Mystery

Tom spent the rest of the morning alone. He called Sarah, but no one answered in their lodge. He knocked on her door. No one responded, and he went down past the compound. The Lincoln and the Cadillac were both gone. He walked all the way around the lake, hearing nothing but birds and insects and an occasional fish slapping the water. Tom felt like the last person left on earth—the whole Redwing caravan had moved on. When he came back around Roddy Deepdale’s lodge to his own, he changed into his bathing suit and swam until his muscles felt tired and relaxed.

At the club, Marcello sat beneath a lamp on a pale couch, reading a comic book. He stood when Tom entered, yawned, and strolled through a bleached wooden door marked OFFICE. Tom went upstairs to the empty dining room. The elderly waiter he had seen that morning got up from a bar stool and led him to a table near the bandshell.

“Where is everybody?” Tom asked.

“They don’t tell me where they go,” the waiter said, and placed the enormous menu in his hands.

After lunch, he took a novel out on the deck, and had just sat down on one of the hard wooden chairs when he heard the telephone ringing in his grandfather’s study.

“So what happened?” Sarah asked him.

“Where were you?” he asked back. “I called your place, but nobody answered. There wasn’t even anybody at the club.”

“We all went to the White Bear. Ralph and Katinka were very disgruntled all through lunch, though they did their best not to show it, and Buddy told me that you said he was spoiled, lazy, and indifferent. Did you say that?”

“I couldn’t help it,” Tom said.

“You got two out of three. He’s certainly spoiled and lazy, but I wouldn’t call him indifferent.”

“Did he yell at you?”

“He sort of yelled in whispers. He didn’t want his parents to hear. I was at a table with him and Kip, and my parents were at another table with his parents and his aunt. Buddy usually watches himself around his parents, and I think he has to be on his good manners at the White Bear for a while.”

“What did you tell him the other night?”

“Just that I wanted him to stop assuming that we were going to get married. I said that I liked you, too, and I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to always live on Mill Walk. It was pretty uncomfortable.”

“You didn’t break off with him.”

“I have to spend the whole summer here, Tom. I thought I was pretty good, actually. I told him that being a Redwing is a career, and I wasn’t sure it was the one I wanted.”

“I told him he should decide that you’re not good enough for him.”

“I like that,” she said, meaning she did not. “Anyhow, will you please tell me what happened, please?”

He described as much as he could remember of the scene between himself and Buddy, except for the way it ended.

“Well, well. The compound is almost empty right now. So if you want to see where the bodyguards live, this is the time. The only person in the place should be Aunt Kate, and she takes a long nap every afternoon.”

Tom said he’d meet her in front of her lodge.

“I suppose I must be crazy,” she said, and hung up.

She stepped out from between the oaks as he walked toward her lodge. He went down the track to join her. She pulled him back between the big oaks and tilted her face toward his and gave him a long kiss. “I had to get out. My mother knows that something went wrong between Buddy and me, and I couldn’t stand the interrogation anymore. I called you when she went upstairs to wash her hair.”

They walked across the narrow parking area in front of the compound, and Sarah opened the door in the tall fence. “Here we go.”

Gravel paths led to three highly ornamented wooden houses with long porches, gables, and dormer windows on the third floor. The houses were so perfectly maintained they looked artificial. Banks of flowers and bright green grass grew between the gravel paths. The whole thing looked like a toyland, like Disneyland. “Well, here you are,” Sarah said. “This is it. The holy of holies. The one on Mill Walk looks just like it, except the houses are newer and they’re not all alike.”

Sarah led him up the steps of the lodge nearest the compound’s lakeside wall. “I’d better stay out here in case they come home early,” she said. “I’ll bang on the door, or something.”

“I won’t be long,” Tom said, and went inside.

The lodge smelled of cigarettes and grease. Discarded clothes and open magazines lay on the floor of the main downstairs room, and the kitchen was a mound of crusty dishes and empty beer bottles. Tom walked up the steps and peered into the bedrooms. Blue jeans, socks, and T-shirts covered the unmade beds and the bare floors. In the largest of the three bedrooms, a portable television and a tape deck stood on a low table. Tom opened the dresser drawers and found underwear, clean white shirts still in the dry cleaner’s wrappings, and clean socks. On a shelf in the closet above two grey suits he saw a stack of pornographic magazines and, in a row of books about concentration camps, Hitler, Nazis, and famous criminals, four tattered paperback books called The Torturer’s Library.

Pictures from muscle magazines decorated Nappy’s room. Crumpled O Henry and Twinkies wrappers lay around the bed. Robbie’s room was a sty of beer bottles, dirty plates, and wadded-up tissues. A cheap portable record player like the one in Gloria Pasmore’s room sat on the floor next to a stack of forty-fives and a full-length mirror where Robbie could watch himself pretend to play guitar.

Tom walked downstairs and went outside.

“I never realized that being lookout was such a tricky job,” Sarah said. “I’m sure that several birds gave me very suspicious looks. My hands were clenched so tight I practically gave myself bruises. Did you find anything?”

“About what I expected,” Tom said. “A lot of Vivaldi records and books by T.S. Eliot. Let’s get out of here.”

“Now would you mind telling me why you wanted to do this?”

“I was looking for—”

A car crunched onto the gravel of the little parking area beyond the fence. Car doors slammed shut. Voices floated toward them. Tom and Sarah were in the middle of the compound, halfway to the gate.

“Whoops,” Sarah said.

The door in the fence opened, and Katinka Redwing came through, immediately followed by her husband. Both of them froze at the sight of Tom and Sarah.

“Oh, hi!” Sarah said. “I was just showing Tom what the compound looks like. It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Beautiful,” Tom said. “So peaceful. I can really see why you love it.”

Both Redwings stared at them with implacable faces.

“Well,” Sarah said. “Tell Buddy I’m looking forward to our drive this afternoon.”

They smiled and walked past the staring Redwings.

Outside the tall fence, Jerry Hasek leaned against the Cadillac, smoking. When Tom and Sarah appeared through the door, he took his cigarette out of his mouth and stared at them and bit his lower lip. His jaws worked as if he were chewing gum.

“See you later, Jerry,” Sarah said. She and Tom walked across the gravel, and turned onto the path.

“Yeah,” Jerry said. “I’ll see you later.”

At ten minutes to four Tom was standing back in the trees near the rank of mailboxes, and after a little while a blue and white mail van pulled up before the boxes. Joe Truehart jumped out and began sliding advertising circulars, catalogues, and magazines into the Redwings’ boxes. Tom walked out of hiding and gave him another long letter to Lamont von Heilitz. The mailman said he would take care of it, and pushed it into his back pocket. Tom walked back down the long hill and went back to his lodge. He read for half an hour, and then walked over to the Deepdale lodge to see Kate Redwing.