Mystery

Sarah Spence jumped up from the cast-iron bench near the mailboxes when Tom came limping down the track between the great pines and oaks. She had showered and changed into a sleeveless blue linen dress, and her hair glowed. “Where did you go?” And, a second later, after she had a better look at him: “What happened to you?”

“It’s nothing serious. I went to Eagle Lake, and I fell down.” He limped toward her.

“You fell down? Mr. Langenheim said you went into the town, but I thought he might have heard wrong.… Where did you fall down?”

She had come right up to him, and for a moment put her hands on his arms and looked up at him with her serious, wide-set eyes.

“Main Street,” he said. “I was quite a spectacle.”

“Are you okay?” She had not taken her eyes off his face, and her pupils darted crazily from side to side. He nodded, and she wrapped her arms around him and pushed her head against his chest like a cat. “How did you happen to fall down in the middle of Main Street?”

“Just lucky.” He stroked her head, and felt something like ordinary feelings return to him. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Didn’t you see me asking you to meet me at the club?”

“I wanted to mail a letter.” She tilted her head and looked questioningly at him. “And I wanted to look up some old articles in the local paper.”

They began moving down between the trees, their arms around each other. Tom forced himself not to limp.

“I’ve had at least three lifetimes today,” she said. “The best one was on the plane. In our little compartment.”

After a few more steps, she said, “Buddy’s angry with me. I’m not so enchanted with him this summer. It’s against the rules, not to be enchanted with Buddy Redwing.”

“How angry is he?”

She looked up at him. “Why? Are you afraid of him?”

“Not exactly. But somebody pushed me off the sidewalk, right into the traffic. I fell down, and a car passed right over me.”

“The next time you go on another excursion, I want you to bring me with you.”

“You seemed pretty busy with Buddy and his friend.”

“Oh sure, the great Kip Carson—you know what he does? You know why Buddy keeps him around? He carries this sack of pills around with him, and he gives them away like candy. Talking to him is like having a conversation with a druggist. Buddy loves these things called Baby Dollies. That’s another reason he got mad at me. I wouldn’t take any of them.”

On the peak that descended to the lake, they looked down at the still blue water and the quiet lodges.

“I don’t think Buddy is ever going to be a captain of industry, or whatever his father is,” Sarah said. “But he couldn’t have pushed you into the street. Around four he took two of those pills, and then he just sat on the dock with Kip and said Wow. Wow.”

“How about Jerry Hasek?”

“The driver? Buddy made him get into the lake and push our boat out. Kip tried, but Kip basically can’t do anything but dole out pills.”

“What about afterwards? Did you see Jerry or his two friends around the compound?”

The lodges looked deserted, and on a terrace of the clubhouse, a waiter in an unbuttoned white shirt leaned against a poolside bar and combed his hair with wide sweeping gestures.

“I guess they were in and out. Do you think it might just have been an accident?”

“Maybe. The whole town was a zoo.”

Orange late afternoon light bounced off the water.

They walked down the hill in a silence that was loud with unspoken sentences. When they reached the marshy end of the lake, she dropped his hand.

“I thought you’d be safe up here,” she said. “Nobody does anything around here but eat, drink, and gossip. But you’re here one day, and somebody pushes you in front of a car!”

“It was probably an accident.”

She smiled almost shyly at him. “You can eat dinner with us tonight, if you want. Just don’t point your finger at somebody and accuse him of murder, like in the last chapter of a detective novel.”

“I’ll be good,” Tom said.

Sarah put her arms around him. “Buddy and Kip invited me to come to the White Bear with them after dinner, but I said I wanted to stay home. So if you’re going to stay home …”

Tom took a shower in the bathroom beside his mother’s old room, wrapped a towel around himself, and went out into the hall. Barbara Deane slid something heavy off a shelf and put it down on a wooden surface. He hurried back into his room. He pulled back the soft old Indian blanket and stretched out beneath it. Beneath the odor of freshly laundered sheets, the bed smelled musty. Tom was asleep in seconds.

He awoke an hour and a half later. Nothing around him looked familiar. For a moment he was not even himself, merely a stranger in a bare but pleasant room. He sat up, saw the towel hanging over a chair, and remembered where he was. The entire fantastic day came back to him. He went to the closet and dressed in chinos, a wash-and-wear white button-down shirt, a tie, and the lightweight blue blazer his mother had made him pack. He pushed his feet into loafers and went downstairs. The house was empty.

Tom let himself out and walked quickly down the avenue of trees to the clubhouse.