Mystery

The next morning Tom woke up in darkness, shocked out of sleep by a nightmare that blew apart into smoke as soon as he tried to remember it. He looked at his watch: six-thirty. He groaned and got out of bed. Millions of dots of water and a dozen trickling rivulets covered his window. The tree outside was a dark blur.

He brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face, and put on a bathing suit and a sweatshirt. Downstairs, he padded out on the deck.

For a moment only his shivers let him know that he was not still dreaming. Distinct, feathery curls of white-grey smoke rose up from every part of the lake and hung in place as if anchored to the hard blue surface of the water. A few of the curls of smoke moved very slightly, turned and leaned. Across the lake, a low fog hung in a gauzy white pane between the trunks of the trees, but this was not fog—the fog was not an endless series of frozen white dervishes held to the lake like balloons to the wrist of the balloon-man. The lake seemed to be smoldering deep within itself.

He pulled the sweatshirt over his head and tossed it on one of the chairs. Then he sat on the end of the dock and put his legs in silky, startlingly warm water. Tom lowered himself into the lake and pushed away from the dock. Instantly he was in another world. The ripple of his body cutting through the silken water was the loudest sound on earth.

White-grey feathers bent around him, slid through him, flattened against his eyes, swam through his skin and re-formed themselves when he was gone. He lifted his arm from the water, and saw the smoke drifting from his flesh. He swam into the shallow water near the dock and stood up. Curls of mist clung to his body like clouds. Dark air chilled his puckering skin. He climbed back up on the dock and the feathery little clouds dissipated against or into his body. A trace of red lay over the dark trees on the eastern horizon.

In jeans, a shirt, and a warm sweater, he got back to the deck in time to see the top of the red sun move up over the trees. The curls of mist on the lake vanished as the light touched them, and the surface of the water turned transparent, showing the dark blue beneath, like a second layer of skin. Separate rays of light struck the docks, and sparkled off the windows of the club and Sarah’s lodge. At the north end of the lake, reeds glowed in the early sun. Tom moved down off the dock when the sun had cleared the tops of the trees on the horizon.

He walked around the side of the lodge and began moving north on the track, feeling as if he were seeing everything for the first time. The world looked impossibly clean, cleanly opened to reveal itself. Even the dust on the path sparkled with a secret freshness the day would gradually conceal. Past the compound, past the old cars against a whitewashed fence at the club; around the north end and the narrow marsh, where the reeds thrust up out of the ooze and a hundred silvery, nearly transparent fish the size of his little finger darted away in unison when his blunt shadow fell among them.

Tom walked through the trees to Lamont von Heilitz’s lodge and looked for broken windows or scratches on the locks, any sign of actual or attempted break-in. The doors were locked, and every shutter was locked tight. The intruder must have heard him coming and fled up the path into the woods.

Tom walked past the shuttered lodges. Raccoons had tipped over a garbage can outside the Langenheims’ place. Cigarette butts, beer cans, and vodka bottles lay strewn over pale wild grass at the foot of a forty-foot oak.

He cut toward the Thielman lodge, thinking about Arthur Thielman walking his dogs down to see the Shadow the day after his wife had been killed. He wished that he could see it—see what had happened on the dock in front of this lodge on that night. He went around to the front of the empty lodge, and saw the green space Roddy Deepdale had created around his own lodge. In those days only untouched land had stood between his grandfather’s place and the Thielmans’. He jumped up on the deck and scuffed at dry leaves and a layer of grit. Across the lake, a stooped white-haired man in a white jacket moved across a window at the front of the club, setting up a table for breakfast.

Two deer, one of them a buck with lacy antlers, moved on delicate legs out of the trees on the far side of the compound and picked their way across soft ground between the docks to the edge of the water. The doe leaned forward, bent her front legs at the knees, and knelt to drink. The stag walked into the water and saw Tom standing on the dock across the lake. Tom did not move. Ankle-deep in the water, the stag watched him. Finally he lowered his head and drank. The fuzz on the tips of his antlers glowed a soft pinkish-brown. Tom saw the old waiter leaning against the window, watching the deer lap at the water. When they had finished they moved out of the water and drifted back into the trees. Tom left the dock and walked back around the side of the lodge.

A little way past the Thielman lodge, the trees on the right side of the track separated around a narrow path that led straight between the oaks and maples for something like twenty or thirty feet, then slanted west into deep forest. Leaf mulch and brown dry needles covered the surface of the path. Tom looked back along the track curving behind the lodges, and stepped on the path.

The lake disappeared behind him.

He came to the curve in the path, and went deeper into the woods. Dense woodland stretched away on both sides. Pale, almost white light slanted down through the canopy and touched leaning trunks and brushy deadfalls. Here and there white fog still curled in the low places. The path led down a gorge, a basinlike valley in the forest, up through a stand of walnut trees with nuts like tough green baseballs, and back to level ground.

Far off to his right, so deep in the woods that it seemed a part of them, a grey-green shack materialized between the trunks of oak trees and disappeared into the background as soon as Tom took another step. On the other side of the path, a shack made of black boards, with a small black chimney pipe jutting from its roof, was half-hidden behind the thick trunks of walnut trees.

Something moved in the woods to his right. Tom snapped his head sideways. Light diffused through massive trunks, and trees felled by lightning or disease slanted grey through the brown and green. He moved forward, and again sensed movement on his right. This time he saw the head of a doe lifting toward him from beneath the diagonal line of a dead branch; then the rest of the doe came into focus, and she bounded off through a clear patch of sunlight. The doe disappeared behind a wall of fir trees. On the far side of the patch of sunlight, the white splash of a face appeared against a dark background of leaves, then disappeared like the doe.

Tom stopped moving.

The doe snapped branches as it ran deeper into the woods.

Tom stepped forward again, looked around, and saw only the patch of sunlight and the grey diagonal of the fallen branch.

The path widened before him. Pale morning light fell on the long grass of a clearing ahead and on the pine trees behind it. On the other side of the clearing, the path would wind through oaks and pines until it came to a road—maybe the highway between Grand Forks and Eagle Lake, maybe some deserted county trunk road. It was a long way to carry stolen goods, but nobody could say it wasn’t secluded.

This theory collapsed halfway to the clearing, when the stone and glass side of a house appeared. He walked nearer. More of the house came into view. Additions of large mortared stone with windows in thick stone embrasures stood on either side of a small brown shack with a wooden stoop before its front door. A big stone chimney came out of the slanting roof of the right side. Bright pansies and geraniums grew around the front of the house.

Just as Tom decided to walk back to the lake, something stirred in the woods beside him. He looked over his shoulder. A burly, black-haired man in a red plaid shirt stood twenty yards away beside an oak. The oak was not larger around than the man. He crossed his arms over his chest and regarded Tom.

Tom’s throat went dry.

A door slammed, and in an instant the man disappeared. He did not shift his body or move in any way, he just was not there anymore. A raspy voice screamed “Who are you?” Tom jumped. A little old man in jeans and an embroidered denim shirt stepped down on the grass in front of the wooden stoop. He had a hooked nose and a seamed face, and long white hair fell straight past his shoulders from a widow’s peak. He was pointing a rifle at Tom. “What do you think you’re doing around here?”

Tom moved backwards. “I went out for a walk, and the path took me here.”

The old man moved nearer, holding the rifle on Tom’s chest. “You get out of here, and don’t come back.” His eyes were flat and black. Tom stepped back and saw that the old man was a woman. “Too many thieving bastards around here,” she said in her raspy shrieking voice.

Slowly, Tom turned around. Off to the side, the burly man in the plaid shirt emerged into visibility again.

“Get out!” shrieked the old woman.

Tom ran down the path.

Bitsy Langenheim was stooping over the ground near her garbage can in a tired grey sweatsuit, throwing the cans and bottles back in. She gave him a sour, hungover look. She tossed a vodka bottle at the can and missed. “What are you staring at?”

“Nothing.”

“What were you doing back in those woods?”

“Taking a walk.”

“Stay out of there. The Indians don’t like it.”

Tom wiped sweat off his forehead. “So I learned.”

She grumbled at him and retrieved the bottle.