Mystery

by Peter Straub

  “Sarah?” he said—croaked. Razor blades and knives dug into his throat.

  “She’s okay. An ambulance is on the way, Tom. You saved her life.”

  He fell on his haunches. He was under the trees on the near side of the Spence lodge, and the great fire all the people were watching was his lodge. Wet wool filled his brain. Now Neil Langenheim had also turned to look at him, and there was nothing in his face but distaste.

  “Was anybody else in the lodge?” Lamont von Heilitz asked him.

  Tom shook his head. “You caught me.”

  “I was about to try to get inside when you came running out—just in time too. I think the whole back half of the lodge collapsed about a second later.”

  “A second before,” Tom said, remembering the explosion he had heard behind him. “Where’s Sarah?”

  “With her parents. You did the right thing by wrapping her in that blanket.”

  Tom tried to sit upright, and a heavy blackness swam in his head. “The plane—and people will know you’re—”

  “Our flight has been canceled, I’m afraid,” von Heilitz said. “Anyhow, Tim will have to stick around here for a day, trying to work out how the fire was started.”

  “Want to see her,” Tom said with his croaking voice, and the razor blades and knives moved another inch or two into the flesh of his throat.

  An oak tree on the lake side of the burning lodge began to incinerate in a rattle of leaves.

  “She told—she talked about—”

  Von Heilitz stroked his arm through the rough blanket.

  A black-haired man wearing a brilliant red silk robe over yellow silk pajamas and sucking on a long pipe stood at the end of the row of people watching the fire. He said something to a young man wearing only a tight pair of faded jeans, and the young man, who was Marcello, swept his arm from the fire to the trees between it and the Spence lodge. Somewhere distant, a horse whinnied in terror. Tom was going to ask von Heilitz what Hugh Hefner was doing here, when the irrelevant thought came to him that the publisher of Playboy would probably have the same kind of private jet as Ralph Redwing. Then he saw that the man in the robe was Ralph Redwing, and that Ralph’s black little eye had just flicked toward him and von Heilitz before it flicked away again. On his smooth, firelit face sat an expression of worried concern as abstracted as Jerry Hasek’s.

  “Everybody saw you,” he croaked to von Heilitz.

  The Shadow patted his shoulder.

  “No, they saw you,” he croaked again, realizing that this was terrible, it must be undone.

  The fire took another oak tree.

  PART EIGHT

  THE SECOND DEATH

  OF TOM PASMORE

  His room was not white, like his old room at Shady Mount, but painted in bright primary colors, lake water blue and sunlight yellow and maple leaf red. These colors were intended to induce cheerfulness and healthy high spirits. When Tom opened his eyes in the morning, he remembered sitting at a long table in Mrs. Whistler’s kindergarten class, awkwardly trying to cut something supposed to resemble an elephant out of stiff blue construction paper with a pair of scissors too big for him. His stomach, his throat, and his head all hurt, and a thick white bandage swaddled his right hand. A twelve-inch television set on a moveable clamp angled toward the head of his bed—the first time he had switched this off with the remote control device on his bed, a nurse had switched it back on as soon as she came into the room, saying, “You want to watch something, don’t you?” and the second time she had said, “I can’t imagine what’s wrong with this darn set.” He just let it run now, moving by itself from game shows to soap operas to news flashes as he slept.

  When Lamont von Heilitz came into the room, Tom turned off the set again. Every part of his body felt abnormally heavy, as if weights had been sewn into his skin, and most of them hurt in ways that seemed brand new. A transparent grease that smelled like room deodorizer shone on his arms and legs.

  “You can get out of here in a couple of hours,” von Heilitz said, even before he took the chair beside Tom’s bed. “That’s how hospitals do it now—no lollygagging. They just told me, so when we’re done I’ll pack and get some clothes for you, and then come back and pick you up. Tim will fly us to Minneapolis, and we’ll get a ten o’clock flight and land in Mill Walk about seven in the morning.”

  “A nine-hour flight?”

  “It’s not exactly direct,” von Heilitz said, smiling. “How do you like the Grand Forks hospital?”

  “I won’t mind leaving.”

  “What sort of treatment did you get?”

  “In the morning, they gave me an oxygen mask for a little while. After that, I guess I got some antibiotics. Every couple of hours, a woman comes around and makes me drink orange juice. They rub this goo all over me.”

  “Do you feel ready to leave?”

  “I’d do anything to get out of here,” Tom said. “I feel like I’m living my whole life over again. I get pushed in front of a car, and a little while later, I wind up in the hospital. Pretty soon, I’m going to figure out a murder and a whole bunch of people will get killed.”

  “Have you seen any of the news broadcasts?” the old man asked, and the edge in his voice made Tom slide up straighter on his pillows. He shook his head.

  “I have to tell you a couple of things.” The old man leaned closer, and rested his arms on the bed. “Your grandfather’s lodge burned down, of course. So did the Spence lodge. There’s nobody left at the lake now—the Redwings flew everybody back on their jet this morning.”

  “Sarah?”

  “She was released around seven this morning—she was in better shape than you were, thanks to that blanket you wrapped around her. Ralph and Katinka dropped the Spences and the Langenheims on Mill Walk, and flew straight to Venezuela.”

  “Venezuela?”

  “They have a vacation house there too. They didn’t want to stick around Eagle Lake, with all the mess and stink. Not to mention the crime investigation.”

  “Crime?” Tom said. “Oh, arson.”

  “Not just arson. Around two o’clock this afternoon, when the ashes finally got cool enough to sift through, Spychalla and a part-time deputy found a body in what was left of your lodge. It was much too badly burned to be identified.”

  “A body?” Tom said. “There couldn’t be—” Then he felt a wave of nausea and horror as he realized what had happened.

  “It was your body,” von Heilitz said.

  “No, it was—”

  “Chet Hamilton was there when they found it, and all three men knew it had to be you. There wasn’t anybody around to tell them different, and they even had a beautiful motive. Which was that Jerry Hasek—well, you know. Hamilton wrote his story as soon as he got back to his office, and it will run in tomorrow’s paper. As far as anybody knows, you’re dead.”

  “It was Barbara Deane!” Tom burst out. “I forgot—she told me she was going to come over late at night.… Oh, God. She died—she was killed.” He closed his eyes, and a tremor of shock and sorrow nearly lifted him off the bed. His body seemed to grow hot, then cold, and he tasted smoke deep in his throat. “I heard her screaming,” he said, and started to cry. “When I got out—when you were with me outside—I thought it was her horse. The horse heard the fire, and …” He panted, hearing the screams inside his head.

  He put his hands over his ears; then he saw her, Barbara Deane opening the door to the lodge in her silk blouse and her pearls, worried about what he had heard about her; Barbara Deane saying, I’m not sure any woman could have been what people think of as a good wife to your grandfather; saying, I’ve always thought that your grandfather saved my life. He put his hands over his eyes.

  “I agree with you,” the old man said. “Murder is an obscenity.”

  He reached out and wrapped his fingers around the old man’s linked hands.

  “Let me tell you about Jerry Hasek and Robbie Wintergreen.” Von Heilitz gripped Tom’s fingers in his gloved h
ands: it was a gesture of reassurance, but somehow of reassurance in spite of everything, and Tom felt an unhappy wariness awaken in him. “They stole a car on Main Street, and drove it into an embankment outside Grand Forks. A witness said he saw them shouting at each other in the car, and the driver took his hands off the wheel to hit the other man. The car hit the embankment, and both of them almost went through the windshield. They’re being held in the jail here in town.”

  “That’s Jerry,” Tom said.

  “All this happened about eight o’clock yesterday night.”

  “No, it couldn’t have. It must have been today,” Tom said. “Otherwise, they couldn’t have …”

  “They didn’t,” von Heilitz said, and squeezed Tom’s hand. “Jerry didn’t set the fire. I don’t think Jerry shot at you, either.”

  He let go of Tom’s hand and stood up. “I’ll be back in under an hour. Remember, you’re posthumous now, for a day or two. Tim Truehart knows you’re alive, but I was able to persuade him not to tell anyone until the time is right.”

  “But the hospital—”

  “I gave your name as Thomas von Heilitz,” the old man said.

  He left the room, and for a time Tom did nothing but stare at the wall. Remember, you’re posthumous now. The second shift nurse bustled into the room carrying a tray, smiled briskly at him, looked at his chart, and said, “I bet we’re happy to be going home, aren’t we?” She was a stout red-haired woman with orange eyebrows and two small protuberant growths on the right side of her face, and she gave him a comic frown when he did not respond. “Aren’t you going to give me a smile, honey?”

  He would have spoken to her, but he could not find a single thing to say.

  “Well, maybe we like it here,” she said. The nurse put down the chart and came up the side of the bed. A single long hypodermic needle, a cotton swab, and a brown bottle of alcohol lay on the tray. “Can you roll over for me? This is our last injection of antibiotics before we go home.”

  “The parting shot,” Tom said. He rolled over, and the nurse separated the back of his robe. The alcohol chilled a stripe on his left buttock, as if a fresh layer of skin had been exposed to the air; the needle punched into him and lingered; another cold swipe of alcohol.

  “Your grandfather looks so distinguished,” the nurse said. “Is he in the theater?”

  Tom said nothing. The nurse switched on the television set before she left the room, not with the remote but by reaching up and twisting the ON button, almost brutally, as if it were a duty he had neglected.

  As soon as she was out of the room, Tom pointed the remote at the blaring set and zapped it.

  “Up here, our victims aren’t usually so well dressed,” said Tim Truehart, standing in his leather jacket by the open door of an old blue Dodge as Tom and von Heilitz came out of the hospital’s front entrance.

  “I’m not usually so well dressed,” Tom said, looking down at the suit the old man had brought for him. It was a grey and blue windowpane plaid, with the label of a London tailor, and except for being a little tight across the shoulders, fit him better than any of his own suits. Von Heilitz had also loaned him a white shirt, a dark blue figured tie, and a pair of well-shined black shoes, also his size, that felt stiff and resentful on his feet. Tom had expected the detective to show up with cheap new clothes, not his own, and when he had looked at himself in the mirror that hung in his room’s tiny bathroom, he had seen a well-dressed stranger in his mid-twenties. The stranger had stubby eyelashes and only a few bristles for eyebrows. The stranger’s face looked peeled. If he had seen himself in the dark, he would have thought he was Lamont von Heilitz.

  Tom got in the back seat with the suitcases, and von Heilitz sat in the front with Truehart.

  “I don’t suppose you saw anybody around your lodge before the fire started,” the policeman said.

  “I didn’t even know that Barbara Deane was there.”

  “The fire was started at both the front and the back of the lodge at roughly the same time—it wouldn’t take more than a cup of gasoline and a match to get those old places going.” Truehart sounded as if he were talking to himself. “So we know Tom didn’t do it accidentally, and it didn’t start in the kitchen, or anything like that. That fire was deliberately set.”

  For an instant Tom wished he were back in his bed in the kindergarten room, safe with his injections of antibiotics and the perpetual television.

  Von Heilitz said, “Somewhere in Eagle Lake or Grand Forks, there’s a man who is down on his luck. He probably has a prison record. He will do certain things for money. He lives off in the woods, and he doesn’t have too many friends. Jerry Hasek learned this man’s name by asking around in bars and making a few telephone calls. You ought to be able to do the same.”

  “There’s probably fifty guys like that around here,” Truehart said. “I’m not a famous private detective, Lamont, I’m a small-town Chief of Police. I don’t usually play games like this, and Myron Spychalla is after my job. I’d hate to have to go to work.”

  Tom could not stop himself from yawning.

  “You have Nappy LaBarre and Robbie Wintergreen in your jail,” von Heilitz said. “That’s all you really need. I think one of them will be happy to work out a little trade.”

  “If they know about it.”

  “Sure,” von Heilitz said. “If they know about it. I’m not telling you anything new. I’m not a famous private detective, either. I’m a retired old man who has the leisure to sit back and watch things happen.”

  “And that’s what you were doing up here, I guess.” They passed the airport sign, and Truehart flicked on his turn signal.

  “Semi-retired,” von Heilitz said, and the two men grinned at each other.

  “All right,” said Truehart, “but this boy’s mother is going to go through hell when she hears that her son died in a fire. That’s the part that bothers me.”

  “She won’t.”

  “She won’t what?”

  “Won’t hear. Her husband is off in Alabama for a couple of weeks, and she never watches television or reads the papers. She’s an invalid. If her father finds out somehow, he won’t tell her right away, and maybe he would never tell her. He has a history of protecting her from bad news.”

  That was right, Tom realized—if he had died in the fire, he would never have existed. His grandfather would never speak his name, and his mother would be forbidden to mention it. It would be the way his grandfather had wanted it all along. Her and her’s Da.

  Tim Truehart pulled up beside a long building with a grey metal skin, and Tom stepped out of the car after the men. The yellow light of a sodium lamp ate into everything like acid. Tom’s hands were sickly yellow, and Lamont von Heilitz’s hair turned a dead yellow-grey. Tom carried one of the old man’s bags around the open front of the long metal building and saw a dismantled airplane on the yellow-grey concrete floor, a glass bubble rearing out of lifeless canvas, and an engine in parts like a diagrammed sentence, bolts like punctuation marks, the exclamation point of the propeller.

  Von Heilitz asked him if he were all right.

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  Truehart’s plane had been pulled to the side of the hangar. The bags went through a narrow opening like an oven door. You climbed on the wing to get into the cockpit, and Tom slipped downwards before Truehart clutched his wrist and pulled him up. He sat in a single back seat, and von Heilitz sat beside the pilot.

  The engine sputtered and roared, and the plane rolled forward into the emptiness before lifting into the greater emptiness of the air.

  In Minneapolis he trudged down a long hallway lined with shops alongside von Heilitz. People moving the other way cast amused looks at them, an erect old man and a tottering boy without eyelashes dressed like actors on a stage, both of them a head taller than anyone else.

  From Minneapolis they flew to Houston. Tom awakened once, choking on wood smoke, and saw the dark tubular shape of a jet cabin before him. For a secon
d he thought he was flying toward Eagle Lake again, and fell instantly back into sleep.

  Between Houston and Miami Tom came awake with his head on the Shadow’s bony shoulder. He straightened up in his seat and looked across at his father, who slept on, his head tilted and his mouth open. He was breathing deeply and regularly, and his face, smoothed by the darkness of the cabin, was that of a young man.

  A stewardess who looked like Sarah Spence’s older sister walked past, looked down, saw that Tom was awake, and knelt beside him with an expectant, curious smile. “The other girls are wondering about something—well, I am too,” she whispered. Her Texas voice put a slow, bottom-heavy spin on every vowel. “Is he somebody famous?”

  “He used to be,” Tom said.

  In Miami they had to run to their gate, and minutes after they had strapped themselves into their seats, the plane rolled down the runway and picked itself into the air to fly south across hundreds of miles of water to Mill Walk. A group of nuns filled the seats in front of them, and whenever the pilot announced that they were flying over an island, they all crowded into the seats on that side of the plane, to see Puerto Rico and Vieques, and the specks named St. Thomas and Tortola and Virgin Gorda, and the little afterthoughts of Anguilla, St. Martin, Montserrat, and Antigua.

  “Am I going to stay with you?” Tom asked.

  Another stewardess placed trays with scrambled eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes before them. Von Heilitz made a face and waved his away, but Tom said, “Keep it, I’ll eat that one too,” and the stewardess replaced the tray and gave them the usual curious look. “I love the way you guys dress,” she said.

  Tom began devouring his eggs.