Mystery

As soon as Fritz had run back to the compound, his wet bare feet leaving footprints behind him on the track, Tom dried himself off, changed into chinos and a polo shirt, and went to the club. It was just past eleven forty-five. Lunch did not normally begin until twelve-thirty, but he was hungry—he’d eaten nothing besides half of the pie for dinner the night before, and had skipped breakfast that morning. Besides, he was too tense to wait: he suspected that the real reason he wanted to eat early was that he could be out of the club dining room before the Redwings showed up, pleased with themselves for having negotiated their way through the obstacles to their son’s engagement to be engaged. There would be one delicate hint to Fritz’s parents about trouble with the Pasmore boy, and Fritz would be unable to keep himself from sneaking shining glances across the room.

“Book scars,” Tom said to himself, and smiled.

The long table had been extended, and set for three more places. Fritz’s parents would be formally introduced, in the lowest of low-key styles, with the formality that conceals itself, to the Redwing Holding Company’s newest acquisition.

Oh, we’ve been expecting this for months.

Oh, I think the formal announcement can come whenever they’re ready, but after a year I imagine our young lady here will transfer out to Arizona. She’ll want to keep an eye on her boyfriend, won’t she?

Laughter, knowing and tolerant.

It’s so nice they didn’t make us wait until the end of the summer—you know, I was actually afraid they’d do that!

Oh, Sarah is going to love her new life.

Tom knew the real reason he was eating early.

He sat in the empty dining room with an unread, unopened book next to his ketchup-smeared plate. Two younger waiters lounged against the bar, and sunlight blazed on the terrace and fell over the first three rows of the thick red floor tiles. Tom looked down at his hands folding a heavy pink napkin, and saw the hands of Lamont von Heilitz encased in light blue gloves. He dropped the napkin on the table and left the dining room.

Back at his grandfather’s lodge, he leaned against the door. Then he began picking the papers up from the sitting room couch.

The telephone rang.

Tom hoped that Sarah had stayed behind in her lodge for a minute after her parents went to the club. “Oh, hello,” he said. He put the stack of papers on the desk.

“Tom?” He did not recognize the voice, which was that of a woman in her twenties or thirties.

“It’s Barbara Deane,” the voice said. “I’ve been thinking—if Tim Trueheart wants me to stay at the lodge, I’d better stay there. Otherwise, I’m going to be afraid of running into him every time I go to the Red Owl.”

“Okay,” Tom said.

“I’ll be along late tonight or tomorrow—don’t wait up for me or anything, I’ll just let myself in and go to my room.” She paused. “There was something I didn’t tell you the other night. Maybe you should know about it.”

She wants to tell me she was his mistress after all, Tom thought, and said that he would see her the next day. He looked at Sarah’s letters, a white stack of pages next to the much larger heap of yellow pages. He picked them up and folded them, then took all of his papers upstairs and slid them beneath his pillow.

A second later, he took them out and looked around the room. The drawer in the chessboard table seemed too obvious. At last he opened his closet and slid the papers on a shelf above his clothes.

Tom wandered out of the bedroom. He looked out the window at the end of the hallway into a tangle of rough green leaves and horizontal branches. Beyond them were more leaves and branches, and beyond these yet more, and then still more, until the clear empty air over the track. He turned around and walked to the staircase and looked down. If Fritz did manage to bring Sarah to him—if he could get her alone, if her parents allowed her out of their sight, and if she agreed to go—they would not arrive for hours. He walked down the hall to Barbara Deane’s door, hesitated, and pushed it open.

She had something hidden on a shelf too, something she had examined on his first day at the lake and once after that. He had heard it sliding out of its hiding place, and the heavy thunk as she put it on her desk. If he found letters from Glendenning Upshaw, he told himself, he would put them back unread.

Tom went quickly into her bedroom, walked around the bed, and opened the closet door. A neat row of dresses, skirts, and blouses, mainly in dark colors, hung from a wooden pole. Above the clothes was a white wooden shelf, and down at the far end of the shelf, barely visible in the darkness of the closet, a wooden box with inlaid flags of a lighter shade. Tom stepped into the closet and reached for the box. Barbara Deane would have had to wedge herself behind the sliding door and strain up on tiptoe to touch it. Tom pulled it toward him, got it off the shelf, and backed out of the closet.

It was heavy, highly ornamented with inlay, but the heaviness was of the wood itself; nothing rattled when he shook the box. He set it down on the desk, took a breath, and opened the hinged top.

She was going to tell me anyhow, he thought.

He looked in and saw a small pile of newspaper clippings instead of the old letters he had expected. He reached in for the one on top and read the headline before he got it out of the box. NURSE SUSPECTED IN OFFICER’S DEATH. The article had been clipped from the front page of the Eyewitness. He took out the second: SHOULD THIS WOMAN BE CHARGED? Beneath the headline was a picture of twenty-year-old Barbara Deane, barely recognizable, in a white uniform and a starched cap. ONLY PERSON TO HAVE ACCESS WAS NURSE DEANE, said the next headline. Tom blushed—he felt as if he had walked into her room and found her naked. There were other articles below these, and all of them accused Barbara Deane of murder. He barely looked at them—maybe Lamont von Heilitz would have read them, but Tom felt that he had already gone far enough.

He leaned over to replace the articles and saw two sheets of yellowing notepaper folded at the bottom of the box, nearly the same shade as the wood. He touched them, afraid that they might crumble, and felt stiff creamy paper. He picked them up, put down the little heap of clippings, and unfolded the sheets of notepaper on top of them.

I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, AND YOU HAVE TO BE STOPPED, read the first. The ink had turned the brown of dried blood, but the large printed capitals shouted louder than the headlines on the old copies of the Eyewitness. He set it down and opened the second. His throat was dry, and his heart pounded. THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR SIN.

Tom dropped the yellowing piece of paper into the box as if it had stung him. He swallowed. He reached back in and picked it up again. The T’s had been crossed with a faintly curved line, and the S’s slanted. A woman had written the notes, and he knew who she was.

He felt absolutely afraid for a second, as if Barbara Deane were about to rush through the door, screaming at him. I know what you are. He slid the two notes together with shaking hands and placed them carefully on the bottom of the box. Then he laid the clippings on top of them and closed the box. He picked up the box and realized that he did not know if it had faced forward or backward. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He carried the box to the closet and stepped inside. Tom put it on the shelf and slid it far down. He thought he remembered that it had been all the way against the closet wall: which way had it faced? He wiped his forehead on his arm and turned the box around, then around again. The house creaked, and his heart tried to jump out of his chest. He slid the box snugly against the wall, facing forward, stepped away, and closed the closet door. Then he wondered if it really had been closed all the way. He opened it and closed it again, then opened it an inch. He groaned, and shut it.

He turned around and saw his dusty footprints on the wooden floor, stamped as clearly as Fritz’s on the track.

Tom yanked his handkerchief from his pocket and walked backward, erasing his tracks all the way to the door. Drops of sweat fell on the dull wood. They left shiny traces when he wiped them. He reached the threshold and backed out of the room and closed the door.

He went down the hall to his bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He wanted to get out of the lodge—to run away. He looked up at his dripping face in the mirror and said, “Jeanine Thielman wrote those notes.” He dried his face and remembered tense Barbara Deane opening the door to the lodge on his first day in Eagle Lake; and remembered the relaxed, friendly Barbara Deane who had lied and lied when she served him dinner.

I know what it is to be unjustly accused.

I wasn’t his type, for one thing.

He walked slowly down the stairs, still afraid that she was going to walk in the front door. She would know in an instant what he had done, if she saw his face.

Tom collapsed on the couch. Barbara had not been unjustly accused, she had killed the policeman in the hospital by giving him the wrong medication; probably Maxwell Redwing had ordered her to kill him. Shady Mount Hospital was where the people who ran Mill Walk put its embarrassments when they wanted them to die. It was the most respectable hospital on the island, the safest place on Mill Walk for a discreet little murder: the Redwings went there themselves, didn’t they?

Tom’s grandfather believed in her innocence and saved her skin, got her out of Mill Walk, and parked her in the village of Eagle Lake. When Jeanine Thielman accused and threatened her, Barbara Deane had killed her.

Which meant that she had killed Anton Goetz too. Tom did not know how this had happened, but a strong young woman like Barbara Deane could have knocked down a cripple … maybe, Tom thought, Goetz had been blackmailing Barbara Deane. Maybe he had even seen her shoot Jeanine Thielman, and helped her hide the body in the lake. His mother had seen him moving through the woods, sneaking back to his lodge for the old curtains. After von Heilitz accused him of the murder, he had gone back to confront her, and she had killed him too. And ever since, she had lived quietly in the village of Eagle Lake. She had even gone on delivering babies.

He told himself to calm down when it occurred to him that Barbara Deane might have shot at him through the window, imagining that he had seen the notes at the bottom of the box.

But he knew one more thing Lamont von Heilitz did not, and it was the crucial fact in Jeanine Thielman’s murder: she had died because she had written those notes.