Mystery

by Peter Straub

  “Well, here goes nothing,” he said. “Literally.”

  Natchez pressed the dead man’s finger into the trigger. The gun went off with a roar, and the head jerked in his hand. Blood-soaked brains, hair, and bone splattered on the wall behind Upshaw’s corpse. Natchez dropped the head, and bent down to let the hand fall open and release the pistol.

  “Sometimes life is like a book,” Tom said.

  On the Saturday of the second week in September, two months after the second death of Glendenning Upshaw, Tom Pasmore sat on an iron bench fifty feet inside the entrance of the Goethe Park zoo. Men and women, most of them herding tribes of small children, streamed through the open gates and past him, going toward the balloon vendor and the ice cream cart stationed at the point where the cobbled entrance widened out to meet the concrete that led to the first row of cages and the paths into the zoo. The people pushing baby carriages or strollers, Tom noticed, always relaxed when they got off the cobbles and hit the smooth concrete. They stood up straighter, and you could see the tension leave their spines and back muscles. Some of the people who passed Tom’s bench took a second to look at him: he wore a chalk-striped grey suit with a vest with lapels, a dark blue shirt and a tie of a deep red, and on his feet were a pair of scuffed brown loafers. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and in the dusty gaps between the cobbles lay crushed cigarette packets, the tan specks of shattered potato chips, and one rightangled bread crust fought over by a cluster of chirping sparrows.

  Other benches were closer to the zoo’s gates, and some of them were empty, but Tom had chosen this one so that he would be able to watch Sarah Spence come in without her seeing him. He wanted one objective, unmuddled look at her before they had to reckon with each other again: he wanted the reckoning, but he also wanted the moment of pure looking, to see her for the space of a few seconds as anyone else would. Since the night of the fire, Tom had glimpsed her once in a courtroom, while her father had testified about what the government prosecutor had described as the more acceptable face of the Redwing businesses—he himself had been waiting, as he was to wait for two more weeks, to speak about finding his grandfather’s body in the study. There were trials inside trials, trials intersecting trials, and Tom was only peripheral to them, but he had been required to spend three more weeks on the witness benches, and during that time the Spences had left the island. The trials and investigations would go on for another year, it seemed, but Tom’s part in them was done: he spent what seemed like half of every day with lawyers and accountants, but these meetings were about other matters, surprising to Tom, but of no relevance to what filled the headlines of the Eyewitness.

  Sarah came in through the gates with a knot of people, distinct from them as a cardinal is distinct in a throng of pigeons, and began floating across the cobbles toward the cages. She wore tight faded jeans—jeans that looked nothing like a boy’s—tucked into high cowboy boots, an oversized white shirt that reminded Tom of Kip Carson and was fastened to her hips by a wide belt, and her thick hair had grown long enough to be gathered at the back of her head into a great loose braid, from which honey-colored wisps and streaks escaped about her face. Fifteen minutes late, she swung along over the cobblestones with long strides, scanning the benches. Her eyes moved past him, and she took another long effortless floating stride before her gaze snapped back to him and she stopped moving. She turned to come toward him with a wondering, slightly bemused smile, and he stood up to greet her.

  “Well, look at you,” she said. “You’re a vision of something or other.”

  “So are you.”

  “I mean those clothes.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “I just mean you.”

  They stood looking at each other for a moment, not knowing what to say. “I feel kind of embarrassed,” she said, “but I don’t really know why. Do you, too?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I bet you do, though. I bet if we danced together, I’d feel you trembling.”

  He shook his head. “I’m glad your mother let you come.”

  “Oh, after everything that happened she got over being so mad at you.” She took a step nearer, and hesitantly put her arms around his waist. “I saw you in the courtroom.”

  “I saw you too.”

  “Did you call me, once? Right after that article about the fire was in the paper?”

  He nodded.

  “I knew it. Well, I thought it was you. I didn’t think you could have died, especially since you carried me out.…”

  “It was just a mistake,” he said.

  “Were you burned at all?”

  “Not really.”

  She looked up at his face as if trying to read it, and took her arms from around him. “Why did you want to come here?”

  “Because I’ve never been here,” he said, and hooked his own arm around her waist. They began to walk along with the crowd toward the cages. “We drove past it once, remember? I thought it would be nice to see the animals. They’ve been here all the time, sitting in these cages, and I guess I thought they deserved a visit.”

  “A social call,” she said.

  They drifted past the first set of cages, still adjusting to the fact of each other, weighing what they had to say. A black panther paced around and around in relentless circles, and a male lion lay like a tawny sack on the floor of its cage, peering at or through the bars with rheumy eyes while a female lion lay on a dead branch above its head, asleep with her back to the spectators. Tom and Sarah turned into the path leading toward the elephants and Monkey Island. From far off they heard the barking of sea lions.

  “Everything’s so different now,” Sarah said. She took her arm from around his waist, and he put his hands in his pockets. “The Redwings are all in Switzerland. I heard Fritz is going to a school there. Can you imagine Fritzie Redwing in a Swiss school?”

  “Not very well. I guess Fulton Bishop is in Switzerland too—he got out in time, and Ralph Redwing gave him some kind of job.”

  “Well, they’re all in Switzerland,” Sarah said. “My father says they still have plenty of money.”

  “They would.” The elephants moved slowly around their big cage, nosing the heaps of straw with their trunks. A man leaned forward over the bar and held out a peanut, and one elephant shuffled forward and extended his grey, wrinkled trunk to pick it off his palm with a quick, delicate gesture. “They’ll always have plenty of money,” Tom said. “They’ll always have enormous houses and lots of paintings and cars and people who work for them, and they’ll never think it’s enough. They just won’t have their own island anymore.”

  “Are we still friends?” Sarah asked.

  “Sure,” Tom said.

  “I didn’t tell other people everything you told me,” she said.

  “I know that.”

  “I just said a few things to my father, and he didn’t know what they really meant any more than I did. Or he didn’t really believe them.”

  “No, he didn’t believe them,” Tom said. “Did he get another job?”

  “Yeah, he got another job. We don’t have to sell our house, or anything. Everything worked out kind of okay, didn’t it?”

  “In most ways,” Tom said.

  They drifted along to Monkey Island, where a tribe of anarchic miniature people with tails and body hair scrambled over a rocky hill separated from the real people by a moat. Children screamed with pleasure as the monkeys surged from one end of the island to another, squabbled over food, masturbated, hopped on each other’s backs, berated each other in squeaks and howls, hit each other with tiny balled-up monkey fists, turned and addressed their spectators with oratorical flourishes, wild gestures of pleading or outrage.

  “You must be sorry about your grandfather,” Sarah said.

  “I’m sorry he was the kind of person he was. I’m sorry he did so much damage.” Her and her’s Da, came his mother’s voice. “I guess I was depressed for a while when I finally had to admit …” Sarah smiled at the antics o
f the monkeys, and he smiled at her. “You know. When I really had to admit to myself what kind of man he was.”

  “After he killed himself.”

  “No, before that,” Tom said. “A day or two before that.”

  Her and her’s Da. Because there were just the two of us in this house.

  She turned away from the monkeys. “Well, that was terrible, what happened to your friend. Mr. von Heilitz, I mean.” She looked at him with both sympathy and a kind of impersonal curiosity, and he knew what was coming.

  “Yes. That was terrible.”

  “Did you know he was going to leave you everything?”

  “No. I didn’t know anything about it until his lawyers called me, and I went down to see them.”

  “And you live in his house now?”

  “Now that I have it cleaned up.”

  They were walking down a path past brown bears and polar bears penned in small separate cages. The bears lay flat on their sides in the heat, smeared with their own excrement.

  “I guess you don’t really ever have to work, do you?” Sarah asked.

  “Not at a job. I’m going to have plenty to do, though. I have to finish up Brooks-Lowood, and I’ll go to college, and then I’ll come back and see what I can do.”

  “Those are his clothes, aren’t they?”

  “I like his clothes,” Tom said.

  “But are you going to dress like that at school?”

  “Are you going to dress like that at Mount Holyoke?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know, either.”

  “Tom,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No. Maybe this zoo is a little depressing.”

  She turned toward the bears, frustrated with him. “There were millions, weren’t there? My father said there were millions. Isn’t that something? Isn’t it really something to know that you can do anything you want? Isn’t it exciting?”

  “I didn’t want his money,” Tom said. “I wanted him—to keep on knowing him.”

  “Well, why did he give everything to you?”

  “I used to go over and talk to him.” Tom smiled at her. “Maybe he wanted to give me the right start in life.”

  “What did your parents say?”

  They moved away down the path toward a high dark building at the farthest end of the zoo. A sign at the entrance announced that it was the REPTILE HOUSE. “I don’t feel like going to the Reptile House, do you?”

  She shook her head. “Well, what did they say?”

  “When I told my mother, she was too sort of stunned to say much, but she was pleased. She liked him too.”

  “Pleased,” Sarah said. “She should have been pleased.”

  “She had to sign a lot of papers, but she didn’t really know what they were. What concerned her most was that I wanted to move out, but it was just across the street. I go home for meals, and to talk to her. She’s getting better. And my father didn’t say anything, because he wasn’t around to hear about it. He just kind of disappeared. He took off. I don’t think we’ll ever see him again.”

  Sarah’s face had expressed shock, concern, and dismay as he spoke, and when he was done, she said, “But you don’t act like you care if he comes back!”

  “I do care—I hope he never does come back. We’re all a lot happier this way.”

  “Your mother’s happier?”

  “She misses him, but yes, I think she’s a lot happier. He didn’t actually like either one of us very much.”

  “Everything’s so different now!” Sarah cried.

  “Everything was different before, only nobody could see it.”

  “But what about you and me?” Sarah asked.

  “We know each other better.”

  “That isn’t all,” she said. “Oh, we missed the sea lions. We’re back at the start again. I heard the sea lions, but we never saw them.”

  “There was a path we didn’t take,” Tom said.

  They had come out at the other side of the panther’s cage, and the pacing creature looked through the bars and met Tom’s eyes with a quick, questioning look that stopped him cold. The panther was crazy, but it was beautiful in a way that even the craziness of imprisonment could not diminish. The animal possessed a native, unconscious splendor—it was helpless before this splendor, it could only helplessly express it, like the tired lions in the next cage. “Do you want to go back?” he asked Sarah, but he was looking at the panther.

  “It’s only a sad little zoo, isn’t it?” she said. “No. Tom, let’s get out of here and go somewhere else.”

  The panther’s eyes flicked away from his, and the panther prowled once more around its cage and turned back and met his eyes again. The panther’s eyes were huge and inhumanly yellow, filled with their urgent question, which might have been Who are you? or What are you going to do?

  “Tom!” Sarah said. “That panther’s looking at you!”

  Who he was and what he was going to do were the same thing, Tom realized.

  “Are you laughing at me?” Sarah asked. “Tom?”

  The panther made another circuit of its cage.

  PETER STRAUB

  Peter Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels including, most recently, A Dark Matter. Two of his novels, Lost Boy Lost Girl and In the Night Room, are winners of the Bram Stoker Award. He lives in New York City.

  www.peterstraub.net

  Books by Peter Straub

  FICTION

  Marriages

  Julia

  If You Could See Me Now

  Ghost Story

  Shadowland

  The General’s Wife

  Floating Dragon

  The Talisman (with Stephen King)

  Wild Animals

  Under Venus

  Koko

  Mystery

  Houses Without Doors

  A Short Guide to the City

  Mrs. God

  The Throat

  The Hellfire Club

  Mr. X

  Magic Terror

  Black House (with Stephen King)

  Lost Boy Lost Girl

  In the Night Room

  5 Stories

  Poe’s Children (editor)

  A Dark Matter

  NONFICTION

  Sides

  POETRY

  My Life in Pictures

  Ishmael

  Open Air

  Leeson Park and Belsize Square: Poems 1970–1975

  BOOKS BY PETER STRAUB

  KOKO

  Book One of the Blue Rose Trilogy

  Koko. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They are Vietnam vets—a doctor, a lawyer, a working stiff, and a writer. Very different from each other, they are nonetheless linked by a shared history and a single shattering secret. Now they have been reunited and are about to embark on a quest that will take them from Washington, D.C., to the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, hunting someone from the past who has risen from the darkness to kill and kill and kill.

  Fiction/978-0-307-47220-5

  MYSTERY

  Book Two of the Blue Rose Trilogy

  Tom Pasmore, ten years old, survives a near-fatal accident. During his long recovery, he becomes obsessed with an unsolved murder and finds he has clues to solving it that he shouldn’t. Lamont von Heilitz has spent his life solving mysteries, until he wanted to know nothing more of the terror of life and the horror of death. When a new murder disrupts their world of wealth, power, and pleasure, the two must form an unlikely partnership to confront demons from the past and the dark secrets that still haunt the present.

  Fiction/978-0-307-47222-9

  POE’S CHILDREN

  The New Horror

  Peter Straub has gathered here twenty-four bone-chilling, nail-biting, frightfully imaginative stories that represent the best of contemporary horror writing. The collection includes stori
es by Dan Chaon, Elizabeth Hand, Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, M. John Harrison, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, Jonathan Carroll, M. Rickert, Thomas Tessier, David J. Schow, Glen Hirshberg, Thomas Ligotti, Benjamin Percy, Bradford Morrow, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Ellen Klages, Tia V. Travis, Graham Joyce, Neil Gaiman, John Crowley, and Rosalind Palermo Stevenson.

  Fiction/978-0-307-38640-3

  ANCHOR BOOKS

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

  www.randomhouse.com