tom looked back over the seat. Nappy was staring straight ahead. He looked like a man on a bus. A smear of blood slid down Robbie’s cheek. A cut on the bridge of his nose bled toward its tip. A bow had been snapped off his sunglasses. Robbie stared at the two broken pieces. He glowered at Tom, then rolled down his window and tossed the sunglasses into the road.

  “All right,” Jerry said. “Now we’re all straight.”

  He swung the car into the bumpy track that led to the lake.

  Tom expected them to pull up before the compound, but Jerry rolled past it without even a sideways glance. They continued past the Spence lodge and stopped in front of Glendenning Upshaw’s. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go in and finish this bullshit.”

  All four of them got out of the car.

  “You first, sport,” Jerry said. “This where you live, right?”

  Tom rounded the car. Nappy and Robbie put their hands in their pockets and looked up at the big lodge as if they were thinking about buying it for a vacation home. Robbie had wiped the trickle of blood from the bridge of his nose, but two red stripes lay on the side of his face like warpaint. Tom went up the stone steps. Jerry crowded him from behind, and the other two sauntered toward the steps after them, looking up and down the path.

  “Wipe the side of your face, for Chrissake,” Jerry said.

  Tom swung open the screen door, and Jerry held it while he opened the front door. They walked inside. Jerry still crowded him from behind.

  Buddy Redwing stood up like a jack-in-the-box from the sofa that faced the door. He was wearing a stretched-out pale green polo shirt and wide khaki shorts. “You took enough time.”