Mystery

Someone knocked on the door soon after Tom got up the next morning, and when he peered around it, hoping that Sarah Spence had managed to slip away from her parents, he saw a police car and another blue uniform. A man in his early thirties with straight shiny black hair that seemed too long for a policeman looked at him through the screen and said, “Mr. Pasmore? Tom Pasmore?” He looked both friendly and slightly familiar. Tom let him in, and realized that he looked a great deal like the Eagle Lake mailman. He was at least ten years older than he had looked at first—close up, Tom saw deep crow’s feet, and a little grey swept back beneath the hair that fell past his temples.

“I’m Tim Truehart, the Chief of Police,” he said, and shook Tom’s hand. “I read the report about the shot that came in here last night, and I thought I’d better come out here and take a look for myself. Despite whatever impression you may have gotten from Officer Spychalla, we don’t like it when people shoot at our summer residents.”

“He was pretty casual about it,” Tom said.

“My deputy has his good points, but investigations may not be one of them. He’s very good at handling drunks and shoplifters, and he’s hell on speeders.” Truehart was looking around the sitting room as he spoke, smiling easily, taking everything in. “I’d have come myself, but I was out of town for most of the night. They don’t pay the Chief much money up here, and I fly a little on the side.”

Then Tom remembered. “I saw you at the airport when I came in—you were sitting against the wall in the customs shed, and you were wearing a brown leather jacket.”

“You’d make a good witness,” Truehart said, and smiled at him. “Were you alone in the lodge when the shot entered?”

Tom said he was.

“It’s a good thing Barbara Deane wasn’t here—Barbara had an unpleasant experience a couple of weeks ago, and getting shot at wouldn’t help her recovery. How do you feel?”

“I’m okay.”

“You had my deputy to reckon with, as well as everything else. You must be made of tough stuff.” He laughed. “Would you show me where it happened?”

Tom took him into the study, and Truehart looked carefully at the broken window, the lamp, and the hole in the wall where his deputy had dug out the bullet. He went outside and looked across the lake at the wooded hill above the empty Harbinger lodge. Then he came back inside.

“Show me where you were sitting.”

Tom sat behind the desk.

“Tell me about it,” Truehart said. “Were you writing something, or reading, or looking out at the lake, or what?”

Tom said that he had been talking on the telephone to his grandfather, and that the shot had come just after he bent over to look out to see the lake, so that he could describe it.

“You didn’t move anything?”

“Just swept up some broken glass.”

“Was the lamp the only light showing in the room?”

“It was probably the only light showing on the whole lake.”

Truehart nodded, and walked to the side of the desk and again looked carefully at the window, the lamp, and the place where the bullet struck the wall. “Show me how you bent to look out of the window.” He walked backwards away from the desk as Tom showed him what he had done, and sat down on the couch against the wall. He joined his fingers and leaned forward on his elbows. “And you did that right when it happened?”

“The lamp exploded as soon as I bent over.”

“It’s a good thing you leaned down like that.” Tom’s stomach felt as if he had swallowed soap. “I don’t like this much.” Truehart was looking at him somberly, almost meditatively, as if he were listening to something Tom could not hear. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen any high-powered rifles around here in the past few days.”

Tom shook his head.

“And I don’t suppose you know of anybody who’d have a reason to try to kill you.”

Startled, Tom said, “I thought hunters shot stray bullets toward the lodges once or twice a year.”

“Well, maybe not quite that often, but it happens. Last year, someone shot out a window in the club from up on that hillside. And two years before that, a bullet hit the back of the Jacobs lodge in the middle of a nice June night. People around here got excited, and I don’t blame them, but nobody even came close to getting hit. And here you are, framed in this window like a target. I don’t want to make you nervous, but I can’t say I like it, not a bit.”

“Buddy Redwing is pissed off at me because his girlfriend turns out to like me better,” Tom said. “He was planning to get married to her. In fact, his family is pissed off at me too, and so is hers. But I don’t think any of them would try to kill me. Buddy tried to beat me up yesterday, and I hit him in the stomach, and that was the end of that. I don’t think he’d climb a hillside with a rifle and try to shoot me through a window.”

“You have to be sober to do that,” Truehart said. “Which more or less lets Buddy out.” He pursed his lips and looked down at his hands. “Spychalla is up in the woods now, looking for anything he can find, shell casings, cigarette butts, anything that would be around where the shooter had to be. But realistically, the most we can hope for is some idea about what kind of rifle he had. You don’t find footprints up there, not with that kind of ground cover.”

“You don’t think it was a stray shot from a hunter?” Tom asked.

“The odds are, that’s what it was. But a lot of stuff has been happening on Eagle Lake lately.” He let this sink in. “And you’re not just an ordinary summer visitor.”

These men wanted what you had handed to you on a plate, Tom remembered.

Truehart said, “I can’t pretend to understand what’s going on there, but something sure as hell is getting stirred up. And I have to consider that somebody might be getting at your grandfather through you.”

“My grandfather and I aren’t very close.”

“That might not make any difference. I can’t offer you any extra protection, but I think you ought to be careful about staying away from windows. In fact, you ought to be careful in general—Spychalla told me that you claim to have been pushed into the traffic on Main Street last Friday. Maybe you shouldn’t go too many places alone for the next couple of weeks. And maybe Barbara Deane ought to spend more nights here with you. Do you want me to talk to her about it?”

“I could do it,” Tom said.

“She likes her privacy, but right now she might want some company.”

“There is one other thing,” Tom said. “It’s connected to her. I know there have been break-ins around this area in the past few years. I don’t know if you’ve thought about this or not, but Ralph Redwing’s bodyguards have a lot of nights and evenings free, and before they started working for Ralph, they called themselves the Cornerboys and did a lot of stealing. I think they did some burglaries on Mill Walk, and I think—” He decided not to mention Wendell Hasek, and instead said, “I think Jerry Hasek, the one who’s sort of the leader, enjoys killing animals. I know he killed a dog when he was a teenager, and Barbara Deane’s dog was killed, and the other day I saw him go nuts in the Lincoln when Robbie Wintergreen, one of the bodyguards, said the word dog in front of me.”

“Well, well,” Truehart said. “Do these people live in the compound?”

“In a house by themselves.”

“I can’t go in there, of course, unless I’m invited or can persuade a judge to give me a search warrant. But do you think they’d take the risk of storing stolen goods in the compound, where they’d have to carry them in and out right under Ralph Redwing’s nose? Unless you think Ralph Redwing is getting a cut.”

“No,” Tom said. “I think I know where they put the stuff.”

“This is getting better and better. Where is it?”

Tom told him about seeing the light moving around von Heilitz’s lodge, following it up the path in the woods, getting lost, and finding the path the next day. Tim Truehart leaned forward on his elbows and listened to Tom’s story with a bemused expression on his face. And when Tom described the house in the clearing and the skinny old woman who had come out carrying a rifle, he put his hands over his face and leaned back against the couch.

“What’s wrong?” Tom asked.

Truehart lowered his hands. “Well, I’ll have to ask my mother if she’s storing stolen goods for a guy named Jerry Hasek.” He was grinning. “But she’d probably hit me over the head with a frying pan if I did.”

“Your mother,” Tom said. “Mrs. Truehart. Who used to clean the houses around here during the summers. Oh, my God.”

“That’s her. She probably thought you were checking out her house for a robbery.”

“Oh, my God,” Tom said again. “I apologize.”

“No need.” Truehart laughed out loud—he seemed vastly amused. “If it was me, I’d probably have done the same thing. I’ll tell you one thing, though, I’m glad you didn’t say anything about this to Spychalla. He’d be talking about it until his jaw wore out.” He stood up. “Well, I guess we’re through for now.” He was still grinning. “If we find anything up in the woods, I’ll tell you about it. And I do want you to be careful. That’s serious.”

They left the study, and walked across the sitting room to the front door.

“Give me a call if you see this Hasek character do anything out of the ordinary. He might be a live one. And try to spend as much time as possible with other people.”

Truehart held out his hand, and Tom shook it. The policeman pulled a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on as he trotted down the steps. He got into his car and backed down the track toward the club the way Spychalla had done. Tom stood on the steps and watched him drive away; he was grinning until his face was only a dark blob behind the windshield.