Mystery

by Peter Straub

  “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.”

  Tom stepped back and let him in.

  “I understand you had some trouble. Show me where it happened, and then I’ll take some information.” Spychalla looked as if he were straining out of his uniform, stretching the dark blue cloth and the taut black leather. His belt creaked when he moved.

  He gave the office a quick inspection, made some notes in a small ringbound notebook, and asked, “Where were you sitting at the time of the incident?”

  “At the desk, talking on the telephone,” Tom said.

  Spychalla nodded, walked around the desk, looked at the lamp and the bullet hole, and then went out on the deck to see the window from the outside. He came back and made more notes. “There was only the single shot?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  Spychalla raised his eyebrows and flipped to a new page in his notebook. “You’re from Mill Walk? What are your age and occupation?”

  “Officer, don’t you think you should send some men up into the woods, and see if you can find who shot at me?”

  “Your full-time residence is on the island of Mill Walk? What are your age and occupation?” His jaw was as square as a box, and the point of the pencil above the clean sheet of paper was perfectly sharp.

  “I live on Mill Walk, I’m seventeen, I’m a student.”

  Spychalla raised his eyebrows again. “Date of birth?”

  “Is that going to help you?” Spychalla waited with his pencil in his hand, and Tom gave his birth date.

  “This lodge, are you staying here by yourself? What I know about this place is, it belongs to a man named Upshaw.”

  Tom explained that Mr. Upshaw was his grandfather.

  “Sounds like a pretty good deal,” Spychalla said. “You get to shack up here by yourself all summer, drink a lot of beer and chase girls, is that it?”

  Tom began to think that his grandfather had been right about calling the police. Spychalla was giving him a hard little smile that was supposed to communicate a total understanding of the pleasures of being seventeen and alone for the summer. “Some of you kids get up to a pretty wild time, I guess.”

  “I guess you could say that being shot at is pretty wild.”

  Spychalla closed his notebook and put it back in his hip pocket. He still had the little smile on his face. “Shook you up a little.”

  Tom sat down behind the desk. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

  “I’m going to explain something to you.” Spychalla stepped nearer the desk. “You got a screwdriver or something like that? A long knife?”

  Tom looked at him, trying to figure out what this request was about. Spychalla put his arms behind his back and did something with his arm and chest muscles that made his uniform creak.

  Tom went into the kitchen and came back with a screwdriver. Spychalla went down on the toes of his boots and began to dig away the wood surrounding the shell. “People ain’t supposed to hunt deer in the summer, but they do. Same way as they ain’t supposed to get drunk and drive, but they do that too. Sometimes they go out at night and jacklight ’em.” He slammed the screwdriver into the wall and chipped out a jagged piece of wood. “We arrest ’em when we catch ’em, but you can’t always catch ’em. There’s only me and Chief Truehart on the force full time, and a part-time deputy in the summer. Now one of the places these people know they can find deer is the woods around this lake, and sometimes we get calls from you people saying you hear shots at night. We run over here, but we know we ain’t gonna find anybody, because all they have to do is turn off their lights.” He slammed the screwdriver into the wall. “If they drive, we can get ’em when they come back to their cars, but plenty of times they walk—hide their deer until the next day, sneak it back into town under a tarp on the back of a pickup. Here we go.” He twiddled the screwdriver in the enlarged hole, jerked it backwards, and a black lump of metal clattered to the floor. Spychalla buttoned it into one of his shirt pockets and stood up. His uniform shirt was so tight Tom could see his muscles move.

  “So I could go out there and root through the woods, but I’d be wasting my time. There’s a village ordinance stating that hunters are not permitted to discharge weapons within two hundred and fifty feet of a dwelling. Now let’s think about where this came from.” He grinned, and looked like a handsome robot. He walked to the far end of the desk and pointed to the broken glass. “It came in here, busted this lamp, and hit the wall—slanting downwards. So the rifle was probably fired from way up above one of those lodges on the other side of the lake. The man who fired the rifle didn’t have no idea in hell where his bullet went. Every summer and fall, we get complaints from people whose lodges are hit by bullets—not a lot of ’em, but one or two. The funny thing is, this guy could have been a quarter mile away from you.”

  “What if it wasn’t a hunter,” Tom said, “but someone who was trying to shoot me?”

  “Look, I can’t blame you for getting excited,” the policeman said. “But if a guy with a high-powered rifle was trying to kill you, he’d a done it. Even if it was dark in here, he’d a put a couple more bullets through that window. I’m telling you, this happens about once every summer. You’re just the closest anybody came to getting hit.”

  And you’re friendly Officer Spychalla, who doesn’t really mind that the Mill Walk people get an accidental bullet coming their way once a summer or so, Tom thought. “Somebody pushed me off the sidewalk into traffic the other day,” he said. “In town.”

  “Did you file a complaint?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “Did you see anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Probably an accident, just like this. Some fat old tourist turned around and hit you with a hip the size of a front-loader.”

  “Probably if I was dead, you’d investigate a little harder,” Tom said.

  Spychalla gave him the robot smile. “What do you hunt down there on that island you live on, rum drinks?”

  “It’s not that kind of island,” Tom said. “We mainly hunt policemen.”

  Spychalla slapped his pockets and marched toward the door, boots and Sam Browne belt creaking magnificently, his service revolver riding massively on his hip. He looked like a hu
ge blond horse. “I’ll file a report, sir. If you’re worried about a recurrence of this incident, stay away from your windows at night.”

  He clumped down the steps to his patrol car.

  A male voice came out of the dark. “Officer?” Sarah’s father stepped into the ring of light on Tom’s front steps, looking like someone used to being obeyed by policemen. He was wearing pajamas and a grey bathrobe. “Is this young man in any trouble?”

  Spychalla said, “Go back to your lodge, sir. All the excitement is over.”

  Mr. Spence glared exasperatedly at Tom, then back at Spychalla, whose face made it clear that he had seen a lot of exasperation. He got in his car and slammed the door.

  Mr. Spence put his hands on his hips and watched the headlights moving down the track. Then he turned around and tried to kill Tom with a look. “You are not to bother my daughter anymore. From now on there will be no communication between you and Sarah. Is that understood?” His big belly moved up and down under his shirt as he yelled.

  Tom went inside and closed the door. He walked across the sitting room and went into the study. He realized that he was framed in the window, and his stomach froze and his blood stopped moving. Then he began sweeping broken glass off the desk into the wastebasket. After that he searched around the kitchen for a whisk broom and a dustpan, found them in a closet, and took them into the study to sweep the rest of the glass up from the floor.

  He was returning the broom and the dustpan when he heard the telephone ringing, and he set them down on the table and returned to the study. He moved out of the line of the window and pulled back the chair. Then he sat down and answered the phone.

  “This is Tom,” he said.

  “Are they still there?” his grandfather asked in a voice just below a bellow.

  “He. There was one cop. He’s gone.”

  “I told you to call me when they left!”

  “Well, I had to do a few things,” Tom said. “He just left a minute ago. He said what you said. It was a stray bullet.”

  “Of course it was. I told you that. Anyhow, thinking about it, I decided you were right to call the police. No question about it. Are you feeling better now?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Go to bed early. Get some rest. In the morning, you’ll see this in perspective. I won’t tell your mother about this, and I forbid you to write anything to her that might upset her.”

  “Okay,” Tom said. “Does that mean that you don’t want me to come back right away?”

  “Come back? Of course you shouldn’t come back! You have some fence-mending to do, young man. I want you to stay up there until I tell you it’s time to come back.” Glendenning Upshaw went on to deliver a lengthy speech about respect and responsibility.

  When he finished, Tom decided to see where one question would lead. “Grand-Dad, who was Anton Goetz? I’ve been hearing—”

  “He was nothing. He did a bad thing once, and he was found out, and he killed himself. Committed a murder, if you want the specifics.”

  “On the plane up here, Mr. Spence wanted to tell me that you had done him some big favors—”

  Upshaw grunted.

  “—and he happened to mention this Anton Goetz, who he said was an accountant—”

  “You want to know about him? I’ll tell you about him, and then the subject is closed. You understand me?” Tom did not speak. “Anton Goetz was a little man with a bad leg who got in way over his head because he couldn’t control his fantasies. He told everybody a lot of lies, me included, because he wanted social success. I tried to help him out because like a lot of con men, Anton Goetz had a lot of charm. I gave him a job, and I even helped him look more important than he was. It was the last time in my life I ever made a mistake like that. He got up to something with Arthur Thielman’s first wife, and imagined it was much more than it was, and when she put him in his place he killed her. Then he killed himself, like the coward he really was. I held his properties for a long time because I wanted the stench of his memory to go away, and then I sold them to Bill Spence.”

  “So he really was an accountant,” Tom said.

  “Not a very good one. Come to think of it, Bill Spence wasn’t brilliant either, which was why I let Ralph hire him away from me. And now Bill Spence is aiming for the same social success Anton Goetz wanted, but he’s using his daughter to get it, not his prick. I hope my language doesn’t shock you.”

  Tom said that he was grateful for his frankness.

  “These men want what you had handed to you on a plate,” said his grandfather. “Now get some sleep and tomorrow try to act like you know how to behave. Let’s get everything sorted out by the end of summer.”

  Tom asked about his mother, and his grandfather said that she was doing better—almost off medication. He promised to give her Tom’s love, and Tom promised to write to her.

  The light in Neil Langenheim’s bedroom went out, and a thin yellow trace disappeared from the lake. The big lodges across the lake had retreated into the overhanging trees, and uncanny light from the black and silver sky touched the ends of the docks, the tops of railings, and sifting leaves.

  Through the broken window, the smells of pine and fresh water came to him wrapped in cool air, along with some other, deeper odor from the marshy end of the lake and the pilings beneath the docks, from the soft earth and the wet reeds and the fish that moved or slept deep in the water.

  Tom felt a tremor deep within him that was like a tremor in the silvery, sleeping world beyond the window. He got up and walked through the ground floor of the lodge, turning off the lights. He undressed, went to bed, and lay awake most of the night.

  Someone knocked on the door soon after Tom got up the next morning, and when he peered around it, hoping that Sarah Spence had managed to slip away from her parents, he saw a police car and another blue uniform. A man in his early thirties with straight shiny black hair that seemed too long for a policeman looked at him through the screen and said, “Mr. Pasmore? Tom Pasmore?” He looked both friendly and slightly familiar. Tom let him in, and realized that he looked a great deal like the Eagle Lake mailman. He was at least ten years older than he had looked at first—close up, Tom saw deep crow’s feet, and a little grey swept back beneath the hair that fell past his temples.

  “I’m Tim Truehart, the Chief of Police,” he said, and shook Tom’s hand. “I read the report about the shot that came in here last night, and I thought I’d better come out here and take a look for myself. Despite whatever impression you may have gotten from Officer Spychalla, we don’t like it when people shoot at our summer residents.”

  “He was pretty casual about it,” Tom said.

  “My deputy has his good points, but investigations may not be one of them. He’s very good at handling drunks and shoplifters, and he’s hell on speeders.” Truehart was looking around the sitting room as he spoke, smiling easily, taking everything in. “I’d have come myself, but I was out of town for most of the night. They don’t pay the Chief much money up here, and I fly a little on the side.”

  Then Tom remembered. “I saw you at the airport when I came in—you were sitting against the wall in the customs shed, and you were wearing a brown leather jacket.”

  “You’d make a good witness,” Truehart said, and smiled at him. “Were you alone in the lodge when the shot entered?”

  Tom said he was.

  “It’s a good thing Barbara Deane wasn’t here—Barbara had an unpleasant experience a couple of weeks ago, and getting shot at wouldn’t help her recovery. How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You had my deputy to reckon with, as well as everything else. You must be made of tough stuff.” He laughed. “Would you show me where it happened?”

  Tom took him into the study, and Truehart looked carefully at the broken window, the lamp, and the hole in the wall where his deputy had dug out the bullet. He went outside and looked across the lake at the wooded hill above the empty Harbinger lodge. Then he
came back inside.

  “Show me where you were sitting.”

  Tom sat behind the desk.

  “Tell me about it,” Truehart said. “Were you writing something, or reading, or looking out at the lake, or what?”

  Tom said that he had been talking on the telephone to his grandfather, and that the shot had come just after he bent over to look out to see the lake, so that he could describe it.

  “You didn’t move anything?”

  “Just swept up some broken glass.”

  “Was the lamp the only light showing in the room?”

  “It was probably the only light showing on the whole lake.”

  Truehart nodded, and walked to the side of the desk and again looked carefully at the window, the lamp, and the place where the bullet struck the wall. “Show me how you bent to look out of the window.” He walked backwards away from the desk as Tom showed him what he had done, and sat down on the couch against the wall. He joined his fingers and leaned forward on his elbows. “And you did that right when it happened?”

  “The lamp exploded as soon as I bent over.”

  “It’s a good thing you leaned down like that.” Tom’s stomach felt as if he had swallowed soap. “I don’t like this much.” Truehart was looking at him somberly, almost meditatively, as if he were listening to something Tom could not hear. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen any high-powered rifles around here in the past few days.”

  Tom shook his head.

  “And I don’t suppose you know of anybody who’d have a reason to try to kill you.”

  Startled, Tom said, “I thought hunters shot stray bullets toward the lodges once or twice a year.”

  “Well, maybe not quite that often, but it happens. Last year, someone shot out a window in the club from up on that hillside. And two years before that, a bullet hit the back of the Jacobs lodge in the middle of a nice June night. People around here got excited, and I don’t blame them, but nobody even came close to getting hit. And here you are, framed in this window like a target. I don’t want to make you nervous, but I can’t say I like it, not a bit.”