Mystery

Sarah did not appear after ten minutes, nor after twenty. Tom read a page of Agatha Christie, then reread it when he realized that he had understood each individual word, but none of them in sequence. Noises on the porch made him jump up to open the door, but no one was there. The lodge made noises by itself. He looked down the long curved avenue of trees, lighted by his porch light and the Spences’.

After ten more minutes, he wandered out on the dock. Far down to his left, distinct areas of yellow light from the club lay on the black water like paint. The Spences’ dock stood illuminated like a stage set. Moonlight silvered the tops of the trees surrounding the invisible lodges across the lake and laid a broad white path on the water. On the north end of the lake a bird called Chk?, and from past Roddy Deepdale’s lodge a second bird answered it: Chk! Chk!

Male voices floated to him, and lights went on in the Deepdale lodge: another dock jumped into visibility. Tom walked back to the deck, found the switches for the outside lights, and turned them off. Light from Glendenning Upshaw’s study fell out on the deck and the few camp chairs and a rough wooden table threw out long, decisive shadows. Now the dock was only a blur of darkness against the paler darkness of the lake. He sat down in one of the camp chairs and wondered how he would be able to stand the evenings at the club.

He went inside, sat down at the desk, opened the phone book and found the number for the Spence lodge.

Mrs. Spence said that Sarah had not come back from the club yet; and wasn’t she going out to the White Bear with Buddy?

“I thought she changed her plans,” Tom said.

“Oh, no, Sarah always goes out in the evening with Buddy. They have so much to talk about.” She would tell Sarah he called. Her voice was blandly insincere.

Tom wrote I’m on the deck—come around the side on a sheet of his grandfather’s paper, and folded it between the screen and the front door. Then he walked back around the side of the lodge and went up the steps to the deck. He turned on one of the lights and sat down to read Agatha Christie while he waited for Sarah.

Moths fluttered around the angled spotlights. The moon coasted through the sky. The light in Barbara Deane’s bedroom switched off, and another degree of softness and wholeness appeared in the darkness beyond the circle of light on the deck. Hercule Poirot strolled onstage and began exercising his little grey cells. Tom sighed—he missed Lamont von Heilitz. On the other hand, maybe Monsieur Poirot would appear to explain what really had happened here at Eagle Lake forty years ago.

Tom wondered why the Shadow had not told him that Anton Goetz was an accountant for Mill Walk Construction; and how an accountant had been able to build the enormous house on The Sevens in the early twenties; and who had shot at Lamont von Heilitz; and why Anton Goetz had taken his meals home from the club, just at the time he should have tried most to act normal.

These were exactly the sort of questions to which Hercule Poirot and every other detective like him always had the answer. They were abstraction-machines, and you never had any idea at all of what it felt like to be like them, but by the last chapter they could certainly tell you who had left the footprint beneath the Colonel’s window, and who had found the pistol on the bloody pillow and tossed it into the gorse bush. They were walking crossword puzzles, but at least they could do that.

Tom closed his book and looked across the lake. Featureless as ink blots, the empty lodges sat beneath the enormous trees. An off-duty waiter chorded on a guitar beside an open window on the third floor of the club building. Another person, probably another club waiter going home, carried a flashlight between the lodges across the lake.

But a club waiter only had to go upstairs to go home. The flashlight bobbed along, intermittently visible as it moved between the lodges and the trees. The only other light across the lake shone in an upstairs room in the Langenheim lodge, and the moving light disappeared behind a dark, barely visible corner of this structure. Neil Langenheim went out for a walk to sober up before he went to bed, Tom thought, and read another page of Agatha Christie while most of his mind listened for Sarah Spence’s footsteps coming around the side of the lodge.

The next time he looked up, the flashlight was bobbing along between the Harbinger and Jacobs lodges. Tom watched it flicker until it disappeared. After a time the light emerged from behind the Jacobs lodge and began bobbing in and out of sight in the long stretch of wooded land between the Jacobs lodge and Lamont von Heilitz’s. Tom set down his book and walked out on his dock. A big grey moth flew silently past his head and bumped against a window. From the end of his dock, Tom could see only the shadowy blackness of oaks and maples on von Heilitz’s property and the front end of his stubby dock in the black water, tipped with yellow light from the clubhouse. The flashlight did not appear on the marshy end of the lake, working its way around to the club. When the light did not appear for another several minutes, Tom remembered that at least one empty Eagle Lake lodge had been broken into. He tilted the face of his watch toward the lighted window. It was ten-thirty, and nearly everyone around the lake would be asleep. Tom trotted back along the dock.

He stopped at the door to scribble Wait for me—back soon on the note for Sarah, and then moved down the steps into the dark track around the lake.

Tom ran past the Spences’ lodge, where only the porch light burned, and then back into the darkness beneath the great trees until he came to the club. Tall lights burned in the parking lot, and in second and third-floor windows. The moon sailed through dark clouds and gave them silvery borders. Up at the narrow, treeless end of the lake, frogs croaked in the reeds. The guitarist in the club played the same chords over and over. No light shone among the trees around the Shadow’s lodge. Tom ran around the top end of the lake, and his shoes slapped noisily on the beaten earth. Moonlight gave him the curve of the path back into the trees. The guitar grew fainter. Tom trotted past the narrow road coming down through the forest from the highway, and went back beneath the trees. Von Heilitz’s lodge was only forty or fifty feet ahead, hidden by the darkness and the massive fir trees that grew down to the lake. Tom wondered what he would do if he saw someone carrying stereo equipment out of the lodge.

He moved off the track and walked quietly across von Heilitz’s property until he came to within sight of the lodge. Moonlight streamed down between the trees. No light showed through the shuttered windows. He moved up on the porch, tried the door, and found that it was locked. Unless the burglar had left the house while Tom was rounding the top of the lake, he was still inside. There would be another door on the lake side of the lodge, and this was probably where he had entered. Tom stepped down from the porch and moved backwards toward the track to see if he could see any light moving behind the shutters in the upstairs rooms.

The house was completely dark. Tom stepped back on the track and looked west. Here the moonlight showed a white narrow trail, as clear as a path in a dream, leading westward. Far down this trail a spreading yellow beam bobbed from tree to tree, going away from Tom.

“Damn,” he said. He had not been quick enough to catch the burglar inside the Shadow’s lodge. Maybe the man had heard him coming and run off before getting inside. Tom began walking quickly after the figure with the flashlight.

He passed a big dark shape that had to be the Jacobs lodge, then the Harbinger lodge. The flashlight kept moving. Tom thought he would wind up following the man all the way to the compound.

By the time the track reached Neil Langenheim’s lodge, the trees on its right side blocked the moonlight. The beam of the flashlight bobbed and wandered, striking the grey bark of oaks, the dusty path, dense shrubbery between the trees. Tom managed to shorten the distance between himself and the man with the light. He could hear his heart beating.

Keeping his eye on the wandering beam of the flashlight, he slipped off his loafers, and started forward again with his shoes in his hand.

Somewhere between the Thielman lodge and Roddy Deepdale’s place, the beam of light swung to the right, illuminating a cavern formed by leaves and branches, and disappeared into the cavern.

The cavern had to be a second path, beating deeper into the woods. He ran toward it. Small stones dug into his feet. Trees across from the Langenheim lodge closed in above his head and blocked the moonlight. The sense of open space before him disappeared. He stopped running and held his arms out before him. Then yellow light flashed between trees off to the right before him, disappeared, and flashed again. He made his way around the curve of the path before the Thielman lodge, and ran forward through an open patch of moonlight toward a gap like a dark narrow door between two maples that might have been a path. Yellow light danced like an ignis fatuus deep in the trees.

Tom turned into the gap between the maples, and the flashlight vanished again. He made his way forward in darkness. Animals whirred and scattered, and something scampered along a branch. He stepped forward. The light flashed again. In a sudden shaft of moonlight, he saw the path curving deep into the forest before him. He went ahead on complaining feet, his arms out before him.

A branch slapped the side of his head. His big toe struck something rough and scaly that might have been a root. Then he pushed away the branch, stepped over the obstruction, and inched forward. Another flash of light came from far ahead of him. The path kept melting away before him—spidery twigs scrabbled on his cheek, and his right foot landed on something cool and wet.

The traces of the flashlight disappeared completely into the forest. The side of his arm brushed the rough bark of an oak. He had lost the path in the darkness. Tom turned around and began to inch his way back to the lodges.

Twigs snatched at his clothes, soft wet ground sucked at his feet. The path had disappeared from behind him as well as in front of him. Tom put his arms up before his face and pushed forward—he hoped it was forward.

A few panicky minutes later, he glimpsed light in front of him, and fought his way toward it. The light grew stronger and shone through gaps between the trees. Before him, the trees and underbrush came to an abrupt stop—he saw a tall spotlight and a wide plane of flat monochrome green like a golf course. It seemed entirely foreign, like nothing at Eagle Lake.

Tom wound through a dense stand of maples, walked over damp leaves, and came out into bright light and smooth short grass. Across the lawn stood a long straight redwood building with a high deck and curtained windows. He was standing on Roddy Deepdale’s lawn.

He walked down to the water and made his way along the shore to Roddy’s dock and padded across it in his wet socks. On the other side of the dock he walked along the shoreline, startling two birds into flight, until the trees on his grandfather’s property began. Then the light on his own deck guided him through the oaks behind his grandfather’s lodge.

A figure moved out of the shadows at the far side of the deck. “Tom?” Sarah Spence came into the light. “Where did you go?”

“How long have you been here?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“I’m glad you didn’t go home,” he said. He climbed up on the deck and put his arms around her. “Did your mother tell you I called?”

She shook her head against his chest. “I didn’t go home, I just came here as soon as Buddy let me go. He wasn’t very happy with me. I had to promise I’d go out for a drive with him tomorrow afternoon.” She pulled a broken twig off his jacket. “What have you been doing?”

“Do you know a path that leads up into the forest, near the Thielman lodge?”

“You tried to take a path through the woods in the middle of the night?”

“I saw someone prowling around the lodges on the other side of the lake. There have been a lot of burglaries up here in the past few years—”

“Besides the one at Roddy’s?”

“You’d know about it, if Ralph Redwing let you read the local newspaper.”

“So you followed him into the woods. Your whole life is one big excursion.”

“So is yours,” he said. He kissed her.

“Could we go inside?”

“Barbara Deane’s upstairs.”

“So what?” She took him to the door and led him inside. “Ah, a couch. That’s what we need. Or is there something better in the next room?” She opened the door and peered into the big sitting room. “Ugh. It looks like a funeral parlor.”

“Don’t wake up Barbara Deane.”

“What is she, anyhow? Your babysitter or your bodyguard?” Sarah closed the door and came back to Tom. “I hope she’s not your bodyguard.” She put her arms around him.

“Did you go back to the compound after dinner?”

She looked up at him. “Why?”

“Did you see Jerry and his friends there?”

“They leave Buddy and me alone, unless he wants them for something. He even sent Kip away—he wanted to make faces at me for paying too much attention to you. As far as I know, Jerry and the other guys were in their lodge. They have a whole big place all to themselves.”

“Have you ever been inside it?”

“No!”

“Sometime when nobody’s around, could you get me in there?”

She looked distinctly unhappy for a moment. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for you to come up here in the first place.”

He sat down beside her. “Maybe we should have just stayed on the plane.”

“Why don’t we stop talking?” Sarah said.