Mystery

by Peter Straub

  “What stolen property?” Fritz demanded to know.

  Tom told him about the burglaries that had been taking place around Eagle Lake and other resort towns over the past few years. “If you walk away from people’s houses with that much stuff, you need a place to store it until you get it to whoever you know who buys it from you. I think they must have to go a long way to get rid of it, and they can’t get away all that often, so they need a big place.”

  They drove past the town hall and the police station, past the signs at the edge of town, and Sarah said, “Here’s the first right.”

  Fritz hauled on the wheel, and turned into a two-lane blacktop road. At first they drove past tarpaper shacks on lawns littered with bald tires and junked cars. FREE PUPPIES, read rain-streaked lettering on a crude sign. The shacks grew more widely spaced, and the land stayed empty. Narrow trees stood at the edge of a muddy field. Far off, a stooped figure moved toward a farmhouse.

  “Fritz, your uncle would never buy or rent anything up here—in fact, he enjoys turning down deals, even when they might be good for him, because of the way the local newspaper treated his family.”

  “Well, here’s the first left,” Sarah said.

  “I see it,” Fritz grumbled, and turned into another two-lane blacktop road. Another sequence of muddy fields, these enclosed by collapsing wooden fences, rolled past them. They passed a large white sign reading 2 MILES TO AUTHENTIC INDIAN SETTLEMENT.

  “So what?” Fritz asked.

  “Two years ago, the Redwing Holding Company rented a machine shop on Summers Street. I saw it in a column in the Eagle Lake Gazette on my first day here.”

  “A machine shop?” Fritz said.

  “It was an empty building—they probably rented it for a hundred dollars a month, or something like that.”

  “Oh,” Sarah said.

  Fritz groaned. He put his forehead against the top of the steering wheel. “What am I—what are you trying—”

  “It’s Jerry,” Sarah said, once again arriving instantly at an insight.

  “Jerry and his Mends probably didn’t know that the paper listed things like that, but they wouldn’t have cared even if they did. They knew no Redwing would ever see it. And on the other side, the name protected them. The police would never suspect the Redwing company of being involved in a bunch of crummy burglaries.”

  A lonely set of train tracks crossed the road, coming from nowhere, going nowhere. The Lincoln bumped over them.

  Five hundred yards farther on in an empty field, shabby tepees circled a low windowless building of split logs with a sod roof. The hides of the tepees had split and fallen in, and tall yellow weeds grew in all the open places. No one said anything as they drove past.

  After another hundred yards, a road intersected theirs. A green metal street sign, almost surreal in the emptiness, said SUMMERS STREET. The road past the abandoned tourist stop was not identified in any way.

  “So where is it?” Fritz asked.

  Sarah pointed—far down to the right, almost invisible against a thick wall of trees, a building of concrete blocks painted brown stood at the far end of an empty parking lot.

  Fritz turned into Summers Street, and drove reluctantly toward the building. “But why would they do burglaries?”

  “They’re bored,” Tom said. “They like the feeling of having a little edge.”

  The big car drove into the parking lot. Close up, the machine shop looked like the police station that clung to the side of Eagle Lake’s town hall—it needed another building to complete it. Fritz said, “I’m not getting out of the car. In fact, I think we ought to leave right now and go swimming in the lake.” He looked at Tom. “I don’t like this at all. We shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “They shouldn’t be doing it,” Tom said.

  “Hurry up,” Sarah said.

  Tom patted her knee, got out of the car, and walked to the front of the machine shop. Above the door was a stenciled sign that said PRYZGODA BROS. TOOL & DIE CO. He leaned forward and peered into a window beside the door. A green chair with padded arms was pushed against one of the walls of an otherwise empty office. A few pieces of paper lay on the floor.

  Tom turned around and shrugged. Fritz waved him back to the car, but Tom walked around to the side of the building, where a row of reinforced windows sat high in the wall. Some of the brown paint had separated cleanly from the concrete, and leaned out away from the wall, as stiff as a dried sail. The windows came down to the level of his chin. Tom looked in the first of them and saw only geometrical shadows. Most of the interior was filled with boxes and unidentifiable things stacked on top of the boxes.

  Tom put his hands to the sides of his head and bent closer to the window. One of the objects stacked on top of the first row of boxes was faced with brown cloth framed by an inch of dark wood. On top of it, half lost in the darkness at the top of the room, sat another object like like it. Then he recognized them: stereo speakers. Tom turned his head and grinned at Fritz and Sarah, and Fritz swept his hand back toward himself again: Come on!

  Tom moved down to the next window in line, blocked his face with his hands, and leaned forward. Propped against the row of boxes, the faces of Roddy Deepdale and Buzz Laing looked up at him from the chairs in which they had been painted by a man named Don Bachardy. Tom lowered his hands and stepped back from the window, and in that moment, an overweight figure in a grey suit too small to contain a watermelon belly walked around the back of the tall boxes, shaking something in an open cardboard box and peering down into it like a man panning for gold. Tom jumped back from the window, and a row of white rectangles reflected in Nappy’s sunglasses as he looked up.

  Tom bent beneath the windows and ran toward the car. He threw himself into the open door, and Fritz scattered dirt and stones with the back tires, yelling “They saw you! Dammit!” The car jolted forward. Tom reached for the open door and pulled it shut as they shot out on Summers Street. “Duck,” Tom said to Sarah, and she bent forward beneath the dashboard. Tom slid down on the seat and looked out of the back window. Fritz stamped on the accelerator, and the Lincoln’s tires squealed on the blacktop. Nappy LaBarre threw open the front door of the building and ran heavily into the parking lot on his short legs. He waved his short thick arms and yelled something. In a second the wall of trees cut him off.

  “He saw us,” Fritz wailed. “He saw the car! You think he doesn’t know who we are? He knows who we are.”

  “He’s alone,” Tom said, helping Sarah sit up straight again. “There wasn’t any phone in there, I don’t think.”

  “You mean he can’t call Jerry,” Sarah said.

  “I think he was putting some of the stuff in boxes for their next trip,” Tom said. “Unless he walks back, he has to wait until Jerry comes by to pick him up.”

  Fritz turned left on another unmarked road, trying to find his way back to the village and the highway.

  “The further adventures of Tom Pasmore,” Sarah said.

  “I want to say something,” Fritz said. “I had nothing to do with this. All I wanted to do was go back to the lake, okay? I never looked in the windows, and I never saw any stolen stuff—I don’t even think I saw Nappy.”

  “Oh, come on,” Tom said.

  “All I saw was a fat guy.”

  “Have it your way,” Tom said.

  “My Uncle Ralph is not just an ordinary guy,” said Fritz. “Remember I said that, okay? He is not an ordinary guy.”

  Fritz drove along the bumpy road, gritting his teeth. He turned right on a three-lane road marked 41 and drove through a section of forest. Thick trees, neither oaks nor maples, but some gnarly black variety Tom did not know, stood at the border of the road, so close together their trunks nearly touched. Fritz ground his teeth, making a sound like a file grating across iron. They burst out into emptiness again.

  “I didn’t see Nappy,” he said.

  There was another long term of silence. Fritz came to a crossroads, looked both ways, and tur
ned left again. On both sides muddy-looking fields stretched off to rotting wooden fences like match sticks against the dense forest.

  The road went up over a rise and came down on a glossy black four-lane highway across from a sign that said LAKE DEEP-DALE—DEEPDALE ESTATES. Fritz ground his teeth again, cramped the wheel, and turned in the direction of Eagle Lake.

  “I don’t know what you’re so upset about,” Tom said.

  “You’re right, you don’t. You don’t have the slightest idea.” He turned into the narrow track between the trees that led to the lake, and when they reached the bench, he stopped the car. “This is where we picked you up, and this is where we’re dropping you off.”

  “Are you going to call the police?” Sarah asked Tom.

  “Get out of the car if you want to talk like that,” Fritz said.

  “Don’t be a baby,” Sarah snapped at him.

  “You don’t know either, Sarah.”

  Tom opened the door and got out. He did not close the door. “Of course I’m going to call them,” he said to Sarah. “These people have been robbing houses for years.” Fritz gunned the engine, and Tom leaned into the car. He looked at Fritz’s furious profile. “Fritz, if you knew you had to see someone again, right after you learned something that made you pretty sure they’d committed murder, what would you do? Would you say anything?”

  Fritz kept staring straight ahead. His teeth made the file-on-iron sound.

  “Would you try to forget about it?”

  Sarah gave him an anxious smile. “I’ll come over tonight—I’ll get put somehow.”

  Fritz pulled ahead, and Tom waved at Sarah. Fritz pushed the accelerator, and the car left Tom standing on the side of the road. After a couple of seconds, Sarah reached over to close the door. The car picked up speed as it went over the rise, and then it disappeared.

  As soon as he got back to the lodge, Tom went into the study and found the number of the Eagle Lake Police Department in the telephone book.

  A male voice answered, and Tom asked to speak to Chief Truehart.

  “The Chief’s out of the office until tonight,” said the voice, and Tom saw Spychalla leaning back in his boss’s chair, pumping his muscles to make his belt creak.

  “Could you give me a time?”

  “Who is this?” Spychalla asked.

  “I want to give you some information,” Tom said. “The stereo equipment and everything else stolen in the burglaries this year is being stored in an old tool and die shop on Summers Street. There’s a Polish name over the door.”

  “Who are you?” Spychalla asked.

  “One of the guys is still there, so if you go to Summers Street you can get him.”

  “I’m unable to respond to anything but emergencies, on account of being alone here, but if you’ll leave your name and tell me how you got this information.…”

  Tom took the phone away from his ear and stared at it in frustration. He heard Spychalla’s voice saying, “This is that kid out at Eagle Lake, isn’t it? The one who thinks the Chief’s mother is a burglar.”

  He put the phone to his mouth and said, “No, my name is Philip Marlowe.”

  “Where are you, Mr. Marlowe?”

  Tom hung up. He wanted to go upstairs and hide under the bed.

  He locked the front door, then walked across the length of the lodge and locked the door to the deck. Then he walked nervously around the sitting room for a time, and when the house made its noises, looked out the front windows to see if Jerry had come up on the porch. He went back into the sitting room and called Lamont von Heilitz, who was not at home.

  The telephone rang when he had just reached the bottom of the first page of a letter to von Heilitz, and the pen skittered across the paper, leaving dashes. Tom set down the pen and looked at the phone. He put his hand on the receiver, but did not pick it up. It went dead, and then started ringing as soon as he took his hand off the receiver, and rang ten times before it stopped again.

  The directory listed two Redwings: Ralph at Gladstone Lodge, Eagle Trail, and Chester, Palmerston Lodge, Eagle Trail. Chester was Fritz’s father. Tom dialed the number and waited through three rings until a woman answered. He recognized the voice of Fritz’s mother, Eleanor Redwing, and asked to speak to Fritz.

  “Is that you, Tom? You must be enjoying yourself tremendously.”

  So Buddy’s parents had not spoken about the difficulty with Sarah; and Fritz had kept quiet about the machine shop.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Tremendously.”

  “Well, I know that Fritz has been looking forward to seeing you up here ever since you left. Of course the big news around here is about Buddy and Sarah. We all think it’s wonderful. She’ll be so good for him.”

  “Wonderful,” Tom said. “Tremendous.”

  “And of course she’s had a crush on him since ninth grade. And they’re so cute together, the way they keep sneaking off to be alone.”

  “I guess they have a lot to talk about.”

  “I don’t think they spend a lot of time talking,” she said. “Anyhow, here’s Fritzie. Tom, I hope we’ll be seeing you around the compound.”

  “That would be very nice.”

  A moment later Fritz took the phone. He did not say anything. Tom could hear him breathing into the receiver.

  “What’s going on over there?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nobody said anything about seeing us?”

  “I told you, nothing.”

  “Where is everybody? Did you see Jerry or anybody after we got back?”

  “About five minutes ago, my aunt and uncle went to Hurley in the Cadillac with Robbie. They’re going to stay overnight with some friends.”

  “Did you see Nappy?”

  “He’s not around. Jerry’s still out with Buddy, I guess. They took Sarah to look at a new boat.”

  Fritz breathed into the phone for a while and then said, “Maybe nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Something has to happen, Fritz.”

  “So—you called, ah, you called who you said you were going to?”

  “I didn’t give any names,” Tom said. “I just told them to look in that machine shop.”

  “You shouldn’t of.” Fritz breathed heavily into the phone for a few seconds. “What’d they say?”

  “They didn’t seem too excited.”

  “Okay,” Fritz said. “Maybe they got everything out. I’m gonna say we were just driving around. Nobody saw anything.”

  “Did you try to call me a little while ago?”

  “Are you kidding? Look, I can’t talk anymore.”

  “You want to come over for a swim later?”

  “I can’t talk now,” Fritz said, and hung up.

  Tom paced around the lodge for another twenty minutes, then picked up a book, unlocked the back door, and went out on the deck.

  He tilted the lounger back, stretched out, and tried to read. Sunlight bounced off the page, obliterating the print. Tom raised the book to block out the sun. Heat soaked through his clothes and warmed his skin, and bright golden light poured down to pool all about him. He could not keep his mind on the book: in a short time, his eyelids drooped, and the book tilted toward his chest and became a small white bird he held in his hands, and he was asleep.

  A bell insistent as an alarm awakened him, and for a second he thought he was back in Brooks-Lowood—his body felt heavy and slow, but he had to change classes, he had to stand up and move.… He sat up. Sunburn tingled on his forehead, and his face was wet with perspiration. The telephone kept ringing, and Tom moved automatically toward the back door to answer it. He stopped when he put his hand on the doorknob. The phone rang twice more. Tom opened the door and went to the desk.

  It’s probably Grand-Dad, he thought.

  He picked up the phone and said hello.

  There was a brief moment of silence, and then a click and the dial tone.

  Tom hung up, locked the back door, walked across the sitting r
oom, went out and locked the front door with the key. He ran down the steps and crossed the track to drag the leafy branch away from the ruts made by Barbara Deane’s car, went around it, and dragged the branch back. He stepped into the undergrowth between himself and the track, pushed aside vines and small stiff branches, and hunkered down at the base of an oak. Through chinks in the leaves, he could see his front steps, half of the porch, and a little of the way down the track to the compound.

  Jerry Hasek came walking up the track thirty seconds later. He was wearing his grey suit and the chauffeur’s cap, and his hands were balled into fists. He took the big steps two at a time, strode across the porch, and knocked on the screen door. Jerry spun on his heel and hit his fists together several times, rapidly. His face wore an expression of worried concentration that was familiar to Tom, and meant nothing: it was just the way Jerry looked. He spun back around and opened the screen door and pounded on the wooden door. Jerry’s body told much more than his face—his movements were quick and agitated, and his shoulders looked stiff and bunched, as if he had developed extra layers of muscle and skin, like armor. “Pasmore!” he yelled. He banged on the door again.

  Jerry stepped back and glared at the door. “Come on, I know you’re there,” he yelled. “Come on out, Pasmore.” He put his hand on the knob and turned it, then rattled the door.

  He moved to one of the windows and peered inside the way Tom had looked into the machine shop, with his hands cupping his face. He slapped the window with his palm, and the glass shivered. “Come on OUT!”

  Jerry went backwards down the steps, looking upward as if he expected to see Tom climbing out of a window. He put his hands on his hips, and his shoulder muscles shifted underneath the fabric of the jacket. He looked from side to side, exhaled, and gazed back up at the lodge.

  He bounded back up the steps, opened the screen door, and struck the door again several times. “You have to talk to me,” he said, speaking in the voice he would use to a person who was hard of hearing. “I can’t help you out if you don’t talk to me.”

  He leaned his head against the door and said, “Come on.” Then he pushed himself away from the door and trotted down the steps. His whole thick body looked energetic, electrified, as if you would get a shock if you touched him. Jerry went to the side of the lodge and went down between the trees to get to the back.