Mystery

Buzz opened the door and said, “Come on in!” His bathing suit was only a narrow strip of blue cloth, and his skin glistened with oil. A red polka dot bandanna was tied around his neck. His perfect teeth shone white. He stepped backwards, and Tom followed him into a long, loftlike room with oatmeal-colored couches and chairs, cut flowers in glass vases, a piano with framed photographs, and creamy yellow rectangular rugs on the polished wooden floor. A big stone fireplace stood against the back wall. Kate Redwing stood up and smiled from one end of the long couch facing him.

“Kate is having a cup of tea, would you care for one? I can give you a Coke or a 7-Up, or any kind of drink, if you’d prefer.”

“Tea would be great,” Tom said.

“Roddy and I are working on our tans out on the deck, and Kate says the two of you want to talk about graves and worms and epitaphs, so I’ll just give you your tea and go back out, if that’s all right.” He put his hands on his narrow hips and gave Tom a humorous inspection. “Have you completely recovered from your tumble the other day? You look as if you have.”

“I think it’s been one long tumble ever since,” Tom said, and Buzz laughed and walked into the kitchen to boil up the water.

“Come sit next to me,” Kate said. “Are you really all right?”

He walked around to her, nodding. Through the window wall on the far end of the room, Tom waved to Roddy Deepdale, who was lying back in a recliner. He wore the same nearly nonexistent kind of bathing suit as Buzz, and his chest and shoulders were turning a smooth, uniform gold. A brown plastic bottle of suntan lotion and a pile of books stood on the deck beside the recliner. Roddy propped himself up on one elbow and waved back. The kettle whistled in the kitchen.

“You’ve succeeded in stirring up my nephew and his wife, at any rate,” Kate said. “There was some kind of unpleasantness between you and Buddy this morning, wasn’t there? Of course everybody’s terribly tactful, but I don’t suppose you’ll be able to keep me entertained at any more family dinners.”

Tom said she probably wouldn’t be able to entertain him, either.

“Maybe not at dinners, anyhow,” she said, and he knew that this wonderful old woman was offering him her friendship. He said he supposed there were other times of the day.

“Well, exactly. Ralph doesn’t think much of Roddy and Buzz either, but we never saw any reason for that to interfere with our enjoyment of each other. The world doesn’t run according to the rules of a few Redwings.” She patted his hand. “I gather that all this has to do with that beautiful young Spence girl. Of course I think it would be a shame for her to get engaged to my grand-nephew. On top of everything else, she’s far too young. Ralph and Katinka will get over the shock sooner than you think, and before you know it Buddy will discover some other girl who will turn out to be much more appropriate. You should just be discreet and get as much out of this summer as you can.”

“So that’s what this talk is all about,” Buzz said, returning with a steaming cup of tea. “Now I know I’d better get out of the way!” He set the tea down on the glass coffee table before them, and padded out through a side door. A minute later, he appeared on the deck, moving past the window toward a lounge chair.

“Does Buzz have a job?” Tom asked.

“He’s a doctor.” Kate Redwing smiled at him. “An excellent pediatrician, I hear. He had some trouble at the start of his career, when he worked with an important doctor, and he’s had some rough patches, but he’s doing very well now.” She frowned into her cup, and then looked at him with bright lively eyes. “But that’s not what you wanted to talk to me about. Weren’t you interested in what happened during my first summer up here? When that poor woman was killed?”

“Didn’t you and your fiancé find her body?” Tom asked.

“I suspect you know very well we did.” She smiled at him again. “I wonder why you want to know about all this.”

“Well,” Tom said, “my mother got much worse during that summer, and I’m sure the murder had a lot to do with the trouble she had.”

“Ah,” said the old woman.

“And I’ve been talking about Mrs. Thielman’s murder with Lamont von Heilitz ever since I met him.”

“So he got you interested in it.”

“I guess you could say that. I think there’s a lot that’s still unknown, or that was never explained, and the more I can find out …” He let the sentence go unfinished. “Maybe I’m not saying this right, but I’m interested in Mill Walk, and that murder involved a whole lot of important people who ran things on the island.”

“I’m certainly glad not to be having this conversation at the compound. But I’ll confess that it’s fascinating. Do you really think that Lamont might have missed something?”

“Probably nothing important.” He looked at the fireplace and saw the bare, slightly paler rectangle spot on the creamy wall above it where the portrait had hung.

“Well, I can tell you one thing. Everything about a murder is probably surprising, because all of a sudden you learn about other people’s secrets, but it really was a surprise to me that Jeanine Thielman had been seeing Anton Goetz. And if it hadn’t been for those curtains—the curtains that were wrapped around her when Jonathan found her underwater—I don’t know if I would have believed that he had anything to do with it. That and the fact that he killed himself, of course. But the curtains were really damning, I thought.”

“He never expected them to be found,” Tom said.

“The lake is surprisingly deep up at that end, and there’s a big drop-off where the reeds end. It was just his bad luck that my line snagged, and Jonathan dove underwater and saw something that looked funny to him.”

“You didn’t think Goetz was her type?”

“Anton Goetz! He seemed so obvious. He wanted to project a sort of terribly romantic masculine toughness, you know, always smoking and squinting his eyes, that sort of thing. That war injury helped. He was an excellent shot, by the way. A real marksman. Under the circumstances, that’s a little ghoulish, isn’t it? And he was supposed to own a rather unsavory hotel. Twenty years after all this happened, I thought of Anton Goetz when I saw Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart and Rick’s Café Americain. Except that Goetz had one of those kind of buttery German accents.”

“He doesn’t sound much like an accountant,” Tom said.

“Oh, he couldn’t have been an accountant.” She looked to see if he were teasing. “That’s impossible. Do you remember when several people were killed in his hotel? The Alvin? The Albert?”

“The St. Alwyn,” Tom said.

“That’s it. There was a prostitute, and a musician, I think, and a group of other people? And there was something about the words ‘blue rose’? And a detective on Mill Walk killed himself? Being here with Roddy and Buzz is what reminds me of all that, I guess. Anyhow, when I heard about it from my relatives on Mill Walk, I thought it was like Anton Goetz to own a hotel where something like that could happen. He couldn’t have been an accountant. Could he?”

“According to Sarah’s father, he was,” Tom said. “He saw Goetz’s name in the corporate ledgers. But it was actually my grandfather who owned the St. Alwyn.”

She looked at him fixedly for a second, forgetting about the cup of tea she had lifted from its saucer. “Well now, that’s very interesting. That explains something. On the night that it turned out that Jeanine Thielman disappeared, Jonathan and I had dinner with all the Redwings, as we did most of those nights. I was supposed to get to know his uncle Maxwell and the rest and, of course, they were supposed to give me a good looking over, which is certainly what they did. Those dinners got to be a little nerve-wracking, but I soldiered through, which is what we did in those days. Anyhow, on that night, Jon and I stayed after everyone else went back to the compound. We wanted to be by ourselves, and I asked him if we had to stay the entire summer. Jonathan thought we should, though he was very sympathetic. We didn’t have an argument, but we went to and fro for a long time. At one point, I walked away from him and went to the balcony at the front of the club that overlooks the entrance. And I saw your grandfather talking with Anton Goetz.”

She looked down and noticed the cup in her hand. She replaced it on the saucer and folded her hands on her lap. “Well, I was kind of startled, I suppose. I didn’t know they knew each other that well—they weren’t each other’s sort at all. Of course I didn’t think that Mr. Goetz and Mrs. Thielman were each other’s sorts either, and it turned out they were. During the day, I’d never seen Glen and Anton Goetz do more than nod to each other. And there they were, having this intense conversation. They were each leaning on something—Anton Goetz on his cane and your grandfather on that umbrella he always carried. I guess so he could hit somebody with it if he got mad.”

“Did it look like they were arguing?”

“I wouldn’t say so, no. What struck me at the time was that Glen had left Gloria alone in their lodge. At night. And Glen never left Gloria alone, especially at night. He was a very thoughtful father.”

Tom nodded. “Goetz always carried a cane?”

“He needed it to stand up. One of his legs was almost useless. He could walk, but only with a pronounced limp. The limp rather suited him—it went with his being such a good shot. It added to his aura.”

“He couldn’t run?”

Kate smiled. “Oh, my goodness, run? He would have fallen splat on his face. He wasn’t the kind of man you could imagine running, anyhow.” She looked at him with a new understanding clear in her intelligent face. “Did someone tell you that they saw him running? They’re nothing but a liar, if they did.”

“No, it wasn’t that, exactly,” Tom said. “My mother saw a man running through the woods on the night Mrs. Thielman was killed, and I thought it had to be Goetz.”

“It could have been almost anybody but him.”

Out on the deck, Roddy Deepdale stood up and stretched. He picked up his books and disappeared from view for a moment before coming in the side door. Buzz followed him a moment later.

“Anybody for a drink before we get ready to go over to the club?” Roddy said. He smiled brilliantly, and went into his bedroom to put on a shirt.

“Don’t you wish we had Lamont von Heilitz here, so we could ask him to sort of explain everything?” Kate said. “I’m sure he could do it.”

“Did Roddy say something about a drink?” Buzz asked, coming in the side door.

“Maybe a little one,” Kate said. “Everybody over there watches me so carefully, I think they’re afraid I’m going to get maudlin.”

“I’ll get maudlin for you,” Buzz said. “I have only another week of lying around on decks and getting tan before I have to go back to St. Mary Nieves.”

Tom stayed another half hour. He learned that the Christopher who had said the wicked thing to Roddy Deepdale was Christopher Isherwood, and then had a surprisingly good time while they all talked about Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin and their author, whom Roddy and Buzz considered a cherished friend. It was the first time in his life he had had such a conversation with any adults, and the first proof he’d ever had that literate conversation was a possibility at Eagle Lake, but he left bothered by the feeling that he had missed something crucial, or failed to ask some important question, during his talk with Kate Redwing.

When he got back inside his grandfather’s lodge, he tried to write another letter to Lamont von Heilitz, but soon ran dry—he did not really have anything new to tell him, except that he wondered if he should not just go back to Mill Walk and start thinking seriously about becoming an engineer after all. He wondered how his mother was getting on, and if he could do anything to help her if he were at home. Home, just now, did not seem much more homelike than Glendenning Upshaw’s lodge.

He took a shower, wrapped a towel around himself, and instead of going immediately back into his bedroom to get dressed, walked past the staircase to Barbara Deane’s room. He opened her door and stepped inside the threshold.

It was a neat, almost stripped-down room, two or three times the size of his, with a double bed and a view of the lake through a large window. A half-open door revealed a tiled bathroom floor and the edge of a white tub with claw feet and a drawn shower curtain. The closet doors were shut. A bare desk stood against one wall, and a framed photograph hung above it like an icon. Tom took three steps closer and saw that it was an enlarged photograph of his grandfather, young, his hair slicked back, giving the camera a thousand-candlepower smile that the expression in his eyes made forced and unnatural. He was holding Gloria, four or five years old, in his arms—the chubby, ringleted Gloria Tom had seen in a newspaper photograph. She was smiling as if ordered to smile, and what Tom thought he saw in her face was fear. He stepped nearer and looked more closely, feeling his own vague sorrow tighten itself around him, and saw that it was not fear, but terror so habitual and familiar that even the photographer who had just shouted “Smile!” had not seen it.